Micah watched the world outside the window beside her seat, her expression blank with boredom. Perfectly shaped clouds of spring skies met her gaze. Everything looked so white, only occasionally tinged with color as the craft she sat in tore through the heavens above Earth. From so high, she could almost believe that nothing had changed.
She had made this same journey twice every year for the past decade. When she had first been made the Reviewer General, she had barely been able to contain her excitement. The fact that she would be the first of her family since the Evac days to set foot on the once sole blue world of the Solar System had filled her with a nervousness and longing like nothing had done before. But, with a slight nudge from reality, the novelty of visiting the quarantined planet had worn off with remarkable ease.
It was not that the old world was uninteresting; rather, it was that the place was nothing like she had expected it to be. She had watched the extravagant advertisements made when the Reclamation was first proposed. She had even poured over old vids before PonR, when the inevitable was finally faced by the criminally neglectful leaders of that time. Yet, nothing had prepared her for the desolation that had become of the cradle of mankind.
There was change though, even in the short time since she had begun her new job. Even if only eyes which seek it alone see it, there was change. Between the shades of brown and gray of the old land a bit of color showed; marking a new beginning, she hoped.
The lights coming from the vessel’s walls around her changed color, signaling the approaching landing she already saw out her window. Her seat shifted around her, molding itself to her body as it formed a gentle, but firm, hold on her. A moment later, the craft landed with ease. If she had closed her eyes, she wouldn’t even have noticed.
The base was the largest place inhabited by humans in the whole planet. Almost a hundred people lived in it at any given moment. But its architects had crafted it in a way that made it blend in with its surroundings. It was not that hard to miss it, even on foot.
The landing area was a large clearing in a sparse forest. Like always, the air felt strangely warm, though this had become a sort of comfort to her by habit alone. With the personnel as usual off to one of their projects, she met no one while she made her way to the entrance of the base.
She had been to other places like this; from habitats in stations swimming in the void of space to sanctuaries in faraway planets that proclaimed themselves as the last haven of a lost world. She had even been to those places where they experimented with life with a frightening ease, creating wonders that had never been before. Yet, it was all nothing compared to this world. Something in this place was simply more.
She was watching the pale pink flower of a paloverde tree, a species she knew had been famous in these parts in old times, when she reached the entrance. An absent smile gracing her features, she turned to look at the one waiting for her.
‘Welcome, Reviewer.’ Only the slight aura surrounding the man distinguished him as a hologram.
The words were heard by Micah alone, having not been uttered in the empty air before her. And with the ingrained curtsy she had been taught since childhood, she bowed her head to the figure in front of her in reply.
‘If you would follow,’ the words were accompanied by the image of the man turning away from her and leading the way.
With silence, they walked to the elevators and went down. Nothing crossed their path, though she knew hundreds of robots controlled by Machine Intelligences roamed the base, performing the actual works the last humans on the planet only supervised. Everything was done by machines; they were now the most numerous moving things in the whole world. Even the figure leading her was a projection of an MI.
Once they reached the office where she usually met the man who ran the whole operation, the hologram simply faded away.
The room was large. It was decorated sparsely, almost haphazardly. But every shelf and table held a smattering of objects from a bygone age.
‘Remnants of a dead civilization,’ she thought absently, but even as the words crossed her mind she felt their wrongness. ‘Maybe not dead yet,’ she thought to herself, moving across the room to her favorite spot, ‘but it’s definitely a momentarily absent one.’
One wall of the place was an unbroken window, looking out at the large green valley several feet below the base. The first time she had seen it, she had been slightly disoriented to find herself so high after having moved down for so long inside the building. When she next came to the base she had paid close attention. She had noticed how the last approach her craft made before landing was low enough to hide that the forest which seemed to go up a small hill actually ended in a sheer drop.
A little search that time had reminded her of the thing she had glossed over as she read the files given to her with her new position. The valley was one of the first of the recent massive projects undertaken to save the planet’s environment. It was the place where Man had gouged the flesh of Earth to make a sanctuary of sorts for a fading world. It was also the place she stood looking out at when the man she came to meet finally arrived.
“Hope you didn’t wait too long,” he said, hurrying to her. He was thin and tall with a drooping nose above thin, colorless lips. Small, dark eyes placed close together below a dusty brown mop of hair watched the world with a never changing hurried look.
He was always in a hurry. Ever since she had met him, Micah had noticed this. Even when there was no reason for it, he seemed to never be able to be still. At first, this had easily annoyed her but as time had gone, and she had grown fond of him, she had learned to not notice this quirk in his character like so many others. Yet, looking at his face now, she sensed a strange change in him.
“What’s wrong, Wilde?” she asked, trying to find what made her uneasy.
“Is it that obvious?” he answered, walking to one of the seats facing the window. He sat with an old man’s sigh. He had always looked old, older than her. But from time to time, she had absently picked up little details that made her suspect he might actually be younger than her at least. Yet she had never had the heart to ask him if he was one of those people who tinkered with their Age-Mesh.
After a bout of silence, he spoke again, not meeting her gaze. “It’s over.”
“What…?” Micah said, confusion coloring her tone.
“We’ve failed,” said Wilde, sagging into his seat as if the admittance took something physical out of him. “We can’t save this world.”
For a time, she didn’t know what to say to that. She simply stared at him with a smile and a frown crawling over her face, neither filling the blankness that ruled most of it. “You must be wrong…,” she finally said, speaking for no other reason than to fill the empty air as her mind tried to stay apace with the sudden revelation. Then, as if reality would change just by conviction alone, she straightened up and said, “Anything can be done, if you just know how. All we need are fresh minds, new eyes to see whatever problems you’ve caught. I know it’s been hard for you here. I should have listened when they said it might become too much for a single person. We just need time…”
“But that’s just it,” the sitting man said, closing his eyes as he broke into her one-sided conversation, “time is the thing we don’t have anymore.”
Falling silent, Micah stared at the person she had come to think of as a friend. She had fought so many times to keep him in his position. She had risked her own skin more than once as those above her changed their minds for unknown reasons over the years. She had done it all believing that he was the man for the job. And her mind had never changed since that time they first met when his convictions had infected her. But here he was now, spouting doubts that other colleagues of hers had to fight off in the media more and more by the day.
She was suddenly angry at him. She was angry at those long dead idiots whom they had to clean up after. But most of all, she was angry because he might be right.
“You must be wrong…,” she repeated, starting her denial a second time.
But before she had finished her sentence, Wilde said, “Stop that,” interrupting again while his face showed annoyance more than anything else. “You’re better than this. No, we’re not wrong. We have checked everything as much as we can for the last two years. I’m sure what we first suspected happening is really happening.”
Taking a deep breath, she tried to control herself while countless responses clamored inside her head, each wishing to leap off her lips though she knew none were important now. “So,” she said finally, still looking at the man before her, “what’s this problem you have come across? Is there something wrong with the atmosphere?”
“No,” he answered, opening his eyes to look at her, “that part of the plan is going well. If we continue with our current work, we’ll have the Earth back to its preindustrial state in about three decades. The problem is that Nature isn’t waiting that long for us. The lifeforms in this planet are changing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything is evolving faster than ever before,” said Wilde, getting up from his seat to join her. “We first noticed it in the plants. They are mutating into things we have never seen before. We couldn’t believe it at the time, but soon after we were seeing the signs in practically everything.”
“Wha…what are you saying?” she said, speaking with a shaky voice even as understanding sparked deep in her heart where painful truths sleep.
“The Reclamation will be finished on schedule,” he said in answer, meeting her fearful gaze. “But by that time, most of the things we are trying to save will have changed. We’ve run tests with the MI, and still we can barely understand the things that are happening out there. All we know for sure is that nothing will remain if we don’t take drastic actions now.”
“And what actions might those be?” she asked.
“Evac,” he said simply, turning his eyes to the world outside. “Only this time it will be all the life we can take that would be leaving this world.”
“And then…?” she urged, though she already knew what he was going to say.
“Complete scrubbing of the planet.”
Her response to this was to go to one of the chairs before the window, and lower herself to its hold without saying a single thing. She could argue with the man. She could try to change his mind. But at some point in their talk she had realized she shouldn’t waste her time with that. She knew others with better qualifications than her would soon be picking at his theory to find fault in it. “Are you sure about this?” she finally said, speaking with a terribly calm voice.
“I’m sure,” he answered, turning away from the magnificent view to look down at her.
Micah stared out the window in silence. The world outside seemed unchanged to her eyes, holding that look of wildness she associated with Nature and old Earth; with rightness. Throughout her years, she had looked at the ages when Man had devastated the only home to life in the entire Solar System with simplicity. The choices those of a bygone time had made had looked foolish to her as she thought of all the things they could have done which seemed obvious to her. But now that she was in the same position, she didn’t know what to do.
“I know it’s hard to accept,” began Wilde, moving to the chair beside hers and taking a seat, “but we must not make the same mistake again. We must do something now.”
“Do you think they felt this way then?” she asked, knowing she didn’t need to explain what she meant by then.
“I don’t know,” he answered, shifting in his seat to face the drop outside his office’s window. “I guess so. What I’m sure about is that only after we sterilize the whole world can we start again. Maybe then we might save some of it,” he said, gesturing at the sight before them.
Still, “There must be another way,” she whispered in a small voice burdened with false hope.
“Yes,” he answered, his face showing his tired state, “and by the time we find it, it might not matter at all.”
“Do you have any idea the amount of shitstorm this is going to cause?”
“I can’t even imagine,” he said, showing a genuine smile for the first time since he walked into the room. “But I’m sure you can handle it.”
“Humph,” she snorted, giving air to a bitter laugh that barely let out what she truly felt. They sat in silence for a time, watching the world outside which suddenly looked ridiculously fragile to her. “And will the mutations stop when we start again?”
“I don’t know,” answered Wilde, a smile, the reason of which she suspected was her using the word when, dragging his lips. “We have tried to mark the changes, but it will be hard to know if we have caught them all. By our estimates, we might be able to save thirty-nine percent of the animal species and twenty-seven percent of the plant species, that’s just too many to be sure of.”
“That’s so little,” she said, the daunting truth finally venturing into her understanding.
“Yes.”
“So it will all be lost,” said Micah, leaning her head in her hands as she spoke the fear most, she knew, would think they had long passed.
Wilde sat staring at the world outside whose end they contemplated with simple words even as his face was tortured with the fear, anger, and sadness he felt inside. When he finally spoke, he said a thing he had come to see as truth only recently. “It was lost long ago.”
