To celebrate the release of my first novel, Hibernaculum, available now in hardback, paperback and e-book, I’m posting a little Hibernation story that went out through Kindle Vella.
HiberNation
Rawls read back over his text and checked for spelling mistakes (dyslexia never does quite leave you). He tinkled on his lower lip with his finger tips, which hadn’t seen a piano in a decade, but still tended to treat everything like keytops. He really wasn’t sure about the tone—of his text, that is. No, he was in doubt. Was it too heavy-handed? Not heavy-handed enough? He’d send it to the committee, and they could go over it together. Larissa could double-check thegrammar. She was good at that sort of thing. Were there too many numbers, perhaps? Maybe. Probably. But how do you get something like this across without numbers? “Numbers make the reader’s mind shut down. They just switch right off”, Larissa said. Rawls didn’t buy that per se. When it came to sport, for example, folks couldn’t get enough numbers. It was all percentiles, decimals, averages, ratios, xTDs versus recTDs, yards, points tallies and other metrics. It was worse than fucking algebra, yet folks studied it, retained it and picked it all apart at the bar. But you try telling them about extinctions and they just straight-up hit the snooze button. It wasn’t the numbers that were the problem, it was the theme.
He pushed back his chair and walked to his pitiful excuse for a kitchen, which amounted to a beat-up aluminum sink and draining board perched on bare-brick stilts at either end. Some exposed pvc plumbing disappeared into a coarsely hacked hole in the wall underneath. Whatever dishwater trickled down miraculously transformed into roaches and came scrambling back up. Beside the sink was a camper’s stove he used for his incompetent, inedible culinary adventures—small wonder he was so thin—but mostly it was used to reheat coffee. Lots of black coffee.
Only 3% of the mammalian species out there in our world today are wild, he read. “Or is wild? Is wild is right, I think, but sounds wrong, and are wild sounds right, but probably isn’t…Sign of the times, I guess”.
Rawls often talked to himself out loud. They say plants like being talked to, and he figured the same held for walls.
Three per cent. He knew that stat very well. He’d been telling it to anyone who’d listen for years, but it still knocked the air out of his lungs. It was crazy. Nuts. Mad. And we complain about cockroaches? We are worse thancockroaches. We’ve reduced the rest of our class, the glorious class that replaced the dinosaurs as lords of the earth, to a measly three per cent. The other 97% of Class Mammalia is us and our living, breathing, flatulent food.
Rawls’ “basement flat” (that’s what they had the absolute cheek to call it on the lease) received natural light and air through a single tilt-window that ran along the wall at sidewalk level, just above head-height. He would often sit and watch the shadows of feet outside and think about Plato’s allegory of the cave. Only in this case, the “cave” was out there. Everything was back-to-front, inside-out, relative these days. It was becoming hard to think. When it rained torrentially, which it increasingly did, his flat would pretty much flood. So everything had to be propped a good half a foot off the floor, on bricks. It was insalubrious, no doubt about it, but it was all he could (almost) afford. Rawls belonged to that growing swath of the urban population that could just about scrape by nine months of the year. The other three were spent in the Hibernaculum. Most people in his boat resented that immensely, but not Rawls. He was more than happy to hibernate. In fact, he felt morally obliged to do it.
The first time he’d hibernated was in the Autumn of 2042, and that was out of desperation. He was broke, depressed, and exasperated, and the only other alternative was suicide. So he went for the reversible option, and it was literally the best thing he had ever done in his entire life. He spent four months in oblivion and emerged a new man, a man with a mission. The biggest change was in perspective. Objective reality was the same as before, or maybe even slightly worse, but subjectively he was on a whole new plane. He no longer saw his penury as the poisoned fruit of his own failure. No, it was the world that had failed. The world was the fuck-up, not him. He was just the reflection, the collateral damage of its twisted ideals. Rawls, and a whole generation along with him, was the product of a world that had taken one-too-many wrong turns. “What sort of a society puts most of its population out of a job by creating A-fucking-I that can do pretty much anything cheaper, faster, and more reliably than people! How many kids does AI have? How many mortgages? How many college loans does it have to pay off? How many elderly parents does it have to take care of?” What a wonderful idea that had been. Bravo, clap clap! Clerk jobs, translation jobs, paralegal work, most analytical functions, didactic-material production, most architecture, post-production and graphic design, civil service jobs, air-traffic control, you name it, it was all done by computers now. What the automated factory had done to the working class, AI was doing to the middle class. It was wipeout. Congress, that swill-pit of parasites that had let things go this far in the first place, was now chewing over a Bill to create a floor for actual human labor at businesses across the country. Yes, a law obliging employers to hire a minimum quota of their own fucking species. That’s where we were now, and there was no guarantee it was actually going to pass.“What sort of animal are we?”, he exclaimed to his three walls, but the walls had heard it all before and weren’t listening. It was only after his first hibernation that he really began to see the world for what it was: a self-making mistake.
He read his text back one more time…Hmmm, more doubts.
Micro-plastics in the bloodstreams of high-altitude leaf-eared mice…he wasn’t sure whether to run with that example. Most people wouldn’t have heard of leaf-eared mice. Maybe he needed something folks actually gave a shit about, like desert foxes, or pandas. No, the whole point was that micro-plastics were in the bloodstreams of a mouse species that lives in the Andes at altitudes of up to five thousand meters above sea-level, about as far from humankind as they can get. How do micro-plastics end up there? How?
But from that line down, the rest was on the nose. Exactly what he wanted to say. What had to be said. Yeah, it was ready to go, he figured. Ready for launch! The HiberNation Manifesto.
There’d be blowback. There’d be scoffing, and piss-taking, and derision. But if it got through to somebody, then it would have been worthwhile.
It was what civilization needed. Someone to place a soothing hand on its fevered brow and say Hush now. Sleep.
“Someday…”, he thought. “Someday deer will potter down Market Street, and graze on the pitch at Levi’s Stadium. Foxes will frolic in the gardens, and bears will come down from the hills. Someday…”, he imagined. “Someday it won’t be all about us.”
HiberNation
A manifesto
Version 2.1 01/01/2045
Our civilization is overblown, overpopulated, out of synch, entirely devoted to its many and varied vices and habits, to the point that we are prepared to risk the few things we actually need in favor of the many we merely want or crave. The earth cannot withstand much more of our presence. We have stung all the bees, poisoned all the snakes, eaten all the sharks, and caught all the spiders in our worldwide web. Our species accounts for just 0.01% of the earth’s biomass, and yet, since the dawn of human civilization, we have been responsible for 90% of all loss of wild flora and fauna. We have transformed the surface of the earth, and skewed the balance of the species. Human beings make up 38% of all remaining mammals, and another 59% of that is livestock bred specifically to feed us. Only 3% of the mammalian species out there in our world today are wild. 75% of all birdlife is farmed poultry, leaving only 25% flying free across biomes disfigured by human ideas. All that remain are landscapes that mirror our fear, our greed, and our total disregard for non-human life. There can be no more beer cans in the Mariana Trench. No more micro-plastics in the bloodstreams of high-altitude leaf-eared mice.
Earth has become an anthropocentrized parody of itself—part garden, part landfill.
It’s not enough to slow the growth and wait for natural recession in human numbers. Earth does not have that long to wait. The time for urgent action is now.
If it were any other animal, we’d be calling for a cull. But we are not fascists. As permanently removing some of the population is out of the question, we must temporarily remove all of the population. It’s the only way to cut back, ration out, distribute, spread around. The time has come for human time-rotation.
The HiberNation calls for the introduction of mandatory 3-month hibernations for everyone over the age of 16, once every three years, starting NOW.
Introduce the Sleep Draft.
It’s the only way to stop the non-human die-off.
It’s the only way to ration our depleting resources.
JOIN US NOW
Anthony Doyle 