On the morning of the 12th of August 2100, Adovoca awoke, as usual, to the shrill metallic laughter of her alarm clock. It was mocking her, she knew, because even as she quieted its calls and sleepily reached for the sleek tube resting on her bedside table, the world’s horrors were slowly creeping up to envelop her like smoke. She climbed out of bed and unzipped her thin, silky night suit and stood still for a moment, watching it drift to the floor. She smeared a generous amount of Ultra-Protective Day Sunscreen on every piece of bare skin on her body aside from her feet, and went to stand on her Foot Shield Provider – The Simply Stylish way to Stay Safe. The sunscreen was cool against her body and the metal surface of her Foot Shield Provider was cool against her bare feet. She closed her eyes, enjoying the remainders of the only pleasurable and calm part of her day. After five minutes, she stepped back down to the floor; flexing and arching her feet to test the shiny silver protective material which now adorned them. Satisfied, she lifted her head to study the room. 

Her room was not large, with barely enough space for anything more than her bed and VCEs and no windows. The bed was near the right wall of her room, with an inch of safety distance from the wall. The distance was necessary, because, at times, even the layers of wool, foam and other heat insulators packed into the wall could not block all the heat from seeping through. The bed consisted of a cheap mattress and a flat pillow, covered with thin, light grey bed sheets. The mattress was squeezed uncomfortably into a bed frame made of low quality wood, and coated with a shiny layer of Insulating Gel to keep the bed from catching fire in case of heat even more extreme than usual. From the foot of the bed to the wall lay a piled assortment of VCEs. Strangely shaped boxes, tubes, crates and other objects labeled with the shiny green tag which read ‘Vital Care Equipment’. From a lotion meant to prevent your hair from catching fire to a 1 by 1 inch compactable mattress; everything one might need to fend off the heat and survive in case of an emergency could be found within this limited strip of floor. 

The wall intersecting with the one lined with her bed and VCEs was what Adovoca called the “door wall”; her door covered a third of the wall and her weapons and raid protecting mechanisms covered the rest. Her door was heavily locked, and only her fingerprint could allow access into or out of her room. The door was located in the middle of the “door wall,” and the walls on either side were covered with slots and sheathes in which every possible weapon could be found. Studded knives, gleaming daggers, a single mace, a delicate looking fan lined with hidden blades, a crossbow, a shotgun, throwing stars, two whips – one golden and the other silver and even a few scraps of protective armor.

The wall opposite the “door wall” was the only part of her room which was dedicated to herself and not to her protection. It was lined with pages torn from newspapers, yellowing and old, and rows of photographs. The newspaper pages displayed articles and pictures of nature – animals, lakes and ecological marvels. She knew that it was not abnormal for current generations, but Adovoca always felt a mixture of distress and sadness regarding the fact that she had never seen a pond, a forest, a stray cat or anything which could be categorized as “common nature.” All the pages shared one thing in common – they were all from articles published more than fifty years ago, before the climate crisis took over everything, including all sections of press. 

The photographs were mostly of her parents. They featured her mother’s pale face aglow with dazzling smiles, framed with creamy chestnut curls and occasionally a wide-brimmed hat. In the pictures, her eyes were a flat tone of brown, but Adovoca imagined that, in real life, her eyes were swirling with shades of caramel and bronze, and she could vividly picture thin golden veins twinkling upon them in the sunlight. Her father was also pale, and very thin. She was told that even before climate change was recognized as an acute emergency as people started dropping dead like flies; her father had been a sick and weak person, and was frequently hospitalized because of various illnesses he suffered from. Some pictures featured her mother holding her or kneeling beside her, but those photos were touched with sadness, for her father was no longer of the living. Her father was already buried under six feet of cold, packed soil when she was born. Her mother had been delirious from pain when Adovoca was finally brought into the world. She had refrained from choosing a name for the baby beforehand, because she believed that if the name would be choosed instinctively the moment she was born it would be as if the soul of her dead husband had whispered the name into her ear. Fate was cruel to many, these harsh days, but not many were named after extinct fruit. In his dying days, her father had eaten nothing. The last “real” food he had swallowed was a rare slice of avocado. The day he died, the avocadoes had died with him, having finally gone extinct due to the sharp change of the climate. When she was born, Adovoca’s delirious mother had cried out the name of the fruit her father had loved, but later, mercifully, shifted her name to be more suitable to a human being.

Along the wall opposite to her bed was a narrow faux wood closet with sliding doors. The closet was giant, stretching along the entire wall and leaving only a small gap between it and the ceiling. She approached her closet, letting her fingertips easily guide the door to the left. Adovoca studied the contents of her closet; the neat rows of piled suits, undergarments and flexible armors. She pulled out three suits of different types. The first one she pulled on was so thin it was nearly transparent, and covered nearly her entire body; excluding her feet, hands, neck and head. The next one was slightly thicker, a murky tone of onyx, and also covered her feet and hands. Her last suit was a startling white and was stiffer, covering her entire body excluding her head. It had built in sheaths on her thighs, back, shank and waist. With slight difficulty she kneeled onto her knees and reached for a helmet and a pair of boots which lay on the bottom of her closet. She finally managed to stand back up – grumbling mightily – and yanked the closet door shut. She slid her helmet onto her head and nearly lost her balance twice while squeezing her feet into the tall boots.

At last, Adovoca went to stand in front of her door wall, contemplating the different tools and trying to decide which ones she would wear today. After a few moments, she settled on a narrow dagger, a short knife and her golden whip. She slid the dagger and knife into her thigh and waist sheathes and wrapped the whip around her wrist. When she finished, she knew there was nothing else left to do, no other task she could complete which would postpone going outside any longer. Her mind was empty; she had taken enough medication last night to knock out a gorilla. Yet, as the effects of the drug were slowly melting away, a single question rose into her head. It was a question which haunted her every day, and dragged after it a series of other questions and a sharp twinge of pain in her chest.

Why did my parents not do anything when there was time? Why did they not drag all their family, friends, neighbors to the streets? Why didn’t they block trains, roads and buildings; their voices rising and falling with demands for change? How could nobody in the entire world have done enough when the forests were screaming cries of warning; when the children were wailing for mercy? 

The heat, storms, days of crying herself to sleep and waking up – her body wracked with vicious fits of coughing – were almost too much to bear. At times, she wondered why she didn’t tear the pictures of her parents off the wall and leave them to melt outside. Then she would remind herself that her parents were not the only ones. First of all, the politicians were really the ones to blame. Many human beings had been polluted, inside and out, with the promise of money and power. Yet, the decision makers were not entirely in charge. They were humans, flesh and blood, and she knew that if masses of citizens had stood on their hind legs and screeched viciously the politicians would have surrendered. Somehow, this had not happened. People who had the chance to prevent the largest disaster in the history of humanity had chosen to keep about their daily lives. Adovoca struggled to understand them. She knew that if she had been alive, she would have done anything, given up everything, to promise that no one would have to live in the horrifying conditions she was forced to live in. If what she did every day could even be considered as “living”.

She wiggled her index finger out of her layers of suits, and shook her head free of thoughts. There was no point in dwelling upon the past. There was no point doing anything but operate mindlessly day after day, drugged by numbing pills and calming medications. She slowly inserted her finger into the oval shaped hole in the door, watching as the system approved her touch and undid, one by one, the locks securing her room, her safe island, away from the world.