Nuclear Tears

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
— Carl Sagan

A sudden pain like fire jolted Michael back into the world of the living. For a moment, he thought he was back in his bed, but as he tilted his head groggily to the side, he see the glass on his pod through the gloom, fogged up with the effervescence of a thousand thousand years. The glass gently opens up, and he rose along with the vapors surrounding him. Remembering the pain, he looked down at his side, where he could see the tiniest trickle of blood poking through a hole in his no-longer-pristine red flight suit.

He heard a klaxon sound in a far off recess of the ship, somewhere above him, and he stood, stretching his limbs for the first time in... how long? They had had to leave the System so quickly that they couldn't even finish installing counters for how long they were frozen while in cryo-hibernation. Michael and the rest of the humans had no way of telling time, and they had no way of telling their bodies how long it had been since they had felt the warm radiance of the sun.

It has been so long since I have felt anything warm, he thought, and longed for warmth. The pod had been cold. How long did that dark and dreamless sleep last, if it even technically could be categorized as sleep. He felt just as restless and anxious as he had on That day... how long, now? How long have we been running from our sins, seeking only to prolong the tattered remnants of humans? It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now but staying alive. He walked through the ship carefully, up a flight of stairs, and stepped slowly to the controls of the Nuclear Tears like a child learning how to walk. When he reached the control console at the bow of the ship he gasped, for the first time in eons seeing natural light, verdant greens and lush blues. A planet rose before him, and half of its visible face was shrouded with night. We can survive here for a little longer, he thought, and as he thought it, his eyes welled up with tears of joy.

Right, he thought, snapping back to here and now. The first order of business is to wake them up. Wait... he thought, remembering the bump that woke him. What had caused that? Was the tiny cut he had nothing compared to an injury that one of the other humans on the Nuclear Tears may have attained? He had turned away from the windows but turned around again to look.

What.

The planet looked like the pictures of Earth before everything went wrong, Blue and green, oceans, continents, the whole nine meters- but though the galactic odds of such an occurrence were incredibly low, the SETI, in years past had proved that Earth-Twins must exist- no, that their occurrence was not even incredibly unusual. The oddity was- well- the SUN revolved around the PLANET. Michael did a few basic calculations in his head- he had never been particularly talented at mathematics- a star of the magnitude of the one before, a celestial body of seemingly comparable mass to the sun, would need to be orbiting around an object massive enough that the Nuclear Tears would already have been falling towards the planet due to gravitational pull.

And yet, here he was.

Alright, that's interesting, but it's time to wake them up now, stupid, he thought, mentally slapping himself.

Walking back through the mist that was still hanging in the air, he felt weight gather in his stomach. He was nervous; what had happened to the rest of the crew? The engineers had warned them that the technology for cryo-hibernation was new and still relatively cantankerous. Was it possible that they were... dead? No, a small voice in his head spoke. It was just a small bump, you always were a light sleeper, who knows how these pods actually worked? But what if...

"There isn't any time, we have to go now!"

Every few seconds the ground beneath them shook. Through the high windows in the cavernous room, Michael saw the mountains of Mars. The Olympus Mons Neutral-Zone GCN Headquarters was not safe from the bombs and missiles being launched by every System superpower- As hard as the ambassadors from every country tried, none of them could convince their country's military to stop the bombing. The Chinese Conglomerate, Russian Federation and United Empire were frantically trying to work out a treaty, though none of them truly deluded themselves into believing they could save anything of the hell-blasted planets. All there was left was to wake up and smell the ashes.

That's when Michael had suggested Contingency One. In the possibility of any cataclysmic event, presumed to wipe out more than 90% of the universal population of humans alive, there was an ancient spaceship- never named, and hopes of its finish were abandoned when humans, in their decadence and satisfaction with their comfortable lives on the ground, gave up the dreams of space that had driven the very first man who looked up into the endless night and wondered.

But the ship was the most advanced piece of technology ever created, even though it was one-hundred years old, because humans, for the most part, stopped innovating at around the turn of the third millennium. It was reminiscent of ancient movies about space- its walls were dark and dreary, but were efficient at blocking even the most hazardous debris from compromising the hull. It was powered by four nuclear Cherenkov Reactors, and magnets in the floors and specially-made boots would create the illusion of gravity.

It was large- almost the length of three football fields, and the height and width of half of a football field each. It pioneered a new technology- cryo-hibernation. The ship was full of scientific instruments and sported the most advanced A.I. ever made, which was programmed to use any means to protect its inhabitants. A small docking bay for tiny, two-man pods to exit and leave the ship was built as well. It was made to house a maximum of one thousand people, but only a few would ever enter.

Not all humans were as happy with opulence as others. A few, fed up with the rest of their race, and ostracized for their willingness to work, study, think, and create were treated as outcasts simply for their human spirit, something that few humans alive at that point could recall. Six were at the GCN Headquarters during the nuclear cataclysm: Michael White, who worked as a security guard, Amelia Mei-Xing, the Chinese ambassador, Aldrich Cynric, the last human who truly studied the heavens, Hleid Vale, a pilot, Luka Baikal, a teacher, and Donna Hall, a physicist.

These six the rest chose to represent humanity after their death. The six of them tried to force the lame and crippled to leave in their stead, but not a single one of them would allow anyone but the most fit to survive. They argued, wasting more precious time, and said "Death is easy. Life is difficult. We are not ready for a difficult task", and "Sometimes we think that humans live too long", and the six of them, eventually defeated in argument and resigned to their fate, allowed themselves and several engineers one hour to make final adjustments, and then, the final countdown began.

"T-Minus 10." The man announced over the ancient loudspeaker system.

"T-Minus 9."

"T-Minus 8." The announcer's voice faltered, and the unmistakable percussive sound, like a warm summer rain- tears- echoed through the room. The last of the humans were crying for their race's fate.

"T-Minus 7."

"T-Minus 6." There was a hissing of air. The ancient launch silo was opening, and the blast doors open. Air seeped inwards, filled with potent biological, radiological and chemical hazards. Rather than taking cover from their certain death, the humans seemed to welcome their death, or at least were resigned to it. What good would it be to run from their certain doom? they thought; they could only pray for the health of their comrades as they ventured into the dark unknown that they feared more than death. Space: The final frontier, and the only one that never submitted to domination by humans.

"T-Minus 5."

"T-Minus 4."

"T-Minus 3."

"T-Minus 2."

"T-Minus 1... Good luck, and godspeed. The memories of the human race are in your hands now." His voice began to fade, the irradiated martian air began to seep into the room, and people were already showing signs of beginning their slow, painful deaths. The loudspeaker crackled with static a few times, and went silent, before-

"Liftoff."

Past Mars, once the jewel of the Solar System, verdant and green where green things fled from earth. More than a thousand years spent terraforming it, the hard work of the human race, gone in less than a year. It was nothing but a smoldering wasteland, a hell-blasted vista that pained their hearts.

The Earth was worse. Though they had been taught as children that the world was once beautiful, it had been a city of the dead for far before the Cataclysm. There were only steely gray monoliths and muddy drain ditches, harsh colors of electrical signs and disgusting swamps of dumped waste. While most of the landfills had been moved to the Moon, there was only so much that could fit there before it began to get full. The necropolis that once was Terra was burning before their eyes.

"God rest their souls", Luka said, his thick Federation accent somewhat slurring the Common Tongue. The six of them were in it together now. Luka and Amelia were looking through the back windows. Luka was silent and stoic, but Amelie was crying.

"My family lived in the most heavily populated areas, and now they're just.. gone!" She broke into hysterics and Luka tried to comfort her, patting her on the back. Hleid, looking subdued, was wandering around the craft, somewhere between excitement at finally being on a spaceship, like she had dreamed since she was a girl and pain over leaving her life behind. She could never bear to look sad outwardly, as she derived pleasure from seeing others happy and content, no matter the toll it took on her. Donna mumbled something about not have having anything to eat in a day, and slowly trudged off.

Aldrich and Michael were looking out the windows into the unknown. After a while Aldrich spoke, unable to suppress a smile. "We're going out there, can you imagine?" Michael could do nothing but grunt. He was happy that the other man was excited, but felt the situation called for a little respect. As he was about to tell him off, Donna returned with a bottle of wine. She spoke up.

"I think we should name the ship. There's an ancient tradition from earth..."

She strode over to a forewall of the ship, inverting the bottle and holding it by its head. "It's not entirely historically accurate, but it'll do." She raised the bottle over her head, and it fell and shattered against the wall. The musical tinkling of breaking glass echoed throughout the ship. "I christen thee the Nuclear Tears, as you are the last remnant of a force that toppled a interplanetary empire." "What?" she said, at the bemused looks on the other five's faces.

"It's probably time to put ourselves to rest now, isn't it? We have much in store for us." Luka suggested. They all agreed, and trudged down a short flight of stairs. Luka volunteered to go first: He clambered into his pod and pressed a small blue button on the inside of the glass. There was a hiss of air and a frigid mist effervesced from inside the pod, and the glass sealed. The five of them walked over to Luka's pod- they looked down upon him and saw that he was not yet in stasis- he glanced up at them, and a ghost of a smile formed on his lips framed by his scraggly blond hair before all motion ceased. A tiny trickle of mist still emanated from inside the capsule, preserving his body for ever.

The rest of them entered their pods, now reassured of the safety of cryo-hibernation. They said a sombre farewell to each other, in case any of them woke up. Then there was a hissing of air, a cutting breeze throughout the ship, and a dreamless sleep.

His thought stretched only a few seconds into what felt like eternity, but finally he was peering down at a glass arch at a pale face, hermetically entombed forever inside the glass. Raven hair flowed from the woman's head, even though it was frozen, he could have sworn a breeze touched her gently, caressing her. The freezing mist ran like rivulets of cloud, protecting her prone form against the ravages of time. But never more.

Amelie Mei-Xing

Chinese Conglomerate Ambassador to the Global Confederacy of Nations

~~~hissssss...~~~

Amelie rose gently out of the capsule, head in her hands. She shook herself, shivering, and peered groggily at Michael. "Where... where am- oh."

Though still tired-looking, she was no longer sitting down. She was gazing, transfixed, at the planet below. She held up a hand and balled it into a fist, squinting still at the planet, and quietly spoke.

"That's not Earth. It's ...green... and the continents are all wrong. Where are we, Michael? That is your name, correct? There wasn't too much time to get to know each other before they crammed us on this ship." There was a strange trill in her voice, musical and soft, but also sad, and he vaguely remembered it from the Ambassador's Meets on Mars.

Michael slowly padded over to the next pod as the woman stared in wonder upon the planet.

Luka Baikal
Traveling Volunteer Teacher in Russian Federation

~~~hissssss...~~~

And so the process repeated itself thrice more, so that after another minute all six of them were gazing, awed, upon the planet, not knowing the adventure they were in for- whether it would be a peaceful withering to an old age, a desperate battle for survival, or something completely different; but none of them suspected, not even the tiniest bit, what was in store for them.

These six were the first humans in nigh on a thousand years to exit the solar system, and the last ever.
Here is their story. Keep their memory alive.