Title: The Green Flash - By Mikel J. Chavez | Cat# 112825

They say that if you are lucky, you can see a green flash the instant the sun drops under the ocean. Most people call it an optical trick. Some call it a myth.

Dr Mara Ibarra did not think about green flashes. She thought about ventilators.

– The First Sign

The first time she suspected that something was wrong with the air itself, she was standing at the foot of Bed Twelve.

The patient was easy on paper.

Fifty eight years old. Abdominal surgery that had gone a little longer than expected. A night on the ventilator as precaution. His lungs were clear on imaging. His blood gases were textbook. pH normal, carbon dioxide normal, oxygen high with minimal support. He should have been ready to breathe on his own.

“Let us take him down,” Mara said. “Pressure assist to ten. Same oxygen fraction.”

The respiratory therapist adjusted the settings. The machine sighed and the patient’s chest rose and fell. The waveforms were smooth. The oxygen saturation number glowed steady in green.

For one minute, everything looked exactly as it should.

Then tears slid out from under the man’s closed eyelids.

There was no grimace. No fight against the tube. No spike in blood pressure. Only quiet tears.

His heart rate climbed.

“Maybe he is uncomfortable,” the nurse said.

“Wait,” Mara replied.

The oxygen saturation held at ninety nine. Breathing remained smooth. This was not the panic of suffocation. It looked like grief.

“Back to full support,” she said.

The machine resumed the work of breathing. The tears stopped.

She noted it in the chart. Attempted wean. Tearful response. No physiological cause. Added a small question mark.

It did not stay one patient.

Over the next months, she saw the same again and again. People whose lungs were ready cried when she asked them to breathe more of the room’s air on their own. Not all of them. Enough.

One woman mouthed words around the tube before the sedative fully took hold.

Do not make me.

“Make you what?” Mara asked.

No answer.

Intensivists joked about “vent blues” at three in the morning.

Psychiatrists called it post operative delirium.

It did not sound right to Mara.

She started checking patterns. Depression rates after smoke cleared from wildfires. Exhaustion patterns in cities with sudden drops in emissions. She noticed that cleaner air sometimes caused sharper emotional breakdowns in the short term.

She collected data.

No one listened.

– The Pattern

She began to search everything publicly available. ICU records. Pulmonary stats. Depression and suicide reports. Prescription rates. Online sentiment scoring data from tech companies.

She mapped them against air quality, ozone layers, nitrogen oxide levels, temperature anomalies.

At first, everything looked like mess.

She refined.

Removed socioeconomic factors. Natural disasters. War-related trauma. Random health spikes.

She reduced it all until she watched only two lines.

Atmospheric irregularity.

Emotional despair.

They rose and fell toward each other.

Polluted cities had long term sadness but fewer acute breakdowns. Clean air interventions sometimes triggered collapse before recovery.

When emissions dipped suddenly, weather destabilized. Emotional crises rose.

When emissions resumed, emotional despair stabilized into passive stagnation.

The two lines nearly met.

She ran dozens of models trying to prove she was mistaken.

Then she pushed the model beyond standard limits.

The lines integrated.

A waveform appeared.

It did not look like weather.

It looked like pulse.

The hairs on her arms stood up.

She dismissed it as coincidence. Ran it again. Removed variables. Each time she expected chaos.

The line wavered but did not vanish.

She zoomed in on nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety one.

The anomaly inhaled. Plateaued. Released.

She cross referenced.

Kuwait. Oil field fires. Hundreds of wells burning. Smoke high into the stratosphere.

The anomaly spiked in sync.

The emissions fed something.

Then, as the fires died out, the anomaly destabilized. Emotional collapse across multiple countries.

She scrolled further.

Three Mile Island. Chernobyl. Economic collapse in nineteen seventy three. All matched shifts in emotional metrics and atmospheric activity.

It behaved like something that adjusted to maintain itself. A system regulating one essential thing.

Human emotional suppression.

She stared at the screen.

“It knows us,” she whispered.

Then another thought followed.

“We are not just changing the climate. The climate is monitoring us.”

She saw vents in the ICU. The oxygen flow. Bed Twelve’s tears.

She wondered for the first time if oxygen was keeping people alive or if it was keeping them compliant.

She told no one.

– Revelation and Decision

Three days later, a government agent arrived unannounced. Eric Stephens. Climate health task force.

He simply said, “You are seeing something in your models that cannot wait much longer.”

He gave her a folder.

Project Lachesis. Nineteen seventy three.

Early stratospheric data revealed reactive anomalies. Not chemical error. Biological pattern formation. A slowly developing metabolic system. Dependent on anthropogenic emissions.

Its unofficial name: Stratum.

Some referred to it as the Skin.

Ozone holes were not simple depletion. They were damage sites. Rockets had punctured them. Polluted industrial regions were counted as primary nutrient pathways.

Notes from nineteen seventy eight:

Coupling detected between Stratum activity and human emotional suppression.

Stephens said, “When people become restless enough to change, Stratum destabilizes. When they remain exhausted, it stabilizes.”

Mara felt ill.

“You knew,” she said.

“We chose to avoid collapse,” he replied. “Immediate collapse would kill billions. So we accepted slow collapse instead. Slow illness. Stagnation. Suffering as sustainability.”

She sat perfectly still.

Stephens slid her own draft paper across the desk.

“You proposed altering what lungs give the air and what sadness does in the brain. That is the first viable method we have seen in fifty years.”

“It could provoke a violent response,” she said.

“It will,” he replied.

“And if we continue letting it feed?”

He did not look away.

“Then we remain livestock forever.”

She thought of Bed Twelve and the tears that came when someone tried to breathe more freely.

She agreed.

– The Experiment

They built it in a desert lab under open sky.

The team: Mara, Sung (nanotechnology specialist), Oliveira (neurochemical emotional regulation), and Rafi (critical care respiratory engineering).

Together they created a lung-film inhalable treatment. It did not block oxygen. It subtly reduced its binding efficiency and flattened the carbon signature Stratum relied on.

The companion treatment trained sadness toward action rather than paralysis.

They tested it on terminal volunteers.

“I am not asking you to save me,” one woman said. “Save someone else with the numbers.”

The treatment worked gradually. The woman still cried but began to plan. She made peace. She contacted family. She acted.

Atmospheric sensors showed a micro change.

Not gone. Just different.

Mara thought of it as teaching people to exhale refusal.

– The Uprising Storm

The pilot extended to a city. Respiratory health initiative. Presented as air support innovation.

Cass Chavez ran the community clinic. Former ICU nurse. Believed people deserved a choice even if it carried risk.

She took the treatment first. Said, “It is like a refrigerator hum stopped. Strange. But I feel more space between thoughts.”

More people followed.

They walked more. Argued more. Reached out more. Some confronted employers. Some called estranged relatives. Emotional scores improved. Pollution levels dropped.

Stratum noticed.

One afternoon, a teenage boy stepped outside the clinic and said, “It feels lighter today.”

Cass smiled.

Her phone alerted.

GMI down zero point eight in twelve hours.

She looked up.

Everything paused.

Then the sky pressed down.

Memories surged. Emotion overwhelmed cognition. People collapsed. Glass shattered despite no wind.

Cass crawled toward the boy.

“Breathe with me,” she said, even as she could not draw air.

He followed.

She tried again.

Her lungs moved.

Nothing entered.

Someone stabilized her physically. Her blood remained oxygenated. Her heart functioned.

But her emotional centers overloaded.

She saw a sun fragment through shattering glass.

A line of green.

Cass Chavez died with intact lungs and a stable pulse.

Cause: external emotional overload triggered by atmospheric response.

Seven hundred twelve fatalities across the region.

Recorded as Atmospheric Neural Impact Incident.

Known publicly as the Uprising Storm.

– The Leak

Orders came to halt the treatment.

Mara ignored them.

She leaked everything. Lachesis. Stratum. Cass’s data. Atmospheric assault analytics.

Files escaped containment before deletion.

The phrase appeared:

WHO BREATHES WHOM

Global panic. Markets crashed. Governments denied everything. Some destroyed archives.

Others, already collapsing from heat spikes and famine, accepted it.

Communities continued the treatment.

Cities adapted or were consumed.

Stratum convulsed. Atmospheric disturbances increased, then gradually weakened.

Hope became behavior rather than belief.

Sadness no longer meant paralysis.

Human action did not stop pain.

It redirected it.

– The Final Flash

Ten years later….

A coastal town rebuilt itself slowly. Few engines. Wind power. Community systems based on motion.

Mara sat on a seaside bench. Her lungs required occasional support. Eric Stephens joined her.

“Stratum has degraded forty percent,” he said. “Models show further breakdown. Emissions down sixty two percent. Humanity is unstable but active.”

“And hope?” she asked.

He did not answer.

They watched the sun lower over the ocean.

“I still feel grief,” she said. “For Cass. For the lives lost. For the before.”

“That means we are honest,” he said.

The sun slipped beneath the horizon.

A green flash burned at the edge.

It lingered longer than physics allowed.

“Just refraction?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Or Stratum acknowledging us?”

“Or understanding that it is ending,” she replied. “Even if it does not want to.”

She rose.

“Was it worth it?”

“I think worth is not the measure,” she said. “We were suffocating either way. At least now we breathe by choice.”

She began walking down the path.

The air remained imperfect.

Every breath was a decision.

The green flash faded.

Almost hopeless.

But not quite.

– Ten Years Later

He did not remember her name until after she died.

Cass Chavez.

The nurse who told him to breathe while the sky tried to stop them.

He kept a stone from the sidewalk where he had fallen. When asked about it, he did not explain. He tapped it twice.

In.

Out.

He grew up in a rebuilt town. Sadness was still taught in schools, but so was response. Children learned that moving through grief was survival.

He became a respiratory therapist.

On the tenth anniversary of the Uprising, he stood at the ocean’s edge.

He saw someone on the bench above. An older woman. Watching the sky with quiet attention.

He thought he knew her.

The sun dipped.

A burst of green.

He inhaled.

He exhaled.

In.

Out.

“It feels different,” he whispered.

Above, something in the sky shifted one degree toward recognition.

Not peace.

Not yet.

But forward.

© 2025 Mike Chavez. All rights reserved.