I knew Mayan was excited, and man, if I didn’t want to get excited with her. A treasure hunt. A real bona fide adventure? Shit! That sounded exciting! But what in the hell was she talking about?

“Cheet, come on. Don’t tell me you don’t think there is something to this too?” she said. My eyebrows shot up, and I pursed my lips.

“And?” I asked incredulously. “Mayan! Think about this. Even if we could fly this thing, you want us to leave the complex, the company, in stolen company property, a SPACESHIP of all things, to fly all the way to the other side of the world to what? Break through the security into a reserve and then what? Wander around an ancient jungle? When was the last time you saw a living tree? How the fuck would we know what to do in a jungle? We’d probably die of some fucking disease!”

Mayan rocked on her heels while she listened. It was true. My words were irrefutable, even for her. Even for a temp, there were no passes to visit the surface outside the complexes. The reserves were brutal places. They schooled us on their security and the dangers to approaching them every year in our annual conditioning classes. Videos of the hundred foot, concrete walls, massive black, fully automated turrets with mounted machine guns and missile launchers that constantly patrolled the perimeter with infrared vision. The words “NO HUMAN PAST THIS POINT” stenciled on the side every one hundred meters.

“I asked my uncle about the reserves,” she said then.

I spun to look at her, my hands moving to clench around my back. My eyes were still wide, I was still trying to figure out how she was still debating this.

“You know he’s a biologist, I told you.”

I rolled my eyes, but shrugged.

“Cheet, the walls are abandoned. Yah, they have turrets still but their unmanned, and old unmanned. Old tech means we can hack them. He didn’t tell me that, but he told me the history of their security ‘plan’, all proud-like. I know you can appreciate the sky people and their pride here, and sure enough, as I listened, I caught the gloat, ya know? It got me thinking; I bet they aren’t so worried about it anymore. They keep all the living people here, and the reserves are so far away. How would a basic human even travel there? So, I took a look at the files on the reserves themselves, even asked him to send me internal stuff on the monitoring of the environment and atmospheric conditions. He agreed, of course. No sky person has ever betrayed a sky city.”

She bounced away, walking on her tip-toes like she was prone to doing and her ponytail bounced wildly behind her. Returning to her pack, she took out a vid screen, and tapped it so it lit up. “According to the latest readings, all is well at the reserve sites. The optimal percentile, the OP, is hovering around the red, which is worse than I thought, but,” she didn’t finish, only shrugged.

“Worse than you thought?” I asked, intrigued enough by her one sentence that held more information than I could have dreamed of knowing in my entire lifetime.

“You know about the ‘OP’?” she asked. I nodded.

“It has a threshold, obviously. Every year, we move either away from that or closer. Because Sky has only increased demand through its Mars Colony project and expanding on the orbiting cities, the refineries here have never slowed down production. No one wants to build new facilities on their pristine colonial sites. But, the cities above keep growing too. It’s nice up there. Clean, healthy. There are families and entire communities who have no idea what dirt looks like and there is no violence or war. Food is grown and consumed. Waste, well,” she said and her voice fell in implied sadness.

I frowned.

“We were supposed to build up there and find solutions to healing down here. As beautiful as the sky is, Cheet, there are no rivers or oceans, mountains, forests or deserts. Sky, yes, but it doesn’t even rain up there. I’m not complaining. I’m just saying we were meant to be down here.”

“You want to fix that?” I asked and chortled humourlessly once.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Uh, no,” she replied with a definite finality to it.

I walked over and moved to stand behind her shoulder.

She lifted the screen and showed me the graph on her vid. “The threshold is here, a cushion above and below the OP, here.” Her finger showed the zones and the OP line, resting on the bottom. She turned to look at me. “No one is talking about that, Cheet. I assure you, even in Sky. Especially in Sky, I guess. And don’t think for a minute that I am not acutely aware that junkers will be the first to go.”

“It’s hot,” I complained and moved to give space between our bodies, remembering that without the circulation of the air, it was stifling in the confined metal room.

“Yes, that’s the clear sign it’s running out,” she urged softly. “It’s getting hotter. The atmosphere isn’t blocking out as much of the sun as it should.”

I cracked open the second bottle. As soon as the liquid hit my tongue, I realized the appeal in guzzling it. I finished it in one shot, same as her.

It was a lot to consider. If the plan to at least keep earth as a viable planet to sustain our lives was failing, that was bad. Frustrating that even with all the technology and brains in the sky cities, they were still shitting on the very basic rules of coexistence. I suddenly realized her point.

“It’s all going to shit, anyway. Why not go out in a blaze of glory?”

Mayan laughed. “No moron,” she chuckled and snorted once. She moved back to the bag to take out the map. I followed her to my small sitting area; two old steel-framed patio chairs and a slightly dented crate for a coffee table. It wasn’t comfortable, but it faced Star Hunter and I could put my feet up and drink my weekly beer, admiring the view.

She laid the paper out, carefully smoothing the surface with light fingers.

“Here, this is the coordinates up here, and this,” she said, leaning close to me so we were touching shoulders, “is the ‘Heaven’s Gate’.”

The words I’d seen last night were still there and a little clearer now that I wasn’t half asleep. Behind them; I now noticed dots. Upon closer and longer inspection, they looked more intentional. I moved a finger to trace the design and noticed, out of the corner of my eye, Mayan smile. I tilted to look at her.

“A constellation. See? I knew you would understand it like me.”

I sighed. “Ok, I’ll bite. Which one?”

“Orion’s Belt,” she replied smoothly and leaned back to slouch into the back of the chair.

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something.”

Mayan shrugged.

I turned back to the paper. The coordinates were plain. Faded but clear and it would take nothing to punch them into a vid to get their location. But Mayan said the third was off-world. How?

“Explain how you know the third one is off-world?” I watched her sit back upright.

“Look at the directions. It’s not longitude, latitude, it’s star coordinates,” she told me. “It’s an astrological number sequence.” She moved her finger to underline them. “RA: 06h 45m 08.9s, dec: -16° 42′ 58″. I looked it up. It’s Canus Major. Sirius. Our brightest star.”

“What the fuck, Mayan?” I asked in exasperation, more confused and getting impatient. I stood fast and went to the food pack to rummage for anything good. Her rations were better. She always brought them to share with me. Finding a package of real cheese, I tore through the plastic.

As if expecting I’d run out of patience here, she raised both hands. “I know, it’s weird. But this first one, that’s Mexico, right here on earth.”

Eating the cheese, I took my time. Damn, it tasted good.

Mayan gave me the moment.

“OK,” I said, giving up and tossing the wrapper back in her bag. “Let’s say we could get there. Forget the how and the security, but get there. Finding whatever this is pointing to? We don’t know what this is, Mayan,” and walked back towards her. She nodded.

“Remember the black hole?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Heaven’s Gate is the project name they gave. They postulated it was a wormhole that could be used for intergalactic travel. The idea was to find new, habitable planets. A new earth.”

“’Kay,” I replied, rolling my eyes.

“Canus Major is the closest galaxy to us here,” she went on. “I’m thinking that there is a connection to the detail on this sheet, and that project. I don’t think they found it, mind you, but I think there is a connection to the site here on earth and Sirius. And if it means a new world, Cheetah, no one would need to die a slow death like here.”

I watched her for a long moment. I get the desire I saw there. I mean, it was my people she was feeling the angst for, but shit, what heroic bullshit was she talking about? A whim and prayer, and no solid evidence. That was what she was proposing. Oh, and if we got caught? A one-way trip to the incinerator for me. Maybe her too.

Mayan continued to sit on the edge of the seat, now with her hands tucked tightly between her knees, her eyes trained on mine. For a second, I flipped them to Star Hunter.

Shaking my head, I left her at the chairs to resume my stroll. It was great, exciting, sure but the logistics, not to mention the half-ass evidence she was using, it was bordering on science fiction.

“I bet in a day or two, we could gather enough provisions to fly her out of here.”

I burst out with an involuntary hysterical laugh and still strolling, disappeared behind the giant burn shields of the rear engines on another lap around the shuttle.