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Seven humans looked out upon the cosmos. They were gathered on the bridge of vessel named Finality. While it was like the others in the fleet, its name meant something, this one was special. It hung, motionless in space. They saw the Earth, a shadow against the distant light. It was ringed in innumerable satellites, tiny, like motes of dust.
Sol had dimmed.
Celeste hovered her hand above the button. She closed her eyes. She remembered her childhood.
As a girl , she had a recurring dream, she always saw it as a ripple of the time before. The dream always started with a calendar on the wall of a class room. To her surprise, the year contained only four digits, perhaps starting with a one and a nine. In her dream, a boy read a book about the solar system. He marveled a the descriptions and images of the planets.
The boy lived in a time before humanity had spread to the stars. The boy in the dream continued to turn pages, reading about the star a the middle of the solar system. He was enthralled.
He read aloud in the dream, a juvenile voice in the class room. It wavered slightly. "... in several billion years, the sun will become a red giant and engulf the Earth. All solids will turn to liquid, the liquids will boil, and if any life remains on Earth at this time, it will end."
He looked upset. He was no more than eight. He didn't cry, but he wanted to. What he really wanted to do was to build a rocket and be somewhere else. How could he build a rocket? Why hadn't they started work on this yesterday?
A few billion years wasn't enough time.
Celeste opened her eyes, extracting her self from the reverie.
Sol was dim.
She pressed the button that engaged the thrusters. "This is for you, boy". They all took a mental snapshot of the Earth they'd never see again. Memories had a different resolution to the cameras.
Sol shrunk into the distance. As per the calculations, it stopped shrinking. It started expanding, the blazing light eager to break the cosmological constant. Humanity was leaving sol, and going elsewhere.
Solid substances on Earth started melting like candles. It didn't matter, the evacuation of Earth was complete. This wouldn't be the only star that they would need to flee.
Eventually, they would all go dark.
Author's Notes
This was written as part of a live writing prompt given at a local writer's group which I attend on a regular basis. This version has had some slight edits for flow and clarity over the original, and was a good exercise in trying to extract a portion of inspiration for a story that I have had in my head for quite some time.
It is very likely that I will be writing a longer-form story exploring this concept and theme - this is just the start of where I can explore this idea.
Love it!
Thank you, this is definitely something I am going to extend! The little boy in the story is me as a child :P I try to put some of myself in all of my fiction.
I actually assumed that reading it, the calendar year 19xx helped put it in perspective.
Poignant. You are an excellent writer friend. I still am not sure I'd be able to write under such pressure but you're insisting me to try.
It is tough, and you tend to vomit it all out. To be fair, I've been thinking about this particular framework for a story for quite some time, but this was genuinely written in that small time frame, and I am very much happy with it!
I am looking forward to extending it out to the longer story I had planned about evacuating not just Sol, but other stars, as the human lot tends to get some "bad luck" with picking new homes - jumping from star to star, a little like a nomadic tribe going camp fire to camp fire.
My mom loves this type of topics and I try to understand physics, but I always end up wondering who created everything that exists, and I can't find an answer and I fall asleep... great to have read you.
At the end of the day, these types of stories should be about the people in them, not just the science behind the idea :)
I think the short staccato aspect of it plays well into the story. i enjoyed the brevity, in other words. :) marvelous glimpse into a could-be.