To Save the World

Jim Conway stood on a cliff overlooking the bleak desert valley that spanned beneath him, his right leg propped up on a large rock. He was leaned forward, both of his arms resting on his knee. In his right hand, he held a heart-shaped locket which contained a faded photograph of a little boy. Jim was a tall man with sharp features and stunning blue eyes, his grey hair kept short in a military crew cut.

Jim shivered, ice crystals forming in his grey stubble as he looked up from the locket to the desert. On the horizon he could see storm clouds, which could only mean one thing: acid rain. He would need to seek shelter soon. Jim stood upright and replaced his gas mask. Outside of the compound, you could go without your mask for a short time, but it was not recommended to do so for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

He sighed. This was supposed to make things better. By all rights, it should have worked. And yet, here they were, their supplies dwindling day by day, and still no end in sight.

His mind wandered, back to several years before…

~

“Well what do you mean we only have a few months left?” Jim Conway asked in exasperation, shaking his head, a young man of twenty-nine with a clean-shaven face and jet black hair parted on the side. He was dressed in a white lab coat, but at least at the moment it was just for show, and he had the sleeves rolled up the elbow.

“You heard me,” his superior, Lionel Bowen, looked at him sternly. “The holes in the ozone are growing at a rate far quicker than what was predicted. We only have a few months.”

Jim sighed, looking at the data spread out in front of him. “I can’t make any promises. I was supposed to have two years, Bowen.”

“I know,” his superior replied mournfully. “But disaster does not follow an itinerary.”

“Clearly,” Jim sat down, rubbing his eyes in frustration. There was a long silence between the two men. Finally, Jim sat up straighter, new resolve in his tone. “I’ll get a bigger team together. We’ll do our best, sir.”

“You cannot fail,” Bowen stressed. “Everything lies with you. Godspeed, Conway.”

He turned and took his leave. Jim shrugged off his lab coat shortly after and headed for the parking garage; he would begin recruiting in the morning. As it stood, he needed to tell his wife what was happening.

When Jim arrived home, he was greeted by his young son, who eagerly ran to him and hugged him around the knees. Jim did his best to hide how morose he was feeling, but his wife could tell the moment she saw him. They ate dinner in relative silence, and once they’d put the boy to bed, they adjourned to the kitchen island for a bottle of wine.

“So… What’s the bad news?” his wife asked; she was never one to beat around the bush.

Jim fiddled with his wine glass, staring at the burgundy liquid, but not taking a drink. “The, um, holes in the ozone are… expanding, much quicker than we anticipated. We don’t have years anymore. Fallout is imminent… I have months to get the project to completion.” Jim’s eyes glazed over as he stared off into space. “I screw up… and everyone dies.”

A heavy silence hung in the air, then his wife approached him and put her arm around his waist. “You won’t screw up. I believe in you.”

Conditions had continued to worsen as Jim and his team slaved away at salvation: air quality became poorer, weather was violent and unpredictable, and many people began to develop various strains of cancer at an unprecedented rate. An ordinance was put in place to remain indoors whenever possible, to avoid the increasing radiation being put off by the sun.

Two months from Bowen’s initial warning to Jim and they had a prototype that just might work. Testing was about to begin when things took a turn for the worst, and it was decided that they would have to take their chances if even a portion of humanity were to survive.

“Have you got everything, honey?” Jim asked his wife, standing at the door with various duffels slung over his shoulders.

“Yes, I think that’s everything,” his wife joined him at the front door, their son in her arms.

“Where are we going, Dad?” the little boy asked, yawning widely as they exited into the gloomy night, the very air causing their skin to prickle.

“Well, if everything goes according to plan, we’ll be going to a place called Mars,” Jim replied, coughing.

“Mars?” the boy asked, but had lost interest and was playing with a heart-shaped locket around his mother’s neck. He did not know anything about Mars, or planets really, yet; he was far too young, only four years old. He could not understand that they were leaving home behind forever, to search for greener – or in this case, redder – pastures.

~

That had been almost sixty years ago. Jim Conway, Jr. tucked his mother’s old locket into his vest pocket as he entered the compound and removed his mask. Both of his parents had passed away decades ago.

He had been too young to understand what was going on that night, but as he’d grown. He’d come to understand the ramifications of his father’s actions. He had worked, day and night, to create a rocket capable of ferrying people to Mars to build the New Earth. When the atmospheric deterioration had greatly worsened, they had slipped away in the night with the others who knew about the project, leaving all of the others back on Earth to die.

Jim knew that his father had never forgiven himself, and he felt that that guilt was what had driven him to an early grave. Mars had been meant to be a fresh start, but in just over half a century, it too was dying, just as Earth had. Since arriving on the red planet, the population had tripled and exhausted Mars of its scant natural resources. The air, already much harder to survive in than Earth’s, had been all too easy to pollute, and now Mars was approaching the danger status Earth had been in when Jim Conway, Jr. and his family had fled that night. Funny how every little boy’s dream had been to go to space, and yet it had brought Jim nothing but remorse.

“Hey, Conway,” Melissa Rovarti, one of Jim’s peers, greeted him as he entered the command deck. She was younger than him and tried to keep her hand close to the chest, but Jim knew that she harbored feelings for him that were more than just friendly.

“Hey,” he replied, breezing past and standing in front of the many computer screens they’d transplanted from the rocket when they’d arrived. He crossed his arms, looking at the many photos and surveillance videos of the withering red planet.

Melissa came up beside him, looking at the screens. “Morale really has plummeted around here. People are wondering where to next…”

“There is no ‘where to next,’” Jim replied quietly, feeling the dark hole that was always inside of him widening. “We are nestled between a gaseous giant that would only kill us and the very planet that we annihilated. Maybe it wasn’t the air that was poison; maybe it’s us. Maybe people are just poison.”

“Don’t say that,” Melissa set her mouth in a firm line, fighting back tears. Jim was tortured, she knew that. She would have given anything to take some of the burden from his shoulders.

Jim continued to look at the screens, but he didn’t seem to truly be seeing them anymore. “I barely have any memories of Earth before… There’s just this one photograph that my mother had of me,” Jim pulled the locket from his pocket, clicking it open, him playing on a grassy, green lawn. “All I remember is a darkened sky and everything that I was told should be green being brown and dead. Mostly I remember the four walls of my house. And then the rocket ship.”

“What about New Earth?” Melissa pressed.

“New Earth has always been a cold and miserable desert. Now it’s just a dying one,” Jim turned and headed for his quarters, leaving Melissa with his parting statement.

~

Under the cover of night, Jim placed the last bomb. He had planned for months, studying maps of the compound. This was the most effective way; there would be nothing left. Rather than dying slowly one by one, they would all go out in a glorious burst of fire; most would not even know what had hit them. And maybe, just maybe, New Earth – Mars – would make a comeback from the cancer that had infected it for almost sixty years.

Jim held the locket in his hand opposite the detonator, looking at the picture of the little boy he’d never truly gotten the chance to be. He took a deep breath and held it, feeling tears well up in his eyes. He exhaled slowly, allowing the tension to go out of his body. “I’m sorry, Dad.” And he hit the button on the detonator.