The Thirst Years: When the Century Learned What Water Was Worth

We remember the 2110s now as the decade the taps stopped, but at the time no one believed it would last. The great water riots — Chennai in 2113, the Cape unrest of 2115, the long Andalusian summer of 2117 — were treated at first as emergencies, spasms to be managed and forgotten. They were not forgotten. What began as looting of tanker convoys hardened, over five years, into a wholesale rewriting of how humanity valued its most ordinary resource: water metered by the liter, aquifers nationalized, the first desalination corridors laid down in a panic that later called itself planning. The augmented among us were still a novelty then; fusion was a demonstration, not a grid. It was thirst, more than any treaty, that taught the century to cooperate — because thirst does not negotiate. A generation raised in those queues grew up certain of one thing above all: that scarcity was the enemy, and that human ingenuity, given enough water and enough time, could out-engineer any threat the planet raised. They believed it completely. So, for the most part, do we.