• Vol. 07
  • Chapter 02
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I wondered, how many people standing on strand and cliff, have cast hopes, pleas, position or place to the sea. How many stood and watched their bottle drift away to be caught by a tide and swept out, until it was lost to sight.
How many have returned home to begin a waiting game, noting that day down in secret places.
What happened to those bottles, those messages, those lives.
The past is gone, innocence long lost to memory. All tales of the golden age mythologised, scorned by critics.
Until one day the tide returned those bottles, containing a message that failed the hopeful and the stranded.
No message in a bottle, the message was the bottle. White-bodied, red-topped, washed up on every shore seemingly overnight turning the strands of nations from fine ground stone to plastic.
Our actions, that equal and opposite had become a reaction. Our manifold gods and deities had returned the offerings. Choking under the volume of prayers beyond their ability to answer.
The weather on the day of the message bottles was the most perfect anyone could remember. Ominously perfect, it portrayed a world now lost.
Our future was plastic, is plastic. All reality, all nature, all life suffocated to silence. Scanned and replicated by machines in 3D forms.
The world now lives through a variety of screens, large and small. We have stopped looking outwards and instead build our reality inside our screens, we own our worlds. Filling our reality screens with plastic and cottonwool clouds. Within this landscape we play out our lives.
And the bottles, when did we notice them. Not it seems when the first arrived, not until the strands were clogged and rivers choked. Not in fact until we had to wade our way to work. The debate has begun, the future, that strange unknown country, is a place we are yet to discover.