FOFO

Anna turned the empty crisp packet over in her hands as though the manufacturer might have printed an apology on the back.

“That’s the whole problem,” she said. “Nothing knows where to go when we’re finished with it.”

Adam looked into his pint. “Beers knows.”

Marcin leaned across the table. “Marin.”

“What?”

“My name. It is Marin. You have all been calling me Marcin for six months.”

There was a brief silence.

“Marin, then, easier to say.” Anna said. “Does that alter your view on the crisp packet?”

“Tja, I mean, we make shit for consumption without considering circularity because there was always an excess, or infinite substitutability. As we recognise a limited economy, waste will probably also be a limiting factor, you know what I mean.”

“Right, so the packaging will naturally become natural once we run out of…”

“Look,” interupted Marcin, “ecological is just marketing bullshit right, everything is natural, just that some of the shit we manufacture has not been tested in the ecosystem before, nature will eventually balance, invent bacteria to feed on PFAS energy, but we might not like what they do further up the “value chain”.

Outside, the monsoon moved along the windows in loose, temporary alignment. The pub lights caught a drop for a moment before it re-attached to the gang and vanished in multiplicity.

Anna put the packet down. “Just think, everything is alive because it recycles. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, rain to sea water. Nothing stays what it was forever, but it stays available. That’s the trick.”

“The forest does not endure because nothing dies there,” Marin said. “It endures because death has somewhere to return.”

Isobel looked at him. “That’s annoyingly good.”

Marin frowned. “Yeh, but the cycles are cycles because they have formed and maintained a coherent structure over millennia, and that coherence has allowed the creation of increasingly complex organic computations”

“Right, so not impossible or even improbable than one could get a PFAS cycle, just that it would be a significant change from the current evolution.” Anna replied. “Silent Spring and all that, we are making shit nature hasn’t had to deal with before and it takes a while to catch up, I mean, there is a feeling of Russian roulette, we do kinda need the ecosystem cycles as they have currently evolved, if they start changing evolution then it may not be favourable for our organisms…”

At the next table, Alby lowered his newspaper.

“Well I’ll be,” Adam said. “Not dead yet eh.”

“Indifferent,” Albert said. “I do not care whether your forest becomes soil, smoke, furniture or a retail park called Forest View.”

“There,” Adam said. “Finally, some realism.”

Albert held up one finger. “My indifference is not permission. The universe will tolerate your extinction with perfect manners. You are the one who must decide whether you prefer it.”

Anna nodded. “Exactly. Sustainability isn’t written into the stars. It’s a preference held by creatures who would like to continue.”

“A woke preference,” Adam said.

“A biological one,” said Isobel.

“Same thing, according to the internet,” Marin added.

Albert folded his paper. “You confuse the absence of cosmic purpose with the absence of consequence. The purpose of gravity is to balance mass in spacetime, a stone has no opinion about falling on your head.”

Adam moved his chair slightly away from the stone fireplace.

“F*cking pick-up artists, what sort of job description is that. Once upon a time the community would have taken them out the back and sorted them the f*ck out, instead we consume there malignancy, like new content slaves in a linear economy no one ever talks about,” Marin said. “Pin it up, brief dopamine hit, then make it someone else’s problem.”

Adam picked up the crisp packet. “So, everything in the ecosystem is an ecosystem and immorality f*cks social ecosystems in the same way as excess plastics or atmospheric carbon f*cks part of nature?”

Albert smiled faintly. “You use expletives, I would just say change, but again, change that may not be evolutionarily advantageous.”

Marin raised his glass. “That is the modern condition. Rip rip wood chip, re-brand it, depreciate it, consume it, monetise it, and throw it in the bin.”

They drank.

The rain continued its quiet conversions outside: cloud to water, roof to gutter, gutter to river, river eventually to cloud again. No morality in it. No intention. A few more molecules of PFAS than before. Albert folded his newspaper and trudged off.

Anna tapped the packet once. “Still, can’t believe f*cking mangels was here, f*cking legend!”