The Turbine at the End of the World
Three words chilled Jana in the oppressive heat of night. They yanked her from sleep, rough hands on her shoulders. “The turbine died.” Those words, uttered by a small girl from the dark, pulled Jana roughly from her bed. Ever since she had mentioned the turbines to Lauren, had explained why she had chosen to live in the sinking remains of an apartment in the sea, the girl had taken to standing guard. Each evening Jana woke and Lauren would tell her that the turbine was okay. It was their form of greeting. A ‘hello’ would suffice to her parents when Jana passed them in the hall or helped unload the boat that they used to take in supplies. For Lauren, though, it was always the turbine. And now it had stopped.
Jana jumped up and ran into the afterthought of a living room. It was filled with pointless salvage that might someday evolve into something useful, the skeletons of hairdryers and microwaves scattered across the damp carpet. Jana walked past it all, hands gripping the windowsill. The wind farm was on the horizon, visible in the silver light of the moon hanging above. Her eyes scanned over the thirty turbines. Nearly all had become ghosts, pale white spectres in the rising sea. The last though had carried on. Four from the right, the entire burden of the world on its shoulders.
Its blades sat motionless.
“Do you know for how long?”
Lauren shook her head, her dirty face reflecting Jana’s panic. “It had stopped when I got out of bed. I checked it straight away. I promise! Is it going to be okay? Are you going to be able to fix it? Are we going to die?”
“Whoa, calm down,” Jana said, kneeling in front of the girl. She locked her own fear away and ran a hand down Lauren’s cheek. She no longer thought about how she could never comfort a child of her own like this. The wound had been cauterised; the world long since making that decision for her. “It’ll be okay. I’m going to fix it, don’t worry. But I need you to do something important for me. I need you to tell Mummy and Daddy that I’m going to need the boat tonight, okay?”
Lauren nodded, and disappeared out of the room.
Alone, the panic and fear came surging back to Jana. It rolled and crashed into her like the waves lapping at the apartment block she lived in. The turbine was dead and if she couldn’t fix it, the world was just as doomed. Turbines had failed before. Some she had managed to revive; others she had not. None of them had ever been the last, though. The final thing between the world and annihilation. Alone in the living room, only the moonlight for company, it was hard for Jana not to picture everything crumbling around her. The water would rise higher. Her home would be flooded. Buildings would crack and crumble. Ground, already parched, would turn to desert. In the silence between two heartbeats, she thought about fleeing. Rowing out to sea, she could let the tides take her, let her body bake under the sun and escape the dying days. That destiny was for someone else, though. Someone who didn’t care.
Jana ventured to the apartment below. The sea had claimed it a decade ago, reaching up to punch through windows and flood the defenceless rooms. The boat that Jana shared with the family bobbed in the empty lounge, tied to the naked window frame. It had once been motorised, but whatever petrol still existed in the world was a distant myth to Jana. They had stripped the engine for parts, fashioned two oars, and made the boat necessary for their lives. It would navigate the canals of former streets and take them to drier land, where supplies could be bartered for. Today, it had to take Jana out to sea. She untied the boat, clambered inside and drifted out into the night.
The town spread out behind her. Her mother had told her it had once been a seaside resort, when the idea of holidays and summers still existed. It was already dying before the warming seas. Tourists chose destinations further afield. Those who grew up in the town seldom stayed, instead being plucked by the wind and scattered elsewhere through the country. Still, some remained. As soon as the sun slipped beneath the horizon, they scurried out of their homes to do what had to be done in the relative cool of night. Most had retreated out to the suburbs, the new coast, but a few still lived in the heart of the town. They survived in the top floors of apartment buildings, owls perched in the highest branches. Boats criss-crossed between old streets, a Venetian memory in a dead seaside resort. There was no panic, though. No cries or exodus. No one had noticed the last turbine’s failure. Jana took a deep breath, plucked the oars from their perch and began to row.
Her family had moved here over a century ago, when borders were still open, and people freely travelled across Europe. They had settled in the dying town, took jobs that the locals no longer wanted. Through time a sense of ownership grew, taking root till the idea of leaving their home seemed sickening. The turbines weaved in and out of family stories. Some echoing great grandfather had worked as a technician when the entire farm still functioned. Later, her father told stories of how he had walked along the beach with his grandmother, how they had skipped stones out to sea. She had pointed to the turbines and explained that they were going to save the world. So much of the story seemed foreign to Jana. The idea of a beach, the image of treating the sea like some passing fancy rather than cowering from its hunger. She remembered the words, though. The wind turbines were going to save the world. He died before he could tell her how.
It didn’t matter. For the next forty years, Jana and others taught themselves how to maintain the turbines, how to drag out their lives, stretching them longer and longer until there was only one left.
And it had stopped.
Halfway out to the turbines, Jana pulled at the shirt sticking to her damp skin. Even under the moonlight, the heat pressed in around her, squeezing her tight. The wind did nothing to help. It only made it harder to row, pushing the boat back, forcing Jana to strain her muscles to mount every wave. Tasting salt, she struggled to breathe, gulping down mouthfuls of air. Her throat burned and her arms wanted nothing more than to throw the oars into the sea, to let the tide push her back towards dry land. She persisted. A whisper danced in the wind, her great grandmother’s voice slipping through the years: the turbines will save the world.
Up close, they jutted out of the sea as if they had been hurled by a god, white hot thunderbolts digging deep into the earth’s flesh. Jana twisted in her seat, counted four from her right, and counted again, making sure the sea hadn’t led her astray. She rowed, guiding the boat to the broken titan. Her ears strained for some sound of damage. The wind covered up any hissing motors or screaming gears as the boat bobbed against the smooth, white tower. Jana moved forward, her body scrambling as she threaded the rope through the small ring jutting out from the turbine. The waves came, dragging the boat away, and the rope went taut, fighting back. She watched the battle. Only after the rope had won three times did Jana reach up for the first rung of the ladder in front of her.
Blood thundered through her ears as she climbed. The trip never became easier. Hanging off the side of the white monolith, each step grew the pit in her stomach. It stretched, the fear threatening to become the only thing she could ever feel. There were hooks every so often, for harnesses that no longer existed, and Jana could only climb helplessly past them. Wind battered her, trying to pry her from the ladder. ‘You’re not worthy; let the world die,’ it seemed to scream. If it could knock her from the turbine, she would disappear into the sea and everything would end. Jana clutched tighter at each rung and emerged pale, sweating, and shaking onto the platform.
Even inside the machine, the wind lashed out. The door rattled. Jana leant in to look at the hinges, the metal crusting over in a brown shell. She’d have to replace them soon. She couldn’t risk having the door falling off, leaving the turbine’s organs exposed to the salty wind and spray of the sea. This was what her life was. Small tasks to block catastrophic consequences. In a way, maybe that was all life was to anyone. Leaving the door for another day, though, Jana grabbed the toolkit tucked inside and began the process of servicing the turbine. There were hundreds of different components. Any single piece could be at fault. Worse, it could be something technical. A glitch in some computer software could have killed the entire system. The technical fault was always worse than the mechanical one. It was easier to hone some borrowed muscle memory than it was to learn the language of computers.
Jana worked from bottom to top, checking each and every potential fault line. She made sure that rust was removed, computers ran smoothly, and gears were lubricated. She followed the path that she had been taught decades before and had walked a hundred times. Originally, there had been a group of them who worked the turbines, keeping them running just in sight of the town. Numbers had dwindled. Some died. Some moved away. Most, though, had grown disillusioned, lost faith that whatever they were doing could truly help the world. Only Jana remained; only she knew that one day the turbine would save everyone, like her great grandmother had said. She didn’t know how, but she didn’t need to. If there was hope, she couldn’t let go.
In the end, it was the computer that saved her. Instead of some gremlin buried within the system, dancing out of sight, the computer fed back to Jana everything she needed to know. It had sensed resistance from the blades. Something pulled at the motors, trying to keep it from turning over, the pressure building along the cables. The computer had sensed it and shut the entire turbine down as a precaution. Jana nodded, staring into the screen as if it might offer some encouraging words. When it didn’t, she took a deep breath and continued her climb.
On the crown of the turbine, the hooks for harnesses seemed even more mocking. No sooner had Jana lifted the trapdoor and poked a head through the opening did the elements double their assault. Her hair betrayed her, whipping at her face, and her eyes streamed from the salt. Still, she pushed more of her body up. Her breathing quickened, her hands shaking. One strong gust would be a death sentence. It would pluck her from the smooth, white surface and send her tumbling into the churning sea. Still, Jana kept easing herself out. She stayed low, wiggling across the turbine like something born from primordial mud. Every movement was a spasm of terror, a battle between her desire to do good and the burning need to retreat back into the safety of the turbine. The emptiness in her stomach evolved into a gagging cough, but she pushed on till she was dangling over the hub of the blades.
The resistance that the computer had sensed was immediately obvious. Coated in the joint of the tower and the hub that housed the blades, rust had dug its fingers deep. It clung tightly, holding everything in stasis. A gift from Jana’s fear of climbing onto the crown. She hadn’t come up here enough; she hadn’t stopped the build-up from occurring. Her cowardice nearly doomed the world. Burning from shame, she reached for the chisel tucked in the toolbelt she had brought with her and began to chip away at the build-up. It was slow, agonising work, each new gust of wind freezing Jana momentarily to the top of the turbine. If Lauren had looked out from the apartment, she might have seen Jana’s figure silhouetted against the moon, a tiny shadow clinging to the modern monolith. But already the moon seemed to be shrinking, retreating at the threat of the coming sun. If she was still there by morning, the heat would bake her alive.
There had been times before, caught in the hours of tedious, painful work, where Jana considered the turbine’s purpose. It made no sense to her, if she truly thought about it. A single turbine couldn’t save the world. As the rust fell away, slowly yielding space, retreating deeper, it would have been easy to fall back into such thoughts. Jana did not. She had decided long ago that she wouldn’t understand how the turbines could save the world. She knew, had even acknowledged and embraced the idea that they couldn’t. Her grandmother could be wrong. In the meantime, though, she would carry on. She had a purpose and she had hope. Commodities more valuable than anything bartered for in town.
A chink, a crumbling of rust into the sea, and there was the echo of motors grinding into life. Jana yanked her hand away from the crevice between tower and blades. She forgot to breathe. She laid there in perfect stillness. The great, old giant groaned into life. Like a runner, the turbine eased forward at first, slowly picking up speed until it found its rhythm. Jana laughed, the relief, fear and nervous energy tumbling out of her. There was hope. There was a chance of redemption, at least for a little while yet. Taking a deep breath, trying to calm the tremor that had built up in her hands, Jana turned and crawled back to the trapdoor. There was only a couple of hours left of night. She had to get back.
She paused at the opening, legs dangling inside the turbine. The town sat in the distance, loitering in the remaining moonlight. Flooded buildings, resolutely standing tall in the rising sea. The occasional candle in a window flickered in the darkness. It was beautiful, it its own kind of way. She could see the specks of people moving back and forth, carrying on with life, fighting to live till the very end. She imagined Lauren with her parents, reading books salvaged from a library. She pictured a distant day where a son and his grandmother skipped rocks on the beach without a worry in the world. Jana tapped the warm, humming surface of the turbine.
“I don’t know how you’re going to save us,” she said, “but please do it soon. Before it’s too late.”