The Tipping Point by Ruiting Zhao

The first rays of sunlight are sliced into neat shafts by thick bars barring the tiny square window of Anemone’s prison cell, and pronounce the gloomy shadows, rather than melting them away. Anemone bolts upright, her eyes snapping wide open. Then, as the bare and cramped cell comes into focus, she throws herself back down again, her face draining of all sunshine and leaving a dark veil of brooding shadows, which do not disperse for the least bit when the back of her head smacks against the floor. 

It has been five years since Anemone was forced to call this cell her home, and already, the outside world has forgotten about her. No more hate mail; no more malicious articles published by media craving popularity, not even the guard who brings her repetitive meals three times a day remembers what she was arrested for. Anemone does not even blink when he comes in. Without moving her gaze from the ceiling, she knows the jacket of his uniform is creasing towards his neck, as he bends down and sets her tray of bland rice and a bowl of potato soup beside the doorway, like he has done for the past five years. “This disgusting mess they call food was probably the only thing I had to get used to when I was arrested,” Anemone muses bitterly to herself, “after all, depression, loneliness, and being imprisoned in spaces constructed out of steel, iron and plastic, they’re all old playmates, thanks to mom.”

Anemone couldn’t remember ever being able to see the sky, or any other piece of nature, back in her childhood. The Eggshell, one of the many oval capsules suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere, had been her whole world. For as long as little Anemone could remember, she had been surrounded by curving, eggshell-white steel walls. In fact, everything in The Eggshell was either a different shade of white or grey. There wasn’t even a single piece of colorful decoration or clothing to be found, which Avy, her mother, considered as “unnecessary distractions.” The only exceptions were full-color display screens in the living room and bedrooms, (which were turned-off most of the time), and the vibrantly-colored fruits and vegetables cloned in the Genetics Pantry (which she often sneaked off to see.) If she had been particularly obedient, her mother even let her help the Chef-Bot with harvesting. Of course, Anemone and Avy, along with thousands of remaining humans, wouldn’t have been forced to immigrate into floating capsules, if it wasn’t for the disasters in 2984.

Anemone was born in that year, which, according to her mother, was “horrible, with earthquakes, avalanches, and tsunamis succeeding each other like droplets from a sprinkler.” Anemone never understood the meaning behind those three words before the age of twelve, when she started taking Natural Sciences lessons, taught online by a professor-Bot. Before then, she would pester her mother, and always encountered the same answer, “You’ll know when you start school, now let mommy work, run along to the Chef-Bot and get some juice.”

By the time she was five, however, not even fresh juice made from home-cloned strawberries could stem Anemone’s flood of questions. The Chores-Bot, whose job also included teaching Anemone basic reading, writing, and grammar, had read her an old children’s story about a family, and Anemone had immediately gone running to her mother, demanding to know where “daddy” is, and the real reason their home didn’t have large windows, or colorfully-painted walls and furniture. For the first time in living memory, her mother’s fingers froze for a moment above her keyboard, then shut her laptop with a resolute “thump”. Avy pulled Anemone onto her knee, and answered the questions that had puzzled Anemone her whole childhood.

“Right now, The Eggshell is floating in mid-air. The year you were born, however, we still lived down on the ground. We had to move, because those disasters I mentioned destroyed people’s homes, and we couldn’t live down there anymore. Many, many people died, and daddy was one of them, b…because w…we only had money for a t…two-passenger escape pod.” She paused to take a deep, trembling breath, then continued, “mommy loved daddy like mommy loves you, and all those things will remind me of daddy and make me sad, as well as distract you. Mommy wants you to study hard and become successful, you’ll be safer that way, and you’ll make daddy proud.”

So, Anemone dutifully sat herself in front of her desk, and completed whatever tasks her mother assigned her every day. She never could recall what her motivation was, aside from living up to her parents’ (or rather, her mother’s) expectations. The timer-watch Avy gave her for her sixth birthday also played an important role in supervising her.

Even after all these years, Anemone still remembers every distinct detail of that watch, from the shrill beeps it sounded, (not unlike the timer of a bomb before it detonates,) to its (not-surprisingly) dull-grey wrist straps, and its cool heaviness as it sat in her palm. She also remembered the pleasure when she first received the watch, before she realized what it did, since it was (and still is) the only present she had ever received that was not an e-book. However, she quickly developed a secret hatred for it, after the beeping began. Her mother had set the watch, so that it beeped at the time she is supposed to start a task, and beeped again to signal the task’s finishing time.

“This will help you get a safe, happy future.” Avy had said.

From that day on, Anemone knew no peace.

Six years later, the beeping of the watch signaled the start of Anemone’s first natural sciences class. Holograms featuring fauna and flora that once thrived on Earth enveloped her in their dim glow, and the projection of a snow leopard immediately caught her eye. Its icy gray eyes stared out of the shaggy, dirt-streaked fur. The background was muddy brown, with a few distant slivers of white. The bot droned on, but Anemone was frozen in her chair. Those eyes conveyed a flicker of dignity, but moreover, they screamed of starvation, and most frightening of all, accusation. Anemone stared into the piercing gaze, and questioned her mother for the first time: Why has she never mentioned all these animals and plants before?  Avy had always focused on humans only, and emphasized again and again how she should work harder for a safe and contented life. There had been another world once, thought Anemone, where pretty colors didn’t have to be cloned, where other organisms had grown and reproduced and died. What had caused the disasters that brought our planet to the tipping point?

As if to answer her, the bot continued “Although researchers suspect solar variations had some influence, human activities still remain as the primary cause for disastrous events of 2984. Early warning signs, such as Global Warming, had already gone on for approximately a hundred centuries, although they were mostly ignored by previous generations, who were in favor of gaining profits over environmental preservation……” 

Long after the lesson had ended, the snow leopard’s accusing eyes still continued to bore into Anemone.

The eyes helped Anemone find what she truly wanted to be. With a major in Eco-VA, she would become an Ecology-artist. She would make the extinct plants and animals live again, on canvas. The dream seemed real and achievable enough, until Anemone lost her right arm, at the age of fifteen. It began with an argument with her mother.

“I want to study Visual Arts as one of my high school subjects, then go on to become an Ecology-artist, mom.”

“After everything I’ve taught you? Artists are practically beggars, living in filthy refugee tents on the ground. Even the most successful ones can barely afford to buy their own capsules. If you take over my post, however––”

“Just stop, mom, please! I’m sick of you always bringing that up! I’m not interested in sitting home and typing up summary forms of profits and signing contracts all day long! Can’t you let me do something fun, for once?!”

“How dare you be so ungrateful! Everything I do, everything your father had done, was so that you could enjoy an easier life. We didn’t sacrifice so much for your education, just to see you flush it all down the drain!!”

Anemone no longer remembers the rest of the fight, but she most certainly remembers the sobs that kept her awake; and her bloodshot, puffy eyes the next morning. She remembers following her watch’s calls and meekly sitting herself on the flycycle to practice meditation (“A focused mind always makes you more efficient!!”). She remembers closing her eyes as the device sensed her weight and floated up in midair, and suddenly, she was staring into a pair of icy grey eyes in the darkness. The irises were expanding, preparing to devour her! Then, without warning, the flycycle had tilted to one side as her concentration slipped, and the bones in her right arm splintered against cold marble. Still the eyes watched, pitilessly.

Anemone was only freed from the eyes’ burden when she turned 38. She had taken over the position of Head of the Chinese Financial Profits and Economic Development Management Office from her mother, after all. It was Avy’s death which completely freed her to pursue the path towards attempting to rescue what was left of Earth. The elaborately-carved box containing her mother’s ashes came sliding out of a chute of the funeral celebrant’s capsule, and Anemone felt like she was submerged in hazy numbness, as she watched her finger press the “release” button. The button made no noise. The sliding chute door made no noise. The dropping box made no noise. The departing capsule of the funeral celebrant made no noise. Panicking, Anemone bolted through the Eggshell, so that the whooshing of sliding doors and the slapping of her feet against the ground could stifle the suffocating silence. After what seemed like hours, she collapsed, gasping for breath. When she looked up, she was startled to find herself in the storage room, in front of her old, disused flycycle. The eerie blue eyes blinked once, and looked at her expectantly…

The next six months flashed past in a whirlwind of events. The incredulous “O” formed by the UN representative’s mouth, as his offer of building more factories in China, which would offer more job opportunities and help increase profits, encountered a flat refusal from Anemone; the satisfying camera flashes, as she fingerprint-signed for the passing of new Financial Laws, blocking unsustainable industries from entering China; and the dazzling light of the Nature and Humanities Observatory, as the lead scientist, with rumpled dark hair and bags under his bespectacled eyes, explained the theory to her,

“Basically, we’ve discovered this pattern that mass extinctions really have happened several times before, where not one single species had survived, yet Earth was always able to breed a new batch of life giga-anni later. All our previous knowledge of nature was actually the observations of the latest renewal. So, theoretically, if we were to destroy ourselves, Earth would be able to renew itself sometime in the future. We haven’t decided on a name for this theory, though…”

“The Tipping Theory.” Anemone remembered the momentary silence that ensued, as if the Earth itself was holding its breath, listening, but no longer watching.

Unfortunately, the people turned out to resemble Avy more, in self-preservation and personal profits, and Anemone only succeeded in publishing a series of documentaries, encouraging people to purchase pills that promised painless death, before the UN sentenced her to life-time confinement.

Anemone, now 45, turns her head just in time to see the disk of their radiant sun fully-emerge into the tiny square of her window, rather like the face of a watch, or the iris of a never-shutting eye, bearing eternal witness to how a world almost tipped… the right way.