Honeymoon

You wake up to the sound of seagulls and gentle waves. Around you is a bed and warm sheets, and the warmth of another body just in front of you--Rina, your beloved, you remember. You open your eyes, and you're filled with so many beautiful memories.

"Good morning, sweetie," she says with a whispering smile. "Guess what?"

You rasp a chuckle and ask "What?"

"It's the first day of our honeymoon!" She beams, and leans forward to kiss you. Bliss.

"I'm so glad you picked this place," you say after a while.

"Me too," she replies. "It looked so beautiful on my old spacewalks, and it really seems to live up to that view in person."

-----

Garret and Rina stared at the feed. Their minds couldn't even parse it fully at first: the images, the numbers, the bleakness in the voices of the broadcasters. The dust cloud just seemed like fiction. But it wasn't, and so they viewed, silent, sinking.

"The cloud first appeared in place of a small town in northern India, but now has spread to cover the entire region at a rapid pace....Observers estimate its size doubles wihin an hour, and it has been seen to be extremely harmful to living things, especially humans...Do not go outside, seek immediate shelter, and, and pray for you and your loved ones' safety..."

They were broken from the trance by Rina's phone, buzzing on the counter. She blinked, then rose to answer like weights were holding her down. She listened with her last pieces of hope. There was a plan. A crazy one. Come to the launch base as soon as possible. Bring Garret.

She immediately went from sluggish to manic, rushing the two of them out the door and straight to the road to hail a car. The nearest one was right around the corner, but they still ran to meet it. She spent the whole ride resenting the speed restrictions, and nearly wept at one intersection where there was a slight traffic delay.

-----

The sun set on the horizon over the beach as you and Rina talked, hand in hand, feet in sand. It was your second evening together in this paradise, and you had found plenty of little adventures to take part in--boating around the beach, diving off the pier and swimming in the waves, campfires, nature walks, cuddling, hiking the inland hill and reading a good book at the top. You reminisced together as the waves came up enough to meet your ankles. "I've loved everything here, and just being here with you," you remember saying.

She agreed, then asked "Would you stay here forever if you could?"

You shake your head, she looks confused by this. "It would get old eventually," you clarify.

"Even if this stuff did, couldn't we just find new activities here? We've been elated this whole time and still have so much that's undiscovered."

"Well you're right, and if I could I'd stay here until I did them all a thousand times." Rina smiled at this. "But that is still less time than forever."

"Okay, well, what about just for the rest of your natural life?"

"Well, there's still so much on my bucket list I want to do, I wouldn't want to throw those away to be here. Maybe after it's completed. Besides, don't you have your own list? What about that paper you're working on--"

"Don't! Don't you dare mention work," she chuckled.

"Right, sorry," you replied.

-----

The atmosphere at the launch base was frantic in a certain way that was familiar to Rina. She grabbed Garret by the hand and led them through the chaos to the director, who was simultaneously reading from a packet in her hand, gesturing outward with her pen, and ordering everyone within earshot to do something, one command at a time, in a gravelly, authoritative tone.

"Prep for receiving! I need a clear line to the rocket and three men ready for onboarding! Move those trucks! Get your ass to your stations!"

"Is this what I think it is?" Rina asked, worry in her eyes. "An emergency launch?"

"An emergency launch," the flight director clarified, "to save the human race. Ah, finally," she said, and pointed with her pen to the truck arriving at the launchpad. It was carrying a massive black box, almost the size of a shipping container, and roughly the same shape, but completely smooth on all sides, and it had chamfered edges that shone a reflection of the sun into Garret's eyes. Before he even asked, the flight director clarified again. "That is the Emergency Human Backup from two years ago. It's got all of our minds uploaded to a digital model of Earth. It was underground, but we've been given the order to send it spaceward. I guess the top brass think it's safer there."

"You've got to be kidding," Garret scoffs. "All of this is for that?"

"Garret, what are you talking about?" Rina stammers.

"There's people out there that are going to die!" he shouts, gesturing to the door with his arm. "We can help get them somewhere safe, like a bunker, and seal it off properly, you know, for the real living human beings suffering?" He looked back and forth at Rina and the director. "We are wasting our energy worrying about that stupid box while the cloud makes its way here. It will be fine, we will not be," he asserted.

"Son, I'll make one thing clear," the director began. "We have about twelve hours until that cloud of death enters all of our lungs, no matter how deep a room we lock ourselves in. Reports from China and Egypt have both shown bunkers to do about as much good as hiding under your desk. We are out of time."

Garret started to retort, but stopped with his mouth open. He suddenly didn't see the reason to keep arguing, or even feeling bad. It was over. That was that. "Why even bother?" he weakly replied.

"Because despite what you believe, this backup is the entire world for billions of digital souls," said Rina. "We have to save the most people we can, and this is how we do it."

Garret stared into Rina's eyes, and for the first time in too long, he had hope for humanity.

---

Several hours passed and Rina and Garret were assimilated into the chaos. Even emergency launches were never set up this quickly when they occurred. They had to do all the preliminary research at a lightning pace, making up days of work in an afternoon. They all watched as the payload was carried aboard the ship, wondering if the world inside could ever know about the peril they faced. With the rest of the launch already set in motion, they began to relax, and contemplate their end.

"We hardly even had enough time to figure out what it was," Rina mourned. "Just that it was manmade."

"No surprise there," the director replied.

"Do you think we deserve it?" Garret wondered aloud.

"Not really," said the director. "Was just bound to happen."

The launchpad got cleared away as everyone made final preparations, but in the distance, the cloud was spotted. It didn't look much different from a large fog bank rolling in from the ocean, grey and ubiquitous, but something about its wispy motions made it seem more intentional, more motivated.

The director rushed to the final countdown. "T-minus two minutes!" She shouted, to the surprise of the workers below. "Skip all prechecks, it's now or never! Start it up!"

The cloud neared at an unexpectedly fast pace, like a tsunami moving with invisible ferocity. The rocket was in position, thrusters opening. "Thirty seconds!" shouted the director, as Garret and Rina tightly clasped hands. The cloud had expanded over the hills now, making the rocket look like it was in a painting without its background. It raced ever closer, erasing everything. "Five, four, three..." the announcement blared, but before it could say "two" the cloud arrived.

The rocket was tilted heavily by the force of the wind, then disappeared from view as the cloud surrounded it. The cloud hit the windows and made them rattle and wobble, but they thankfully didn't break. The cloud was blocking out the sunlight and darkening the war room, with Rina and Garret watching in horror. The director stayed stoic, until the intercom stated "We have liftoff!" And the room was once again lit up, but now by the immense fireball jetting out from the rocket's thrusters. Only the flame was visible from inside, but they could see it setting off at an awkward angle, and their stomachs dropped. "Come on, straighten out!" The director shouted, when suddenly the doors behind them rattled and wisps of smoke appeared from underneath. The air got thicker as the cloud made it in, and breathing became difficult. Rina and Garret embraced, knowing this was it, watching others in the room start to keel over and wheeze.

"Garret," Rina whispered, "Do you remember the heart-shaped locket you gave me?"

"Of course," Garret replied. You left it on the moon on your last visit. You said you put something special there."

"Yes, I did," she said, remembering leaving it gently in the silver dust. "And it's still there."

Garret began to understand that the locket he gave her after their honeymoon would outlive them both, and grew an ironic smile.

"We are there," she added, coughing, starting to feel faint. "I...I put us there...forever..."

Garret's smile immediately faded. So that's what she actually meant. He's been uploaded, just like he said he never wanted. Now there's a version of himself that really will have to grapple with the concept of forever, and God only knows how long it will last until the data is corrupted in some torturous way. This version, too, would outlive him, and he would have resented that, but when death was this close there was little you could do but accept your circumstances.

The director only stared at the rocket's flame, flying off to one side, then twisting and slowly righting itself. A smirk appeared on her face, for the first time in who knows how long. She could feel her own breathing start to fail, but it didn't matter anymore, her backup was safe. But then she watched as a strong gust smacked into the windows, finally shattering them, and caused the flame of the rocket to sputter and twirl. Her eyes gaped as the wind of death overtook her and the rocket fell back to Earth. This really was the end. The director fell to her knees, gasping, just before the rocket exploded on impact, shining one final light through the darkening cloud before it was extinguished.

---

You were on your way to bed in your hut, the twilight above the ocean starting to give way to endless constellations. Both you and Rina haven't stopped smiling for three days, and now you're both exhausted. But once she is fast asleep, you quietly walk out onto the beach, feeling your feet step through the sand. You think about what Rina asked. You think about time, forever, yesterday, tomorrow. How strange it was to feel a moment, then feel it pass. How much you worried about future moments that never came to be. You turn and look up at the moon. Maybe it's okay to want something forever after all.

Suddenly, a gigantic display blinks into existence and fills up the sky: the word "CYCLES" above the number 364951. You stare in disbelief as the 1 digit slowly ticks to a 2.

"What the--"

Then you black out.

---

You wake up to the sound of seagulls and gentle waves. Around you is a bed and warm sheets, and the warmth of another body just in front of you--Rina, your beloved, you remember. You open your eyes, and you're filled with so many beautiful memories.