Chapter Thirteen

Rosa walked throughout the hidden secret spaceship, their vessel to take them to HH190, the nearest habitable planet. It was still under construction, but they grew closer to completing it every day.

The enormous concrete room disclosed even the faintest noises with an irritating echo. The entire area smelled of strong chemicals and smoke, the smell of a rocket burn test or perhaps some electronics that had caught fire.

He sat in the navigation chair with the half-finished command panels in front of him, the wiring entirely exposed.

Carbon-fiber panels hung unhinged on the ceiling from the work he had been doing earlier in the week.

There was much to do, but he was pleased with their progress as the ship continued to show the results of their dedication.

Their hope.

The vessel barely fit in his enormous lab, taking up the entire space that belonged to his particle collider at the lowest level of his facility.

When he and Eva had embarked on that undertaking, this felt like the most logical place to put their ark, though he hadn’t expected it to become as large as it was.

It was a pieced-together patchwork of equipment they swindled from work and materials they bought through off-grid retailers without suspicion.

Because of the chaotic nature through which they approached building the craft, it wasn’t as efficient as it should be and therefore took up a bit more space than they had originally supposed it would. Some of the available ‘spare’ components were twice the size of the most modern versions.

He toyed with the command unit in front of him, twisting wires into place temporarily and using a hand-held monitor to test the current. He had been having a little trouble connecting the newest nuclear power generator to the ship’s command system.

However, he was not too concerned. It was a problem he had before and was something he was confident could be resolved.

Their ship would make the trip—he had no doubt. The biggest problem was not fuel or generators, or space. It was time.

Just time.

It would take many generations to reach HH190, and they made the ship for maybe one hundred and eighty passengers.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

With three passengers being from his own family, he thought about maintaining the genetic variation of the human species.

He slowly tilted his head backward, clasping his hands tightly under his chin. Freezing embryos had been outlawed for years since discovering misaligned genetic sequences occurring when long-term human subjects were revived.

People would need to have children on board to keep the journey alive and well, and they all needed to have diverse genes.

A system for efficient and ethical population replacement was required.

He cringed at the thought of creating a protocol for human reproduction, of creating essentially what would be an instruction manual for who could reproduce and when.

He didn’t want to do it—to ask people to sacrifice their choice in something that was supposed to be one of the greatest joys of life—but it was necessary.

Eva understood the need for rules. She was the one to have pointed it out years ago in the first place.

He fiddled with another set of wires and cursed under his breath.

If only they had cracked the secrets of cryostasis, avoiding the problem of reproduction on board altogether.

They could all simply go to sleep and, theoretically, wake up at HH190.

He shook his head. The ethereal dream of a stable cryostasis apparatus was leagues of science ahead of where they were now. It would be impossible to resolve before the Frost took hold of the whole Earth.

An alarm rang. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the reminder:

8:00 AM—Work: DefTEX Project.

He sighed and swiped the reminder away. Work seemed trivial in the grand scheme of the world’s problems.

Sure, they were tracking the acceleration of the Frost, but those were mainly Eva’s responsibilities.

She received climate data straight from TITAN and ran future weather and trajectory simulations.

He was stuck monitoring the oil company’s fruitless and baseless experimental effects of spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

And no matter how many reports he provided, saying the efforts were utterly useless, the fossil fuel giants just continued conning people into buying gasoline to use in their old combustion vehicles. Smaller countries were even becoming convinced to switch over to legacy-based power generation.

It proved how much money ruled the world, even here at the end of all things.

He wiped his hands on his black lab shirt and stood from his crouched position over the controls, taking a moment to stretch. He then walked through the ship—out of the command center and into the poorly lit hall with open holes in the walls—and out the small side entrance.

At the bottom of his large lab, he tilted his head upward to the ceiling nearly two hundred feet overhead. He saw the grated platform of his lab’s main office area.

The concrete walls of the circular chamber drove deep into the ground, only reinforced where they had cracked over the years.

The air would have been damp, but the lab had so many dehumidifiers running that it was drier than the Atacama Desert.

The elevators were removed to allow for more space to work on the vessel. He began ascending the spiral staircase. When he arrived at the top, he looked down over his project.

It had a window portal in the very top center—a sunroof of sorts. He smiled at his work—at their work. He and his beautiful wife’s labor.

They would be the reason humanity survived, the reason their family survived.

And despite all the doubt he had about this venture, that’s what kept him going each day.

He finished the last steps of the spiral staircase, reaching the top with a haze of dizziness.

Now for work.

Time to start the day.