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Chapter 9. Underneath all currents
This is where I’m staying/this is my home (Björk,”The Anchor Song”)
Glasgow, October 2028
With the project completed and the results finally out, our lives returned to some approximation of normality. I went back to my flat, and realised that I actually missed living with other people, if only a little. There was still much to do because, of course, academically speaking, there was no final peer reviewed publication yet, and considering how momentous this work was, the reviewers were unprecedentedly critical. It took many rounds of reviews, edits and rebuttals to appease them. The community wanted to make sure that this one was absolutely beyond reproach. Fortunately, we had a small army of researchers to attend to this long-drawn-out process, because for several years after that, my life became quite busy. For worse or for better, I had become the figurehead of the “Stop The Freeze” movement, and so I became a public figure. At times I almost felt more like a politician than an academic. I barely had the energy to keep it up. It was the same, to varying extents, with the other team members, in particular with Li-Zhen, who was the face of the project in Northern America just as I was in Northern Europe, but she being an extrovert was just naturally better at this kind of thing.
World, Spring 2030
By the time the final paper was published, this time in Nature proper, it was the spring of 2030. The world was now a very different place from 2024. The effects of climate change were more pronounced everywhere. The Royal Navy had announced that they would have to abandon the base at Faslane by 2035 because of the increased flooding risk. Partially thanks to their role in our work, the views of the Navy on climate change were now taken very seriously. Politicians wanted at least to be seen to be concerned about strategic issues, and now climate change was one of them, and therefore no longer easily ignored.
Also, the historical tide was strongly on our side. A green wave had swept the northern hemisphere, and the time for prevarication seemed to have ended for good.
Slowly, demands on my time grew less. I took a sabbatical of a year, and did a once-a-lifetime long trip, going back to Indonesia and visiting Malaysia, Australia and (a small sin) Japan. After that, my life returned to its old routines, and for a few years I was quite content in Scotland.
Stockholm, March 2035
But in the end, a quiet but insistent voice inside me called me back to Stockholm. It’s hard for me to imagine now that less than half a year ago I was still enjoying the Scottish autumn in Helensburgh. And yet, I left part of my heart there. While walking back along the pier, with the dark waters of Saltsjön beside me, for a moment I am back there on the walkway boarding the Gareloch, with the autumn sun setting behind the hills. Another Sigrid will always be living there for as long as I am here. The sea joins us: a current will carry parts of her old life up here, another one will take fragments of my new life down there.
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