I
On the eave of catastrophe, Dr. R.J. Becket was pensively considering the contents of his glass, empty as it was, and wondering where exactly it was that humanity had gone wrong. Humanity had survived the annals of hunter gatherer life, survived the power hungry practitioners of faith and coin, survived the advent of global connectivity and the birth of the singularity. And sure, there had been squabbles, some of them large squabbles that had cost human lives….but a common theme in history was that the price of survival had always been human lives, and yet. And yet, this was different.
Dr. Becket placed his glass neatly on the ledge of the veranda overlooking project vanguard’s primary pylon, networked to gather with 44 alternate pylons that created a field to bolster the integrity the Earth’s natural tectonic fields and simultaneously house, each and every one of them, a cold-fusion reactor capable, and now likely, to outlive humanity by a factor of millions upon millions of years.
Dr. Becket tried to imagine a chunk of the Earth’s mantle turned biosphere by human ingenuity but no longer sustaining human life, because the old problems of greed, fear, and mistrust inevitably surfaced again to turn human beings against each other and cause them to lose sight of the great truths: the precious and precarious nature of sustainable life, the truth of average and beyond average human needs, the truth of masking and saving face…and probably a hundred more such truths that all boiled down to the same conclusion. Human beings weren’t meant to last.
Dr. Becket chuckled to himself. His late wife, had she caught him brooding like this—like a super villain above his project—she would have called the whole thing Maudlin and melodramatic. Well, maybe he was feeling kind of corny and sad about the whole thing.
He made his way back through his company, provided apartment and pressed his palm to the scanner that set the lock to engage within 15 seconds. He closed the front door behind him and waved to first officer Cameron, the marine stationed at the intersection of the second floor dormitory wing of the California station. She smiled pleasantly and waved back which almost helped Dr. Becket forget that she could kill him just about as easy as he could set the lock on his bio signature-encoded security system.
Once he was passed her station and down the bleacher-styled stairwell, he came onto the landing and threaded his head through the loop of his credentials and lanyard. When he thought about it, there was a lot to be Maudlin and pensive about. Project vanguard was to be humanity’s last and most spectacular death throe.
On paper, should the worst happen and the powers that were decided that rather than compromise and hunt for an iota of common ground that actually the best thing to do was to nuke and mar the Earth past any hope of salvage—that or a giant of an asteroid snuck through Earth’s advanced warning systems and punched a hole through the Earth the size of Nebraska—then project vanguard would power up, run a system diagnostic and maintain biospheric homeostasis for centuries to come.
Like all the best nightmare fiction, the company had auctioned off reservations within the sphere to fund completion of the project, and since the projects completion the company continued to auction off reservations knowing full well that the sphere could really only support the lives of a few thousand humans at best—a small community and nothing more. For Dr. Becket, he knew his work was important and represented an important safeguard against the uglier parts of human nature, but the hope that project vanguard offered was undermined by its unbridled cruelty: it was an acknowledgment that differences could not be settled and that humanity’s mastery of violence and war had become large enough to pose a global, existential threat to itself.
Dr. Becket secured a pen, ball-point down into his breast pocket, and sighed to himself. At least, as far as he knew, things on the planet were simmering with the same amount of tension and anger with which they’d always simmered. In science, they called that equilibrium, and equilibrium was sustainable. He might still die of old age yet.
II
In the incandescent lights streaming through their front room windows, Marlissa and Favian spooned out scoops of fresh pasta and tomato paste seasoned with parmesan onto four plates for themselves, their daughter Mercedes, and Marlissa’s mother Jasmine. Jasmine sighed and pawed at her food without enthusiasm, she’d come from a generation of splendor and restaurants serving cultural fusion on every street, and while a few restaurants survived, the rest of the world made due with government rations and the few luxuries they could buy. Pasta al Paste was about as good as it got in the sprawl and besides that, the sauce was enriched with chicken broth for nutrition and flavor.
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Marlissa thought her mother ought to do a better job of keeping her sighs to herself, but she was old and perhaps forgivable in time. Marlissa spooned dinner into Mercedes’ plate and she wiggled with excitement instantly grabbing a handful and shoving it into her mouth after first smearing it across her forehead and chin. Classic Mercedes and classic baby as far as the Internet forums were concerned.
She took a minute to enjoy her daughter and as her husband shoaled a forkful into his mouth, the whine of his phone cut the air, and the local news station began its nightly whine filtered first through YouTube, then through the network, and finally through Favian’s phone and into their ears…whether they wanted to hear it or not. Frankly, Marlissa was tired of the evening news, but she’d gotten used to it even if she didn’t exactly like it.
“Can we turn it off just for tonight?” Jasmine’s request came as a relief. Favian wouldn’t have listened to her request, but if it came from his senior, it just might work.
“ Turn it off? Why so we can be just as uninformed as the rest of these idiots?” An almost kind smear spread across Favian’s wrinkled features that still captured the countenance of his youth, and the man that Marlissa had fallen in love with what seemed like decades ago, but in truth had only been six years in total. “I’ll turn it down, but you, you millennials ought to know better! Sleeping on the news and the world is how we got into this mess in the first place, and we have to set a better example for Mercedes.” He turned to Mercedes, his voice rising a couple of octaves, bot quite baby talk, but a Favian-approximation that was sweet enough to spark a little warmth in Marlissa’s heart. “Little one, in this family we care about the world beyond our front door. We take the time to know what’s happening out there because it’s important to know.”
Mercedes squirmed in her chair happily ignorant of any point Favian tried to make, and yet Favian still seemed to take their girl’s smile for understanding. He thumbed the side of his phone and the volume cut down to a small whine, almost ignorable altogether.
Announcer: Foreign delegates spoke with the president about plans to demilitarize the eastern sprawl..
Marlissa rolled her eyes, talks of demilitarization in the foreign occupied Eastern sprawl had been discussed since before she was in grade school, and it had always just been noise. Truth was, the instability was good business…in fact her livelihood was made simpler and perhaps better from foreign occupation as she was able to charge quite a bit of money tutoring locals in Chinese to prepare them for entering the world of international business and global politics. That was why they were able to afford the few luxuries they we’re able to.
President Fusk: “The pylons are merely an insurance policy. They are not really meant to be used seriously and perhaps project vanguard is capable of providing high quality, nutrient rich food to hundreds and thousands of households across the continental United States…how can anyone be opposed to that?”
Mercedes bounced happily while people Marlissa would never meet debated the finer points of her daughter’s future. Marlissa set her fork down and studied her daughter’s joy. She loved that joy, she would do anything to help her daughter keep it, and to keep the world from taking it from her. It was a conclusion that dawned on Marlissa frequently, and it was one she was certain that every parent felt deep down in their core.
Favian slapped the table! “There, see? President Fusk knows what he’s talking about. Food for the people so that Mercedes might just have a taste of the life our parents had.”
Jasmine scoffed.
Favian pointed a finger at his mother in law, “something funny?”
As Jasmine began, Marlissa tuned into the news. The story had changed again. Some educated science type standing with an array of satellites behind him looking sullen and grey faced.
Dr. Alan Watts: The meteor measures 1000 miles across and it’s currently passing the rings of Jupiter. It’s projected to cross the asteroid belt within the year.
Interviewer: And they’re calling it a planet killer?
Dr. Alan Watts: Yes, it a meteor of this size were to impact any of the planets within the inner circle the results would be tremendous…catastrophic were it to impact the earth, but what were more interested in will be its impact on tides…
The voice slipped and something in Marlissa’s stomach turned like a fat stone chucked headlong into the calm of a lake before dusk. She suddenly wasn’t hungry, and somewhere in the background she heard Favian and her mother still arguing about project Vanguard and whether or not President Fusk would be capable of living up to his philanthropic reputation.
Marlissa scooped her daughter up into her arms, not caring that the little girl would smear doctored tomato paste across her shoulder. She could wash her shirt. Above all the scientists filled her with a sense of time, and that time with her daughter and with her daughter’s unbridled joy was precious, perhaps fleeting, and she wanted to enjoy it…not spend her time listening to noise on Favian’s phone. She smiled to herself supposing that in the end she was just as bad as the generation of her mother, preferring to enjoy her time with her family and her community, sparse as it was, rather than think about readying herself for a revolution that she expected would never come in her lifetime.