The Nature of Change

Those We Leave Behind (Terry 02)

THREE DAYS LATER

My explanation done, I rest my hand on her shoulder as she wipes a tear from her eye.

"At least we don't know they'll wipe us out for sure," she tries to console herself. I know better than to interfere when she's like this. Instead I simply sit there, hoping my warm hand on her back will be enough. Beatrice gives one wracking sob, and then composes herself.

"What about Gerard?"

"What about him?" I ask, in my usual calmly resigned tone.

"We can't just... tell him all this, can we? If he knows all of his friends might die..."

"Oh."

"And we can't... damnit, all of us have friends we can't just not take with us!" Bea starts to cry again.

She's right. And yet... there isn't an infinite amount of room in the bunker. As hard as it is, we can't take everyone. I'm fine, because I've never been one to make civilian friends. Beatrice is the only exception, and... well, we took it further than just friendship. But not everyone has the luxury of a self-contained crew they can go into the bunker with. Civilians so often have these interweaving networks of friends, so that if you were to allow people to bring their closest friends along you'd be taking half the population of a good-sized city from just one person. And Beatrice and Gerard are no exceptions.

I don't know if Gerard can take it. He's too young. Six-year-olds are not built to process apocalypses.

At least Harry might be able to. He's twenty-one, and a fairly reclusive nuclear engineer. In Aquilino's second call, he told me that Harry was on the bunker intake list, and he got a similar call yesterday.

Well, Aquilino told me a lot of things.

The bunker is being built by a new organization called the Mustard Seed Foundation. (I'm not quite sure they thought through the name quite well, though, because that particular parable is more about humility than resilience.) They were tasked - in an astonishing stroke of good sense - with keeping as much of humanity's cultural and scientific knowledge as possible, while leaving out the big societal problems as much as possible.

They're building the thing to be completely sealed off from Earth's surface, and to be completely self-sustaining. They'll grow plants using lights specifically tailored to help photosynthesis, powered by nuclear reactors running off of uranium mined from the walls. (When I asked about uranium in the walls, Aquilino assured me that the walls I'll be looking at from inside the bunker are not the walls with uranium in them. Whatever that means.) They picked their site pretty much for that exact reason. Carbon dioxide will be scrubbed by specialized high-temperature thermal reactors using a process I didn't quite get. Pretty much everything seems to rely on the reactors, from the charging stations for the ubiquitous battery-powered motors to the heat for industrial operations. At least they're spread out fairly well...

Beatrice calms down again. I can tell that her grief isn't gone, but at least she's holding it together.

"I'll tell him," she says, getting up.

"Tell him what, though?" I wonder.

"Oh, I don't know, you have a deployment, and he gets to come along? He's always wanted that, hasn't he?" Beatrice takes a big, ragged breath in as she composes herself to tell Jerry.

I nod solemnly. I hate to lie to him like this... but what choice do I have?

I inhale with finality, and then... "I'll tell him. Not now, not like this. Tomorrow."

Beatrice walks off to the kitchen, breathing still shaky.

I swing my legs up onto the bed and pull the covers over me, staring up at the ceiling, lacking the raw willpower needed to flick the light switch. Funny how different I am when aboard the Ignatius. The bunker will be like the Ignatius, I think, except I won't be coming back home.

Deep down, somehow, I know. Nobody wants to say it, but something about those aliens...

... says that they're here to kill us.

====================================

It's been three hours.

I lay still, staring at the ceiling, trying in vain to divine a course of action from the patterns in the ceiling popcorn. I wonder why it's even there at all, and whether all that effort was even worth anything. Why bother doing that, when a bunch of pricks on the other side of the universe decided we were going to die without ever getting to know us?

It just doesn't make sense.