Chapter Eleven

Eva smiled at the dimly lit room, an auditorium filled with over seven hundred of her peers looking down at her from the rows of ascending seats. She pressed the button in her hand, switching to the final 3D slide of their hologram presentation.

She eyed over her shoulder to make sure the Thank-You message flashed over the stage.

The topics had been carefully crafted to be generous and engaging, yet critical of the scientific community’s current indecisiveness toward addressing the Frost—the name the media had chosen for the world’s current climate cooling crisis.

She smiled as the paragraph, which she, Rosa, and Aura knew would leave the audience feeling inspired to challenge, flashed onto the screen in 3D.

“And with that, we formally conclude our presentation on alternative solutions to the Frost. Thank you for your time.”

Aura stepped forward as the lights in the large auditorium, which could accommodate one thousand, slowly came back on, revealing the skeptical faces of their peers.

“So, we now enter our Q&A time allotment for this session. Any questions?”

Normally, when Eva and Rosa did presentations together, he would field the questions. He was the cool-headed of the three. But Aura was the crowd’s favorite.

Funny and bubbly, but harshly truthful in her words.

A blue light shining from the far left of the auditorium went off, indicating that an audience member intended to ask a question.

“Our colleague from Canada, please,” Rosa said, motioning for the scientist to unmute their mic.

The petite woman in a white lab coat stood. “Thank you for your presentation,” she said, addressing the room with a thick French-Canadian accent.

Eva frowned.

The Frost had hit northern countries like Canada extremely hard, and Quebec, the French-speaking part of Canada, was on the brink of being uninhabitable in the winter months.

“While several of the solutions you provided were very interesting, I can’t help but notice you favored one—spending most of your time speaking about it. Do you really believe converting all our world’s efforts to planetary relocation is the best and most realistic course of action? Leaving the entire planet behind?”

“We do,” Aura said, with no hesitation and with full authority.

A grumble sounded throughout the room.

“No matter how many simulations we run, even considering the current greenhouse gas resupplying effort by other members of Team Halikkon, the floating rock we live on will soon be a floating ball of ice—”

“We know this all too well here in Montreal,” the scientist interrupted. “But we’ve just come from a presentation yesterday evening which showed recent studies find that the burning of fuels and the greenhouse gas resupplying efforts are positive. And that we can compensate the trajectories for the new orbital path.”

“Only the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” Rosa chimed in, stepping forward. “They have seen no actual results following an improved Earth trajectory or meaningful change in temperature—they’re honestly just making our air much dirtier with micro-warming results. Their hope is in a flawed expectation this will warm the planet enough, even with our wider orbit.”

Eva stepped forward to join her husband and friend, her brow furrowing in frustration. She was about to repeat the same fact she had been harping on since their first presentation to Edmund all those years ago.

The community could just not accept that their decision to expel matter from the atmosphere through TITAN was to blame.

She sighed and immediately regretted it as the microphone caught it and echoed it over the loudspeaker.

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Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. But she had already stepped forward and had to say something now.

“The fact of the matter is, the actual artificial expulsion of teratons of greenhouse gases from our atmosphere has fundamentally changed the planet’s mass, thus impacting the trajectory and orbit of Earth. Both are now fluctuating and changing so much that we can no longer accurately assess the effects. We understand the trend is getting worse, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Our planet is getting further away from the sun and colder, and nothing we’re currently doing is working to reverse these effects.”

Another blue light surfaced, but before they could turn to the flash, the scientist had already started speaking.

“And you expect us just to abandon hope? To just discard the Earth? HH190—the planet to which you propose we flee is light-years away, as we all know, and we simply do not have the technology even to get there before any of us die, anyway. Frost or no Frost. So, now to add to my other colleague’s frustration, how do you propose a realistic alternative to what we are doing now? This seems impossible.”

“It will take generations. This isn’t a cab fare to the market!” Aura yelled over the rowdy whispers of the crowd, tired of pacifying their banter.

They settled upon hearing her voice.

“But, besides myself here, you have the world’s leading nuclear and rocket scientists. They got us to Mars, these two. They did it, them and them alone. They will get us to HH190, even if the journey takes hundreds of years. At the very least, humanity lives on and survives.”

“But at what cost?” another crowd member with a Spanish accent yelled out, this time preceding the blue light altogether.

“We cannot take all humanity to HH190, so we will elect some to make the trip and live on without the rest? Those left behind here to perish and freeze to death?”

A woman with a Nigerian accent yelled from the back, “No, the Kuzlands are right! We must leave! Humankind must evolve and survive, even if it is a remnant. We must remove the ban on frozen embryos.”

“Nothing is working. We need to look to the stars. There we will find solace.”

“We should develop atmospheric initiatives and expand the existing Mars colonies. There is a foundation in place there already!”

The grumbles of the crowd grew louder. “And why should we even trust these two? They’re traitors anyway, having leaked our proprietary data!”

“Not true! That is false-news! They were all cleared, cleared of all wrongdoing! False-news,” came a shout from across the room.

The auditorium—a room filled with the world’s brightest minds—erupted into chaos.

Some audience members argued with one another, while a few others remained focused on the front.

Eva looked at her feet. Her posture slumped, and her shoulders sank. This happened every year and at almost every major session, but it got much worse each time.

She began quietly, “Please, people, we have to work tog—” Tears formed in Eva’s eyes as she looked to her husband for assurance.

But the rumble of the arguments took over as the new melody of the auditorium, the new song of the broken, angry, and discontent human race.

Arguments about which avenues to pursue consistently brought any progress they made to a screeching halt.

The three friends stood motionless on the stage, with scowls chiseled into their faces showing their disillusionment… Or perhaps their disgust.

And the only people who benefited from that indecision were the global oil companies that had convinced the public that spewing carbon into the atmosphere was the best solution to warm the planet again.

Oddly enough, the public was so desperate for a solution that most of them bought into it.

Even some scientists in this very room did.

“Let’s go,” Rosa whispered into her ear. “There’s no calming them now. This is a mess that cannot be undone. I’m skipping the next tracks. I can’t take any more of this.”

Eva took his hand and nodded to Aura, who was still attempting to quell the crowd and yelling into her microphone.

Eva, openly crying, tried to chase her tears away with the cuff of her jacket and whispered, “I, I need to leave. I’m not coming back; I don’t think I’m ever coming back here again. Let’s go home.”

Aura rolled her eyes, threw her headset onto the platform with such force that it broke into pieces, and followed them off the stage, then up the stairs toward the main lobby.

Glares stuck to them while they hustled up the carpeted steps and into the now quiet lobby.

Aura stopped in her tracks for a moment as an angry attendee pointed his finger at her and began shouting.

“You can all go step-off, every damned one of you single-cells,” she yelled back at him, stomping away.

The Frost spike on the other side of the enormous lobby window raged even harder than it had in the morning.

“So, we gave it our best,” Aura said quietly as she caught up to her colleagues. Her usually bubbly demeanor faded, a show of defeat that Eva hated seeing in her dear friend.

Aura took Eva by the hand. “Next year,” she said, trying to console her.

“If there is one, I… I don’t think I can,” Eva cried back to her friend, slowly shaking her head from side to side.

Aura took a long, slow sigh and rubbed her eyes.

The three stood in defeated silence in the middle of the large lobby.

The only conciliation for Eva was their plan to save themselves, since no one else could be convinced.

If the rest of humanity refused to join them on the journey to HH190, that was their choice.

She glanced at her husband out of the corner of her eye and nodded. He returned the slight gesture.

They would tell Aura of their plan soon, their intention to leave Earth for HH190, regardless of whether anyone wanted them to go.

And they would ask her to join them.

But for now, they just stood in silence under the beautiful, majestic looking banner for the Fourth Annual TITAN World Summit, with a perplexed, sullen look on all three of their faces.