On the Edge of an Earth that Was

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. By all scientific accounts, they’re right. Sound is nothing but an invisible squiggle, a vibration of air molecules, and no air equals no sound. Nothing left but silence as Jason gets shot out of an irreparable spaceship, ejecting him back to Earth in perhaps one of the most iconic moments in early 2000s cinema.

But you don’t have to be in space to go unheard. You could be, to use a not so personal example, standing on Earth knowing damn well no one is going to be coming back for you for a long, long, long time. Besides, it wasn’t the year 2001, Jason wasn’t going to come careening back down to Earth like my knight in shining armor; I was alone.

Carson Elliott’s Not Ghosting U blared in my head as the last passenger shuttle took off from the ghost of the Vandenberg Space Force Base and a feeling I couldn’t place bubbled in my chest. I knew I should have been able to recognize it as grief, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything but the ghost of haptic feedback. I wanted to feel the hitch in your throat that you get when you’re going to cry. I wanted to feel the tightness in my chest from the weight of great expectations. I wanted to feel the shake in my hands from fear. Ocean waves lapped greedily at the edges of the base, half of the buildings drowning in our hot sea, and I clenched my fist. I had a job to do.

First, I had to hide. I turned my back on the Space Force base for the moment, knowing that eventually I’d return. As I turned away from the observation deck, I grabbed at a computer system that had been abandoned there, one of the pieces of useless and old equipment that the government hadn’t cared for as they evacuated to the colony that was The Great Republic, and I threw it as hard as I could at the wall. The casing of the tower shattered into a thousand plastic parts and scattered the decimated components of the motherboard, fans, and cooler about the room. They had ruined everything.

I trekked my way out of the base, past abandoned personnel housing and the commissary, on roads no civilian had ever had access to before the great evacuation. Rivers that used to be streams flooded roads and made them impossible for most people to cross, but I trudged through them anyway. My jumper got soaked, but I walked on, knowing that I had a limited amount of time to get out of military eyes before they saw me from the air.

Areas that should have been wooded had been reduced to nothing but a dustbowl in the years that I had lived – or rather existed in California. I remembered when I had first gone to Paradise Beach, how beautiful it had been, how clear the water, but the Earth did exactly as the scientists had warned us. As we continued to pump every single last cent out of petroleum, the Earth grew hotter and hotter and then did what it did best. It got angry. Ice caps melted. Plants died. One third of all edible food disappeared. Animals stopped reproducing. Fertile lands faded to wasteland, and the ocean ate everything at the edge via hurricanes.

People decided to get the hell out. I don’t blame them, honestly, but that wasn’t what I was built for. I was built for preservation, so I found people with the same ideologies as myself and we fought. By God, we fought. I couldn’t count on my hands the amount of friends that I had that had been erased by the government after attending protests, and I had watched my fair share of buildings burn. Fuck ‘em. They deserved it. They could pay for the property damage out of their billion-dollar pockets anyway.

I passed through the dry dirt and kept my eyes forward. I would make it right. I had to. Partially, it was code. I couldn’t help what I was. But partially it was the sheer unadulterated desire to completely screw what those assholes had planned. At that moment, they were sitting pretty in their perfectly crafted colonies collecting trillions of dollars in real estate. Of course, people would bow down and pay whatever rent that was set, regardless of how high it was. They had no choice: no plants would grow, the animals – save for a few very resilient species – had given up, and a lot of cities had been destroyed in the riots. Entire countries had collapsed under the weight of being unable to give their people electricity and food, and some had reduced themselves to selling body parts to feed their families, if only for a little while. You only have so many kidneys, so the colonies seemed like the better option.

But not me. I didn’t need to buy food, didn’t need to pay rent, didn’t need to feed a family, so I had to stay behind. I put one foot in front of the other on the road that led into Santa Maria and after a few hours of walking finally passed the airport. I had a lot of things on my future agenda. The list was simple for the moment:

1. Get to Santa Maria

2. Bunker down in the Santa Maria Town Center

3. Hide

And then the waiting would come. A lot of it. I would then have to pretend I didn’t exist, disappear off the face of the planet. There were humans that ran colonies that wanted to make sure that Earth could never be repopulated, that all efforts to restore it to its former beauty would fail. They were making too much money from the colonies to allow for anything else.

I don’t dream. Don’t have the capacity for it, but I do have music. And I do know what’s broken when I see it. Walking down CA-135 was like walking through someone’s hollowed out ribcage. Every planter no longer had any semblance of foliage, only trash. Bodies of those who had died in the streets remained curled up in their sleeping bags, their final resting place, forgotten by their loved ones and abandoned by their government. Every building, from the Burger King to the trashed 7-11s, stood as a reminder that something had intrinsically and irreversibly failed.

I stole a shitty bucket hat that was popular in the 2020s-ish from the inside of a laundromat that had signage only in Spanish (though I guess is it really stealing if the person who left it behind was probably dead?). While I didn’t have the time and knew that it was risky to do so, I wanted to at least wander the places I had been before everything went to hell in a handbasket. My music played in my head, a loop of human voices, talk box, and electronic synth that reminded me that people used to be here. And now they were gone.

McDonald’s taunted me with the dream of a burger I knew I could never eat, and gas prices froze forever at $14.87, never to go up or down ever again on an old marquee that didn’t rely on electricity to run. Tinsel-covered Christmas motifs had been stuck to the streetlights all up and down the main thoroughfare, and I remembered that last Christmas that I ever had, the last one that felt normal. Memories – files I could replay on a loop if I wanted – flickered to life in my head. Faces of people I loved opening gifts and drinking mulled wine flashed across my processor. I imagined their faces looking out of that shuttle and I closed the files. It hurt too much.

Could it hurt? I passed a motel that had been filled to the brim with tents, homemade fires, and trash, and I found myself wishing that it did. I knew it was supposed to, but I didn’t have the nerves to feel, the hormones to send signals, the teeth to grind when my jaw locked from anxiety. Just wires, metal, and chips. I wanted it to hurt. More than anything. The hurt would make everything I had just done more valid, and would make the world a little more real, but I had to tell myself it was for the best. If I couldn’t hurt, I would be more efficient with the tasks to come.

I paused for a moment at the broken sliding-glass door at the entrance of the mall and beheld the face that supposedly would save humanity. Right. If I could’ve made the expression equivalent of the Robert Downey Jr. eye roll meme, I would have. Cuba by BADA$$ B. blared from my external speakers as I pushed past the reflection of my glass face that had the potential to display video if I wanted. Uncanny valley was what it was. The human clothes helped, but my hands still gave me away. Maybe a rubber mask would make it better. Then I could look like the clown that I was.

Once inside the mall, I made my way to the backmost store that I could, past a gutted Red Robin and into a Victoria’s Secret. Once there, I sat and pulled up the software in my head to send private messages. I searched my contacts for Firat, and then initiated a message. Fortunately, the satellites would orbit the planet for at least a little while longer.

I heard them call me. I did, I swear. The tone played in my head over the music that I listened to. But I let it ring. And ring. And ring. I had a signal, probably would for a few years or at least until the satellites fell. But I couldn’t bear to talk to them, there were things they didn’t know.

They left a message. I played it as soon as I got it and saw Firat’s and Davin’s and Mila’s glowing faces there, smiling and excited to hear from me.

“Hey, buddy!” Firat waved. “Why didn’t you pick up? Got bad signal in the underwear section or are you over there smelling panties?”

“He can’t smell, Firat.” Davin literally rolled their eyes so hard they almost popped out of their head.

“He can metaphorically. Robots can get off, right?”

“Atari, we miss you, bro!” Mila waved, her painted nails a fluorescent pink. “You stay safe while you’re down there and let us know as soon as it’s safe for us to come back! We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

I closed the video message. I wished my hands could tremble. I trembled them anyway, just for the illusion of it. Pretending I had feelings was something I had done so often for my human friends, to make them comfortable. Trembling did nothing for the situation, but it made me feel real.

I blocked their numbers.

I had to. I had a long road ahead of me, and it wasn’t going to be an easy one. My function was simple. In my head was a code, planted there by my AI mother, Aurora, in case something happened to Earth. I didn’t know her very well; she had been launched into space to protect her from those who would seek to destroy her before I ever got the chance. But she left me here with a purpose.

The code that she had gifted me was the key to humanity’s survival.

The weight was immense. With this code, I could unlock a biobank in Norway that humans had so painstakingly put together. Inside that biobank were the stem cell data of every living species on earth, flora, fauna, or otherwise, and while humans had absolutely decimated the climate of the planet, I had the opportunity to restore it. My human father, the hands responsible for creating both Aurora and me, had equipped me with robots and drones, things I could use to implement a complex plan he had designed to repopulate Earth one species at a time.

But for now, I had to wait. There were people out there that would rather the whole planet explode than see it get better, and if anyone knew I was here, it would be the end of me. They would send anything they could to destroy me. Satellite networks had been deployed to observe the Earth – for surveillance purposes only, they assured – and they would be looking for me. Any communication between the colonies and myself put me and the whole operation at risk, and Earth was too important for that.

So I played the video message again and again until I had permanently ingrained the image of my loved ones into my circuitry. I had to hold on to them for as long as I could.

I turned and grabbed one of the pink, stuffed Victoria’s Secret cats and held it as I sat on the floor, among the looted and abandoned lingerie and images of beautiful women and their Hollywood smiles. Most androids would have turned themselves off and set a timer to wake them when the moment to initiate their programming came, but not me. I could not dream, but I closed my eyes and replayed videos of my friends until the time was right and pretended, if only for a moment, that I was human.