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Earth. What can I say about it?
It was home, a blue-green sphere surrounded in nitrogen and oxygen that hung deep in a sea of black, with only its single satellite trailing its orbit. It was the most special of all our planets. It was the only planet in the solar system that not only harbored life but intelligent life, life that learned to brave the ocean waters and took to the air and eventually flew in space.
I had left the planet on four separate occasions, two International Space Station trips and one moon mission. The fourth time I got lucky, if you can really call it luck.
Humans set foot on Mars in 2033; since then we'd built a city of habitats that sustained our astronauts. We created a medical center—where our first Martians were born—and a science facility to continue work NASA had been doing on advanced propulsion systems, plus numerous mining stations around ancient craters and volcanic regions, scooping up precious metals such as iron, copper and nickel in addition to using the planet's large supply of carbon and hydrogen to produce pure silicon for our electronics and solar panels.
It is now the year 2059, which means that for over twenty-six years we learned to survive and even thrive on Mars's hostile surface and within a dense cave system we found below. We drilled for water, made our own oxygen and grew all our food in greenhouses.
What I wouldn't give to be back in 2033, watching from Earth as we took our first steps on the Red Planet. I'd leave NASA and go to my old home, the one in Houston, before the wife and I moved our family to the New York apartment. I'd look at all my old things, smoke a cigar in the garage and drink one of those homemade beers my neighbor used to brew. I'd kiss my wife and kids, and grill up some steaks in the backyard, all while the moon complemented a cloudless blue sky just above the seven-foot-tall privacy fence that surrounded my castle. I'd do all of it without wearing a space suit.
It would be years before I'd feel a cool breeze on my face that wasn't kicked up by a cheap rotary fan or a decontamination burst.
In early December of 2043, my moon mission ended. It went like this: We had mined yet another asteroid captured and placed in lunar orbit by a crew before mine. I then worked at a moon base that housed twenty-one men and women. To this day, everyone on Mars believes those twenty-one brave astronauts are dead. Without the natural resources needed to maintain daily life, even a team of the smartest humans would fall to the hands of death. Mars has those resources; the moon never did.
A little over two years later in the early part of 2046, I was on my way to Mars. It wasn't meant to be a one-way trip, and, if I had known the fate of my family's world, I would have stayed with them.
After my crew of eight landed, we got the truth from NASA. The whole world had known of the planetary body heading toward us for years, but they told us it was nothing to worry about. They told us it wouldn't come between Earth and the moon. That was the quiet lie that only the US government had known about, the shameful truth that had plagued those few who were in the know. She was coming for us, and we could do nothing about it.
