The Last Immigrants

30 A.I. (After Immigration)

It happened just the way they said it would. The temperatures continued to rise, the polar ice cap and the layer of ice covering Greenland melted. That combined with the thermal expansion of seawater, caused the ocean levels to rise around 50 centimeters. All the island nations disappeared under a layer of water. The Bahamas, the Philippines, Bangladesh, to name just a few, all gone without a trace. Egypt with its great pyramids and ancient temples disappeared almost as if it had never been.

Florida was swimming underwater. Of course, by that time no one was living there because of the prolonged and violent hurricane seasons. No more wildfires in California once the waters covered it and the rest of the west coast. Really, the only thing they got wrong was the timing. It all happened years before they thought it would.

That was the state of the world in the days before the Last Immigration. I was very young then, but I remember it clearly.

Now that I am an old woman and won’t be here much longer, the People have asked me to write what I remember of that time. I don’t mind doing this for them. Maybe it will put an end to the little ones’ constant pestering. “What was Earth like?” “How many people were there?” “Did they really eat animals?”

To be honest, I like the questions. They help me remember how things were back then. But I would never admit that to the children. That would damage my grumpy old woman persona.

Like so many others fleeing poverty and violence, my mother’s ancestors immigrated from Ireland to the United States. As a girl I was crazy, obsessed with this idea of being half Irish, reading everything I could get my hands on about Irish history and culture. It was during this Irish phase that my mother gave me a heart-shaped locket. It had been in her family, handed down from mother to daughter for generations. There was that distinctive and beautiful Celtic knotwork on the outside of the locket and when you opened it someone had inscribed these words, “Many a ship is lost within sight of the harbor.” An interesting old Irish saying. Interesting, especially since it made the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the harbor in New York. Receiving this locket from my mother, knowing where it came from, just increased my desire to learn more about my forbearers.

This was a common preoccupation then, this obsession with ancestry. Several companies were quite prosperous based on our desire to know who we were and where we came from. People today laugh and wonder at this, but everyone wanted to know what percentage of this and how much of that they had in their DNA. I guess it was a desire to belong to something ancient and powerful. Maybe it made us feel our lives somehow had more meaning if we came from the Vikings of the north or the great tribes of Africa.

I think being so enamored with our own individual pasts not only kept us from living in the present but also fostered a sense of tribalism. We were so interested in our own past, where our own people came from, that we forgot about our collective membership in the tribe of the living. Thank goodness in this new world we honor and learn from the past, we honor and live in the present, and we honor and design the future. The rising waters taught us that. The super storms, droughts, and wildfires taught us that. They taught us we could no longer afford to disconnect ourselves from each other and from our planet.

So many people died in those years after the waters rose. Especially people from underdeveloped countries. People who were used to further some petty tyrant’s power dreams were the first to go. The famines and new diseases took ahold of the people and shook them like a dog with a toy. Thousands journeyed to places not quite as badly affected, like the United States and the European countries, only to be turned away at gunpoint.

So once the world was swimming and burning all at once, the great minds decided it was finally time to do something about it.

1 B.I. (Before Immigration)

Dr. Joshua Alexander looked out over the city he had once loved. New York City had been the epicenter of the arts and technology, and everyone considered Alexander to be the best and the brightest in the latter. Now, looking out of his office on the top floor of his high rise, he felt only disgust. Now that the water had receded from the latest storm, there was another layer of muck and debris to wade through. The subways had closed long ago, so moving around the city was next to impossible.

“Christ,” he said, speaking to himself rather than the person he had just invoked, “I can’t wait to get off this Godforsaken rock.”

Joshua Alexander was the epitome of a self-made man. Coming from a lower middle class family, he worked his way through school earning a BA in Physics from the University of Texas in Austin. From there that he went to Harvard on a full scholarship, where he received first an MA and finally a PhD. in astrophysics. He could have continued his education, but Joshua was more interested in getting out into the world and making a name for himself. Which he did in breathtaking fashion, if he did say so himself. Winning awards and contributing tremendous leaps of knowledge in his field of study. So when things fell apart so spectacularly in the world that even the most skeptical could no longer deny it, the world governments appointed him to head a large group of scientists, politicians, and businesspeople from all over the world who had come together to accomplish one goal. Get off this Godforsaken rock.

They found a suitable planet almost immediately. The problem was it was over four light years away. It would take tens of thousands of years to travel that far. They discussed putting passengers in stasis, but that technology was dicey. No one liked the idea of a multi generational ship. It just didn’t seem fair that no one from the original team would get to see their new home. Besides, who knew if the ships would last that long. And then it was Joshua himself who had the breakthrough. He found a way to bend time and space and take giant leaps through space in the blink of an eye. It cut the travel time down to an incredible four and a half years.

Joshua had spoken to Li Qiang just this morning. He was the team leader in China who built the giant ships to take them to their new home. They were ready. The giant ships were ready. The technology was ready. It was time to go.

While the businesspeople provided the money and the scientists came up with a solution. The politician’s job was to convince the public that the real heros were the ones who stayed behind. Sacrificing their lives so humanity could continue on some distant planet. Because of course, not everyone could go. Even with the population cut in half by the wide variety of disasters, there just wouldn’t be room for everyone on the giant ships. Priority had to be given to the scientists, politicians, and businesspeople who had made this possible, as well as their families. There were a certain number of tickets available for others. Anyone willing to pay, let’s say a medium-sized fortune, was welcome to come along. The economy and our way of life had to be preserved after all.

They had recruited a small army of people to do the menial tasks aboard the ships such as cleaning, cooking, and other service related jobs. And finally, a large army of military personnel to deal with any unrest on the trip. That would leave about two billion people behind. A sad but necessary sacrifice.

Joshua was proud of what they had accomplished in such a short time. And he was very proud of his own part in that accomplishment. He smiled as he thought of how history would remember him as the man responsible for what he was sure would be called the Great Journey.

30 A.I. (After Immigration)

Just as my Irish ancestors immigrated to the United States so long ago fleeing poverty and famine, just as the people of Central America traveled the dangerous road to North America fleeing war and terror, the people of the Last Immigration fled the terror and destruction of a broken planet. Only these immigrants were the wealthy, the powerful, those who had profited off the rape of the earth. They fled the destruction they themselves had caused, leaving the rest of us here. True to their culture of use and discard, they discarded us, thinking that the earth was dying and we who were left behind would soon die with her. They justified this by proclaiming that humanity would continue and that was more important than any group of individuals.

We kept track of them on their journey as the years went by. We heard of one ship being lost because of an engineering problem. Another gone due to human error. Several ships disappeared during one leap and were never seen again. They expected to have losses, so it wasn’t that big a problem. Most of the ships pushed on to their destination.

But then, as they were within sight of their new home, the planet they were certain would save humanity, something happened. First there was some frantic talk about danger and explosions. None of us here could make out what exactly was happening. And then, with the feeling of a gong strike echoing into silence, they were gone. All the remaining ships went quiet, as if they just disappeared. We never heard from them again.

Those of us left on earth, many of us immigrants ourselves or the descendants of immigrants, understood. The journey is long and dangerous and coming within reach of the destination does not ensure success. Often, the destination is just as dangerous as the journey.

And how did we survive when the earth was supposedly on the edge of death? Well, it appears that when you remove greed, profiteering, and the hunger for power from the equation, something remarkable happens. The earth, no longer burdened by humanity’s destructive qualities, or oppressed by the sheer weight of us, healed more quickly than we could have imagined. We who were left behind choose to honor and cherish our planet rather than use her. We put all our resources into renewable energy. We gave up cars and planes. Anyone wanting to travel does so by bike or by foot. There is no longer anything to be gained by traveling overseas. No profit to be had. Most of us are more interested in staying home, raising our families, and contributing to our smaller, more sustainable communities.

We also understood very well that the enslavement of other species and mass production of them for food was a major contributor to the destruction of the planet and the destruction of our souls. We ended that right away.

As for our brothers and sisters who immigrated to another world, who knows what happened. I’m afraid I fear the worse for them. Maybe it was asteroids or mechanical failure. It seems unlikely those things would take out all the remaining ships though. Maybe there was someone already living on the chosen planet who just wasn’t interested in making room for a ragtag bunch of immigrants. We’ll never know, but I suppose that old Irish saying on my many times great grandmother’s locket was right. “Many a ship is lost within sight of the harbor.”