The last girl on Earth.

Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday my Mom arranged for me to be the first person to walk on the surface of Mars.

Not the actual planet. Just part of it that got put on Earth.

The Fixits had decided that some places on Earth were just too toxic to even try to clean up, so they decided to just take entire portions of the landscape and swap them out with land from Mars.

They tended to do things like that rather arbitrarily. It was their whole thing.

I think the spot I took my walk on had once been called Love Canal at one time.

Mars was pretty disappointing, I had known it wasn’t going to be red. But it pretty much looked like any other dry lifeless spot on earth.

Sand, rocks, very dry. Seen one lifeless desert wasteland, you've seen them all.

At least she tried. In a arrange with a call and not have to be there herself sort of way. I had long since gotten used to it.

I suppose I could have at least had bragging rights if there had been anyone else my age left to brag to. The only one left only spoke Cantonese. Which I didn’t.

Mom had meant the Mars walk to cheer me up after I found out I was the last girl on Earth.

Becky Hodger has been a few weeks younger than me, but her parents had gotten into a fight. Her mom was all for holding out until Hong Yu, the youngest person left on Earth, turned eighteen and everyone else who was still around would get forcibly removed by the Fixits.

That would be it. Finito. Last call. You got to go to your new home and you can’t stay here.

Becky's dad had managed to get himself hurt expanding the underground shelter her enclave hoped would let them hide from the Fixits during the Great Eviction. But there weren't a lot of Doctors around anymore to help him and the ones that were left would all say the same thing.

Opt Out. Get transported to the Fixit’s ship. Fall asleep, get the full medical upgrade and treatment. Then wake up on Terra, the artificial planet we, the entire human race were being exiled to.

If we screw that one up too, we would be left to choke to death on our own poisons. It would be our second and last chance.

When the pain got too much for Becky’s dad. He called out, “I want to go, I want to go, I want to go.” Three times the charm. Everyone at their farm blinked and he was gone.

Along with most of his personal possessions. You can't take anything not clearly yours, not unless there isn't anyone left with a claim to it.

Normally they just send a shuttle and let the person Opting Out say their goodbyes. But they had learned that in these situations, Hold Outs might get violent against the person Opting Out of waiting to hide from, or fight against, the Great Eviction.

Becky was pretty mad at her mom for making her dad endure all that pain when everyone knew the Fixits weren't going to miss anyone. When the youngest person left on Earth hits exactly eighteen years after their first breath, everyone goes.

So Becky Opted out that night to get back at her mom, and I became the younger girl left on Earth.

Me, I was still angry at my dad for not Opting Out despite how badly he was hurting.

He didn’t want to miss a moment of seeing me grow up, or cheat me out of spending as much time as I could on the world of my birth.

Mom made him set up a contingent Opt Out. The moment his heart stopped, I blinked and he was gone.

I had to watch him as his body slowly failed him over several months. I had to watch him live through the pain, knowing it was all for me.

I begged him to go and he just looked at me like I was hurting him even more than the tumor. Then he was gone in a blink and I didn't get to say a real goodbye.

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What a wonderful memory for a ten year old.

Then it was just me and my Mom.

I thought about Opting Out myself. There wasn't an age limit, the Fixits wanted us to leave early. Once we were all gone they could really get to work undoing all the damage we had done to our world. Along with all the evidence we had ever been here.

But my Dad made me promise to wait it out with Mom. He was worried about what it would do to her to be alone for so long.

Mom was an Archivist. Collecting all the things, and now the places that humanity was going to treasure in our new home.

While other people took along entire cities, archaeological dig sites, and even natural wonders, my Mom was collecting atrocities.

She thought we needed to bring along evidence because we should remember all our short sighted thinking and who had suffered because of it. So that we would remember our shames and didn’t forget the sort of things that we had done that got us kicked off our home.

The house they came for Anne Frank in. The death camps. The monuments to those we slaughtered.

People, species, cultures.

The Fixits weren't the ones who judged us guilty of malicious stewardship of a living world, it was pretty much everyone else out there. Unanimously.

The Fixits were just the ones to carry out the sentence. I’m not even sure what they look like, or if they even have bodies.

They did give the youngest of us the chance to have an entire childhood on earth, just like all the adults.

Even for those of us still in the womb.

We were the last to be born on earth, the witness generation. An unnamed boy from India was the last one to be born after everyone else became sterile from something the Fixits did. His family decided to Opt Out immediately after his birth due to a fear of being targeted by those knowing the eighteen year countdown started with his birth.

There had been talk of deliberately lengthening the pregnancy.

They stuck around to allow their son to be born as the last child of Earth, then got out of here before they even gave him a name.

I had been about two months along when the Fixits came to Earth and announced the price of our crimes to humanity. My parents didn’t even know I existed yet.

There had been a few attempts to fight back, but there wasn’t a target to shoot at. As things fell apart, there were even a few people with the “If we can’t have the Earth, no one will.”

The nukes they tried to set off vanished from the silos. So did all the others, and the nuclear power plants. The Fixits weren't taking any chances.

After that things fell apart.

Older people took the risk first. When your days are numbered and you feel like a burden, why not take a risk? Prisoners went next, some as a way to escape, some because their countries stopped feeding them.

The oppressed, the poor, the bored. They all followed. Then nations began to crumble and people left because they didn't have power or food.

The Fixit's had food. The people who worked for them got paid in consumables, which was pretty basic, but it's what I grew up on. You ate consumables because you were hungry, not because they tasted good.

At least you didn’t get fat.

I don’t think the Fixits needed the help, but hired people because they thought of it as a sort of rehabilitation, or maybe penance.

Pretty soon it was just Workers, the politest term used for people like my mom, and the Hold Outs left on Earth.

Ten days after I walked on Mars, Hong Wu got tired of being the deadline boy and quietly Opted Out after watching one last sunset.

As he had been the last boy, and I was already the last girl, suddenly everyone left on Earth had four days to either collect the last bits of planet Earth we would get to take with us or finish trying to hide.

My mom didn’t have the time to talk to me in those last days. She was busy trying to arrange for the transfer of a collection of statues honoring American civil war leaders, southern ones, from a Hold Out whose family had collected them after they had been removed from public view.

While I was visiting the gardens that I tended around the remains of the house I had grown up in, the last place I had seen my father, Becky’s mom showed up with some of the people from her Enclave.

“You’re coming with me girl.”

It was only four hours before the end and they locked me up to spend them in a dark room.

What a wonder full way to spend your birthday.

I don’t know what they hoped to accomplish. I don’t think they did either. There was a lot of yelling outside.

It was a little scared, but I had my contingent Opt Out set up since I was sixteen and became the forty seventh youngest person on Earth.

Some radical supporters of the Exile had decided to force members of the last generation to Opt Out at gunpoint to move things along.

The moment I am in danger of death, I'm gone, without a word needing to be said, let alone three times.

Instead, the clock ticked down to the last second, and there was a moment of silence.

Broken by the sound of a message from the Fixits on the widget around my wrist.

[ Happy Birthday Dawn. ]

[ You are the last. ]

[ Do you wish to leave now? Or will you stand witness? ]

I thought that one over. Once you Opted Out, we are told that we would get put into a deep sleep while they fixed up your body. Everything wrong with it was corrected and even some things improved. Then you go into Time Out, frozen in time as the Fixit's ship travels between the stars well below the speed of light.

They had Faster than light space travel. They just needed us to take the slow road while they made our new world for us with samples of plants and every other living thing they had sent ahead of us in a smaller, faster ship.

“Yes. I will witness.”

The next thing I knew I was wearing a sort of knee length white tank top. In a room that was almost all window.

Looking down on the Earth below.

I didn’t feel different. But a few scars from some childhood mishaps were now just smooth skin.

That wasn’t something I would have asked for. I earned those.

The room I was in sort of wrapped around me into a sort of bubble as it fell to earth. Soon I saw below me plains filled with buffalo, and above, skies blotted out with passenger pigeons.

“How long.”

[Five thousand years. Just to be sure. We are leaving soon.]

I saw clean oceans, and beaches with only driftwood washing up on its sands.

Over North America, we passed over a circular area nearly five miles across. It was now all green but the amount of rocks in the soil made it look different. At least from above.

I pressed my hands against the window. “Mars?”

[ Once. ]

“Can I go down there?”

[ No. This world is not a place for humans anymore. ]

I took a step back. "Then I don't need to see anymore of it. Do I?"

“I Opt Out. Now. Now. Now…”