Upon hearing the news that climate change will most likely end all of human civilization by the year 2050, most people I know became understandably upset, but not me. I’m good with it. Let’s let climate change do its thing. The sooner, the better.
I don’t know what the rest of you have been doing for the last thirty years, but based on an informal poll of my coworkers, it seems that almost none of you have been digging a large network of underground tunnels as a place to live once the surface becomes a nightmare world incapable of supporting life. You could not say the same about me. Beneath my house is a series of tunnels and chambers rivaling the capacity of any major city in the world. If that sounds rad, that’s because it is.
Most people don’t know this about me, but I have what I’d describe as a moderate case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
I discovered this fun fact about myself in middle school when I’d spend hours many nights attempting to flip down a light switch that was very much already flipped down, all the while standing in complete darkness. But that’s the fun thing about OCD! The logic of “I’m standing in a visual deprivation chamber” has no effect on my checking compulsion. If The Sadistic Boss inside my brain tells me to check that the lights are off, I’m going to do it even when cocooned in absolute black.
So when the compulsion overcame me to check what was in the ground beneath my house, I did not plunge my shovel into dirt with the intention of digging an inverted megacity. I did so to appease The Boss (not Bruce Springsteen, I think), who would scratch from within at my mind until I’d give into his cruel instructions. Digging was not what I wanted to do. It was what I had to do. Or else.
All my life, I considered The Boss to be tantamount to a curse.
Until smartphones became a thing, I could not bring myself to step away from my computer due to my need to continuously hit refresh on my browser to see if any new email dropped into my inbox. Never mind that I had no friends and was not anyone important. I knew I would not get anything more than a random promotional email or piece of spam. That didn’t stop me from checking. That didn’t stop the rising terror of panic from overtaking my chest whenever I was away from my computer, pounding my heart and hiding my breath from me.
Even today as a full blown adult with a family and job and the latest iPhone, I am unable to go more than a few minutes without checking twitter for mentions that surely won’t come, checking my email for replies from nonexistent pen pals or refreshing webpages about music, basketball; anything, well beyond or before the fixed time they update every day. And you can find me straightening objects all around my house when stress overtakes me. This is not cleaning, I am literally adjusting crooked objects until they have clean, simple lines, all parallel and perpendicular to each other, forming patterns in my head nobody else can see because they only make sense to The Boss and whatever his plan may be.
Claim God is speaking to you in any tangible way and people will accuse you of possessing a severe mental illness. This is probably true. Logic would dictate God doesn’t need a concrete voice that can be heard with sounds and syllables. God’s Will could be a suggestion or urge or compulsion.
Assuming The Bible is true, how did God tell Noah to build his ship?
Did it comes with instructions? Was it a booming voice? Or did Noah obsessively cut down trees for reasons unknown even to himself? Perhaps Noah began crafting the ship from the wood he hoarded. He collected animals for no other reason than a force unseen, unheard compelled him to do so. The rain came and Noah thought to himself, “Interesting.” The water levels rose and the ship lifted from its drydock and Noah boarded his family onto the boat while his neighbors silently screamed underwater until they couldn’t scream anymore.
Only then did it dawn on our hero that his sick compulsions were God’s voice speaking to him. A rainbow served as a wink when it was all over.
“See what I did there?” God said without saying. “Do you see what I did?”
God doesn’t need to be all-powerful. God doesn’t need to be a creator. God can be a warning sent backward through time, dragging humanity’s existence through a battlefield strewn with corpses and plopping it into the relative safety of an uncomfortable trench topped with barbwire.
So it was with me and my inverted city.
One day, I was making foot prints in the dirt roads of the underground when a thought appeared like a gnat circling my head. An incalculable number of years I spent digging out this place, smoothing the structures into streets, alleys, buildings and open parks. I built this place the way others might build entire Lego cities in their basements. Earth’s core provided an energy source to produce power and thus produce the basics of clean air, sanitation, power grids and cooling systems. Underwater lakes and rivers rested on certain levels of the city, beauty and utility sparkling as one.
The thought was this: All those years of torture, flipping switches down and avoiding certain numbers and claiming certain numbers and straightening and avoiding cracks in the walkways and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking and checking, all of that was a test to see if I deserved this.
The Boss would not reward someone with saving humanity if the threat existed that the person would ignore his compulsive instructions He needed someone he could trust to carry out his will. Someone like me.
No, I wasn’t perfect.
There was the time in college when I was too vocal about wanting to commit suicide, and my parents insisted I see a psychiatrist. She put me on Prozac to calm the depression, but Prozac is also known to quiet compulsions, quiet obsessions. In that respect, the drug worked, but it also numbed my entire existence.
I’m not saying mental disorders are indistinguishable from personality, although the two do merge. True for me, though, was that I became my own uncanny valley as a side effect of Prozac. I wasn’t quite me. I seemed a little like me in a very basic way, but everything was a little off, a little strange. So I stopped taking my meds and my psychiatrist chewed me out over the phone so I never went back.
Even though, during those weird months on Prozac, I kept The Boss at an arm’s length, he did not punish me for it. Quite the opposite, in fact. He toned down some of the more obtrusive compulsions over the next few years. He made the panic attacks during a complete OCD mental meltdown a little less severe, a little shorter. I think he realized he was pushing me too hard, so we came to an understanding. I wouldn’t take antidepressants anymore and he’d go a little easier on me.
The reward is this, an inverted, self-sustained city. A place where life can continue when the surface world dies.
I don’t care if people think this place is a product of happenstance. Behold the majesty of the labyrinths underground. Behold the moss and exotic mushrooms clinging to the surface of the building, the domesticated animals roaming free among among the buildings and crystal caverns branching out in their own naturally formed gouges offshooting from my man-made spectacle.
Only so many people can fit down here, so please remember it is first come, first serve. Please bring rare and wild animals with you if you can, not only so we can use them to repopulate the Earth but so we can build a zoo for our own entertainment. Some lions and snakes would be especially cool. If you bring one of those, I’ll move you to the front of the line.
We can even have board game night if that sounds fun, and I’ll be bringing my Gameboy if anyone is interested in playing Tetris. The world will soon burn alive, but that doesn’t mean us survivors cannot have fun. If anything, it’s an excuse to really enjoy ourselves.
The Boss gifted us this underground fortress. I don’t want to be exactly like Noah, just his family and some animals left to start over. That’s a lot of pressure. It’s kind of gross. I don’t even particularly like people, but the prospect of being here alone suffocates me more than the serenity of the wide open chambers.
On top of these obvious benefits, I can picture vividly Earth one day normalizing into hospitable for organic life and our descendants emerging to see the sky for the first time in their lives. Our whole civilization of mole people will collectively gasp at a world surely different from the one they had known. Hilarious, of course, if in that time another intelligent life form rises to existence and marvels at us marveling at them marveling at us.
Venus is our sister planet, closer to Earth than any other planet by distance and now closest by fate as well. Electrical storms rage across the entire surface of Venus, a prophetic byproduct of climate change.
When I think of our sister planet, I have to wonder if what happened there was the same as what’s happening here. I wonder if they did this to themselves, and their people lurk below the surface the way half a billion us will soon lurk below Earth’s surface, underground with the storms raging above.