The Last Digger

The spade pierces through the carefully-engineered topsoil, crunching and scraping with each shovelful carried away. There is a particularly relaxing rhythm to the movement of digging; the work is arduous and repetitive, yet it bears the firm dignity only found in labor. The wooden handle of the spade groans under the weight of an overfilled load, reminiscent of the creaks and groans emanating from your own overworked joints. The soreness in your extremities, however, is dwarfed by the ache of your empty stomach– a pain which is, in turn, made insignificant by the burning in your lungs.

You pause, spearing the blade of the shovel into the dry ground beneath you. You rest an arm on the apex of the handle, heaving one burning breath after another. Your suit’s damnable atmospheric filtration is hardly enough to keep you upright anymore, and the colony’s stock of anti-inflammatories was exhausted over a year prior.

You raise your wrist up to your narrow field of view, lessening the tint on your visor so that you can see the cracked display adorning your forearm. It’s not like the arbitrary date or time matter much anymore, but something has been bothering you. Something has been eating at your psyche today as if, in the sequence of events that brought the shovel to your blistered hands, you’ve forgotten something.

Dismissively, you decide to push the thought out of your mind. It probably doesn’t matter anyway.

You weren’t always a Digger, but job prospects became decidedly narrow of late. You’d been a Teacher, once, when there were students in the city in need of education. History. You had been tasked with sharing the history of Saint Jude, the once-thriving settlement you called home. The colony was founded almost six-hundred years ago in a daring expedition during the Great Diaspora of Mankind. Fleeing the most destructive conflict ever to bloody the hands of humanity, ships of every conceivable make, drive, and design webbed outward from Sol, determined to carry on the course of humanity.

The vast majority of them failed.

Most didn’t make it past the Oort cloud. They perished due to unreliable navigation systems, inexperienced pilots, and ships that were simply not made to withstand the rigors of interstellar travel. Many others died out in the abyss, their reactors and life-support systems going dark out in that unreachable vastness between the stars. Of the few ships that actually entered the proximity of their target systems, over half tore themselves to shreds upon deceleration: it was not their thousand-year journeys of coasting at cruising speed that killed them, but rather that final, futile attempt to battle against the laws of inertia.

The Jude, however, had held true, both to its course and its structural integrity. The ship carried its cryogenically-frozen cargo of nineteen-thousand souls faithfully to their destination, though it took them fifteen-hundred years to get there. The brightest minds, those first awoken, made the greatest sacrifice: they knew they would never set foot on the planet below, but they put their lives’ work into making the planet habitable.

They did the work of gods. They sent daring remote expeditions out across the planet, strategically detonating their atomic weapons and carefully releasing chemicals into the atmosphere. They forced volcanoes to erupt, tsunamis to crash over the land, and coerced the planet’s tectonic plates into quaking. They altered the air, finessed the water, designed the very soil down to the finest detail, and conjured weather patterns where they could. The machinations they put in place, like clockwork, forged a livable place for humanity’s refugees.

And, three-thousand years removed from these bold terraformers, the first pioneers awoke from their icy sleep. They founded a colony on the surface of the planet, calling it Saint Jude, in honor of the ship that had borne them across boundless distances of space and time. And there, they flourished.

They built cities, agriculture, infrastructure. They built lives. They were hard lives, at first, but they made the lives of those who came after easier, and those in turn for their own descendents. The population exploded, with Saint Jude at its core, and for a while, people actually managed to live comfortably. They began transmitting signals out into the void, calling out to their brethren out across the cosmos, hoping to hear any response from other humans who had scratched out lives in the harsh universe after the diaspora– hoping to call them in to their home, where they had built all but a paradise. The relentless spirit of the human race made every effort to survive, and it seemed that the fruit of their labor was a cemented existence in the universe.

How could they have known the speed at which the blind indifference of the universe could be transmitted?

Twenty-three years ago, the decline began. It started with some unchecked reaction between the system’s stellar center and the artificially engineered biosphere inherited from the terraformers. Nobody could have predicted it. Nobody could have stopped it. It was, after all, evolution. Survival of the fittest.

A particular fungus found that instances of its species exposed to ultraviolet light could replicate at a staggering ten-times their natural rate; these genes, selected by volume, soon spread throughout the globe. No manner of fungicide, no natural predator, and no human interference was capable of stopping it. In a matter of decades, the whole sum of the planet’s water supply was covered in the black sludge of this fungus, infecting the air with its spores.

As people died in droves from the effects of inhaling the spores, the delicately balanced colony cascaded out of control. A few folks got off-planet in time, but the population was huge, and the Jude had only arrived with a few heavy shuttles. The cities burned. Equipment broke down. The people who knew how to fix the equipment were dead, as were the doctors who could have saved them. The hermetically sealed inner-sanctums of Saint Jude were the last bastions of human life on the planet, but even so, their filtration systems could only hold the fungus at bay for so long. It was only a matter of time.

You look around yourself, impressed at the work you’ve done. By recycling and reusing layers of suit filters, you were able to hold out just long enough. The rows upon rows of upright stones stand like an army of soldiers at attention, waiting for orders they will never receive. They’re made of tiles, bricks, or even slabs of metal– anything you thought might last a while. Hundreds of rows of gravestones, piercing up through the topsoil and the black fungal sludge that now covered everything.

You wish you could’ve buried more. They surely deserved the honor.

You look up to the sky one more time, hoping, against all odds, to see the plume of a fusion drive coming down through the atmosphere to save the day. You actually laugh, though silently, and the motion of your larynx burns your parched throat. There’s nobody coming. For all you know, there’s nobody out there. The only responses the planetside transceivers received to their calls for interstellar companionship were the neutrino-bursts of failed fusion drives, the faintly repeating, fading signals of distress calls, and the overarching silence that permeated the cosmos.

No, you know that nobody is coming.

Instinctively, you look at your watch again, as if there’s anything to be late to. Of course, there is nothing; there is nobody else alive in Saint Jude, nor is there a living soul on the entire planet– lest the fungus itself has pulled itself into some state of collective consciousness. Wouldn’t that be an oddity?

And then you remember– you recall what you’d forgotten. The reason you’ve been incessantly checking your watch since you took on this task. It is your birthday.

You laugh again, a hoarse cough spewing from your lips and leaving crimson speckles on the inside of your visor. The irony is infallible. Your smile splits your dry, chapped lips, but you can’t help it. Those old astronauts– terraformers, the pioneers, and all their like– had given survival the old college try. They had put all their effort into defying nature, and in the end, Nature had gotten hers. They had failed, and miserably.

And now, here you are, digging.

Finding no bright flash of blue fusion-flame plummeting from uncaring skies, you finish the last few shovelfuls, tossing them behind you with the same care through which you’d done countless times before. You look ahead of you at the stone before you, carefully running a finger over the inscription you so-scrupulously selected.

Your smile has not fled, despite the pain and despite your circumstances. You’ve got the last filter from the thousands you’d compiled, and its life is about to run short, inundated by spores and toxicity. The air is full of them. Your lungs are already burning from their infiltration. It won’t take long, now.

You are glad that your task is complete. You squint– the spores are already degrading your optical nerves, but you can still see, for now. The words on the stone are perfect. A satisfying culmination of a noble effort. A noble failure, yes, but effort nonetheless.

Here is the last hole dug.

You lay down in the hole. In your imagination, staring up at the sky, you can see the atmosphere is full of tiny black dots ready to infest your body and unknowingly claim their last prize. You take a deep breath, unlocking your helmet from the lugs at your neck and placing it gingerly at your side.

You relax.

You exhale the last breath of remotely-clean air on the planet.

You close your eyes. You inhale.