I remember the day the waves came.

We knew it was coming, but what could we do? As we sat at home, watching on the TV that day in 2047 we talked about it on social media, we made jokes about how many people would die.

"Lol" we said "As if the water could get this high, it's all just a lefty plot."

Even when the worst came, we thought then that something would be done to save us. That perhaps the government would swoop down and make some emergency effort to hold back the waves or to evacuate us all, with our belongings, to somewhere safe and that eventually life would go back to normal. We thought that our greatest worries would be who won the latest reality show or the outcome of Survivor, Antarctica.

I didn't die when the waves came. I sat right here, on the balcony of my ninth floor apartment as the water rose, I watched it as it came over the foreshore and streamed into the streets of Glenelg. I watched as the cars started to get washed in land and the people either fled or got dragged under the rising flood.

I couldn't move when it happened. It was like some sort of obscene, unrealistic dream which I could wake up from.

Which I could ignore

A dream

How could we have been so blind?

So many years the scientists and "concerned citizens" had been telling us that we were going too far, that the planet was changing, that if we didn't act it would all be ruined.

Well, we didn't listen; not really. We only cared about the tanking economy and the oil wars in the Middle East, while our leaders argued about how to combat the threat of the Neo-Reich and the Islamic Freedom Movement and the government seconded all its responsibilities to private corporations to save on the bottom line. We ignored it with game shows and the ever present production lines of "reality" TV, contrived and impossible situations cast on camera as normal and desirable.

We ignored the real threats.

We ignored the changes in our rights to protest and fight back, we didn't care.

We ignored the legislation that sold our food production and resources away to faceless conglomerates, we didn't care for that either.

When they started mining the Antarctic and a cold snap made them think the only way to reach the oil beneath was with a new thermochemical reactive bomb, we barely looked away from our screens.

The company responsible, a joint venture of some of the most successful venture capitalists and oil barons of the 21st century, had assured the governments of the USA, the UK and Greater Russia that they had conducted rigorous, exhaustive tests to make sure there would be no fallout, that we would have first go at a new source of fuel, enough for another hundred years. Australia's dying science group, the CSIRO had argued against it but the sanctions immediately imposed by the Pacific Economic Lobby stopped that and the CSIRO was finally dissolved. The Australian government meekly did as it was bid and set the project up.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Egged on by shock-jocks, people wrote letters of support to the papers, our government basked in a popularity not seen since the 1970s as the population, drip fed only the choicest bits of positive spin; eagerly toasted the opening of the first Antarctic oil drilling complex and refinery. It was to be a triumph for both Australia and for the new conglomerate called SeaCorp Industries.

Three days, that's how long it took before the accident happened. They still don't know why. The whole damn factory exploded out there and dropped a nuclear core that set the subterranean oil on fire. That's what people said anyway.

Then the ice started to melt. Not like the scientists had said it would slowly, giving us time to change. It melted in hours. The milder summer airs left it vulnerable as the shock of fires and explosions in the plant set off long dead volcanoes. Overnight Antarctica became a steaming, sulphuric nightmare. We saw the clouds in Adelaide, dark and rushing outward from the south.

We weren't told to escape though; we weren't told to flee.

As phones rang around the world, Canberra was issued a directive from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Don't evacuate the people and firewall the media.

That it would ruin consumer confidence and share-prices would fall if there was a panic and quarterly reports were due.

The big media players complied. They sat on their hands as the waves crossed the ocean floor and the storm front of acid rain drew in close; to seal our doom. We're told they were rewarded for their decision, bad news sells better anyway. The smaller independent media groups put out the word and so the people that listened to them had a chance to pack up and run. It wasn't much but it helped.

It didn't help us, we never listened to the little guys; our news came from Vulpixxx, the biggest media service on the planet.

I guess it figures they wouldn't tell us.

Fingers in too many pies

The big boys, the ones with trust funds and solid connections, they sold up, they sold up and got out, almost overnight. All over the world they did that, abandoned their waterfronts and headed for the hills.

Literally

They had always been ready. They moved inland abandoning their waterfront homes and transferring their wealth electronically to the high ground in places like Switzerland. The Caymans went bankrupt overnight.

In the morning, the waves came.

The waves came and we died.

I watched it all from here, the ninth floor of my apartment in Glenelg.

The wind grew strong and the rain began to fall, hissing as it burned the plastic setting outside my window. The waves reached in over the beach and dragged away the sands, then washed higher like a cold green claw. They got as high as the seventh floor and I thought I was going to die, that they would never stop; but there was no way I could escape. No way that I could go.

I'm still here though.

I've never really left.

I don't have power now, I find shellfish to eat, I use a raft to trade them for water with some of the other oldies, some of us never found the will to leave; where would we go? To the place they call Scumtown? That cesspit of murder and violence and crime? To the silver city that sprang up as soon as the waves died down and the air calmed? The big boys were back and they took all that remained, pushing the homeless down into the flooded streets or North onto the swamped, stinking plains and towards the Barossa.

The few others that had stayed helped us all to survive, we rigged a little solar panel thing up to give us a bit of power and Jim made a water still we can all share.

It's like our own little remote community, in sight of paradise and completely out of mind.

A few have died since then and we gave them to the waves, the water is deep enough to bring in the sharks and the seals; they take the bodies down deep, so we don't see them again.

We can see the Scumtowners poling little rafts further toward the hills, they don't usually come this far out though and they know not to bring trouble. We're too old to want new "friends" out here.

Oh well.

I think I'm just happy to die here. In my little island of the dead past, in a sea of the flooded future.

I still think what might have been.

If we had have cared for just a while, when it mattered.