15 May 2012
“We have a problem. In fact no, we have two. The first problem...”
He stuttered, seemingly reluctant to continue.
“I’m so sorry, you are dying.”
I stared, frightened, into his sombre eyes.
“We tried everything, but the most we could afford to do was prevent any further damage to your body”
Further damage? I could feel adrenalin beating in my heart now as his words ricocheted in the walls of my mind.
“By the time we found you, you had been here for over an hour. Your planet’s atmosphere contains significantly less oxygen than ours. The sudden exposure to such abundance has poisoned your blood stream. Technically you shouldn’t have survived, one of the doctors remarked that it was almost as though your body was trying to recover itself. You still have time left, but less. I am so sorry...”
As loud as his voice was in my head, my own panicking mind was louder. Racing with impossible scenarios, flitters of hope, depressing realisations. Who would I say goodbye to? I had spent my life chasing my own ridiculous dream. Now it had finally become reality, but I had no one to tell, no one to share it with. I was alone. Then his voice cut through again:
“...If we had more time then we could have done more. Which I’m afraid brings us to our next problem...”
His voice suddenly faded into vibrant colour and my vision was flooded with vivid images, like I was seeing through someone else’s eyes.
“...You see, when the lightning became constant, when the rain droplets turned to acid, when the thunder started to crumble our cities, when people started to die, we had to think of something to completely eradicate the storms from our planet. We thought we had lost all hope, then a file came across my desk, a ‘plan Z’. It was the only way...”
His words morphed into wisps of shapes that curled into an entire scene before me. I was in a lavished office. A woman entered and mournfully placed a file on the varnished desk in front of me. My eyes drifted over to the reinforced window and I gazed at the dark and destructive sky outside. I felt scared, scared that this time it wouldn’t work out. The images in front of me dissolved and his voice slowly grew louder again.
“...we set up the wormholes above all of the major cities...”
I was up in the clouds, illuminated by blue lightning so close. I tried to reach out and touch it but as I grasped at strands, I felt nothing at all. Suddenly the familiar multicoloured hole in the sky grew before me, pulsating like some living organism. My vision abruptly cut to a different location. I looked around and I knew immediately where I was.
“...an optimal planet from a neighbouring solar system was located; yours...”
Surrounding me like a blanket was that infinite plane of black, tiny sparkling pinpricks fixed to its surface. It mesmerized me even more now than it did before. I wanted to stay. My eyes glanced down and I saw my planet before me. There were no clouds, no storms. No one.
“...we made certain it was completely uninhabited, and uninhabitable, before continuing the process...”
Rapid metallic machines suddenly flew past. Green lasers emitted from their underside and swept across the planet’s dusty surface. Uninhabited?
“...the planet’s greater gravity pulled the storms in from the other side...”
I watched silently as the hole in the sky slowly grew before my eyes again, and the very first torrent of clouds cascaded into the atmosphere, obscuring the tiny lights and surrounding me in a dark electric mist.
The fog lifted and the white walls appeared again.
“...little did we know that dumping the storms would transfer elements of Earth’s atmosphere, inducing an environment capable of developing life.”
As though on cue, the room suddenly shuddered with a familiar storm-induced shockwave, the lights quietly flickered. So this was what the storms were? Our entire species was created from an ignorant planet’s atmospheric waste?
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with me?” I thought almost angrily, “if the storms are keeping mine and your species alive, then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that they’re getting worse.”
He leaned forward and crossed his arms on the table, bringing his head closer to mine.
“Our only option is to set up more wormholes in order to keep our planet safe. If this happens, then the storms will eventually destroy your planet and civilisation. Your species is not advanced enough to be capable of a Total Global Evacuation. It would kill everyone on your planet, and fast. If, however, the wormholes are removed from your planet and another suitable one is used in its place, then the storms will eventually disappear and with it the elements of the atmosphere that sustain life. It will linger for a while – we are unsure for how long – but the storms are not self-sustaining. Your planet never developed any plant life, relying entirely on the replenishment of oxygen from the wormholes.”
The walls echoed with silence as his voice evanesced.
“Now you see our problem. In both futures your species dies”...
Weathered Worlds: 9/10 • Opuss № I