It was getting unusually hot. I reach for the fan remote. Wasn’t it right next to me when I switched the AC off and turned the ceiling fan on instead last night? Half asleep, it occurred to me that the room was devoid of the usual whirring of either fan or air conditioner. I think I found the AC remote. I pressed the glow in the dark button, nothing beeped. At this point, I hazily thought, “ah something’s not working again”. The batteries maybe?
I got up and pressed the manual switch on. Nothing happened. An outage? On a hot stuffy night in Klang? Really, classic bullshit. Too sleepy to make a fuss, I drift back to sleep, this time a hundred years into the future.
…
Internet cafes were back in trend again, operating like semi-public speakeasies. The last frontiers of privacy, they were the only places that ran on independent servers untapped to the System. If you wanted to get on the black market for fresh produce or bypass paywalls to edit out your own records, you’d have to surf privately. These servers are secure because of how they’re powered by DIY batteries. Dynamos, mushrooms or hydrogen — or a composite of any, the more complex, the harder to crack.
Batteries were the wild card of the Climate Crises that no one (well, at least not us commoners) saw coming. Once, the premise of tapping into infinite energy sources like the sun, wind or ocean gave universal hope to overcome the Climate Crisis of 2.0 (CC2.0). But it was a matter of time before, enterprising scientists saw the pot of gold lurking behind any good crisis. Like selling bottled water that ran free from mountain springs, the technology to harvest, store and distribute energy in the end was bottled in custom batteries developed by a select few, who had been researching and securing the patents for energy-storing technology, long before the Kyoto Protocol was even incepted.
They say he who controls energy, controls the world. In the global intellectual economy, he who controls the technology to store energy, controls the world. It was a power struggle, not between political factions or corporations, but one between intellectual properties. Like many countries on the Equator relatively shielded from the worst of CC1.0, Malaysia maintained its laissez-faire attitude. After all, they were also some of the smallest carbon emission contributors, hardly to be blamed for taking a backseat. The price we paid was of course disproportionate to our indifference. The land flowing with oil and gas brought to its knees in a swoop of international sanctions crippling fossil fuel economies.
My machine is smoking up. The shopkeepers lay a cold towel over the back of my monitor. “It happens on really hot days,” he said. “Good for the battery cells, but bad for the equipment”. I look at his face perplexed…. “How is grandpa still alive?”
…
I got up and grabbed my towel. Luckily, cold showers were still free.
