The Last Survivor

7462- April 17- 12pm- Engineer Quarters C803   

It would be night time, if there still was a sun, perhaps the moon would be visible from my window.  I've seen pictures of the moon, but they never can live up to what I remember. They say the memory is faulty, we don't remember things as they happened, our brains like to change little details about the past.

I don't care what they say, I remember how beautiful it was, I remember how I used to be able to see the moon rising from the balcony of my apartment building.  I used to watch every night with her, we always talked afterward. I remember what love felt like.  There is no love here.

5450 years ago, all of that was taken away from me.  I'm not sure how to say it all, but there isn't much time, and I need someone to know, if there ever is anyone.

Maybe you remember what a normal day was like. A lot of people tell me I'm lucky because I had more time than anyone else to enjoy the sunshine. Heinson used to be the old guy, but he's dead now, like all the others.

It was an asteroid, they used to talk about asteroids, how we had no real way of defending ourselves from them. They used to talk about how we were due for our next one. A lot of people didn't understand that asteroids enter the atmosphere every day. After they enter the atmosphere we call them meteors. This one wasn't like the rest though.

Tell me if you remember how big Delaware was, pretty small state, not even really big enough to learn about if you're a foreigner.  It was only the size of Delaware.  But it was moving so fast there was nothing we could do. Sure, you might say that they discovered it in time, but that still doesn't change the fact that over three fourths of the world's population died in a quarter of an hour.  I saw it, with these eyes, I saw it all happen right in front of me. I should be dead, chances are I would be dead. Right now looking at an old newspaper article, I can see my face. The headline: "Local Man Chosen to Survive" that word feels soiled. I didn't really survive.  I died in the same instant that those other 315 million Americans died.

They found out about it, the mean, they calculated the trajectory in 2010, and it still amazes me that in two short years.  They manage to pool that many resources. All of the war stopped instantly. All the bombings in the middle east stopped overnight. For the first days, the world was in shock, and then, panic, for a few weeks, the world was a nasty place to live in. Regular lootings, riots, God, I don't even want to talk about the mass suicides. It seems like every wacko in every town gathered together a bunch of his friends, locked themselves in, and sipped Kool aid. Order was restored was when the government ordered martial law. I never thought I would see the day, but there they were, American troops, some of them marching down the street to their own hometowns. Some places couldn't restore order, I hear that there was chaos until the very end in South Africa.

After the world accepted its fate, after we all realized that we were going to die, there was peace.  And then, the world found some sliver of hope. They looked to the stars, maybe in the exact same way that the ancients looked up at the heavens, and wondered.That is how I was saved, Project Exodus.  Everyone hated the name, but it was appropriate.

The only people I can think of who used eugenics were the Nazis, and never thought I would see the day that our own government used them.  Of every race, religion, and ethnicity there was supposed to be at least one member, like it was some sort of damn Noah's Ark. I guess some eggheads in a lab drew up with the ideal genetic code was, and then made up a way to test for it.

It was the same 18 year old boys who I have taught in high school algebra, that guarded the line to the tests. Some EMT would swab the inside of your mouth. Green was rare. If you got green then you were one out of 10,000 people who came close enough to get a shot at meeting the gentic requirements. I will never forget the look in that mans eye when the light turned green. He didn't try to hide it either. He hated me, for having a chance. He drew my blood, and by now there was a crowd. He left me alone for about half an hour, I think they had to confirm me with some other tests. An hour later I was in the back of a hummer traveling down the Interstate. I cannot forget young faces of those boys wouldn't stop staring at me, never guessing that their teacher was one of them, the survivors.

They didn't let my wife visit until a week later. She had tears in her eyes. She told me that everything was all right, how they had moved her into the compound too. She was safe and she would be able to visit me regularly. She didn't tell me that they firebombed the apartment, I already knew. I don't know who "they" were, I still don't know. But I suppose now that I understand them. It hurts to get the red light. I know a lot of people knew the probability, but there also must have been a fragment of hope that they were a survivor, that they could be saved. The only difference between them and me is that my crutch wasn't kicked out from under me.

We trained for one and a half years. All the way up to launch we were being fed controlled calorie intakes, mandatory exercise, ten hours of classes. And what they didn't have time to teach they gave to us in manuals. I think that we had some positive effect on our trainers. A lot of the time you would think that being so close would make them angry, depressed. Yes, there were those few, but I remember out of all of them one guy named McCormik. I remember the last month, he pulled me aside and said, "I know its gonna be tough, but you have to do it. Do it for me, do it for us all." He used to joke about how I should name a planet after him.

That was our mission. We were trained, designed, and equipped to find worlds capable of sustaining life, and start over. 

Number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy= (rate of star formation (ten per year))x (percent stars with planets( almost 100%))x (planets suitable for life(1))x (percent those planets that develop life(100%))x (percent those planets that intelligent life develops (10%))x (percent those planets that develops advanced technical civilizations(10%))x (lifetime of civilization (10 million years))

According to that equation, one million civilizations exist like ours. All we had to do was find a world, a world where humanity might sink down its roots again. Mars was eliminated because of the atmosphere, too thin to provide enough air for an earth ecosystem to develop. The only way to be certain New Earth was going to survive would be to find life already existing on the surface.

Maybe the most technologically amazing thing about the Eden was the superdrive. All of the worlds most famous and brilliant minds collaborating all at once. Sure, the research teams had been on the verge of a breakthrough since before we knew, but the tapes of it still amaze me. It seems like every physicist, chemist, and mathmatician who had ever earned a Ph.D was sitting in that stadium. And they did it. They gave us the thing that has allowed us to go this far, this fast. Four times the speed of light, it is a terrifying thing to behold.

That is how I am writing this now. When you travel past the speed of light, time slows down. Einstein’s relativity was right.

It all looks good on paper, and they built it, but they never could imagine what it is like, to see asteroids pass by so closely that they look like a stream rather than individual masses. They also could never imagine the sounds that sub-quartile fission makes. I have long since stopped hearing it, but it drove some of us mad.

We have searched thousands of planets, and on not a single one have we found life. The odds are in our favor, and have been growing ever since, but something is wrong with the equation. There is some factor that we don't understand. Maybe earth was some sort of fluke, one of a kind in the universe, an accident because of astronomically bad odds that one day just happened to all come together.

Captain says we shouldn't speak that way. But I couln't give a damn what Captain thinks, not after what we saw him do.

I can hear the alarms from here, I thought my compartment was soundproofed, it doesn't matter. Dust to dust.

Maybe you will visit Earth. If you found this transmission then you probably will have some interest in whatever remains. I always thought of archeologists as little old men with British accents, I never thought that one day my bones might be put up in a museum, maybe none will ever read these words. I am not sure I want anyone to ever find this, let our race die. Let our secrets die with us. Perhaps that is perfect, that all that ever was for us will be nothing once more. Poetic. I have no other choice than to say that it is poetic.

I used to believe in God. A very long time ago I once prayed. But there is no God. There cannot be a God because of what happened. You might not understand, let me explain.

I saw it.

I saw the impact.

I stood there in front of the plexiglas and watched as everything I ever knew, everything I ever loved, was wiped away in less than thirty seconds.

You couldn’t see the asteroid coming. It was traveling as such a high speed that it was in sight, and then it was gone. It disappeared into central Asia, just north of the equator.

At first it didn’t seem like anything had happened. Perhaps my adrenaline is just too high that seconds seemed like minutes. I watched it happen in slow motion. The sky caught on fire. Those who were within 1000 miles of the impact were lucky because they were simply disintegrated.

Then the clouds started to spread and disappear in the face of a shockwave, so much like a giant ripple in a pond. The superheated temperature as well as the air compression would have killed any that it reached, like being instantly hit with 500 pounds on all sides and then cooked alive.

Those who were in shelter suffered the most. Because the shockwave might have left some of them alive, the superheated air would kill them. The human brain is 75% water. Raising the temperature by a couple hundred Kelvin instantly causes all that water to turn to steam instantly. Your head explodes.

Then the fragments of rock started raining down. Pieces of debris the earth’s crust measured in cubic kilometers were thrown thousands of feet into the sky, hundreds of miles. There weren’t a few of them, there were enough that one could not see land because of all the streaks in the atmosphere from debris as it burned up falling back to the ground.

Each one a streak of fire, each one a yellow glow when it struck down on another continent. I couldn’t see land that was green. The heat wave turned vegetation to cinders instantly. There was only red. A red scab.

I must have been crazy then. Do you know when sometimes someone will tell you of how they had a near death experience, and they thought of something funny at the moment, like if they had oven on?

I saw the world lighting up before me, burning beneath my feet as I stood helplessly watching my life disintegrate, and I thought about the meadow behind my grandparent’s house. I remembered how the wind would make the tall grass bend in waves, just as the shockwaves made the clouds disappear before them. I remember wildflowers as far as the eye could see, just like the world was blossoming right now in beautiful yellow flame. And that’s the thing.

While I watched it, the only thing I could think was how beautiful it was, like a solar eclipse or a morning sunrise, or any other natural phenomenon. That is all I could think. I couldn’t picture the billions below me, they never crossed my mind. I think something is wrong with me, I don’t think I have a soul.

<transmission put on hold>  

Had to clean myself up. I think I am ready to die. I died a long time ago, now my body is just catching up.

I remember most of all the last time I saw her. They gave us the last two day liberty. We could do whatever we wanted with whoever we wanted. It felt strange to have all the regulations lifted so suddenly, to have time to myself. To have time to spend with her.

The whole time I was in training I thought that one day I was going to get a message from her. She would tell me that I wasn’t able to find enough time for her, that the last time I had seen her was a month ago, that she was going to leave me to find someone who would love her like I had before. I spent all two days with her.

When the last few hours came, and we were ordered to come to the facility so that I could be accounted for, we both sat in the cafeteria almost in the dark. The only light was from the moon through the window, casting a pale moonbeam over the floor.

She held my hand. I looked into her eyes. I wish that I could have said something to comfort her, something to make her believe that we would be together again. I wish that I could have taken her with me, away from death and into life. I cried. She only stared at me with a face made of stone. I had never seen her look at me that way before.

We embraced.

She said, “I love you. You will do great things. You must forget me, you must not look back.”

I could only cry into her shoulder. I didn’t have the nerve to leave her. I didn’t know how I could tell her I loved her. Words weren’t good enough, this last time.

I could only repeat that I loved her over and over into her shoulder. She held me.

Over and over I wish that I could see have those minutes back, that I could have said something more meaningful, something full of truth and hope and faith. Every night I have seen her face, and felt my own tears warm on my cheeks. Every night I have held her, clinging to her for survival. Every night I have screamed her name in my head.

I wish that I could have some hope of seeing her again. But I know there isn’t any after. There is no happy ending into the sunset. There is only cold. I am ready to die.

<End Transmission>