http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/nsw/content/2004/s1156736.htm

Story and Digital Mischief by Warrigal Mirriyuula

Benny sat down on the crumbling edge of the warm rust stained concrete, the high tide lapping below his flippered feet. It was a beautiful sunny day again and Benny closed his eyes and lifted his face to the light.

“Visibility should be fantastic,” he sang out over his shoulder, the sunlight boiling red through his closed lids.

Dropping his head, he spat into the visor of his diving mask and rubbed the spit around the glass. Ensuring the straps didn’t twist, he put the mask on, checked the seal, connected the air supply and tested the flapper valves just to be sure. He looked at his watch. It was 11:30AM; the sun, almost overhead, would light the depths of the lagoon beautifully.  He needed about two hours, he reckoned.

“Hey Fish, ya right, tied off?” Benny shouted over his shoulder, waiting just long enough to hear, “Yeah, off ya go.”

Benny slipped into the water, sorted out his line, then with a pike and a kick, set off down the concrete face of the wall as Fish began to turn the wheel on the air pump.

Like it’s highrise neighbours on this section of what had been Pittwater Road, The Flight Deck, once a landmark Collaroy beachside apartment tower, had been demolished down to the fifth floor when volcanism in the west Antarctic rift had destabilised the overlying ice. The sudden spike in atmospheric CO2 had put paid to any further debate about the climate when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice had let go completely and sea level rose nearly twenty metres in just a couple of decades.

When the high tide had regularly begun washing at the foundations of the buildings, they were abandoned and unceremoniously snapped off; the rubble pushed over the seaward side to create a breakwater to hold back the worst tidal and storm surges that now came regularly from early spring.

The government project had been part of a last ditch attempt to geo engineer a solution for Sydney to rising sea levels. It had never been finished. Over time, first the money, then the will began to run out. Eventually the collapse of the supporting supply chain meant that even the decision to cease work became moot. Several breakwaters had been achieved on some of the northern beaches but the huge sea gates across Sydney Heads were abandoned at a stage that left only two vast, complex, towering blocks of concrete anchored in the very sandstone of the heads themselves. No doubt they’d still be there when the sandstone had all been erroded back to sand.

Here on the landside of Collaroy Lagoon, the protected conditions meant the water was calm. Benny figured he might be able to find a way down into the old foyer.  He’d heard stories from other divers about the demolished and partially submerged tower. He wanted to salvage the chunky ceramic wings that had greeted tenants and their guests in the main lift lobby.

As he descended the water was wonderfully clear, almost as if it wasn’t there at all; as though it were perhaps a heavier kind of air that Benny was flying through. He felt perfectly at home underwater. Benny pulled up, taking a pause for a look around.

Visibility was almost unlimited. Through a large school of dashing Yellowfin juveniles he could see all the way to the bottom, mottled and moving in the dancing beams of submarine sunlight. He kicked off again and stroked his way deeper. A little way off he could make out the dissolving stumps of the Norfolk Pines that had surrounded the car park and just beyond that, showing through the accumulating bottom debris, he could make out the surface and line markings on Pittwater Road. Commuter traffic was low today, Benny mused darkly; and he thought again, as he often did, of those lost and wasted years Poppy had told him about. When people had endlessly argued about climate change but never seemed to do anything about it.

“Change is what happens in life.” Benny mentally confirmed as he swam deeper. “Trying to hold anything in place is a waste of energy.”

Well it had all changed now and Benny didn’t really mind. He’d read books, seen pictures, and sure enough it all looked wonderful, but it was all gone now. You can’t miss what you’ve never had. Better to “go with the flow”. It was an expression that Fish used. Benny liked it. It suited his feeling for life. It had an economy that Benny often thought profound.

This period of fast dynamic change was all Benny had ever known and he loved diving on the old beach side apartment blocks. Stripped of all their re-useable materials they had become high-rise concrete reefs, home to dazzling darting fish and the Bronze Reefers; a pretty little shark that had come inshore from the open ocean and downsized in response to rising sea temperatures. Benny had tried to befriend a pack on his last dive on the Flight Deck and received a nasty bight for his troubles. They were smaller than their forebears but no less aggressive. A few stitches had put that right and today he had Fish’s home brewed shark repellent. They wouldn’t want a second bight. The stuff smelled just awful.

Benny pulled up a few metres from the bottom. All around him in the dappled half-light swam fish of every conceivable colour. On the bottom crabs crawled and various brachiopods where beginning a tenuous tenancy on any clear piece of concrete; there was algae everywhere, sponges and soft corals, and the plant life was a riot of forms and functions. Perhaps this was the beginning of a new speciation as old habitats were abandoned and the littoral zone moved onshore. This new territory was the prize for those creatures that could make the best, most efficient use of the resources this fresh environment contained. “Precious”, Benny thought as he swam off toward the gloom of the old lobby.

They were the first of the new wave. It might take another million years before this incipient speciation replaced all the benthic and pelagic animals and plants that had been lost in the last few decades.  Reef corals were going well though. Benny had dived on the submerged spine of Long Reef and was surprised at how much new coral growth there was in these warming waters. Benny had seen pictures of The Great Barrier Reef, but it was long gone; dissolved away as ocean temperatures and acidity increased, leaving a sun bleached skeleton, battered and broken by the cyclones of summer and then finally submerged as the sea rose. These isolated little southerly coral colonies basking in the warm shallows promised a big future if they could just hang on and sea level didn’t rise or fall too much for a while.

Benny checked his watch. Ten minutes.

He gave his line the double tug that alerted Fish that he was entering the Flight Deck’s lobby. He switched on his lamp and immediately the dimensionless dark filled with colour and movement. Thrown into stark relief by the hard blue white light, brightly coloured fish danced with their black, hard-edged shadows, flitting across the walls of the submerged foyer.

Making sure not to snag his air line, Benny made his way into the black of the lift lobby, his lamp revealing the chunky silver and red ceramic wings he’d come for; a dream of flight, of the freedom of the air, now lost and forgotten to a new dark watery reality. In the bright lamplight the vitreous surface of the tiles showed little wear or corruption for their years under water; a quick thrill rilled through Benny’s body. The wings looked great, better than he had expected.

Very little light penetrated here so the wings were free of any sort of  life, excepting a pair of ghostly white Sea Pens. “Precious” popped again like a bubble in Benny’s consciousness. He’d leave that tile in place.

Taking out the mallet and chisel, he began to prise the tiles from their wall one by one and place them in the bubble bag. It was slow, hard work and required a certain determination, given that underwater everything needs twice the energy and yet still happens as if in slow motion. A blow which might fell an ox on land, impacted with little more than a soft thud in twenty metres of water. Benny soldiered on and at last got the final tile off the wall.

Dragging the heavy bag full of tiles behind him, he exited the foyer, fully inflated the bubble bag and watched as it and its cargo ascended through the dancing light to the sparkling surface. Doing his best porpoise impression Benny followed.

As he surfaced he took off his mask and disconnected the air-line, Fish wound it in. Benny tied a line onto the floating bubble and in two strokes he was against the wall again. The tide was on the ebb and the water level was lower than when he had begun his dive. He slipped his flippers and slung them and his mask up on the deck. Gripping the end of an exposed piece of rebar he pulled himself up onto the slab that had once been the floor of a luxury apartment on the fifth level of the iconic building; the ghosts of hostesses past, and their guests, enjoying the sun and sea view. Now carpetless bare concrete, the floor slab was just part of the walk along the top of the breakwater these days. Benny pulled the bubble bag in and Fish helped him haul it up onto the deck. Dumping his weights, Benny lay down on the hot concrete, enjoying the sun as it tightened his skin with a thin salt rime.

Having deflated the bubble bag and sorted the salvaged tiles out to dry in the sun, Fish came over to Danny with a loaf of rough bread and some cheese for their lunch. It was hard work down there and Benny was ravenous.

They sat together talking quietly and tearing lumps off the bread and cheese and washing it all down with a pull on Fish’s home-distilled vodka.

That ex-military canteen seemed part of Fish and sometimes he resorted to it too often. A lot of older people tended to drink too much, or smoke too much ganga, and Fish was older than Benny by many years. They were the best of friends though, “family” since Benny’s parents died.

His Mum and Dad had lost their lives like so many others, in the fires that had raged out from the ravines and ridges of the Hawkesbury and consumed much of the leafy northern bushland suburbs in 2094. It had been a bad year for fires all over the country. The drought had been too long already and the bush was just waiting for a spark. Much of Sydney’s suburbs, all those quarter acre blocks with tidy town house duplexes, burned, and burned and burned that dreadful summer.

They had been sad days; so much loss and devastation that many of the survivors, having already endured years of turmoil and change, simply walked away, abandoning the coastal city. For a while it was common to see the main roads over the mountains to the west filled with family groups, neighbours, even groups of strangers come together for the journey, their goods and possessions heaped on an array of human and animals drawn conveyances, trekking over The Blue Mountains, hoping the future they would build in the bush might spare them the unrelenting change going on all around Australia’s seaboard. Benny had been one of those survivors, just a little boy of six, alone, until Fish had finally found him again in a children’s transit camp.

Benny remembered Poppy years ago telling Fish and his Dad that this world, the one after global warming, would be a world non-one had ever seen before. Benny was just a little boy then. He didn’t really understand what Poppy meant. How could they have not seen the world they lived in? Now that Benny was himself a man, that figure of speech seemed to hold a greater truth.

Older people had lost their book of rules. It had been made irrelevant, redundant, and obsolete. The old ways were meaningless in the face of all the change; and Benny thought that these older people, the ones still invested in that old past paradigm, they were the ones for whom this new reality was the hardest to accept, to live in.

All the “just in time” convenience, the conspicuous consumption of the late industrial age with its attendant noise and pollution, violence and inequity, as well as all its triumph and grandeur, had been burned down, broken up and washed away in the global tumult that had begun in the Twenty Fifties with the failure of the northern monsoon. Millions had starved. By the Twenty Eighties wars over water and agricultural resources, famine and disease had taken their toll and the global human population had collapsed. It seemed for a time that the human hegemony over planet Earth might be in peril as first international trade and then even contact fell away.

In Australia the population had fallen from over 30 million to something below ten, though nobody had any real clue. There hadn’t been a census for decades.

It was all before Benny was born and he had no real idea how it had all played out. Fish was deeply reluctant to remember. He seemed, like many other older people, ashamed of the past and his role in its collapse. Benny had grown up in the shadow of that shame and the pain and dislocation left in the wake of the collapse of global society. He often thought that for the older people, the survivors, this world, today’s world must be a constant admonishment, a life sentence at hard labour in a world they had made.

Fish was old school and kept faith with that past by collecting examples of all its now pointless, broken and unworkable technologies.

“What for, mate?” Benny had asked when Fish had turned up late one afternoon brandishing a disabled leaf blower, once the pride of some long gone suburban gardener.

“It’s a petrol one. Even if you could get it to turn over, where are ya gonna get the petrol?”

“Ya never know mate. Ya jus’ never know.” was all Fish had said as he rubbed the grime off the Briggs and Stratton logo, a wistful and distant smile on his face.

“But mate, it’s never gonna be the same again; there’s no clock to wind back. It just doesn’t work that way.” Benny couldn’t understand why Fish just didn’t see it. He continued to cling to a truth that had almost completely lost its meaning.

Well Benny wasn’t fussed, and even lent a hand when Fish went out hunting for some piece of early twenty first century kit. Fish had a huge collection that filled the rank grass at the rear of his shack over the back of the lagoon. He had tonnes of it and Benny had been there one day when Fish had been offered good exchange for the metalliferous junk; as scrap to be melted and remade into more practical, more relevant goods; but Fish had turned the offer down, muttering about entropy.

He vowed it was to be his retirement project to get it all working again. Benny had to laugh at that. Fish must have been sixty, if he was a day. When was this fabled retirement to be? What was “retirement” anyway? People used to retire to do the things that Benny and Fish now knew as every day life. Growing a few vegetables and fruit trees, keeping chooks, a few pigs and a cow, fishing, and fossicking for bits and pieces of useful salvage that they could Exchange – like the wings; but he wouldn’t be exchanging them. They would look great above the new fireplace he had built over the summer.

Benny was happy with his life as a “Changer”. He liked the coast, enjoyed the maritime weather and he found the constant change exciting. He knew that it could be easier inland, on The Grid, but that had its obligations too. He was still young and for the time being he was happy to be his own man, responsible only to those around him, Fish and the small community that lived on the lagoon. He could always choose to go over the mountains and get Online, join the Rebuild, but from the reports that came back over to the coast with the occasional returnee, the Rebuild seemed to be going well without him. Maybe in time, maybe if he wanted a family, the decision didn’t seem important at the moment.

Fish was now sitting on the edge of the concrete scaling his catch, the airpump and its lines all packed up. Fish was obviously quietly proud of how well the pump had worked and it occurred to Benny that the device was another example of Fish’s endless mechanical ingenuity. Fish had gotten sick of having to turn the pump continuously, so he’d modified the thing to include a pressurised air tank and flow regulator that controlled the release of air to Benny on the bottom and, importantly for Fish, allowed him to spend his time fishing, with only the occasional turn on the pump to restore pressure in the tank,. It was what Fish did best; knock up a machine in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon; and today, while Benny was salvaging the wings, Fish had pulled a bounty, a veritable piscatorial cornucopia from the lagoon and all for the price of a little ingenuity, perseverance and some salvaged bits and pieces.

“Yep, it’s a different world alright,” said Benny.

“The fishin’s much better,” replied Fish as he hacked the head off a big Leatherjacket.

That wasn’t all that was better these days. People were better Benny figured. The gradual decline of global humanity had touched everyone alive and as a result co-operation, compassion and empathy had once again risen as the primary drivers in human interaction. People looked after one another better, seemed less concerned with having things, less focussed on themselves, and Benny was certain in his heart that this time, his time, was a better time, or at least could be a better time than either Fish or his Dad, or even Poppy had lived through.

Fish wiped the blood and muck of his scaling knife and slipped it back into the sheath on his belt. He wrapped the partially prepared fish and put them on the cart. Benny loaded the tiles and their gear and then, having harnessed up, they set off together at a trot for the land end of the breakwater, falling into the rhythm of one of Fish’s old army chants.

“I don’t know but I been told.

Once ‘pon a time use’ t’ be cold.

I look around, don’t see no snow.

Them old blokes just don’t know.”

They laughed easily together and brightened the pace as the westering sun and the gentle sea breezes promised another balmy evening. Tonight they’d feast on the fish that Fish had caught while Benny was diving on The Flight Deck.