Man V World

TW: Climate change, death.

It began with strangled screams. Behind those agonised sounds was the rushing crackle of a tiger the size of a mountain roaring with a mouthful of crunchy cereal.

The lawyer for the prosecution paused the recording. She gave the court a long, meaningful stare. Monstrous sincerity was underscored by the painful looking sunburn that covered all of the skin the jury could see. Her lips were cracked from dehydration, as were theirs.

“That is the sound of a family burning to death ladies and gentlemen. That is the sound of our generation betrayed.” She raised an open palm to point at the defendant in his wheelchair.

All the while the fragile politician's ventilator wheezed and pumped. Gadgets beeped to say that despite his ancient appearance the man who had once run the country was still very much alive. Unlike the rest he sat in a ragged suit. His eyes were either wide with disbelief or just stuck that way in his decrepitude.

“I am not responsible for wildfire.” His voice was a ragged gasp that put the smooth eloquence of Darth Vader to shame. He was a shriveled man but still somehow in better shape than the young men and women of the court.

“Alone, no. You are just one of the many political and industrial leaders who condemned your children to painful deaths and your species to either extinction or a desperate struggle to survive as the world around us dies.”

“I did the best I could.” The wheeze should have inspired pity. Instead the entire jury glared at the man with murderous contempt. He gulped a dry gulp that hurt his throat.

Was there any point to the trial he wondered? Was it to make them feel better when they inevitably murdered him?

“You were the leader of the most powerful country in the world for eight years. You had the power to shut down every fossil fuel industry in a country responsible for three percent of the world's emissions. We hold you to account for three percent of the unnecessary deaths worldwide.”

Trying to argue, the man only coughed. He saw glittering joy in the eyes of the jury as they watched him suffer.

“I didn't have the ability to shut everything down. The economy would have been devastated. I have have been thrown out of office!” He wheezed and gesticulated wildly. He saw the jury roll their eyes. They'd heard it all before. No one was responsible for the dying world. It had just happened, blah, blah.

“When the world needed an end to oil you increased subsidies. You authorised pipelines that ruined the world you had a duty to protect. When children protested in their millions across the world, you shrugged and kept on.”

“Without the funding of those companies I would never have been in office.”

“You took cash you couldn't possibly spend to kill us,” said the lawyer. Her voice was heated, almost shouting. Her brown eyes were narrowed. He imagined she would have the same look in her eyes as she squeezed the life from his neck.

“No one person can take responsibility for the tragedy of climate change.” He knew he was wasting his breath, but he had to try.

“No single individual will,” said the lawyer with an evil gleam in her vengeful eyes. “Any survivors of the political and industrial leadership from the time of consequence will be tried for their criminal negligence and manslaughter.”

He remembered his time in office. There had been threats of war from other military powers and a global plague which had devastated economies. He tried to explain.

“Your excuses mean nothing. You killed us. We're going to die because you wasted the opportunity to save us.” It wasn't the lawyer this time but a man from the jury. Calling him a man was a stretch. He looked twenty but was probably no more than sixteen. Times were hard. His face was emaciated. His hands were skeletal as they pointed. His blue eyes were going milky from sun blindness.

“Remain calm.” The judge cleared their throat on a chair which was bleached and covered with the pock marks of woodworm. The judge's gown was an original, almost as old as his time in office. It was a rag held together by bare fibers.

The lawyer presented more 'evidence'. That meant reciting more statistics about people who had died thanks to climate change. She asked the jury to raise a hand if they knew someone who had died due to fires, floods or famine. Thirteen hands, a unanimous agreement, rose into the air.

With much theatrical aplomb the prosecution threw open the doors of the courtroom which had once been a high school gymnasium.

“We all know what's beyond those doors now. Nothing.” She pointed to a brown landscape of dirt and burnt buidings. “I however have photographs of this area just forty years ago. On a dusty screen on the wall images of trees and flowers around the school were as beautiful as anything the man remembered. He barely remembered some of those colours. Everything had been brown or grey or red for a long time.

Despite the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach he remained defiant. He'd done his best. The changes needed to save the world had been impossible to enact. Human nature, habits prevented the leaders of the world from turning off the oil pumps and letting the world go dark. If they had tried there would have been revolutions. He would have been lynched by people who needed the fuel to get to work. He'd done his best. He was sure of that.

“I set a record for renewable funding.” He talked about solar power farms built with money he'd released.

“You allowed the expansion of airports. You promoted carbon offsetting to let polluters off the hook for killing the planet. You spent billions repairing roads so our parent's could drive the world to dust more efficiently.”

“Half of the green energy generation from my time in office was there as a direct result of my policies.”

“You wasted hundreds of billions on weapons of war when we were fighting for survival of our planet.”

“I TRIED.” Tears were rolling down his craggy face. He wiped them away with liver spotted hands. He was shaking. His heart was beating like a man running for his life. There was no winning this race. Nowhere to go.

“If you had tried we would be fighting for survival instead of waiting to die. You condemned the world to death. Now we return the favour.” She hated him. There was no doubting it. Her eyes were narrowed with rage. From the tension in her jaw she seemed to be grinding her teeth. What had happened to her? Did they all feel like that?

He looked at the jury. He saw burning hatred on every face.

“I lost people as well.” He thought of Sarah. “My daughter drowned in New York when the flood barriers broke. I had family caught in the fires in Sydney.”

The lawyer shrugged. It meant nothing to her.

“Will we all share the story of family who died because of your generation's indifference? Alright. I'll start us off. My family lived in New Mexico. There were food shortages already. Crops were dying everywhere. My little sister starved to death first. It sounds like a quiet way to die. It's not. She cried in agony from hunger pains. Next was my father because he made sure my mother and I had enough to eat.

There was already fighting in our neighbourhood by that point. People don't just casually starve to deat if other people might have food. My neighbours started killing each other for scraps. We had homes and we'd been educated. We had been friends but we fought like animals to live another day.

Eventually there wasn't any food left. That's when things got really bad. When there's nothing left but people, there's still food for anyone who'd kill for it. By that point most people would. We were skin and bone but people killed each other. That's how my mother died. I watched a man beat her to death with a hammer so he could eat her. Then I shot him.

That's the world of your making mister president. The people you were supposed to defend fell to murdering each other for survival. Do you know how many bodies I've seen with bite-marks on them?

I moved north where there were still crops growing. I saw the gangs of people grouped together to hoard the last of their supplies. I kept going. Further from the equator. That's how I ended up here.”

The lawyer ended with an exhausted sigh. She didn't look angry anymore. She looked depressed.

“My family died when their building collapsed,” said a man from the jury. “Our house was on the upper floors so we were alright when the lower floors flooded. We used a boat to get in and out. Buildings like that aren't made to be underwater though

People from all over crowded in because there was nowhere else. The weight must have been too much for the foundations or the lower floor. I was in the boat when the building came down.

Do you know what it's like to hear almost a hundred people scream as they die mister president? It's the sound I hear when I fall asleep. I remember the wave that capsized my boat. I almost drowned that day. People that might have survived were pinned beneath the water by rubble. That is the world you left us sir.” The man spat on the ground in disgust.

“Mine died of disease after drinking flood water.” It was a short woman with a heavy Mexican accent. Others around her nodded as if to say their family had gone the same way.

“We didn't have bunker to hide in mister president.” The prosecution lawyer was calm again. “No one stockpiled supplies for us while the world fell apart. Were you happy in there while we died? Were you guilty? You are guilty? Does it eat at you?” Her rotten teeth showed with malice.

“The prosecution rests.” The burnt woman bowed to the judge and jury. She retired to the bleachers behind the jury as the judge stood from the worn chair that was her throne.

“What do you have to say for yourself sir? You are accused of allowing the world to die through negligence. If found guilty we will render the death sentence. No one feeds prisoners anymore. Thanks to your generation there is no food to spare.” Her tone said the sentence was inevitable. The formalities of the trial were just a way to make these people feel better about murder.

“All of us know already that I will be found guilty,” he said. “You decided that long ago. You want to kill me. You hunger for it. You also feel guilty. That's the point of all of this.” He held out his vein covered arms.

“I want you to know that the guilt will never leave you. Yes I feel guilty. I regret decisions I made while in office. Just know that I could not have prevented this world that we know from coming to pass.” He stopped as someone in the jury swore loudly.

“I have always done my best for my country and my planet. Wherever I could I gave funds to green energy to projects. I lobbied for tighter regulation of fossil fuels. My party agreed to things I did not agree with. That's politics. The party is bigger than the individual.

Politics is the art of the possible. Getting everyone to agree to do what we needed to do was impossible. I did as much as I could. It wasn't as much a I needed to do, but I did my best. You're going to kill me one way or another. Just know when you watch me die that you will always feel guilty about it. Know that it won't make your life any easier. It will not return the dead.

I lost my own friends and family. I have been punished every day for not being a dictator who could have made unilateral decisions. Every day I see the faces of people who died as your friends and loved ones died. No one got away with anything in this disaster. We all suffered.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry for the way things are. I'm sorry for the fires. I'm sorry for the flooding. I'm sorry people starved and turned on each other.”

He was crying. Trembling with grief, he thought of Sarah. She had been his pride and joy. She was a lobbyist for solar energy. When the floods came she'd been trapped in a subway car. His wife spent a month crying before she'd hung herself.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” asked the judge as he wept.

“We have,” said the jury's speaker.

“The verdict?” asked the judge as if it wasn't a foregone conclusion.

“We find the defendant guilty.”

“Then I have no choice but to sentence him to death.” The judge banged a hammer against a metal block because there was no gavel.

Armed thugs wheeled him out of the gymnasium into the burning heat of the sun. It was 135 degrees Fahrenheit. He was taken away from the school, over blistered tarmac. Dead trees lined the broken road. Sneakers swung from a branch. It was so hot that you could almost hear the world cooking.

By the roadside he saw mounds of earth and began to cry. He knew what was coming.

“Don't worry sir. You wont be alone. My sister is buried in there. Half of the town is.”

The wheelchair rolled to the top of a ramp. Blinding sun saved his eyes from the sight for a moment. He could smell it though. He could hear the swarms of flies.

“Thank you for your service,” said a man with cruel laughter in his voice.

He tried to grip the arms of the wheelchair as it tipped up. Gravity showed him no mercy. He fell down the embankment. Rolling over red soil and brown stones. Only the dead broke his fall at the bottom. He had arrived at his final destination.

He remembered being the most powerful man in the world. As he turned his head he wretched. The pecked sockets of a young boy stared at him. Every old man worries about their legacy. This was the world he was leaving behind.

His heart rate jumped. He was broken. He was burning. It was too much. Gasping, he closed his eyes and left the world behind.