Saoirse Malloy is a good kid. 

At 17 years old, she has a GPA of 4.25, thanks to all those AP classes. She volunteers 10 hours a week at Lakewood Hospital on the Children’s Neuro Unit, and she’s active in three different clubs at her high school. She doesn’t smoke, vape, drink, or use drugs, and has never had a serious boyfriend.  She has babysat for practically every family in her neighborhood and all of her friends’ parents; she is universally adored. Her siblings annoy her, but she tolerates them with generous equanimity, and she gets along with her mom, her dad, and her dad’s girlfriend, even now, even after everything. So far, she’s been accepted at two of her five reach schools, with offers of substantial financial assistance. Saoirse Malloy will be able to write her own ticket. She could be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a scientist; she could be all of the above.

She is not going to be any of those things.

Saoirse Malloy is not going to college; chances are, she won’t graduate high school. As it stands, the best-case scenario probably involves attending community college from prison…but there are worse options on the table.

At the beginning of 10^th grade, Saoirse had become active in an after-school club called EarthWatch as part of her long-range college planning. She knew that extracurriculars were crucial to getting into a good school, so she’d spent her freshman year club-hopping, checking out the various organizations to see which ones appealed to her, and which would look best on a college application. She ended up committing to three different groups whose schedules and purviews worked well together; the combined portfolio of environmental activism, racial justice, and anti-gun advocacy appealed to Saoirse, who—at that time—imagined herself pursuing a career in politics, law, or possibly the nonprofit sector. She would train the totality of her ferocious adolescent idealism and moral clarity—resources she imagined she would always possess in practically endless abundance—on the most intractable problems of humankind, and one by one, she would solve them.

It wasn’t one thing, precisely, that derailed these ambitions, though they weren’t helped much by the EarthWatch meetings, which, most days, consisted of 40 minutes spent googling environment memes to post on social media, or brainstorming alliterative challenges such as Skip The Straw, Pass On Plastic, and Love The Lake, which were intended to motivate their classmates to Do Their Parts (Doing One’s Part being a key component in all of the activist groups Saoirse joined). No, it was a lot of things in combination, over time: a protracted accrual of information that built into understanding, like the bits of dirt and dung that termites gathered and spit together into looming, indestructible towers. There was the relentless drone of climate-disaster news, swelling louder by the day as her freshman and sophomore years ticked past—news made viscerally worse by the brief would-be reprieve of Joe Biden’s presidency, followed by Kamala’s demolishing defeat and Trump’s zealous resumption of punitive, petroleum-fueled power. There was the stunning condescension and indifference of certain state lawmakers she and her club-mates visited to petition (read: beg) for changes to gun laws or policing policies. And most of all, there was her own growing awareness of the world around her, and the imminence with which it was predicted to change, worsen, or disappear. 

This awareness happened slowly and all of a sudden. It was there in the way she started to think differently about certain things, like the nature shows her family loved to watch together: Animal Kingdom and Planet Earth and Our One World. Where once she’d shared in her mom’s and Michael’s delight as the shows spun them through the world’s most exotic and awe-inspiring ecosystems, Saoirse began to notice how watching them plunged her into dread and despair. No episode was complete without a disclaimer of some sort, a warning in terms sometimes subtle, sometimes scary, about the peril this particular animal or habitat faced, the urgency with which help was needed. But help from whom? What was Saoirse supposed to do, or her brother, or her mom? The older the program, the deeper the dismay as she wondered—privately, not wanting to ruin anyone else’s mood—how much of what they were looking at even existed anymore. 

Then came the 2024 election, when, in the least surprising turn of events in human history, the United States reelected a former president who was not only a deranged and semi-demented rapist, but had actually tried to overthrow the government (add that to the list of things he thankfully couldn’t get right). Those weeks after the election had been some of the worst Saoirse could remember living through—worse than when her parents told them they were getting divorced, but similar in the way the two of them had slogged through the three weeks of living separately under the same roof until her dad had found a place of his own, conspicuously avoiding one another, not meeting each other’s eyes, failing to achieve the benign indifference to which they were clearly aspiring. The way Saoirse’s friends and Democrat family members and progressive online personalities performed their exhaustion and dismay; the way they sleepwalked through the interval between election and inauguration, like the final days of empire, like they had nothing left to give and now would have to take to their collective beds…it infuriated her. What were these people going to do about things? What would be their response to the outrage of a second Donald Trump presidency? Were they just going to spend the next four years hate-posting on social media while he destroyed the world?

And then he commenced doing exactly that. Straight out of the gate: the Project 2025 agenda in full force, across every sphere of government. Dismantling everything from scientific research to academic freedom to environmental policy to foreign aid. Disappearing people! Bringing back coal! What was anyone doing about any of it? Making cute signs and standing on street corners. Posting snarky memes. Crying over brunch. Standing around with their phones in hand while masked, unidentified stormtroopers threw zip-tied landscapers and delivery men into windowless vans. Fucking useless—that’s what the American people were. Generations of exceptionalism had rendered them incapable of seeing that the same thing that had happened to nations all around the world was finally happening to them, and all they knew to do about it was whine and wait for a future election that, at this rate, was never going to happen. 

Then it was January, 2026, and suddenly it seemed like Minneapolis was ready to start the revolution, but with what? Whistles and phones? They were going up against ICE agents in Kevlar and gas masks, carrying the same guns we’d sent with our troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren’t even real cops or soldiers, most of them, just unemployable losers ready to vent whatever rage they’d been nursing in their parents’ basements on moms in puffy coats and kids in bunny hats and whatever Black or brown person had the misfortune to cross their paths. Suddenly even her stupid uncle Mike wasn’t quite sure what to say about Trump’s America; he had a closet full of guns and had voted for the orange bastard three times, but the idea that someone should be shot down in the street because of the legal firearm they were lawfully carrying didn’t sit well with him. Not that you could get him to admit that with more than one liberal family member in the room. 

But even with the frisson of revolution in the air, Saoirse could hardly come up with a reason to hope. What was her future going to look like? Her siblings’ futures? What kind of world awaited her generation, and those who would follow? And for how much longer would the generations follow? Because even now, Saoirse cannot imagine what sane human being would ever choose to have children. Why would I bring a baby into this world? had been an elitist trope for decades, the sort of thing jaded first-world intellectuals asked in earnest outrage at parties. For Saoirse—for her whole generation—it was a wholly legitimate question, with a baldly self-evident answer: I wouldn’t. Any prospective offspring of hers would inherit a world so red in tooth and claw, the few species capable of adapting to the apocalypse battling each other for survival, that there would no longer be any safe places. You might find a home far from hurricanes and wildfires, only to drown in your own living room when a springtime’s worth of rain fell in a single afternoon. You might live at the top of the hill, but still die from the heatwave that followed while everyone’s power was still out. Or starve when the crops failed. Or you could hang on through all of it, and live among a community of traumatized survivors just waiting for the next disaster. 

This was all bad enough; this information was plenty to keep her up at night and kill her appetite. But worse was the knowledge that the people who still had power to do anything about the state of the world—who could still head off the worst of the calamity, if they wanted to—clearly could not be convinced to do so. The world was run by men (and a few women) far beyond fears like hers: their love of money, their grip on power, and their proximity to death (she assumed) rendered them impervious to arguments for change. Donald Trump would be long dead by the time Mar A Lago sank beneath the waves, and his billions (if they existed) would protect his vile offspring from the trials that lay ahead. Mitch McConnell wouldn’t struggle to survive a famine, and Lindsey Graham had no family whose bleak futures might move him to action. For fuck’s sake, the whole world had spent years watching the Palestinian people murdered, starved, relentlessly traumatized, and the US was still sending Israel weapons! And nobody was paying attention to Sudan. The people with power wanted to stay in power. None of them were interested in breaking the system. And none of them were going to live long enough (or be poor enough) to suffer the repercussions of their inaction. 

Her peers agreed, and many of them acknowledged that they were actually terrified, on a daily basis, about what the world was going to look like by the time they were adults. But did any of them know what to do about it? Did any of them have a plan of action, to get to the people with real power, to show them what needed to be done right now, today?Of course not. Instead, they retreated to the climateless limbo of TikTok and Instagram the moment their fears bubbled to the surface. They knew the world was burning up, but what were they supposed to do about it? They stopped using straws, and they organized recycling drives, and every so often they rallied their classmates to boycott a company or a brand whose climate policies were unsustainable. A dedicated few went to Columbus, or even Washington, to talk to their elected representatives about the changes that needed to be made. They would be shown around the capitol buildings, provided with fifteen or twenty minutes to sit down with an aide and enumerate their concerns. Maybe the official in question would pose for a photo with them. No one deluded themselves into believing that any of this was going to make a difference. So Saoirse had decided on a different approach. 

She has an awareness—keener than most—of her assets. She is articulate and personable; reasonably extroverted; emotionally intelligent. She might not have quite a Greta Thunberg-caliber intellect, but she’s smart enough and she works hard, and she has a certain charisma. In fact, she is self-aware enough to call it what it is: not just personal magnetism, but privilege. Whiteness. She is a pretty, green-eyed blonde with straight teeth and a cute little figure, from an upper-middle-class family. Not the sort of girl anyone is going to suspect of criminality. And not the sort of girl anyone wants to see die. This is a substantial well of resources from which to draw.

But her most valuable asset is no asset at all: Saoirse Malloy has nothing to lose.

Still several months from legal adulthood, Saoirse has already given up on the idea of a future. Summer nights with her family, sometimes she’d sit on the back porch while her siblings toasted marshmallows over the charcoal grill and wonder how many more nights like this there’d be: fed and comfortable, in a peaceful city, with AC, a nominally-functioning government, and a refrigerator full of food. To be able to sit in front of a television at the end of the day, with no more pressing worry than tomorrow’s test or the number of likes on her latest post, and then sleep in a bed secure in the knowledge that everyone in her family would survive the night: this was a life of luxury billions of people around the world would never know. She couldn’t explain how she had won the lottery of existence by being born into these riches, but she knew it couldn’t last. Too many systems were collapsing simultaneously. By the time she was her parents’ age, this world would be gone. People like her mom and dad would see it end. People like her and her brother and sister would pioneer the new one, remembering all that was lost.

She’d started small, compiling a list of the worst lawmakers in her city and state—people who’d voted to loosen gun laws, repeal regulations, block access to abortion or voting or healthcare. She began with subtle acts of sabotage: simple hacks to crash their websites, embarrassing deepfakes she made with Sora. The acts themselves weren’t the point; she made TikToks documenting her mischief, and posted them from a VPN with AI-voiced commentary describing what she was doing, and why, encouraging them to follow suit. She tagged influencers across the social media spectrum and got them to promote her videos, and before she knew it, she had a following of her own: hundreds, and then thousands, in countries all over the globe, and a few of them were doing what she asked. Some had begun posting their own videos in reply, documenting their own acts of resistance against the rich and powerful in their own communities who were working to keep the world on its current course. She had created a network—decentralized, nebulous, largely anonymous, and growing—united around her message that the adults of the world had thrown up their hands, and the only hope now lay with the youth. No one is coming to save us was the tagline she used to end every video, and it had become the rallying cry of her little movement. The next step in her plan was to escalate the attacks: destabilizing acts of destruction and violence in unexpected places that would not only reach a wider audience, but would further unify her supporters. Once they reach a critical mass, she will reveal herself and initiate Phase Three, a whole new kind of collective action; guerrilla resistance, taken to its furthest extreme. She will lead her followers in the delivery of an ultimatum to the world’s adults: a global hunger strike that won’t end until either the planet is saved, or the future is lost—which is the inevitable outcome of the course they’re on, anyway. It will be a battle of the suicide pacts: one faction leading the whole world to doom via willful disregard of multiple escalating catastrophes, the other ending it all preemptively, by sacrificing themselves.

Within the four walls of her childhood bedroom in a comfortable neighborhood on the West Side of Cleveland, Saoirse has everything she needs to change the world: her phone, a little gas money, and her imagination. The powers that be could finally pull their heads out of their asses (or their piles of money) and do something to fix the mess they were in, or they could face consequences they had failed to foresee. To Saoirse Malloy, it is a perfect plan that cannot possibly fail. Maybe they’ll all die in the apocalypse, as expected. Maybe they’ll die by their own hands, and be spared the agony of having to see it all through to the end. Or maybe, by some miraculous alchemy of fatalism and teenage bravado and irrational American optimism…maybe they will actually save the world.