Adelaide Burning
Typical. How could Isaac Asimov get it so wrong? The year 2047 and the futures and possibilities that he dreamt of - where are they? I'm still waiting. Waiting. Tick. Tick. Tick. They can't even get the date right on the screen - no, don't dream, this is not the first decade of the new millenium - it's 2047.
2047? No gleaming towers. No advanced civilisation. No space stations (not even a good public transport system - although, depending on the state of the electricity grid we can catch a tram from Adelaide Central to Glenelg now that they've finally laid the tram tracks from Victoria Square down King William street). No third law of robotics or whatever it was. The only robot around here is my stupid dog-shaped vacuum cleaner, Fido V7.3. "Man's Best Friend"? "The Golden Staph retriever"? My foot! The only law of robotics that she follows is getting stuck in the closet and sucking up my keys as soon as I drop them.
Even now she's banging into my feet under the desk, trapped in some infinite search loop bounded by the mathematical environment of the curved plastic that pervades in my freshly upgraded apartment.
But I digress. My job is to send you the situation report for Southern Australia.
It’s been a horrible day. Goldie (that's what I call my Fido) and I woke up to unbearable heat. The CBD here in Adelaide averages about 6 hours electricity daily and the rest is generator electricity, provided by "The Company" which means we get switched to the B circuit - we can run the small things like ceiling fans, and microwave ovens - but no toasters and definitely no air conditioners. Except for the Execs above the twenty third floor, who can run whatever the hell they like.
We woke up to an ominous silence - and then I realised I still had my noise-cancelling headphones on. I took 'em off and let the sound of jack hammers and backfiring oil-fuelled buses, screeching trams and buzzing mopeds hit me. I could even hear the sound of regimented boots on tarmac as one of the local troop detachments practised up and down North Terrace below. The noise is enough to wake anyone up. Not to mention the stench of uncollected garbage.
Goldie was whining - an indicator that the generator hasn’t been working and that she needs to be recharged immediately. So I went next door to check and got a confirmation. It might not work all day. The neighbor responsible for it, we call him Brad, is a veteran of the old Electricity Trust and loves to tinker with transformers. He was going to bring by the ‘generator doctor’ as soon as he was free. In the meantime "The Company" suggested we go to work as the factory generator was working just fine and it was nice and cool (as long as the 'Work For The Dole' people kept peddling).
This evening the electricity came back on at 7 pm. For only twenty minutes- as if to taunt us. Goldie was actually past taunting. She was lying on her back, four legs to the ceiling, tail in the wall socket, in the default recharge position. Twenty minutes got back her pulse but little else. The moment the lights flickered on I jumped in front of the television. I could hear the neighborhood children on the streets below scatter back into the shadows.
The television flickered on, my profile registered with the information service provider, and "Channel Me - Everything I Want To Hear - And Nothing Else" splurted into life. Same old boring stuff - a "Happy Days" four day special - every single episode. But believe it or not I'd had enough of The Fonz. So I fiddled with the hack circuit (that I'd bought in an alley down off Hindley Street) and managed to tune into some government channel intra-station, probably leaking from Parliament House.
The news was all so depressing. How come none of this gets out? Soaring temperatures and declining rainfalls caused by climate change are wiping two a billion dollars a year off Australia's wheat industry within 30 years, a study shows. Rice yields are also well-down since the Murray stopped flowing. (But at least we can have cheap T-shirts with the cotton we're growing.) Professor Peter Dice, from the Queensland University of Technology, today said a study of five major wheat-growing areas showed that changes to weather patterns had caused a drop in production of 34 per cent. He said atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had increased significantly in Australia over the last 40 years, causing temperatures to rise by an average of four degrees and rainfall to drop by around 27 per cent.
I was half-way through an analysis of the George Zee Bush invasion of East Timor when the power went off again. This apartment only has a small UPS so I'll end this report now.
