What remains of Her... (And us.)

It’s one thing to think about the future, and another to live it, I think. Should I explain that one? I suppose so. It’s about the year 2056, and the Earth is gone. For Us. It’s still there of course, the requisite 5 million years haven’t passed for the Sun in our Solar System to go supernova and truly swallow the planet whole.

It’s not like the planet is fully inhospitable either. The surface temperature is just around 60 degrees celsius on average in summer. Maybe about 30 below in winter as well. Livable, but not for everyone. Maybe you think that’s nothing, and maybe you think you could easily survive that kind of temperature, but this was never about you.

This was about Her.

I had a dream about her back then. More than one. In the first one, I was already looking at her. How do I even describe her? Her skin glistened like a jewel, blue and green in a way that caught the light. Like Opal, given human shape by an impossible sculptor. Her dress, like tangled undergrowth, with every kind of vine, moss, and wood seeping out from under it in a full spring bloom.

Her hair was like the wind, flowing endlessly. And I would always hear it all around me, but when I tried to catch a glimpse of it, I would see nothing. There were the animals, of course. The birds, pecking at the seeds that fell from the flowers as she walked. A barn owl landed on her shoulder, eyeing the mice and small animals scurrying about in the undergrowth.

She walked on that bed of undergrowth over a stream that seemed impossibly deep. I could see the shadows of fish underneath. Too many, and too varied for me to count them. Birds of the jungle, the big cats of the savannahs, everything was there. All of them trailed in her shadow.

And then she reached me. She spoke with a voice like the rustling of trees, the murmur of the stream. Piercing my ears like a bird’s cries in the morning, but at the same time deep and soothing, like the gentlest animal breathing softly next to me.

Why are you here, my child? She said.

I didn’t know. I couldn’t open my mouth to speak any words. I couldn’t remember a thing about myself, about why I was here, or anything except that it was a dream.

And then I woke up. And I remembered I had no idea what I was doing here, either. I mean, I knew “why” I was here. The apartment was cheap and it was close to my work. Sparsely furnished, sure, but you take what you can get. Every morning I woke up, every night I went to sleep. Up and down. Breathe in, breathe out.

Maybe thinking about breathing in and out finally reminded me that I was wasting time. The morning heat was already coming radiating in through the window. It was the peak of summer right around now. The air conditioning was doing what it could, but I could still feel it. That overbearing heat. It was easier to deal with when you were moving. Sweat was the body’s natural cooling system after all. But better than that would be a cold shower.

–

I didn’t want to think about the dream. That’s what I would say about that, I suppose. That line echoed in my head. And the vision of Her. I tried to let the water wash it away. I was supposed to be good at forgetting. Good at keeping my head down.

Not like that mattered out here. The future.

I said it was one thing to think about the future, and another thing to live in it, right? That was Us, in a sense. The New Generation. We’d grown up with the generation before us, but we were offered the chance at a new future. A better future.

That was really just a fancy way of saying that we were leaving them. We were leaving the planet, and we’d be leaving them behind. I guess I should explain a little bit.

If we were the New Generation, it was simply the generation before us that was the Old Generation. And that they were. They were our parents, grandparents, you name it.

I remember they said that they grew up in a time long before our future was realized, and it came faster than they thought it would. As an aside, they used to call me from time to time to tell me about the old times. I liked listening to it when they did, since it was hard to imagine it now.

The future came fast. The world’s tipping point wasn’t that long ago, maybe about 30 years? We knew we had to leave, back then. The climate was getting much, much worse as time went on. Exceeding our models and expectations. Remember, the tipping point had been reached. We were already past the point of no-return.

So we decided to leave.

We also knew that no matter what, a significant amount of us would have to be left behind. Population growths were down, but so were our resources and our time. We were running out of materials even 50 years ago.

30 years wasn’t a number I pulled out, it was their number. The earliest we would be able to pool our resources to leave the Earth. That it was only delayed by almost a decade was apparently a better outcome than they had been hoping for.

A chip shortage early on didn’t help matters, but plans were drafted, and resources were being committed. There was the problem of getting all the countries to agree with it. But the bigger problem was…

Only half of us would be able to go. That was what was projected, matters could be different when they were finished, but it was pretty clear even that early that 4 billion, even back then, was a high estimate. The world population was almost 10 billion now. So what was to be done?

Select people by lottery? Select on merit? Neither. The New Generation.

They made a choice to entrust the future, to the future. The next generation would leave Earth and colonize the stars. Maybe the expertise still left behind could salvage a life down here, and this was probably the least cruel they could make this. Instead of people fighting for spots, their children born after a certain point were guaranteed spots.

Now mind you, while the birth rate was trending down, it’d still been projected to be 4 billion in the end. We’d have been taught as essential personnel, for a lot of us. Engineers, farmers, that sort of thing. But in between then and now, automation stepped in to take care of it all for us.

We’d still need engineers to oversee the automation, and we’d need programmers and other specialists to help improve it while it was running. We’d need scientists still to study what we found out there, we’d need architects and planners to help plan out our living spaces.

Each and every one of us would shape the future. Or so we’d been told, but reality was obviously not going to make it that easy. Let’s just cut the middle part and skip to the end. I’d been told what I was going to be in that future already.

A retail worker. A janitor too, maybe.

A hundred thousand geniuses paved the way for 4 billion people to leave the earth. Maybe that same amount would pave the way for the 4 billion to live while in space and the rest of us would have to just fill in the blanks.

Automation was going to solve a lot of things, but not everything. 30 years of automation wasn’t going to be enough, so they automated our education. We were taught everything we needed to know on a basic level. But when it came time for the scientists, architects, engineers, and everything I said; they were chosen from the best of us.

The most passionate and talented. I knew a few of them. They deserved everything they got. But the rest of us had to watch them go while we knew what was ahead of us. We were essential. We were important. Every single one of us was still the backbone of society even if it didn’t look that grand or heroic.

It wasn’t about being grand or heroic, I just wish it wouldn’t stop crushing me inside. Day after day I would be working towards my role in The Future, and day after day all it looked like was serving people for 10 hours, going home, and going to sleep. Repeat, day after day, after day.

Why am I here? That question rang in my head, but there was no time to answer it. I had to go to work.

–

I had that dream again a few days later. I couldn’t talk while I was in front of her, just like last time. All I could do was look. The owl on her shoulder looked back at me this time at least. She was looking at me as well. Her eyes glittered gold, like the sunset. She was smiling.

Did you find an answer, my child? She said.

I had. More than one actually, as far as this dream was concerned. Something triggered in my memories when I was thinking back on it. An old picture book I used to read as a kid. It was old even when my parents bought it. It told us about a time before the current time, and now that I was back in this dream again, I could see everything I saw in that book.

The Owl, a common barn owl. Back when I learned about ‘animals’ that used to exist. The barn owl had been my favorite. All of my friends had had a favorite. The rat which had run through the undergrowth in my dream, the bluebirds singing in the trees. None of them existed anymore, but it had been fun to imagine them back then.

I did find an answer. I tried to imagine myself saying those words to her.

I wanted to escape, I suppose. There was nowhere for me to go in real life, so why not a dream? A dream of better times that I had never lived in.

Then I’m glad, She said, smiling softly.

That was the end of the second dream unfortunately. I was a little annoyed that I couldn’t control the dream after all. I suppose I never have been able to. I almost had to wonder. When I looked into her eyes back then in the dream, I felt a pang of doubt that it was really my dream at all.

Those animals I’d never seen in motion, the plants as well. How could I know them well enough to dream about them?

–

I decided one day to try to trace it back to its source. I tracked down the book, waited for a cooler day, and decided to set off, tracking down whatever examples I could find of the places in that book. It was a pretty simple story. Definitely childish in the wording, but that was fitting for… you know, Children’s books.

Mother Earth created us all, was the title.

Mother Earth created the trees… It was hard to find any trees that weren’t stunted or shriveled in my area. Industrial output choked the life out of everything here. Necessary, calculated industrial output. The earth was getting its life choked out one sector at a time to keep overall pollution levels low, but living in those areas was a bitch.

She created the mice and the bees… Mice were still a decent choice for pets. For lab experiments as well, they’d never fallen out of use. Bees though… yeah, the bees were gone. We had tiny robot drones as a replacement. They were a marvel of micro-engineering, but there just weren’t enough of them for the entire planet.

The rivers and lakes… Hard to find any rivers and lakes that hadn’t either dried up or been Encapsulated to protect the habitat inside. Encapsulation made it sound like we put it in a bubble, which wasn’t always the case. Lakes was a yes to a certain extent, but with Rivers it was a lot more involved.

The Clouds and seas… The clouds were a different color from what was depicted in the book. To be honest, he couldn’t remember them being a different color. The ocean was the same in that regard, although even if I had the time he didn’t think I would want to visit.

Mother Earth made you and me! And that was the end of the book. I abridged the hell out of the book, but that was because there really wasn’t anything left of the world it depicted. I couldn’t find many of the animals it listed, I couldn’t really match any of the scenery without trying to imagine it myself.

I could easily track down some old videos if I wanted to see it. Maybe I could even load up a VR module or 2, I’m sure they’d made some that emulated it well enough. But I wanted to be there. I wanted to see all of it for myself. I wanted to touch it and know that it was there, but it just… wasn’t.

I had the dream again a little while after that.

Welcome back, she said to me as I opened my eyes again in that paradise.

Once again, confronted with that scene that I couldn’t find anywhere except media. The wind on my face, the grass under my feet. This was real. I remembered it now. I couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4. The skies were blue, and the clouds were white.

I remember now… I remember thinking. You were real… I… We… did this to you.

I hadn’t even realized I was crying until I saw the crystal tear drops falling towards the ground. My memories of the days I spent back then. The Old Generation- to hell with that name. My parents. My parents who I couldn’t see anymore, and who I barely even remembered.

It felt so stupid and pointless to cry those tears. They should have come out years ago.

It took me a while to notice the touch of something hard and multi-faceted on my shoulder. I looked up and saw her, looking at me.

Do not cry, my child. She said, wiping a tear from my face. You will survive. You will not need to mourn me.

As I watched, the plants and animals which had filled the place slowly started to disappear. The skies, the grass, the water, all started to fade away to white.

For why would you need to mourn something that never existed? Render this world down to its atoms and you will not find me. When this place is dust you would not find even a whisper of my name. My child, do you understand?

Words failed me. Again. It was all I could do to swallow the lump in my throat and nod to her. Satisfied, she rose to her feet. She seemed smaller than she was before.

This world is a miracle of cosmic coincidence, but you are even more than that. You are the one that gave life to me. So do not mourn me.

I understood. I understood the message she was trying to tell me, but I wanted to shout. I wanted her to be saved.

Do not cry, my child. And do not regret. I shall meet you again amongst the Stars.

And with that, she was gone. Soon after was the day that the New Generation went off into the stars. I’m writing this now from my cabin, after unpacking all of my belongings. You may be wondering what the point of this all was, and to be honest I don’t know that it’ll really have one a few months from now. But who knows?

But I kept that picture book with me, and I know that seems kind of stupid, but between that and this, I think it’ll make a good Foreword. I know there’s way better people than me that’re doing this, and I met and talked to a bunch of them already, but I felt that I owed it to myself to… try something.

To try and document the things we carried with us onto this station. To see... I suppose, because I didn't really know.

What remains of Her.

And Us.