Kiera took off her air mask and wiped away the grime caked beneath her eyes, a paste mixed from sweat and the terracotta dust that got into everything.

The window glass giving her such a raw and piercing view was the same glass as in the mask –a standard-issue Pure130, its screen mixed with a special chemical to deflect the Sun’s now-unfiltered radiation. Her room was dark; she didn’t rate high enough for the special privilege of powered lights at night. For Kiera, the darkness was a cool respite from the heat and glare of her day’s work. She had grown up with the Power Ban starting at 8:00 in the evening, so feeling her way around a room was familiar and comforting, and one of the only consistent habits between here and her childhood apartment in Massachusetts.

This was her last chance to witness a Serengeti sunset, and she was not sorry for it. Kiera preferred the constant gray cloud of home to this vivid and terrible land, where the sun glowered bloodily from its heavenly throne while the region gave one heaving gasp after another to survive the constant poison of exposure. This used to be a beautiful place, but the local government was too poor to afford inclusion in the Grid when it first went public, and what couldn’t be carted off by Samaritan groups had died here. By the time Façade Industries joined forces with the UN to bring life back to everything –not just the places that could pay through the nose- it was too late. Elephants, giraffes, lions wildebeasts… all in zoos or dead, but not here anymore.

This hub was the very last stepping stone in completely globalizing the Grid. The radiation from today would hopefully be the last Kiera ever experienced. Perhaps she would come back, not soon, but in a few decades, and see if her efforts to bring Africa’s greatest natural preserve back from the brink of extinction had come to fruition. Maybe she would like it then.

Kiera had been looking forward to this trip, expecting to feel some kinship with the land and its people, but she felt nothing for the place of her ancestors except pity and revulsion. Everything here was dead, save the Masai and their few, sick cattle. That was Kiera’s job; helping to negotiate between the officials of Kenya and the officials of America in order to get the Grid set up, streamlining the implementation of the final hub and coordinating all the proper committees and forms needed for taxes and grants and sponsorships. For such a desperately-needed development, every government fumbled the urgency with their petty politics: who maintained the hub, where it was located, who got to publicly announce ownership of it, etc.

The Grid was expensive. Not monetarily, because the UN paid for all that, but in energy. Energy, which was more valuable now than the bits of paper and metal acting as currency. Try to sell coal and you’ll be shot on sight, not that there’s any left, but bring a couple of solar panels in and you can have free range of the place. It takes a lot of energy to keep the Grid active, and that had to be coordinated too: where the energy came from, who owned it, who spent it, and how it was transferred.

For use of their land the Masai got paid in continued life for themselves and their cattle, but someone had to make them understand that before Façade could send in trucks and workers. For the trouble of hosting, Kenya got paid in tax breaks and good press. And Kiera? She was paid in education. Government jobs, even this one as an Energy Ambassador (read: administrative aide), paid for any school she could get into, along with housing, her electrical bill, and all-expenses-paid trips like these to any part of the world that needed her.

It had been an honor to be included on this final installation, and now the arduous task was finished. She was going home, returning to headquarters with Kisme and the rest of the team. Home, where she didn’t have to wear the air mask, where the glass was unfiltered and the sky never burned but merely stormed silently above the force fields.

She paid her respects to the African sun, then stepped into a warm shower. It never got cold enough here; water could only be as cool as the earth they stored it in, and no one would waste electricity on cooling water. Now that it was her last day, Kiera was thankful she hadn’t cut off all her hair like the Masai women, though it might have been the best course of action when she first arrived. Her short, springy dreadlocks kept a mop of heat over her at all times, but at least now she could return to Washington looking moderately the same as when she left, save for the tan and the weight loss. She’d probably fit her Celebration Ball gown like an anorexic model, still the preferred look in the States. At least that would make Kisme feel reassured in his decision to get her on the guest list. Brushing shoulders with both the players on the Hill and Façade’s bigwigs could only help her career, and she’d earned the right to celebrate with both those who had worked hard to make it happen and those who merely funded it in either investment or public endorsement.

She stepped out, from one darkness to another, and stared out the window again to a night now sparkling with stars through its storm clouds.

Stars. That was the one good thing about Africa. Here she could still see stars. That was half of her dream, at least. In America, nothing was ever up there except the eternal swirling clouds of gray and brown held back from the cities by the Grid’s force fields. It was just like that old television show they were always talking about. Everyone said, ‘look how far we’ve come,’ while the world degenerated into something resembling a new and inhospitable planet, like the atmospheric mess that is Venus.

Kiera changed into night shorts and a tank top and climbed into the top bunk of the bed she was sharing with another Ambassador. It was strange not to hear the noise of celebration outside on this last night, as had been heard in all the other cities across the world. St. Petersburg, Hong Kong, Sydney… all these had shouted for joy when they announced their global hub was fully functional, though it wouldn’t be turned on until the ceremony the following day. Nairobi was quiet, like a sickened child approaching death. Of course, it didn’t even have a local hub, and its global one wouldn’t be functional until the world was ready to put on the ceremonies and galas and press conferences associated with the completion of the project. Good news was so hard to come by these days in terms of the environment, and everyone wanted to make a spectacle out of something finally going well, but didn’t they know that every day counts to a land that is dying?

Kiera hated what this region was now, but she hated more what had been done to it to take away the majestic beauty so far gone it seemed mythical. Still, whatever the journey, the destination was now in sight. Now, at last, things would get better. The Grid would go up, even people outside major cities could breathe again without the air masks, and when Karman Inc. released their miracle product into what was left of the ozone layer the sky would be repaired before everyone’s very eyes in a matter of years.

After twenty years of pollution storms, Kiera would experience something she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl being fit for her first Air Mask: a natural, clear, blue sky.