Merciful Wanderer and the Distraction of Being a Dinosaur

After the critical tipping point ensuring humanity’s extinction was reached, but before those generations unfortunate enough to bear witness to the end of the world realized it, the hospital ship Merciful Wanderer was launched. Its original five year mission had been to supply medical aid along the coast of the shrinking African continent. However, as sea levels rose rapidly, the state-of-the-art vessel's purpose changed from one of support to one of survival.

With Merciful Wanderer floating peacefully under the stars in the southern Atlantic, Dr. Noah was anything but peaceful. Playing Dinosaur Simulator for the umpteeth time, the game had again ended with the inevitable meteor strike. He knew he spent too much time with and got too emotional over the frivolous endeavor, but he was obsessed with the idea that he could win, despite all evidence to the contrary. He’d started playing as a cover for his obsession, a way of explaining why he spent so much time in his office, hunched at his screen, endlessly spinning his wedding band around his finger.

Annoyingly, he’d found that playing as the scaly beasts, red in tooth and claw, was the perfect mindless distraction, but was distracted how he wished to spend the last of his days? His true purpose, he kept secret from the crew, except for the captain. After so long at sea she hated everyone on board and no one had heard her speak a word in almost a decade, so he didn’t worry.

A quarter of a century after an Olympic gold medalist had smashed a bottle of champagne against Merciful Wanderer’s bow during its christening ceremony, there were no more Olympics and no more champagne. Dr. Noah had been present that day, eager to assume his duties as chief medical officer aboard the ship, thinking he could make a difference for legions of humanity in need. All these years later, as the sea-level rise had surpassed even the most catastrophic predictions, swallowing all but the most elevated land masses as unprecedented geothermal activity had caused vast underground oceans to empty and join the waters of the melted polar ice caps, he missed his wife and his children, but with so many to mourn, grief had become more of a defining undercurrent to life, than a thing people would express.

Other than some photographs and his wedding ring, which weighed his hand down like an anchor when the anguish rose in his heart, Dr. Noah had nothing physical left to remind him of the life he had once known, though his secret passion kept the past close at hand.

As resources had grown scarcer, wars were fought over dry land, with victors celebrating on mountaintop islands surrounded by floating corpses, though for those who claimed all but the highest peaks this only delayed the inevitable embrace of the ocean. Much of humanity lived in huge flotilla cities, made of ships of all sorts lashed together which sat atop seas brimming with the useless detritus of a dead civilization. Dry-landers and sea people alike were faced with unpredictable storms that only seemed to get more violent with each passing year as Earth’s weather systems underwent rapid change. The greatest danger that the storms presented was the potential to damage the desalinization facilities on which every living human relied on for potable water. Whether huge industrial units or arrays of solar stills, the continued functioning of these finicky technologies had become essential to human life on the drowned earth.

Fresh water was not a concern aboard Merciful Wanderer, but the ship’s nuclear fuel reserves were reaching the end of their lifespans. Soon, the people living aboard would have to decide where to settle. Between the medical knowledge and desalinators, they made an attractive addition to any society, but were faced with a difficult choice.

They could ally with the industrial-cult flotilla which siphoned oil slicks off the surface of the sea over what was formerly Texas. Their refineries powered some of the last industrial endeavors in the hemisphere, but the people had become maniacal in their dedication to the dying arts of manufacturing. Dredging the seafloor for scrap with which to make more ships and platforms consumed them with a religious ferocity. They believed it was their divine purpose to resurface the earth, leading ascetic lives under choking clouds of smog.

The Northern Flotilla was another option. Regarded as one of the safer communities, the sprawling conglomeration of ships and barges existed under a harsh code of justice. Crimes were punished with summary amputations and executions which supplied meat for their cannibalistic lifestyle. Having long since grown tired of fish, Dr. Noah would admit that the smoky, meaty aroma of their barbecues made his mouth water, though he had never partaken of their offerings.

The Rocky Islands, formerly The Rocky Mountains, offered yet another option. Among the few remaining vestiges of dry land, the islanders had eked out agriculture more easily than those who lived on the open water. Most of their energies, however, were dedicated to tunneling into the mountains they lived on in search of secret government facilities. Residents were tight-lipped about any possible discoveries, but Dr. Noah had a suspicion that certain successes had been achieved. Five years prior he had treated several cases of radiation poisoning in the area of an oddly abandoned island, an unusual affliction in contemporary times, though occasionally found among the crews of the handful of nuclear vessels still roaming the Earth.

Dr. Noah had reached the age where he had believed he would retire, but the world had changed so drastically that such concepts had lost all meaning. Once upon a time he had dreamed of leisure years tying flies and fishing trout out of Montana rivers. A framed photo next to his bed showed him and his wife, so much younger now, in front of a narrow expanse of placid water, with their RV in the background. This was supposed to have been a prelude to the remainder of their lives together. These days Dr. Noah dreamed only of murky ocean depths full of haunting songs.

In an effort to conserve power, Merciful Wanderer spent most of her days adrift. Use of the engines was reserved for rough seas or in pursuit of a necessary destination. She was well capable of defending herself, but seen as a beacon of goodwill, had only come under attack twice in all her years at sea.

A third of the crew wanted to go past the usual limits of their travels, west beyond the Rockies or east past the European flotillas to The Himalayan Islands, the largest land masses remaining above water, which supposedly harbored an insular, secretive society who lived in abundance. It was believed that in the decades leading up to the great melt, certain countries had been caching vast resources up in the freezing mountains in anticipation of such a disaster.

Dr. Noah was the person on board most vehemently opposed to setting course for the Himalayas. Citing hostile waters to the east and the need to contend with a possibly impassible garbage gyre to the west, coupled with fuel concerns, he was unable to tell them the truth. A limited nuclear exchange had rendered the whole region inhospitable and poisoned the nearby seas with radiation that would have proven problematic for future generations, would there be any, but there wouldn’t. However, he could not say this without revealing his secret. The more time he spent in his office playing Dinosaur Simulator, the greater the desire grew in the crew to make such an excursion, despite the risks.

Treating the bumps and scrapes of the crew occupied only a fraction of the doctor’s time. His position freed him from most of the mundane shipboard chores, which were otherwise divvied up among the crew according to a schedule. This left ample opportunity to engage in his secret task, which required precise positioning of the satellite dish, impossible with the ship under steam. The obsession necessitated certain mental gymnastics, not the least of which was the need to convince himself that he was making a difference when he locked himself in his office in the dark and turned to the screen.

The ship’s computer and satellite uplink allowed Dr. Noah access to the graveyard of the internet, which existed as a shadow of its former self among various orbital servers. As a medical doctor he was unqualified to treat the various madnesses that had presented, to some degree, in literally every human present for the drowning of the earth, including himself, and so his time with the screen was spent searching for remedies. At issue was the fact that most contemporary afflictions had no corollary in the past, and therefore no treatments.

Having known no other way of things, children born in the last twenty years were spared the anxieties and depressions that consumed the older generations, though the unnaturalness of their demeanor often amplified the negative effects on others. More than once, Dr. Noah had seen young mothers in his office weeping over their childrens’ ignorance that they should be hopeless, that there was no future to look forward to, even for their audacity to laugh as they ran across the deck. He wanted to help them, but there was no diagnosis for a parent who resented their child’s innocence with good reason. The world they’d been promised would be inherited by whales, squids, or some other species equipped to adapt to the larger, warmer seas. They felt their children had been denied a divine birthright stretching back to the dawn of life on Earth, but they’d forgotten the cruel balance sheets of evolution.

So, he persevered with his obsession, chasing every link, and downloading as much information about humanity’s past onto the ship’s huge solid-state data banks, which had been designed to store patient information, and were equipped with a rudimentary artificial intelligence to look for patterns. The online search engines were all broken, and so he was aided in this endeavor by the two-dozen or so others who could still access the system. All aboard various nuclear vessels, they were mostly military, with a few scientific researchers, and two men who had been among the world’s richest when “wealth” was measured in something other than fresh water. It was from these distant strangers that he learned the truth about the Himalayas.

Dr. Noah had never revealed that such a connection existed to the crew, as he knew what would happen if he did. They would each become obsessed with the idea of finding their loved ones from before the flood, just as he had, and he wished to save them from the inevitable disappointments of dashed hope. He had chased down every hint and rumor for a quarter century looking for anyone he had known from the world before, always to no avail. Each time it was like picking the scab off a wound, and so he remained silent to spare them.

Humanity’s case was terminal, the voices and actions of those who still survived amounting to little more than the death-rattle of a species. Life had truly lost all meaning, and yet he did what he could to amass as much information about his people as possible, knowing no one would ever access it, especially once the ship and all its contents inevitably settled into the seabed.

One night, while most of the crew slept, Dr. Noah stood on the upper deck, looking up at the night sky, grateful for the stars, the sight of which had been denied the dinosaurs in their death-throes as dust and ash had filled the air. He was torn between gratitude and resentment that his world ended with a whimper, not a bang. Impulsively, he tore off his wedding ring and cast it towards the sea, compelled by the need to unburden himself, but not knowing how.

Instantly regretful, he was overjoyed to hear the ring clang on the deck below, and by some miracle he caught sight of the gold gleaming just beyond the rail. Against all shipboard rules and common sense, he ran down the stairs, his grip slipping on the railing as his hand now felt lighter than air. Rushing across the deck, he clambered over the railing, single-minded and heedless of all danger. Plucking the ring from its precarious resting place, he clutched the band to his heart. Then, whether he slipped, fell, or jumped, even he could not say, but Dr. Noah suddenly found himself falling through the air, caught between the starry sky above and dark seas below.

…

Deep beneath the sea, the player swam its massive humpbacked body backwards out of the Biped Simulator game unit, bemoaning that it was the simulation’s accuracy that made it so frustrating. Created from actual records left by the bipeds, it seemed there was no way for them to successfully repopulate the Earth after the flood. Playing as the very biped who preserved the records, it was a fun bit of resource management, and the interface really allowed one to get into the biped’s mind and attempt to understand their history, but it was ultimately rather pointless.

The player shuddered, imagining the world again full of the savage, hairy brutes who, at one point had powered their civilization on rendered blubber. Even dinosaurs were better, their brutality excused by ignorance. The limited, psychopathic, ego-driven consciousness of the bipeds made them the most terrifying monsters to ever roam the Earth. Their menace still presented certain dangers after all this time. They were the devils whose ghosts still haunted the radioactive forbidden zones. This all made them quite exciting.

An array of plankton lit up in front of the player. The Grand Mother was home from an emergency mission to the Kupier wormhole to deliver much needed medicines to the Trifaxis, who were suffering a terrible plague in a nearby galaxy. Soon there would be a transmission from the capital. It was time to return to the pod and bear witness to The Grand Mother’s song of gratitude. Being alive during a time of literally universal goodwill and intergalactic technological singularity was even more exciting than Biped Simulator, and the player swam away from the arcade with barely a thought of Dr. Noah as he plunged again into the black waters.