Autumn 2030.

Anna Graham rowed on in her daily commute from her Greenpeace office, through old Upper Street.

High above, in the grey sky, three hover-cars dashed through the heavy fog. Whizzing and turning on his way to another party, one of the revelling drivers knocked down a row of champagne bottles, which fell down below.

‘Bugger’, he said, as he opened a new one.

The oak-aged litter rushed downwards into the affectionately named ‘Greater Thames Swamp’, also known as London. There, in the many brackish waterways that now separate the Victorian buildings, the traders peddled their wares, atop their gondolas and coracles, in the lively floating bazaar. Thick brown leaves floated lazily in the stagnant waters. In one of the dinghies, a newspaper boy cried out about the Chinese Revolution. Unannounced, one of the bottles crashed on his head. The whole street dropped dead silent. He got up again, unfazed, and the chattering resumed.

Anna caught one of the sinking bottles and shoved it in her old bag. Later that evening, her team was having a celebration, having managed to put a revolutionary environmental policy up for consideration before the European Parliament. Her trip to New Strasbourg had been scheduled for next year, due to the ongoing acid storms on the Channel.

As the rowboat turned to Pentonville Road, she looked with melancholy at the lost streets of her childhood.

Winter 2031.

Anna and Jamaal walked back to their hotel in the outskirts of New Strasbourg under heavy snowfall. They passed a statue of Europa, reduced by the acid rains to a blackened stump. Their eyes were firmly looking at the soft white ground.

Their proposal had been defeated. Despite their efforts and the clearly worsening climate, nothing seemed to goad Parliament into a decisive position. They were chased off as radicals.

That winter, like the one before, was being particularly harsh. The erratic weather led Europe to introduce rationing for the first time since World War II. Disillusionment was at an all-time high, and whispers of riots hung in the air. As she often did when she was sad or disappointed, Anna tugged at her coat’s left breast-pocket. On it hung a bronze tulip-pin, a gift from her mother and the remains of the family’s once thriving tulip plantations. Like so much else, the 2021 North Sea Storms had annihilated their farms, turning the colourful fields into brown nothingness.

Neither of the two Greenpeace delegates knew what to do next. Perhaps it was too late anyway. They arrived at the hotel, made a few phone calls, and slept. The next day they took passage to London.

Spring 2043.

Twelve years passed. Twelve years of unheeded calls. Twelve years of fire and storms and breadriots.

As the Long Winter of 2031 showed no sign of abating, peaceful protests turned to confrontations. All-out carnage had been mostly avoided, but the world was still reeling from the shock.

Like many others, Anna and her family now lived in a small agricultural community. The extreme weather of earlier years had softened, thankfully, and the nascent settlement grew mainly rice, figs and corn in the wetland soil. Life was hard and unforgiving, but few went hungry.

The new towns and villages that dotted the landscape were by no means isolated, but the turbulent political situation made them naturally mistrustful. Raids by marauders were a reasonably common feature of life, something no one could have foreseen thirty years before.

With the afternoon sun slowly setting, Anna looked out from her porch at the growing fields. Although they had vindicated her fearful predictions, the tribulations of the past few years had been everything but joyous to her. The idealism of her youth had died, leaving, in its wake, only the harsh realities of surviving.

She fell asleep, a row of red tulips on her lap.

Summer 2072.

She was frail and dying. Anna dragged her old rocking chair as she waded through the house where she raised her children. Her long life, though ravaged by hardship, had been mostly content, seeing her community grow as the land pulled itself out from the dark abyss.

Still, in her last moments, she wondered what Humanity could have done to avoid its mistakes, its losses, its fall. As her eyes closed, a new day dawned on the fields.

6:35:00 AM, September 19th, 2015.

‘BOOM-TACA-TACA-RRRRRRRRRRRRR’

(Anna’s alarm rang with the subtlety of a thermonuclear bomb)

Anna was catapulted from her bed as from a long, dark nightmare. Her interview for an internship at Greenpeace was in two hours.

Though she had been doubtful of her resolve to work at Greenpeace, she woke up with an almost renewed purpose. Perhaps Humanity still had a chance at a future. Perhaps.

She got dressed, ate, and left.