Before the universe dies

“Do you think they’ll find us in time?” She blurts the words out as if she’d been holding them for hours. They’d been walking in silence for the past few kilometres, and he’d heard her stifle, swear and snort quite a few times behind him. He knew she had something on her mind. But the question still sounded strange. Unreal.

“In time for what?” he answers, eyes fixed on his feet shuffling through a patch of shifting sands.

“Well, you know….”, she mutters, her hand reaching up to her sternum. The Locket is cold against her fingertips, like it always has been. It’ll get much colder by the end of this day, and will remain so for aeons to come, she figures. “In a couple billion years or so…even space’ll be gone, right?”

He wants to look at her, but he’s afraid he’ll trip on a rock and lose his balance, or worse. It’s not safe for them to walk alongside each other in these parts. Sure, the greenish sands and the scattered white pebbles look harmless enough. And they’re not the first ones to make that trip through the valley. Heck, everyone he ever knew already left. And we’re among the last to finally go, he thinks. But a Strand can grow hidden in between two scorching rocks or curl up and wait amid any of the scrawny bushes that pepper the desert. You wouldn’t notice one before it was much too late for even your locket to save you. He isn’t taking any chances. Not when they’re getting so close to the Tomb. Just a couple more kilometers.

He can already see the top of the old control tower and the heavy ascension trusses arrayed in an uneven ellipse around it, their tip disappearing into the green sky, crisscrossing beams of metal weaving their web up and up to the only place humanity knows the Strands can’t follow.

“Hassan?” she shouts, clearly frustrated with him. Again. He was never very chatty, but he could usually find the right words to get his sister to calm down when she became agitated and started thinking too much. Now it’s his turn to become lost in the damp and stinky waters flooding his mind.

“I’m sorry…”, he answers coyly, shifting his head to the right without letting go of the treacherous grounds, hoping to safely get a glimpse at her from the corner of his eyes. “I think it’s going to be a while longer before space dies. About ten billion years, give or take,” he says, trying not to linger on the head-bashing absurdity of these numbers.

“Do you think there’ll be another universe after this one?” She asks, sounding almost excited. “So even if they don’t find us before the ten billion years then…there’ll still be time…” she trails off, and he can imagine a frown on her tiny face as she tries and grasp the magnitude of what she just asked.

It’s his turn to touch his chest now. The locket gently vibrates under his thumb. It knows they’re surrounded by Strands. When he was younger, it used to be completely inert. Most of the time anyway, if he didn’t stray too far from the confines of the city. If he concentrates enough, he can almost hear it order his heart to keep beating, one thump at a time, just like it does for everyone else.

The heart-shaped piece of tech's the last gift humanity had received when the Strands had started growing like weed all over the world. Once they’d been done turning the sky green and the air sour, the Locket had become the only thing keeping the remnants of civilization breathing. And for what? In three decades, he still hasn’t found an answer to that. He doesn’t think anyone did.

“Maybe there’ll be many universes after this one, you even thought about that?” he answers, trying his best to sound cheerful and engaged in the conversation. At least, it might keep her distracted from their more immediate problems, and from what he knows will invariably happen when they reach the Tomb.

“Of course, I did!” She exclaims, ending with a loud snort and a couple of weak coughs. “I always had way more thoughts than you!”

“You sure did,” he says, smiling slightly. “I never think about all that stuff, it’s just too complicated.” That was a lie, of course. Like everyone in Yazd, he always knew he would end up on that road, making that trip to the Tomb. He’d waited for that moment all his life with a mix of terror and fascination. A death that could still be ripe with possibilities. Amel on the other hand, was always just positively curious about the whole thing.

“Be careful now, and follow me close,” he tells her as the path narrows. To the left, the Shir Kuh’s serrated ridges stand untroubled, its sharp creases cascading down like silk frozen cold and hard, the faintest glint of minty snow dotting its peaks, way up there. The Dakhma ruins rest above the sandy hill to their right. It was already ancient centuries before the Strands came. Every single patch of land around it now bathes in them. Graceful and green, their long leaves quivering in the air as if hung from the sky by invisible threads, gently sizzling in the breeze. Beautiful. Deadly. Everywhere.

Amel grabs his shirt as they go down the slippery path between the two rocky mounts, and he’s grateful to her for being so careful. If she trips and falls into a Strand, there would be nothing he could do. His locket is getting restless, buzzing and pounding in his sternum as it works tirelessly to keep his lungs working and his heart pumping amid the Strand-infected air spewing around them. His vision becomes blurry, and his head starts spinning. But he’s had it worse. They’ve trained for this. Years and years of progressive exposure since they were born and had already come so close to dying on the very same day.

The Locket needs to be put in when one starts breathing. It grows within its host, its shape moulding around the bones like soft metal, its wires threading the flesh as if sewing life into a frail canvas. It learns, teaches, and adapts to every organism it merges with until it becomes just as much a part of it as its own mind. And when one dies, it is torn from the flesh and passed to another who would be born, granting them life and dooming them to the world.

There’s a rumble above them, quickly followed by a high-pitch, explosive bang. It comes from the Tomb, of course. Another slingshot capsule breaking through the thick clouds after being hurled straight and strong along its sky-grazing rig. The rings drawn in the sky from the sonic impact form a perfect circle. They will expand until they merge into their puffy siblings. Until the next capsule pierces the veil once last time, Hassan thinks.

“Do you think the next one will be ours?” Amel asks as she lets go of Hassan’s shirt. They’ve reached the bottom of the trail and the Tomb stands straight in front of them, less than half an hour away through flat and dry desert land. This is the furthest both of them ever wandered from Yazd.

“Yours, maybe,” he answers. “You know there’s only room for one in these things.”

“I hate tiny spaces…”, she mutters, sounding more like a child than she has in years. “Do you know how many there are left?” His heart would have skipped a beat at that question if the Locket was capable of letting it.

“I don’t,” he answers. Another lie. He takes comfort in the fact that he won’t have to lie for much longer. “You can walk next to me now, if you want,” he says, changing the subject. It was still a risk, but there hadn’t been reports of Strands growing wild over the cracked and parched land leading to the Tomb. They were never far, of course.

She trots to his side without a word and throws him an inquisitive look, as if she was expecting him to say more but didn’t dare ask. “I’m not taking your hand,” she just says. Maybe he was just getting paranoid and scared that she would sniff out the lies he’d been burying for the past months. “No hand grabbing, that’s fine,” he replies, flashing her a quick smile before setting his eyes back on the Tomb.

It used to be the crown jewel of the country, that place. Of the world even, perhaps. Most dwellers believe so, but this knowledge is mostly lost now. And what’s left of it sleeps within the very same thing that keeps us alive, Hassan reflects, rubbing his locket again, right here next to our hearts. He knows - they all do - that people used to come from all over the world to be launched into the vastness of space from this one, top-of-the-line site, the pinnacle of innovation and audacity born from a doomed realm, powerful and proud. And these people, these experts, the best of humanity, they even came back down! And they would do it again, and again.

Now it’s a one-way ticket to a fading hope. A ticket about to expire.

For some, it represents the ultimate spiritual journey. A way to keep their bodies safe from the Strands, sheltered from decay, to be released into the void glorious and whole for the remote chance that at some point in the universe’s life span, others could find them. And they shall be born again.

Hassan never believed in that. But Amel does. And she can’t wait to climb into one of these rounded metal coffins and get hurled into the cold toward faraway stars, even if it takes ten billion silent years to reach them. Ten billion years of wandering death.

Hassan thinks of the Dakhma they passed on their way. Some say the capsules are the towers of silence of this era. They only accept dead flesh, but they will keep it from the vultures in exchange for an eternity of frozen emptiness. But how do we come clean if our bones are not scraped? Hassan wonders. A Dakhma is not meant to keep us whole. It’s the other way around. One I understand…

They’re stepping up the Tomb’s curved prep stage, all twelve of the majestic metal launch pads towering above them like pillars supporting the weight of heaven itself. Their paint has long peeled away, and the former control tower is overrun with Strands, their long waving tails topping its dome-shaped head like shaggy hair.

“This one’s yours,” Hassan says, pointing to a somewhat shiny looking capsule whose ascension pillar stands closest to the cragged foothills of the Shir Kuh, still looking like a blade of grass against the godlike peak.

“You’ll follow close, won’t you?” she asks, her eyes bright and red from the Strands’ fumes. Or she knows I’m not coming, Hassan thinks, releasing the capsule’s locks. It slides open with a soft sigh.

“I’ll take this one,” Hassan answers, pointing to the least decrepit of the remaining capsules. “You go now.”

She enters the capsule and straps in. It takes someone else to seal the door from outside. He wants to get this over with but feels her hand against his Locket. She stares into his eyes, silent, and he does the same, his arm reaching for her locket too, feeling it hum and breathe and beat.

A moment later, the capsule is sealed, but their gazes remain locked through the tiny window. As he initiates the launch, he prays to the void waiting for her up there.

Let her see the stars before her heart stops.

Let her live again before the universe dies.