Page 55 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Aquifer Virginalis

Hydrargyrum Diggers surveyed the other members of Maxwell’s
Daemons with a calm but penetrating gaze.
“Fine,” she said. “Now, on to my next idea. I intend to write a
quartet of post-apocalyptic stories, each related to one of the
ancient alchemical elements—nothing to do with particle physics, I
assure you! It seems inevitable to historicize unpleasant futures by
making them resemble unpleasant pasts. And why not? Readers
carry a load of assumptions about the pre-modern world we can
exploit: social, political, religious, material and linguistic. And they
believe the simple idea that erosion and dissolution of civilization
will most certainly follow an atavistic path into earlier stages of
history. Of course, other sources overlay such sword-and-sandal
versions of life a century or two hence—bits of steampunk
technology, superhero saviors and every sort of chthonic spirit our
store of folklore can yield. And those scenarios, so rich in detail, are
most appropriate for page-turner sequel-driven novels of high
fantasy. But the tighter focus of a short story cannot possibly
encompass all that material. Thus, I will leave most of my dystopian
denouement of current trends in the background, and follow one
theme and how it is reflected in the lives of a small number of
characters.”
“Thus, the Setback: a tidy term for what has befallen us at our
own hands, a blasted and barren planet on which human survival is
difficult and in which the collapse of cultural institutions has left
most people in a superstitious state resembling the Middle Ages.
Never mind how many elements were in the periodic table in the
twenty-first century: it’s down again to the four basics of antiquity:
fire, earth, air and water. Fire is energy creation and management—
not simple after nuclear meltdowns, deforestation, fossil fuel
depletion and the loss of technical knowledge by all but a few
people of alternate or renewable sources. Earth, the soil in which
we grow food and the land on which we must dwell, is largely
infertile and uninhabitable thanks to environmental pollutants,
factory farming and ecological upheaval triggered by climate
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