18: Chloe – Do As the Spaceman Does

18: Chloe – Do As the Spaceman Does

end of the world

Earth.

My whole world. The only world any of us had ever known sat silently below, encased in ice, flashing with lightning against a black void. It reminded me of that famous NASA picture, Blue Marble, and I could think of no more apt description for what I was seeing.

Kinsley, or James, unbuckled his seatbelt and rubbed his hands with glee, and gave a childlike “Yippee!” before launching himself from his chair. He glided through the zero-G air. Sealed in a perimeter of glass, the lobby was his tank and I was a diver waiting for him to pull off his latest trick. I doubted he could top the last one.

“Fuck it.” I said.

I unbuckled my own belt and pushed away from my chair. Maybe James had been trained or perhaps it was the thrill of the moment, but he gracefully bounced around the lobby like he’d been an astronaut all his life. I on the other hand, spent a quarter hour flailing between the ground and ceiling.

“Stage one complete.” A voice over the tannoy spoke. “All departments please report your status.”

“Be a dear and let them know we’re safe.” James said. “Green app, bottom of the screen.”

I found the app and stuttered into the mic.

“Err, we’re fine?” I said. “Me and Kinsley. James. This is Chloe by the way. Chloe Heralds.”

“Status received, thank you Chloe.” Came the polite response.

The app ticked both our names off and lumped us together at the top of a list under Class-A Executive Administrators. Other classes or ranks or job descriptions or whatever soon filed themselves into neat rows.

“I’m surprised,” I said, turning the screen to James. “Your rank’s barely over halfway through the administration column.”

“Oh?” he said, halfway through an aerial cartwheel. “And why does that surprise you?”

“You’re the boss aren’t you? You saved all our lives. I’d have thought you’d be sat on a throne calling yourself king.”

He hit the ceiling and pushed back, grabbing me mid fall and pulling me back to our seats. For the first time I saw his expression sour.

“Don’t ever say that again.” He said. “I did what I had to, to save as many people as I could. I didn’t do it to rule them and I certainly didn’t do it to be remembered as their savior. We’re all in this together, Chloe. We do our small parts so the whole of us, or as many of us as possible, survive.”

“Oh, so your new world order’s gonna be communist.”

“New world order? That implies an ideal of permanence, that we know a better way. Life is experimentation. We drop the old ways when they no longer work.”

“So is that what all those people are? All those human lives we left on Earth to die?”

Kinsley at least had the decency to look troubled. “When it comes to survival, we aren’t a species or a society or even a nation. The human race is a body, albeit one with detachable limbs. ”

“And in that body, you’re the big brain.”

“Perhaps, but what’s a brain without a heart? What’s a brain without all those menial jobs people look down on? You think you can live if your liver went on strike? You think your brain can function without lungs pulling in oxygen or your digestive system in working order?”

“So what, every department’s an organ? And the people in it, we’re just cells?”

“Precisely, and only by cooperating can mankind redeem itself.”

I scoffed. “I’ll ignore the fact you lifted that from a movie about the world’s end. What about ambition? What if one of your cells wants to set itself up above the others?”

“Let them, as long as they’re aren’t taking from those around them.”

“And if they do?”

“What do you call a cell left growing unchecked, Chloe? It’s a cancer. You cut it out before it kills the rest of you.”

“Some might call that tyranny.”

“Tell that to masses dying because their leaders won’t share.”

“Like you didn’t share your way off a dying planet?”

James’s glare intensified. A red vein bulged from the side of his temple. This is it, I thought. This was when I got to see the real James Kinsley. His brows creased, his vein popped, his hands gripped the armrests until their knuckles turned white and he locked eyes on mine, ground his teeth with a guttural growl and showed me who he really was.

By welling up.

“If I could have saved them, I would have!”

He pushed away from the seat again, this time spinning towards the elevator. When it didn’t come quickly enough, he fled around back, to the staircase, and I was left alone without any clue how to follow.

I strapped myself back into the seat and flicked through my tablet, trying to uncover everything, anything to fill the gaps in my knowledge. One app listed drone numbers, half active despite the upturn. I clicked on one, watching recordings of the Earth from the last few hours.

Melting buildings and then a superstorm, and now all the cameras seemed stuck upside down. One found a survivor standing on scaffold outside a building. A scratch on the lens obscured the man’s face but everything else was clear. He dropped a bottle off the edge of what had been the top floor of an apartment block, now the bottom dangling over sky. The bottle spun into the swirling stew of clouds below. The man swayed on drink, watching it fall. Then he raised a leg out, screamed at the world, opened his arms and stepped forward.

Shit. It was a suicide.

The man fell forwards, off the edge. Slowly. Maybe gravity wasn’t as strong upside-down, but his feather fall allowed him the time to change his mind and twist in mid-air to grab a winch trailing beneath him. It ran a few feet before it stopped, and he clung to it, looking down, back to the camera. When he caught his breath, he tossed his head back and wailed silently through the screen. He almost looked like my ex’s best friend, but he curled into a ball at the end of the rope to sway there before I could get a good look.

Below the recording window, a dozen comments showed the footage was already trending. Five minutes into outer space and we were back to binging screen data. I turned it off in disgust, hoping the man would be alright.

A whole five seconds passed before I checked if he was.