The World That No Longer Glitters

The last ship went out last night. The world is quiet in the pre-dawn hours, and I long for just a few more moments to steep in dreams while I lay in the cot I’ve been provided.

But the day must begin. I yawn as I slip on my one-piece standard-issue uniform and put on my clunky anti-hazard boots. My water allotment for the day allows me to splash water on my face and rinse my mouth out. Still, the taste of metal in the water persists. It won’t kill me, but I make sure I don’t swallow any.

The broken mirror shows my eyes in fragments. I don’t even bother smiling. There’s nothing to smile about, is there?

When I leave my room for the day, I take a brisk pace down to the mess hall. It’s still early, so there are only a few clusters of people in the vicinity. I take my offerings: a grayish lump of oatmeal, a hard biscuit, and a small canister of cafa to bring me some energy. My stomach grumbles in protest, as if it already knows it has to subsist on crumbs until a meager dinner that will hardly satisfy either.

I drain the cafa first because it’s the one treat allowed to us. It’s bitter, true, but sugar has long been a rarity in this starving world. I swallow down the rest of breakfast and try not to think of how sticky the oatmeal feels as it slides down my throat.

After that, I head down to tackle my duties for the day, such as maintenance to what remains of the internal power grid as well as small tasks like carting materials to and from docking points.

Only when I am done with the thankless work am I allowed to make use of free time. I go where I always do when the workday is done: the simulation room. What was once entertainment has ceased to exist in the world I know, but tech still allows some freedom to imagine what the earth was once like.

A few presses of buttons, and I’m watching a playground scene of children running and laughing. The brightness of the sun and the way everything green stands out make me think this is what was once deemed summer. The seasons have long ago ceased to exist. There is only hot and cold to describe the aboveground now, and the sky always has a smog-like texture to it. And the recycled air in the facility is still much better than what you can inhale now if you go maskless outside.

I wander through scenes like they are pages I’m flipping in one of those Old World books: there are the beaming lights of city life, the myriad of cars that once populated the planet, the sights of crowds ambling to and from destinations of varying degrees of beautiful. A woman passes by, a gleaming gold heart-shaped locket at her throat; it's the kind of trinket you wouldn't even find in a scavenger's hoard nowadays. I want to reach out and touch a fabled tree, with its leaves turning from green to orange, but the simulation is limited in its abilities.

Some people can’t take living in the facility. They get claustrophobic, nervous, jittery; the only way to calm them down is to give them sedatives and allow them to rest in a simulated environment. I have no such qualms, but I still wonder what it’s like to live in a simulation and pretend it’s the real world. And then I can’t decide if those people are lucky, sad, or both.

But who am I to judge? I use all my allotted free time to scan through the views of the once-world I was too late to be born into. Even the sky of that world is a marvel: pinpricks of light gleam in the looming darkness. A shooting star passes so close that I could almost pretend to catch it.

This world makes tears come to my eyes. This world is what I would have loved to experience.

But this world was no one’s to keep.

I hear laughter again ring through the air. I feel the softness of a breeze tug at my hair. I close my eyes as a smile comes to my face for the first time in what feels like forever.

But the images lose their luster. They always do. They’re just memories plucked from the people who donated them for the archives.

A sigh escapes my lips. It’s so futile, this want, but I can’t get rid of it. Getting rid of it would be to deny what makes me happiest.

I swipe a hand across the screen, wiping away the gleaming view of once-earth, and with it goes away the illusion. What I see through my filtered window makes my heart sink. Smoke, dust, debris—it’s just another day of a world hanging on a cliff’s edge and just waiting for the moment the tumble downward commences.

Our fingers are slipping, nails failing to hold us in place, and soon there will be no choice but to fall.

If I were to leave the safety net of the facility and venture out into that landscape, the heat would probably kill me before even thirst did. Some brave souls still go aboveground to test for any lifeforms or the existence of water reserves, but no one comes back with good news.

It’s true. This world will be gone soon. It will be another desert planet added to the rest, and the only ones who will remember earth are off on ships gone off to find new worlds to inhabit.

I press my hand to my prosthetic leg that I’ve used since an accident during one of my maintenance tasks. During the physical portion of my examination to deem me fit to go off-planet on one of the ships, the doctor had given me a look of pity the moment he saw my leg.

Even when the rejection notice came through, I didn’t cry. What was the point? Even my tears were a precious commodity.

Over the past year I’ve seen the fleets of ships leaving one by one in the areas of the world that still cultivate life. I count each one on my hands to fall asleep at night. I’m not even twenty years old, and already I know my death is imminent.

The moment the last ship went out yesterday, what was left of hope went out like a sputtering flame.

But I still got out of bed this morning. I went through each of my tasks one by one. I even went and viewed the simulations like everything was still normal.

Normalcy fled a long time ago, long before I was even born, and the world that once glittered—it’s just left to the realm of a simulation born from the deepest memories of those departed.

Tomorrow will not change a thing. But still I live. Still I breathe. Still I survive.