Abandoned fiction: should I continue this one?

I started the following piece for a fiction contest from "Futurescapes". But life got in the way! (I'm sure that never happens to other writers. Ha ha. For explanation you can read my Four funerals and a wedding post.) So anyway, I didn't complete it in time to submit it by the contest deadline. I'm trying to decide if I want to continue.

The story takes place in Minneapolis, about 10 years in the future. Technology has advanced, and the world has made progress toward drastically reducing carbon emissions, but these are troubling times, as the problems are deep and wide.

My idea was ultimately that crypto-currency would provide the financial support for the technology-based solutions that would reverse global warming. My stumbling blocks are that A) I don't ever write futuristic fiction so I'm out of my comfort zone, and B) I have an ongoing writing project that needs my attention. So, I'd love some feedback. Thoughts? Does this piece have merit? Should I finish it?

Green Rain
Alicia and Matias Luna walked together through the office, pulling papers out of trash cans. The electrical storm that flashed periodically outside of the firm’s 14th floor suite punctuated their movements. At the end of their rounds, they had a recycling bin full of note paper and cast-off print pages.

“Attention, everyone!” Alicia said, looking around the office. “Can we have a minute of your time, please?” After a few moments in which the team members in the office saved the work on their computers and shushed others who hadn't yet paused their conversations, the room fell quiet, save for the crackle of lightning and thunder. Alicia nodded to Matias.

“Guys,” he said. “We are going to remind you today, and every day between now and the Well World Expo, that Minneapolis is at the cutting edge of this movement. And our firm intends to win the top prize and lead the cause to save the planet.” Lightning ripped across the sky outside the windows, illuminating the office in a brief, blinding flash, as if orchestrated for dramatic effect.

“What do we have here, Matias?” Alicia asked. She looked around the room, at people hunched over collections of electronic devices and 3D city models. Several people had their hands poised over keyboards. Someone coughed.

Matias reached into the bin, pulled out a giant handful of papers, and threw them into the air. The papers fell like snow.

As they landed, Alicia said, “We shouldn’t have to police you. You need to police yourselves. You need to monitor your own use of every resource.”

“No offense,” Neil Barton said, from a work table where he was testing electronic sensors in heating and air conditioning units. “But isn’t the use of paper the least of our worries? Like, are we going to halt the use of fossil fuels by recycling a few pieces of paper? How does this even matter?” He huffed out a laugh and looked around the room for confirmation. No one dared look at him.

Alicia stood taller, in an attempt to maintain authority. “But it does matter,” she said. “Everything you do, every choice you make, makes a statement about our intent here, and it makes a profound difference. If everyone on the planet just wastes a little bit each day, it amounts to an enormous excess use of resources and energy. It’s one of the very reasons we are where we are today - millions of people all using resources without regard to the impact.” She resisted the urge to say, “How can you not see that? Why do I have to even explain this?”

“We really have to eat our own dog food,” Matias added. “How can we put ourselves out there as the firm that can solve the climate crisis and reverse the planet’s path to destruction if we don't follow the most fundamental ecologically sound practices ourselves?”

Maria raised her hand, as if they were in a classroom. “Um?” She said. She stood and cleared her throat. Maria Hernandez was the firm’s lead strategist. She was a tiny, brilliant, soft-spoken woman who people tended to overlook in their first encounter. In fact, on his first day, Greg Martin had mistaken her for a member of the cleaning service and notified her that the men's room needed attention.

Alicia, who was the Green Platform firm’s co-COO with Matias, was thankful for her every day. In Maria’s tenure at Green Platform, everything they were working on had improved in performance and efficiency. They had incorporated three of her sustainable resource patents into their plan and had made improvements across the board.

The firm’s original focus, to solve at least four key issues that were contributing to carbon emissions and climate change, had been completely revamped to instead pose a reformulation of all major infrastructure and energy systems in place in the modern world. Her vision, to contract out and incorporate the work of top sustainable solutions providers worldwide, along with the firm’s partnership with the world-renowned Drawdown organization, was making it possible.

Maria was not a speaker or public persona, by nature, and Alicia knew it was not easy for her to speak up. It only happened on occasion, when she really had something worth saying.

“Policing doesn’t work,” Maria said simply. “There are too many choices every person makes each day, and you can’t oversee all of them. “Nor do you want to use your time that way.” She looked at Alicia and Matias and smiled. “While choice is admirable, a significant percentage of people won’t make the right choice, whether out of ignorance or indifference. It really doesn’t matter why. They just won’t.” Alicia and Matias looked back at this diminutive woman who always soft-pedaled her ideas. It had taken a long time, but people were finally listening.

“So what do we do, then?” Matias asked.

“I suggest we take choice out of the equation, whenever possible.” The lightning crackled further off. The storm was moving away. “Why do we have paper printers, for example? What do we really need to print? Why do we have pads of paper, for that matter? What do we need to write down?”

Alicia looked around the room. She realized that it was an important time to make a decision, but what? Perhaps, she thought, they would have to take away trash cans, and therefore everyone would be forced to recycle instead. Matias looked at her and nodded. She nodded back. It was their ping pong game that they played sometimes. “You decide.” “No you.”

“Fine,” Matias said. “No more printing. No more paper. It all goes out today. All non-verbal communications and all records must be electronic. The only printers that will remain will be one paper printer for truly urgent needs, behind locked doors, and the 3D printers, for protoyyping and modeling. And you will need to go through Brad to get an okay to use them. The rest will be taken to the recycling center. If you need to jot something down, use the notepad on your phone. Got it?”

There was a nodding all around.

“Damn it!” The loud outburst came from Greg Martin, one of the scientists. Alicia looked over at him, thinking he was upset about having his print capabilities taken away, but realized he hadn’t even been paying attention.

Greg monitored the impact of global warming and environmental imbalances on animals and birds, and reported on endangered species. When the Environmental Protection Agency had been reformulated as the Environmental Policy Agency by the administration in place a decade back, in 2018, the focus on business and money over the health of the environment had resulted in disastrous effects from air quality to watershed damage and loss of habitat. Fortunately, the lists of extinctions that had been growing exponentially were finally tapering off. Good things were happening around the world, due to the work of Drawdown, and the Global Consensus Mandates. From sustainable coffee growing to reforestation, to self-driving electric cars and exponential growth in the wind and solar industries, carbon emissions were slowing. But so much damage had been done, and the ripple effect continued.

“It’s the ospreys,” Greg said. “They’re gone.”

Neil Barton stood. “Wow,” he said with a rich note of sarcasm in his voice, “let’s stop printing stuff. Maybe we can save the pandas.” Then he stormed off to the break room.

To be continued... or not?

I am intrigued by the main character, Alicia, who is highly motivated to create change, but struggles with insecurity. (This is revealed in more depth later in the story. I'm just providing a partial excerpt.) She believes her husband is truly the change maker and she herself is something of an impostor. So it may be interesting to see how this plays out.

Image credits: Pixabay and Pexels free to use images