Halfway to Nowhere

Flying

I breathe on the window and trace a circle around the Earth. The pale blue dot. I wonder how much longer it will be blue.

"How are you holding up?"

I turn my head away from the view and look up into my dad's eyes. Warm, sad, maybe scared. But still he smiles for me.

I shrug. "Okay, I guess. I don't really know how I'm supposed to feel."

"I know you'll miss home, but we'll build something new. Something great." He rests a hand on my shoulder and glances out of the window - only for a second, like he can't bear to look. He made a career, a life, out of fixing things, creating things. Is he feeling guilty to be turning away from this most crucial of problems?

"Something else for us to destroy," I murmur. Why should we have high hopes for ourselves, when we have so clearly given up on those we are leaving behind?

"Don't say that," he mutters, sweeping a look around as though to check nobody heard me.

I throw a glance over my shoulder too at the other people milling around this floor of the ship - politicians, entrepreneurs, royals. Those able to buy or bargain their way onto the ship, plus the lucky guests like me with a benefactor. Every Prime Minister or President must be thanking their lucky stars that they were in office for this day out of all others, every billionaire delighted that they hoarded those last few virtual coins.

Thanks to my dad's tech empire, I was shepherded along with him up the runway past glaring lights into the ship. Mum died 10 years ago, leaving me as his only family member, and leaving me with a lingering question: if she were still alive, would he have left me behind to burn with the rest of the planet? Would he have considered one more life lost among billions to be an acceptable margin of error?

Just days ago, I was in the arms of my first love. She told me it would all be okay. I told her I would never leave her behind. We were both wrong.

Dad is still looking at me, his expression pinched and pained. Though I don't feel it, I smile for him, because he smiled for me and I don't know what else to do.

"I'll be okay, once I get used to things," I reassure him. To prove my point, I move from the window and slip into my coffin-like pod as others have begun to do. "For now, it's just falling asleep, right? Easy."

His shoulders relax a little, and he pats the rim of my pod. "Right." Despite himself, a small, excited grin pulls at his lips. A lifetime of sci-fi and technological dreams had left a childlike wanderlust in him, and now we are bound for the stars. "A thousand years passing in the blink of an eye - literally, almost - and off we go towards some new home, some new world. We can build something new, something great, and one day our journey might just be a creation myth.

"Ancient hominids travelled to untrodden lands, the Māori discovered the last uninhabited islands, we sent robots to the depths of the seas and the edges of the solar system, and now... Now humans take more giant leaps again, and it all happens while we sleep."

A nervous laugh bubbles up my throat, and I realise my hands have started to shake. This might be physically as easy as falling asleep, but a daunting future lies ahead for when I re-emerge from my cryogenic slumber.

"Hey, we'll go past the year 3000." Dad lightly punches my shoulder, his eyes shining playfully as his quiet voice turns singsong. "Not much has changed but they swim underwater."

I grimace, both at the age of the song and the garbled lyrics. "Live underwater, Dad; everyone swims underwater."

"Of course." Some of the mirth fades from his expression as he glances out of one of the windows again. "Guess I should be getting settled, too." He runs a hand through his hair and looks back down at me. The temperature in the room has begun steadily dropping, and the lights overhead are slowly starting to fade to red. "Sleep well."

"Night, Dad."

He moves towards his own pod, and my view of the window is clear again.

My breath has faded from the glass, but the Earth has not. Not yet. The next time I wake it may be just a pinprick in the distance, or gone from view entirely.

Will it be fire that consumes the world, my world? Will it suffocate in smog and toxic air? Will it drown in everything we have melted?

Will the people we left behind admire us, curse us, or simply forget us?

A series of warning beeps sound through the room, alerting those few still standing to settle into their pods, and soon the lids rise in synchrony to seal us in. I can no longer see the Earth, and they can probably no longer see us, not easily anyway.

I barely feel the injection in my shoulder, but I do notice the growing pressure behind my eyes, the fog beginning to cloud my brain. The fog will not lift for 1000 years, and I will simply have to wait and see where we are then - some perverse, futuristic Sleeping Beauty.

I wonder distantly whether the human race will truly be any worse off without us.

We said we were exploring, but really we are escaping. We flee from catastrophe into oblivion.

***

As the last passenger loses consciousness, the ship drifts away from the Earth, scanning spectra for hints of life or habitable worlds. Artificial years pass without orbiting the sun, and the computer collects, analyses, and compares data. To a sleeping vessel, it announces, "Rerouting to new destination."