The Unconformity

In the Late Ordovician period, before continents rose and fell and rose and fell again, into the shape we know today, was a land we would not recognize as earth. What little life there was, was simple and sparse. What there was, however, was a couple small, fortunate parcels of land in this world, where conditions were just so, and life progressed rapidly and constantly. So constantly and rapidly that life, walking talking whining life, would develop millions of years before anywhere else. This glorious anomaly was not fated to last. It would wiped clean and swallowed whole, the grains of its existence washed away between layers of time turned to stone.

Before that happened though, a group of incidental bureaucrats stood in a clearing, staring at the sky. They had trained for this moment for months, but they had never desired to hold the reigns of public council. Coincidentally, they had all the features of a typical government body. Those obsessed with appearing obsessed with the greater good, those looking out for more precise interests, those who spoke the truth and those who spoke the most. When the Tall Ones, The Helpers, left, they had to find their own way and that just wasn’t easy, or natural.

One of the men in this crowd, slightly shorter and paler than average, shifted his eyes back and forth, looking for his chance to speak. As he cleared his throat, his torso wobbled as if the fasteners on his clothes were planets trying to escape his orbit.

“It’s getting hard to tell the difference, you know, between it and the sun now. That can not be a good sign.” The thought was mumbled as quickly as it was careless, his eyes started searching for support.

Gorvan clenched her teeth and nearly crushed the metal bottle in her hand to prevent herself from throwing it. What wasn’t immediately visible was the paperwork he’d filed delaying the official recognition of the impending doom. Her memories of him and his cronies standing in the way, sometimes literally, of the attempts to prepare for the apocalypse were as vivid and tinted red as ever.

“If comments as helpful as that are going to be your contribution, Mr. Kenney, I’d encourage you to do your problem solving in the privacy of your quarters.”

With a vacant yet somewhat offended look on his face, he turned and waddled away. Gorvan looked down at the immense crevice beneath them, and the impressive, life-sustaining ball nestled inside. An hour before, this structure was her and her people's shared, greatest pride. It had been emblematic of every shared value she’d dared hope they had. They literally and metaphorically overcame themselves and were going to dodge a fiery armageddon. An hour before, this steely ball in the ground was physical proof that she and everyone else were capable of overcoming basic, human selfishness and that a common good could exist.

Her second in command, Starla, was the only other thing in the world that gave her this hope now. The Captain looked at the dirt trapped in Starla’s fingernails and thought about digging their way to safety, like the Southern sects had. In every previous dilemma they’d been in, Starla had had some piece of recycled, old farmers wisdom that she’d inherited from her mom that she would spout as she out-worked the problem. Gorvan waited for the wisdom, but was left wanting as Starla looked as desperate as everyone else.

They stood beside each other, puzzling through the possibilities. The gargantuan orb they had designed and laboured over to escape the Earth and its certain doom in, wouldn’t move. As of an hour ago, it was locked. Stuck. Inexplicably immobilized. Starla watched one of the onlookers kick a bloom of dust, dirt and rock into the cavern below and wondered if they just bury the thing.

Just yesterday, they had performed several hover tests between loads of passengers. The fuel cells and batteries were topped and triple confirmed. Diagnostics were checked and reworked and reviewed. The whole thing was turned off, and back on again. Nothing seemed to help and there was no detectable reason for them having been landbound. They had already delayed their launch to wait for stragglers, and now they were woefully close to being out of time. Which was the exact wrong time for something like this to happen. According to the control room clocks, they had barely a day left until there wouldn’t be a planet to launch off of.

After agreeing they would delay any announcements to the populace inside until they had a better idea of what to tell them, the assembly split up and resumed their respective duties. No one had any desire to keep this as privileged information, but the one thing that would definitely make things worse would be mass panic.

The breakthrough came several hours later, as the Navigation Team was giving their midnight update on how much larger the threat in the sky appeared and how much closer they were to certain destruction. When the thought struck her, Starla couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it sooner. The training centre had a perfectly functional Seed Ship just sitting empty. A whole, empty, functional ship. She sprinted to the debrief room, and burst in through the doors.

“Captain! The dummy seed!”

The vivacious second-in-command explained her epiphany to the room of shocked looking middle-management types and her captain. If they could get the training ship from the yard, park it near their Seed Ship, it would be a simple matter of transferring everyone and then they could probably, safely, launch. Even better, if they figured out what was wrong while she was gone, they could cannibalize the “old” training ship for parts.

The training ship was built first, and completed before they started production on the other ships. Their first step beyond Earth, into space, was to be their greatest technology leap. While others toiled at constructing and filling the other life rafts, those chosen to operate the ships trained relentlessly in the dummy seed. It was functional in every single way that mattered, and void of everything that didn’t.

The sticky part was sorting out how exactly they would acquire the “dummy ship”, as Starla reflexively referred to it. Most present for this meeting couldn’t understand why it couldn’t simply be summoned. Which, to be fair, was actually a very reasonable question for their time and place in history. The real debate was between Capt. Gorvan, who wanted to exhaust the possibilities of having someone from the base or Escape Corps bring the Seed to them, and Rexin the director of propulsion system maintenance, who wanted to send a whole crew, immediately. As they volleyed valid points back and forth, Starla heard nothing, and felt only her visceral reaction to the display on the wall counting down the meters until their home planet was annihilated. Each word they tossed back and forth, death gained ground. Every increment closer to death felt like another shock in her system, ticking with the clock.

That’s when she made a unique decision in her life, and acted entirely on compulsion.

She walked out of the boardroom. Jogged to the elevator. Sat on the high speed transport that took her to the outer level. Sprinted to the airlock, which was currently functioning as an impractically fancy bootroom. She snatched a set of keys from the large cabinet on the wall, and wrestled with whether or not to fill out the sign-out sheet.

“Ugh! No time!” The frustration in her voice betrayed a lifetime of sincerity and keenerism. A heated, internal debate of whether or not she made the process too complicated reignited, setting her brain on fire. A new dynamic that couldn’t, but must, be ignored.

She tapped on the adjacent control panel. A gentle, robotic voice advised her to sit or hold a rail as the wall began to disappear into itself with a hiss. She grabbed a bag from a locker, and sprinted across a plankway as the doors finished opening.

“It is now safe to use the platform.” the voice says, drowning in the disappointment of being ignored, once again.

The transport truck was the fastest land vehicle she could find. She pushed it to the limit and shrieked away, out of the crater that housed the ship, and into the horizon. This younger Earth had no recognizable flora or fauna. It looked like a stripped down, demo version of the one we know here and now. The path she drove on straddled the edge between cliffs, one side freezing at imperceptibly slow speeds, the other streaked with slow, settling lava. The landscape was raw, and life was small outside those precious pockets.

With her body still, her mind scrambled to think of a better plan, another way of averting the crisis. One that didn't require her to travel for hours away from safety. She played out every variable and scenario she could imagine and got nowhere. Once it dawned on her that she was spiralling in whirlpools of doom and logic, and it was far too late for turning back, she tried to commit her mind to other tasks. Starla had always been fascinated by The Helpers who began appearing a couple decades ago. Who wasn’t though? They were the only living things her people had ever seen that were larger or more complex than they were.

When she was close to the training campus, Gorvan called Starla.

“Hey Captain. How are you?” Surprise and guilt peppered her words.

“Starla! Where are you?” If this was anyone else, or less out of character, Gorvan would be irate. All she could muster for Starla was concern.

Starla explained her plan and the steps that remained to be carried out. Capt. Gorvan reflected on what happened, what could be done, and their quickly dwindling distance from the imminent cataclysm.

“I need you to be honest. We have zero margin for error right now. Can you complete this mission solo? There might be time for adjustments, there is NO time for mistakes.” If the Captain’s voice gave away the tears tracing her nose, eyes, and cheeks, Starla failed to notice. Gorvans mind had been assaulting itself with a barrage of terrible and likely conclusions to the journey since the moment she discovered Starla’s absence. The relief of hearing her proteges voice in this moment of compounding stressors was more than enough to create the leak in her eyes.

“I’m mission ready. … I promise.”

The shaking in Starla's voice wasn’t a lack of confidence, but the undeniable weight of the commitment. She knew she could do it, but she also remembered this was the end of everything. It was the type of realization that will show the cracks in any level of confidence. The plan had always been to find a new beginning after the end, but if she failed, everyone she knew would die along with the planet and most of what sparse life inhabited the rest of its surface.

The Captain made the necessary calls in the time before Starla’s arrival, and the way was cleared remotely ahead of her. Everything up to booting up the ship's operating systems. Starla sprinted back and forth across the control room. She cycled up thrusters and pressurized hulls. Set dials and switched the switches. She’d been trying to recall start up sequences and control placements on the drive, and it all came back to her quicker than expected. Finally, in the captain's chair, she shook her head and took a deep breath. All of the anxiety and doubt and stress had instantly been replaced with hope. Until nothing moved.

It was happening, or not happening rather, all over again. The buttons and levers that should have unleashed a spectacle of controlled, atomic catastrophes that propelled this life sustaining ball up, did nothing. Even a disaster would have been preferable to nothing.

It was supposed to move.

Technology had been handed to them by The Helpers, and was still not entirely familiar, but after years of training and total immersement in it, she knew it should at least make sound. Some observable sign of effort on the machines behalf should be present...

She screamed. It was the only way to unfreeze her brain. Her senses had never operated at this heightened state before. Eyes searching each switch, knob, hologram, rolly thing, display, and warning light. Ears listening for any sign of strain or transfer of energy. Sweat beaded over the skin that felt carefully for any tremors from moving parts. With a deep breath, she entertained the thought of defeat and then it blinked again. The brief, dim, blipping of one very crucial yet mundane display.

She disengaged the thrust locks, and cursed quietly under her exhaling breath. Repeatedly. Elation burst from her face as the ship burst out of it's cradle, up and away.

...

When Starla returned, there was less time for the evacuation than was hoped for. The first of eleven batches of escapees stood outside on the transport pad, with their bags in hand and transponders pinned to their chests. She was pleased to see that all personal items and the luxuries missing from the dummy seed had been packed into larger, freight containers and were being loaded before even the crew. A full crew flooded into the eerily vacant control room beside Starla, and she took her first calm, full breath that day.

After a brief, intense embrace, Gorvan told her to rest up in her new room. Once they were clear of the atmosphere and confirmed to be out of harm's way, they would debrief and Starla would need to be ready to lead the nav deck and support crews. In a highly unexpected display of passion, Gorvan pulled Starla close, and the words “We couldn’t do this without you.” stealthily made it past her lips, as if they’d be trying to find release for a thousand years. A tear escaped Starla’s eye. The enormity of the situation hit her again, paired with another wave of relief, and the squeezing from Captain Gorvan’s strong arms made all the more palpable. As they parted a moment later, Starla remembered the hidden, potted plant she had in the walls of her room in the grounded ship, and how much easier she’d sleep with it beside her.

The low volume, crew transporter was free, so Starla was able to ride it down directly onto the dead Seed Ship. Numbers started running through her head, as she moved through the corridors. The thousands of people saved, the time they had left to escape, and how long it would take to get everyone onboard. The proximity these numbers had to each other made her grit her teeth, but it would work. They’d used up their buffer, but that’s what buffers were for, right? She decided to think about her stowaway plant instead. The head botanist had granted her permission to have it, but it was meant to be somewhat quarantined from the other fauna, hence the secret compartment Starla had crafted in her wall. She was relieved to know she would save it and the sound of her semi-giddy steps filled the massive, empty hallways. With her eyes closed and arms outstretched, she twirled down towards her quarters. Starla indulged herself with a moment of self gratitude, “You saved me, Starla! You saved all of us! Oh wooooow!”.

When she left the farm behind, she had made a promise to take the little plant behind her bedside table with her, wherever she went. The tiny, juvenile plant had thin papery leaves with something like spores on its underside. The leafy, upright stalk and short, hair-like roots made it quite the novelty for those who cared for plants.

Her mom must have told her a hundred times “This plant is the future. Just like us, it's changing who it is and learning new skills, in order to survive.” She had a way with words that Starla wished she’d inherited. She had helped a younger, scared Starla understand that this was their chance to contribute to the universe, the way this plant was giving back to evolution on Earth, and how these little changes would become something magnificent and new. The end of the familiar was scary, to be sure, but the beginning of everything else was a blessing not everyone would be able to share. The impetus to leave their home, and accepting the help of the Tall Ones would be the first step in creating a mosaic of unimaginable wonders on a galactic scale. As hydrogen was to the creation of the universe, so they would be to the proliferation of life therein and “maybe, someday, we can do for others what the Helpers have done for us.” She cursed herself for hiding it so well and gathered the plant from her secret hydroponic cubby hole. Plant in hand, she inspected the drawers for anything else that may have been left behind on her way out.

On her way out of the abandoned ship, she noticed a door, slightly ajar. This only caught her attention as it had been a solid section of hallway just yesterday, before she left, and always had been before then. Through the crack in the wall, she saw the blinking of control and communications panels and Alexander Kenney, crumpled up in a sobbing, shaking blob on the floor.

His bloodshot eyes caught hers almost instantly, “It’s my fault, Stella! Our committee made the engineers include a secret break that I controlled and I forgot to turn it off. They’ll never forgive me.” She’d saved his life and he couldn’t even be bothered to remember her name.

“Oh… no.” The countdown clock in Starla’s head was screaming at her. They were down to minutes now. “Wait. That just means we can take both ships now, right? That’s great news! I’ll let Gorvan know and she can send a pilot crew down.”

The adult man held his stomach with both hands and made a sound like he was being stepped on by a giant. He rolled his way up into a seated, cross legged position, moaning. Starla set down the rescued plant in front of herself, leaning closer to the broken man. His tears seemed to slow, with great effort, as she listened to him.

“Not exactly… I put the wrong password in too many times and now it’s locked out for 24 hours.” His eyes and lips scrunched up tightly and he took a sharp breath, between sobs. “I know we only have a few minutes left to take off. We’ll never be able to send a crew back for it, either.”

Starla turned slowly, trying to take in the room and its contents to distract and calm herself. She let her eyes drift as she searched for the words to express her horror. Her words were distracted and disjointed when she finally spoke, attempting to console him enough to leave.

“People make mistakes… It might not make sense now, but good could come of this. We gotta go though, now. Like you said, we’ve only got a few minutes until launch, whether we’re onboard or not. Actually, come to think of it… There’s a chance no one knows I’m off board.” Her eyebrows dropped as she was instantly distracted, contemplating the implications of that statement.

“Starla. I… also lost my transponder…”

Another growl shook its way out of her and her attention snapped back to the tear soaked man. Her feet turned her in a circle, her arms flew up in exasperation and when she looked back at the secret doorway, she saw black. She would never forget the millisecond before she lost consciousness. The wooshing sound behind her, the bewilderment she was trying to set aside to save them both, and the split second of fury, fully realizing the unnecessary betrayal.

...

She woke up, dazed, some time before the world ended. Blood and drool slowly ran down the creases of her face and onto the cold, tiled floor. A pair of monitors cutting through the dark showed her one fireball entering the atmosphere and another leaving.

She stood to assess the situation. Her head swam and hands started gripping her body, looking for injuries. First she noticed the absence of her transponder badge, second the truck key bulging in her pocket.

She picked up the plant out of its shattered pot and Starla ran.