New Zealand: Year 2118
Narrative Collection By Students from Raroa Normal Intermediate School
These short stories are student entries into the 2018 Elsie Locke Writing Prize
The Prize is offered by the Elsie Locke Memorial Trust in conjunction with Lift Education and the NZ School Journal to commemorate Elsie Locke’s life as a writer and as a worker for peace, the environment, women’s issues and community.
Elsie Locke (1912 – 2001)
War broke out… Hundreds of millions of innocent people lost to the evil-doings of world leaders.
No animal, no matter what species, is truly out of harm's way. The bullets make sure of that. Everyone is petrified of the forces fighting one another. Power against power, rebounding and bringing starvation and fear to the nations of a once beautiful Earth. Whole coastal towns have been wiped to extinction due to the oceans’ rising. People’s lives utterly ruined.
My great grandmother tells me tales from her youth, when she would walk through Otari Bush. Luscious greenery surrounding her that I would give so much to even have a glimpse at. For a second, a look of rare serenity will pass over her face, just to be replaced by disgust and hatred for the humans who ruined her beautiful country. I try to imagine an untouched wonderful land that I am told New Zealand used to be. They took it all for granted back then, thought there was nothing spectacular about the divine plants, safe undisturbed cities, the endless supply of food. Everything now is wilted, not just the flowers, the people too. Hope was lost a long time ago, and no one has found it since. The light does not even have a spark left; it was blown out.
Everything always revolves around war. Our planet has been ruined because some foolish people wanted more oil and land and felt the need to take it away from each other. Sometimes I wonder if they even remember the reason they are fighting. Why they put this bomb here or those troops there. It is hard to try and think of a world where the girl who I have gotten to know, who lives at the back of my mind, doesn't constantly enter my conscience to nag me about the death that could seize me at any given moment. I can’t say I’m not lucky though. I get a small amount of food a day to keep me going, which is more
than the citizens of the larger countries can say. I know it is not out of sympathy or kindness. Long ago I realised that all the government are feeding me for is for my strength that will be put into the military when I come of age. I often lay in bed listening to the gun shots in the distance, thinking about why people are so cruel. I reckon, that humans started out as just another species in the food chain, the circle of life. But then, as they got more and more ideas, they pushed their power.
Now, look where we are at. Distraught, struggling hard to survive. Using every man, every woman for war. War. Murder. Nothing like the glorified version our leaders tell us about. All patrimony is lost. All war, is murder.
Sophie Boulieris, Year 8
No Survivors
Keiko I could hear it when I woke up. The boats were coming in again. It always made me nervous, as I had to walk past the beach on my way to school, but I had learned to tune the sirens out. My mother was at the kitchen table, her vacant eyes a window to the waters of the past. She liked to say she surfed on them, but it seemed more like drowning. The boats remind her of things she doesn’t like to talk about. I said goodbye, but she didn’t respond. My stomach grumbled, but I ignored it. No rations until midday. I sipped some water in an attempt to quench my hunger, trying not to imagine how many times this water had been through someone else’s body. Sometimes I wish I lived in the past. I can picture it before I turn the corner. The neat rows of soldiers, taupe and teal, like the striped kete used to hold the chicken’s eggs at home. The boats, small and brightly coloured. Family boats. The harbour, still, and completely clear. And the guns, their shiny metal coverings a vessel for death. We know the orders. No survivors.
Bindi I woke up early this morning. I couldn’t help it. Dad had told me I shouldn’t be worried. But he was. Mum said that this was our only chance. Everyone knows what we’re doing is illegal. And dangerous. My brother just looks at me and says Butterflies. But my nerves aren’t butterflies, they’re a horde of elephants stomping around in my stomach. He holds tight onto my hand as we begin to enter Wellington Harbour. He doesn’t understand what’s going on. This is the only chance we have. It’s impossible, but so is surviving where we came from. Mum says not to believe everything people say. Dad says we don’t know for sure. But I know the rumour: No survivors.
Ngaire There’s a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The Commander gave the orders an hour ago, and now we’re on the beach. My jacket is already soaked with sweat. Not just from the heat. I just…haven’t processed what I am about to do yet. When I was drafted, I imagined killing the bad guys, like the storybooks. I imagined fighting on the side of justice. At the very least I imagined adults at the end of my gun.
But this….
No one knows who’s on those boats. My mates say they must be stupid, trying to get in. I think that they just have nowhere else to go. The boats are coming in now. The one at the front is named the Rainbow. It has been hand-painted bright blue. Before I have time to think about it, the commander gives a shout. No survivors.
Izzi Anderson, Year 8
We lie here. Day and night. Deaf to the screams of the earth. Tangled in cords that connect us to each other. talking through our heads, through our minds, through our thoughts. lying, listening, thinking. Still. Public not private. Open, no choice about it.
I wish, I wish so much. I wish I could think, think without everybody, everybody commenting, criticizing that one thought. I hate it. I wish i could sit under the shade of those things called tree’s. Tree’s t hey died out long ago. I wonder why they died out. Because of us. We cut them down for our fires for the companies that have now polluted every. Single. Little. Inch. of this poor dying planet. A place we used to called home but would now be called a rubbish dump, a polluted, uncared for , sad environment. A place that used to be full beauty, a place that used to be called amazing, now it’s called eww, gross, disgusting. Might as well be trash islands for all we care, the people of the earth, the people who weren't the first living things on the planet, and at this rate we certainly won't be the last.
I was born, well created by a machine brought into this world with metal claws. Robots, machines. Why? My parents memories, thoughts and dreams were implanted into my head. We moved five years ago because of rising water levels. Wellington, well, what was left of Wellington is now. Underwater. Now we live upon grey rocky mountain. There could be landslides at any time around here. When it rains really hard the water level rises even more.
All of us lie here, as we will for the rest of our sad lives. We lie attached to machines that feed us, that do everything for us. And apparently, it’s good for us. Breathing this polluted air that’s full of chemicals that could kill us any moment. Every thought I have is projected out into the world even if it’s
something like “what disgusting slushy much are the machines going to feed me tonight?”
I’m criticized for my wonderings. My own private wonders about trees, about fresh air, about what would it taste like? What do trees look like? Maybe if people 100 years back had cared about the air i would know those things. maybe.
Soon, we’ll have nowhere to run, nowhere to escape our doings. We’re murderers. Killers of the earth. Mankind? More like, man mean.
I woke up. Beads of sweat rolling down my forehead like condensation on windows. I looked around. My solar powered house. So will it still be man mean?
Scarlett Anderson Year 7
A New WorldÂ
No. No. No. What had happened? The world had somehow turned. Somehow flipped violently to one side. I had missed it all. My world had changed. I do not remember anything. It feels as if somehow my mechanical brain has been sucked of all its knowledge. All its intelligence.
Continuing walking cautiously down the crowded footpath, somehow the heart of Wellington had changed. The scenery had been warped sharply into something of a nightmare, scraped violently of its living companions, replaced with neat, geometric metal sculptures. These dismal, almost too modern areas appeared frequently as I stumbled, astonished.
The sea tossed and turned in Wellington harbour, but no fisherman sat longingly on the ragged rocks. Something deep beneath my tangled brain told me there was nothing to catch. I couldn’t see a pohutakawa in sight; what replaced the forests was something of an artificial material. Something introduced in the time I had been asleep. Skyscrapers shot sharply from the set concrete grounding them, reaching high into the clouded, polluted air; thick and fumey, blurring my once perfect vision. Men and women stood afloat magical hovering devices, gracefully drifting into futuristic, sleek openings.
A holographic sign projected against a steel wall said:
Sadly, our native animal has become extinct! Donate and try save them if we can. If we have time!
Call 0800343212 now.
The Kiwi? Gone? Already? Mind delirious and confused, my gaze drifts away again. “What a load of absolute nonsense,” I say in sudden bursting anger, although everyone surrounding me was too busy staring forward at their holograms levitating in thin air. They seemed totally engulfed in whatever lay upon their luminescent, floating screens.
I stare some more at the humans, with such oddly out-of-this-world clothing. Skin tight jumpsuits they appeared to be; everyone of them different. There were different colours and wonderful patterns displayed upon them. I looked around slowly to lay my eyes upon a group of younger humans peering eagerly at one’s hologram reflecting off the sun’s blistering rays. My eyes drifted away, disinterested in their commotion.
I saw a small figure seated awkwardly on a bench. He was scowling coldly at the group of somewhat imbecile young humans huddled together. Then he muttered something that only my superior machine-driven hearing could hear. “What foolish young children,” he started, staring forcefully at the group. “It had been so well ordered back in 2018, such a long time ago...”
What? Had he just said...said. It doesn’t make sense. The numbers don’t add up. I had thought it was 2018. Suddenly, it all came rushing back into my memory. A sleep. A very very long sleep. “Oh, come on Bernie, make the most of 2118! You don’t have much time left to live!” came an interrupting voice. I gazed around at the crowd; it had come from a fair-skinned and very attractive young lady, helping the scrawny man up from his seat.
From those words on, my mechanical mind went crazy. My metal body shook violently. My blearing alarms went ballistic and I started to topple over. Then black. Thick, deep, motionless black. Hushed, muted calm silence.
I open my eyes. Now it is 2308.
Evie Wright, Year 8
A Gem in a Pile of Trash
Year: 2072 A large underground volcano erupts, causing large chunks of Earth to fly into the air. When they don’t come down, scientists discover a new element, ‘Tenuitium’, based on Latin ‘tenuit’ or held, that is holding them up. Sea levels rise and smog pollutes the lower ground, forcing humans upwards. People migrate up taller mountains, and design airships to live on.
Year: 2076 Car manufacturers go bankrupt when everyone changes to piloting aeroplanes.
Year: 2079 Food becomes more valuable than gold as sources of food disappear.
Year: 2084 A few new dangerous professions develop, including Junk Divers - travelling to the lowlands, finding valuables, and selling them on for food.
Year: 2093 Kira Nakano is born.
Year: 2095 Kira Nakano’s parents, engineers aboard a large airship, die in the crash of the airship. It is a huge tragedy, flooding news programs around the world. Although, one fact all of these very programs get wrong is that all onboard die.
There is one survivor, found by a group of junk divers, who was dropped at the stop and left to fight for its survival. And that survivor was Kira Nakano.
Year: 2107 Kira Nakano wakes twelve years since the death of her parents. She eats some leftover foodsludge, then stands. Looking around her little one-room shelter, made from scrap from the scrapyard, she goes over what she needs to do in the day. This is things like moving electrical devices, to working on a new game console for the games she makes with her friends. Their most popular game is ‘Quizzlesnak Slayer’, despite the strange name.
Kira sits down at her desk to get to work, before quickly realizing there are no useful spare parts left, except some scrap metal.
Walking to the exit and awkwardly squeezing into the outside world, Kira’s nose is bombarded the smell of twelve-month-old cat piss sprinkled through some trash. A rather noisy aeroplane flies by. Kira normally wouldn’t notice planes, but as mentioned, it was pretty damn noisy. She wanders around aimlessly for a while, digging through piles of scrap, before finally finding a small device, with parts that look like they could be of use for the new console.
Kira goes back to her little shelter to inspect it. She shimmies through the door and sits down at her working desk, and has a closer look at the device, noticing that it’s relatively new, but definitely pre-eruption tech. Kira looks inside her desk for anything she could find that could get it enough power to boot up and run its programming. She finds some old cables that she rewired to be able to connect to a modern portable solar charger, and uses them to charge the device.
After a while of charging, it boots up and Kira fiddles around with it until she figures out what it’s for and its capabilities. It seems to be a recorder that can play back its recording. She plays the recording. Static and then, a few seconds later, a documentary about an old world island called ‘New Zealand’. A beautiful place. A place that is covered with forests, these forests full of birds and wildlife. Kira wishes she could live there.
She daydreams about it for hours, before a ping on her communications device draws her back to the real world.
Jan Munro, Year 8
Takahe Expedition Here I am, in Wellington, year 2121.
Somehow, NZ’s population had leaped to 20 million, our flag changed to a sheep and hokey pokey ice cream, and Wellington has become the most densely packed city on earth per square metre and least densely per cubic metre, and houses 1,678,453 people. Now, I can reflect on my long life and the stories I can tell.
Throughout this last century, Wellington has been an amazing innovator of infrastructure, with the underground small houses, the dense metros designed for tiny trains, etc. All in all, Wellington hasn’t developed much per square metre, just spreading mostly downwards. I accept that and take pride, as 90 years ago I was the ideator of these. Though I do think that Wellington has been by far the best city in New Zealand at this, we still have an outstanding number of problems. The fear of climate change still beats down on us, for example.
Now travelling in the aforementioned tiny trains to town, I think back to a trip 3 years ago. Being a prominent environmental advocate and explorer, I was permitted to go on my own—without a tour guide as required by law, and further than the trails—through the vast expanse of Fiordland. The reason for
my old body to go on this one-man expedition was that I had the best techniques in the country to find possibly extinct species. My legs of 111 years coped surprisingly well with the cold and walking spells of 5 hours. Maybe because it was an important mission: to find takahe. The elusive species had came back once before, and I was determined to not let them slide away from existence.
After days of walking through uninhabited Fiordland native forest, my eyes note dazzling Milford Sound. The beauty is still there. Silent beauty. Then I hear a huge thump. And another. I smile. The reason? I knew exactly what the sound was. It came from the forest behind, where no one except me was allowed. Actually, not no one. No human. And the only NZ animal big enough to make that thump supposedly doesn’t exist. Moa. I walked towards the creature. Then I saw it. It wasn’t what I was expecting though. It was a baby bush moa the height of an infant. The sound? It slapping an attention-grabbing rock on the side of a cave, sound being echoed to the extent that it was as loud as a huge moa’s thump. Clever. But still I had one query: Who was nursing it? As if nature could read my mind, out of the cave came two of my mission’s reason—each slightly shorter than the baby moa.
Walking back, I thought of what I would say. I would show the takahe and breed them for children. Easy. The hard part of it was the moa. I was almost certain this was the only moa left, and I wanted it to have a normal life. If I showed it to the world it would get massive attention, which I think would be bad. If I show it to an normal nature reserve, then another moa would be created via de-extinction, which I am very much against. By the end of my travel I had reached a conclusion. It was a sad one, no doubt. But I believe it was the right one. I hid it in a private part of Zealandia, only known to a few people, visiting weekly to this day. I still have doubts that my decision was right, but they no longer prevail that much.
John Hyatt, Year 7
Salty tears danced across my vision, before slipping down my cheeks and staining the ugly ripped uniform I was wearing. For 12 years I had put up with life being unfair. The government ruled everything. And now they had taken away my one love. Learning.
No Third Class citizen was allowed to attend school. They said that they would need extra money to fund the army. I was so sick of war. Our earth barely survived WWlll. My mother’s calls brushed past me as I climbed the creaky stairs to the attic. This was a place I went often, to shake off the day’s pain. And right now I was hurting more than ever.
My vision was blinded by sadness, and I tried to stumble over to my corner. Something sharp grazed my ankle. I fell to the ground, barely realising what had happened. Perhaps it was the weight of never seeing the inside of a classroom again pushing down on my chest that had delayed such a reaction. I wanted to scream, but curiosity got the better of me. What had I hit? A box. A small, wooden box, held together by a tarnished gold lock. Tenderly, as if it were a diamond, my fingers scrabbled to pry it open. Patience was never one of my strongest suits, and anticipation pounded through my body. With a final pop, the box sprang open to reveal a small book. From what I knew, it looked like leather. Hard, smooth, and cold. My eyes flickered over the many words, scrawled in a spidery print.
May 21st, 2018 Dear diary, I hate school. I HATE it. The teachers, the learning, the classroom. It is a waste of time. What other way is there to put it? The government forces us to go. I
can’t possibly endure it for a minute longer. But I suppose I have to. What other choices do I have? Sit in a dull classroom for hours upon end, learning the use for a semi colon, straight after extremely long division. And the teachers. They don’t know what it’s like, do they? No offense, but it has been quite a fair while since Mrs. Bennell attended school! She says it’s a privilege to have an education, but I think it is the opposite. A total waste of my time!
Disbelief hit me like a tsunami. The Government, the same Government that has banned me from having rights, eating nourishing food, education. T he same Government whose motive is power and riches. The same Government who crave w ar. But maybe, once, equality was more than a myth. A powerful, fair, just force. The tears that I thought had dried up began to drip again. If only, if only, I could go back. By Lola Wood, Year 8