Posthumous Forgiveness

System Login: 22:35

Audio Log

User: George Cromwell

To: Malverine Ellis Ph.D

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Hey M; it's about half past ten down here and i just put Alex to bed. He was up a while, talking about you and trying to get me to tell him endless stories; so he could avoid falling asleep. He reminds me so much of you when you were his age; cute and curious. Ive gotta be honest Im pretty mystified by the world these days. I never thought it would really end up like this. Everyones on edge and frantic; desperate to live but barley alive. When you were a child the world was in a state but there was still some hope for it. Now everyday is the beginning of the end; but you’re on a mission to save us all. My baby girl. From Wyoming to the moon. As a child you would ask me where you came from and i’d say love and when you got older you asked where we came from and I'm a man of science in my simple way; so i told you the truth i knew. Life on earth rose from the big bang, bombardments and star dust. Single bodies to single cells to organisms singular in their complexity. With only one like you my Malverine. You did raise the question of god too but i said it was up to you to find what you believe in. So you grew up with our world in atrophy; yet you still flourished.

I tried to explain your mission to Alex and your role as a geneticist. Not the easiest thing to explain to a 6 year old as you can imagine. But it made me think about why you chose to be a geneticist. After all; it was the climatologists who were supposed to save us and our world. I think you saw the issue was never the world; it was us. We altered the planet and made uninhabitable. Then we attempted to change it again to make it suitable for our persistence. When what we should have changed was ourselves, our bad habits and our complacency. But It's too late for a change of habit; so you're up on the dark side of the moon working out how to adapt our carbon. I wish I had the chance to speak to you before you left. Being with Alex and seeing so much of you in him and with the world being the way it is there’s just a lot i wish i could say to you.

You were too young to remember but It was when you mother passed i moved us out to Wyoming. When i think about it now her death was a big push that made me leave New York. But also the city was so congested infinitely more people moving in. Fleeing the fires, earthquakes and back the; even some wars. It was the sea wall that scared me the most though. The city felt dangerous and unstable and i couldn’t loose you both so i headed off to find eden. It was about when you were about 7 we saw the shift in urgency to try and fix the climate crisis. Time to wake war on our own destruction but; we had at that point, already irreparably scarred our earth. Thats when the government tried to save us at the point of no return; and obviously none of it worked. You’d be here with me and Alex if it had.

When i think about all those years we spent in Wyoming i really want to say i miss them. The mountains as our back drop with the sheep and the cattle that would wander onto our little property. I remember how the the cooing of the barn owls would put you right to sleep. We even had fresh air back then. Real fresh air, not the recycled stuff we breath in now. It was heaven while it lasted but I can’t say i miss. It was so far removed from reality. I did what too many others did in my time and the times before me. I turned away from the darkness and stood in what was that last sliver of light. I brought you into a decaying world and did nothing to help fix it for you I took you and ran. Now I'm old and no longer a participant in the world merely and onlooker watching as you grapple with the generations of sin you didn’t commit and I'm so sorry.

I know you probably feel the same about Alex; the guilt of brining him into a world like this. But of all people you should never feel that guilt because you unlike me are actually doing something about it. You were never a bystander like your father was. You are building the solution and i could only be a part of the problem. Let me know what you think of all this even if you think they’re just an old fathers ramblings.

P.S I love you

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I sent this message up to you at 10:55 EST you listened to it at 11 my time and i would never receive a reply from you. I wondered why they had to build a base so far from earth if it was supposed to produce the things that were meant to save us. Altering the human genome is no simple task and one of your experiments mutated and you got infected they said it was slow and then all at once. You were fine listening to my voice then you were gone. Our savior my Malverine, my sunshine lost to the dark side of the moon.