Vignette #5 — Baby

Baby walks through the dry heat of the early morning. Only the tip of the sun edges above the horizon. The low sky is a sheet of red dust haze. It's enough, temperature-wise. Soon it'll be too hot.

They used to call him Baby on account of his babyish face, but he doesn't have that any more. It's creased by sun and hidden behind his beard. His goggles. His squint. His shade. Not many people call him Baby nowadays because not many people are left. Most of them have moved on. There's not much left of the old town here, either. The termites have eaten most of it.

The termites are his thing. Tracking them, mapping them. Tapping their methane. It's a valuable source, and valuable to keep it away from the atmosphere. He gazes across his field, at the mounds. The hazy sun casts long, fuzzy shadows across the orange, dusty land. If things still grow here, Baby can't see them.

Every morning he checks the mounds. He has them covered in gas catching shrouds. Made from sheets of dark tarpaulin, glued and ribbed together. Weighted at the bottom with stones, and dirt.

The termites don't seem to mind. Don't seem to notice. Though the mounds do move, or grow. New ones appear. Old ones lie abandoned, when the termites themselves shift allegiance to a new patch of food. It's a slow process, not one anybody would normally notice. Baby notices, because it's what he notices. He has to reconfigure the tarps, make new shrouds, extend and shift them.

Ahead of him are hundreds of mounds, encroaching on the edge of the old town. Thousands more have sprouted amongst the buildings—and what remains of them now, after all the wood has been eaten.

When they've finished eating the town, he doesn't know what they are planning to do. It's not something the termites have ever tried before.

Hoses snake across the land from the mounds, to his collectors. They chunter in the sunlight, compressing and separating out the methane extracted from the mounds. It's only a little, but it's something. Everything counts.

[ here, we may talk more about the methane issue ]

In the distance, already doubled in reflection by the heat haze, the new settlement. As much as it is. Shipping containers, cut and welded together. Coated in huge drifts of foam insulation. Half buried by the red desert dust. Baby lives there, with a few others. Those who still have things to do in the baked, half eaten town.

In one of those containers is the methane converter. It draws the gas from the mounds—millions of termites venting gas while they digest. Breaks it down into useful components. It's simple chemistry but complicated to keep it safe. Methane goes in, water and CO2 come out. The water is for drinking, the CO2 goes direct to the algae farm. That's most of their food these days. They could just eat the termites, but that wouldn't solve the methane problem.

Behind it, Baby's baby.

His observatory.

It's hard to know if he's here because of the termites, or the observatory. Baby's been here so long, he can't answer the question himself.