An after-drizzle; an echo rain.

An after-drizzle; an echo rain.

The droplets return for another pass, rebound off the front that preceded, slingshot back through space and time. We were fooled, by the gap the pause the sunshine smile, then snapped back through the gauntlet, double-wet, showered again, submitted for the second time that day to the pummel of the sky.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m merely setting the scene, priming you with a sly sketch of the weather patterns circumscribing the main action of this story. But this is it; this is the story, the action.

These weather patterns — these deja vu drizzles, these persistent storms — these are our protagonists.


The above, an opening to (perhaps) a piece of speculative fiction about the climatology of conscious entities, patterns in which some sort of emergent intelligence has been noticed in the ways that winds and rains attack the world.

Perhaps they are malevolent, or perhaps they’re just playful, curious, provocateurs, testing how they can affect our reactions. They probe the hyperobjects of human activity; trace the micro-patterns our movements etch into the environment, our negotiations of landscape, shifting hour-by-minute, our habits of resource use, our adaptations to the environment.

Until now we’ve maintained the illusion that it’s been us, more than anything, shaping the environment. That and time and chance; nothing with a will of its own. Until now…