Water Carriers

Water Carriers

Story by Jesse D Lopez

You have to be honest to be a water carrier, people are counting on you with their lives, back when we still had glaciers on the earth nobody had to think about water, but now that the earth has settled into a new era, us terrestrials, as we’re called, must provide for ourselves like the tribes of old.

               I hear people used to think they had the power to change the weather, in the end, the sun changed into a new cycle, the magnetic polarity of the earth shifted, and the new weather systems wiped out entire civilizations that couldn’t survive the end of the Quaternary ice age.

               I think of how most people took for granted that we used to live in an ice age, where polar caps routinely covered the earth, the normal that the earth is used to consists of the way it is now, an over abundance of natural gasses in the atmosphere, new life evolving to adapt to the dry new sunbaked environment under a weakened magnetosphere, the earth has seen times like this before, the only thing new here is us.

               I remember being taught that the last time the poles flipped, there was a mass extinction event on earth, now that it has flipped again, we have survived the mass extinction of our era, the birds, whales, and insects that relied on geomagnetic poles where the first to go extinct, then the dominos fell and half the world’s animals had died off, then people, in their lack of foresight continued to fish, hunt, and eat many of the earth’s civilizations out of existence, leaving the rest of us to starve for more resources in their wake.

               As a water carrier, you are always reminded that you carry the guilt of the world on your shoulders, since men are needed to protect the water carriers, the task of carrying water falls onto the ladies of the land like me, much like the water carriers of ancient Rome, the aching backs and bruised shoulders are what we deserve for taking our lives for granted all this time, and for leaving the Earth in trash filled shambles after the final wars.

The rusted relics of the final wars are here to remind us of what happens to humanity when we are pushed to the brink, the final wars destroyed many of the worlds surviving civilizations, and culminated in a new world order that used it’s power to end the final wars, and began moving humanity into off world colonies on the moon and mars.

I heard the stories as a child about the last of the best people on earth as they colonized their off-world paradises for one generation with all of earth’s elite lining up to join the build, they lasted forty-nine years with news of corruption and infighting never out of the normal news cycles, and then the colony on mars collapsed and the refugees came back.

My mother told me of the horror story that became legendary to all people on earth, according to the stories, the moon colonies were destroyed by terrorist activities, leaving refugees to flee back to earth, in this way earth has lost almost all of its best and brightest scientists and many technologies became archaic to a less knowledgeable civilization of service workers to collapsed industries that catered to the off-world industrialization.

When I was schooled with the other girls and boys, we learned of our town’s founding which came at the end of the last age, we learned with the collapse of the colonies, came the collapse of society on earth with global currency, then the surviving economies splintered and divided into tribes concentrated in places with abundant natural resources such as lakes and riversides, during these times, laws against outsiders became normalized, and many ‘wilders’, people without tribes starved without an ease of access to the same resources as townsfolk who banded together to protect a vast area of resources, like us.

               I’m told by elders that we live in an age of tribalism, compared to the vast cityscapes of the old ice age earth, families band together and form towns, and amongst them, a council of elders choose candidates to lead the tribe, and the people vote for their tribal leaders, of whom are of some relation to townsfolk, this is life as I know it, and for me the idea of large cities full of millions of people is terrifying, but I suppose people can do most anything they put their minds to, except conserve the environment.

I grew up knowing hunger, and thirst as the worst things in life, while fear of strangers is the backdrop of all other fears, it is taught to children to fear the others, whomever they may be, scenarios where strangers poison the drinking water and murder entire villages like ours are a popular theme in children’s horror stories, stemming back to the terrorist on the moon.

               I see the images of women like me carved onto the walls of city hall, carrying water pots on a wooden yolk, I see these depictions of water carriers in many places, and it reminds me of how vital and essential my banal task is to our people, suddenly the aches and pains of my labors is belittled by the timelessness of our traditional that I am proud to be part of.

               Work ends when the water is collected at the desalination plant in town.

               At the end of the day me and my sisters wash together in the washing hall, where clothes are tossed around as freely as the jokes and laughter, I used to be shy around the other girls, but being a water carrier makes women like me very solidly formed and tightly built, I’m not ashamed to play in the water with everyone else, after a hard day of carrying the water who wouldn’t want to splash around in the showers.