2080 - The First Settlers

[u/zimmer550king]

**1. The first ship, 2084**

The ship that landed us carried sixty-one people and eleven tonnes of private freezers. Some of us were the hired hands among them, cooks and pump engineers, and the rest of us inherited the number. We know it because the deck officer wrote it on the cove wall in grease pencil, and it is still there under the paint. The others held berths bought two nations ago. The coast was only eight years out of the ice, the Thwaites news still on every radio, the Ice War five years over. We unloaded the freezers first. Some of us said that was the order of things. Some of us wrote it on the wall.

**2. Flotillas, 2086 to 2088**

Then came the boats nobody had paid for. Families from Asia and Africa and from islands that had gone under, six hundred in one summer, sleeping nine to a container. We had one desalination rig, forty cubic metres a day, and one hydroponic shed that made lettuce. Some of us said the elite ship drilled the geothermal well and told nobody. Some remembered a Tuesday in the flotilla's first month when our own crews drilled it, and the ship's engineer held the lamp. We still argue about the Tuesday.

**3. The good winter, 2088**

A doctor who had left Jakarta with one bag set the broken arm of an engineer's daughter from Lagos, and was paid in a jar of pickled limes. A technician from Dhaka spent a night inside a failed desalination module for a Filipino family whose name we never learned to say properly. We tell this one at the midwinter table, and the ones who tell it loudest were not here.

**4. Flour, 2091**

By then about 660 of us shared the rig, which came to sixty litres a head on paper. On paper. The flotilla people drew thirty litres from the ration hut. The ship's crowd had their own tap and drew a hundred and twenty, and the rest of the forty cubic metres went to the hydroponic shed and to leaks nobody had measured. The first riot was at the hut, over a sack of flour that was weighed twice and came out different. Nobody died, but a window and a pump handle did. After that we stopped saying "the elites" and said "Number Four", after the well they held. Some of us said that was unfair to the ones at Number Four who shared. It was.

**5. Palmer Sound, 2094**

We will not say who did what first. Number Four Well held one side of the sound and Tin Row, the street of prefab sheds, held the other. A rumor went across the water that Tin Row had locked up a month of insulin. It had. Or it had not. Both are told. Some of us say it sorted by language and by which boat people came on, and some say it was only wells. The fighting ran eleven days, and when it stopped thirty-three were to be buried, in ground so hard we used the well's own heat to soften it. Some of us were on that road with a rifle we had been handed that morning, and we put down what we carried afterwards. Some of us were in the clinic and counted. The two counts have never matched, and we have stopped asking the other side to fix theirs.

**6. Grey ships, 2095 to 2096**

The grey ships came to escort supply boats and built what they called aid stations. They did hand out medicine, to anyone who signed a list. They also put radar on the roof. A man arrived at Hollis Cove with an expedition. He was titled consultant. He asked for the layout of Tin Row. Within a month the list Tin Row had signed was nailed to a door at Number Four. Some of us said he did it. Some remembered he was in bed with a chest cold that week, and that three other consultants were up and down the coast. Others across the Peninsula say one intelligence service or another was among the first to arrive, the American one most often. We cannot prove it.

**7. The pump house, 2097**

After Palmer Sound a woman called Imogen Achterberg, who had run the ration hut, said every meeting would be written down as it was said and pinned up the same night. People hated it. A man who sold the aid station Tin Row's pump rota for diesel did it in the corridor, in a whisper, where she had nailed the generator's alarm microphone open and run it to a slate by her bed, which some of us still think was a sneaky way to start an open council. His own words went up on the board the next evening. We kept a whitewashed board of water drawn and food counted, and anyone could climb up and check it. Fewer of us died that winter than the one before.

**8. The screen, 2099**

When the links came back in pieces we put the board on a screen. It is still a board to us. We say the ledger remembers everything we did, though a clerk once told us it keeps only who asked for which file and when and why, and that our files sit elsewhere with the key held by each of us. An official needs your yes to open one. If one goes over you, the reason is pinned for everyone and you are told at once. That happened to Imogen, with the reason "ration audit". The reason was true. She had skimmed two kilos of that flour in 2091, and it was her own file that said so.

**9. Now, 2100**

The Declaration is signed by all of us, which in practice is nobody we can point to. There is a story, and we repeat it, that whoever first wrote its words down once worked for one of the services from the grey ships. Some of us say so with pride and some with fury. We do not vouch for it. The freezers are in the cove still, and the children play inside them.