The Last Summer

I love this story, may be my favorite short story I've written.

It might seem like a very post-pandemic story, but I actually wrote this before the Covid-19 pandemic. I wrote this in summer 2019. It is about climate change (which is still fairly obvious probably) and it's kind of funny to read now because the idea of a pandemic stopping flights had not crossed my mind at all, as that would also solve the boat problem (which is an admittedly slight plot hole here, but who cares).

It sure has some extra poignancy now.

I had two ideas in mind when I started writing this: The idea of the last summer, knowing life is going to change forever after it, that loss of youth or safety, which has hit me quite hardly several times over the last couple years, as I've transitioned my life from being a student to working to moving to a different continent. One of the ways that is exemplified is through the loss of summers, those eternal obligation-free months that never happen again when you're an adult.
This ended up being a different way of approaching that, but that was very much my starting point.
The second idea is turning out to be a rather constant idea in a lot of my writing; the human effects of increasing climate change. Not focusing on the changes themselves but how we deal with them as people. That's where the Rectification Flights came from: How are we going to deal with the fact that we will have to travel less? That's taken to an extreme here on purpose, but it turns out to be less extreme in 2021 than I thought in 2019, haha.

And to anyone asking, the card game they're playing is Netrunner. Because of course it is.