As The Stars Winked Out In The Velvet Sky

Short fiction with monthly prompt

When was the last time I saw a star, twinkling like a gemstone nestled within the dark velvet cloth of a rich midnight blue sky?

Many years had passed by since I found myself upon this strange world alone, looking out at the sky, so different to the one I had so often gazed upon at home on my parents farm. As a child, I had always been transfixed by the night sky. I would climb from my bedroom window at the farmhouse, run out into the fields to gaze, enraptured, upwards, dreaming.

Then as the years passed the Great Disasters began to strike us. Fields which were once filled with crops lay fallow, the ground dried, cracked, parched. The sea levels rose and monstrous waves swept inwards, causing catastrophic damage to homes and lives. The Sun beat down relentless. We were losing ground against the death throes of our own planet — and that was when the call went out among us.

The populace was dwindling. World governments grasping at any slight chance their scientists could throw their way. And so the Pods were commissioned. Worldwide — for the first (and last) time ever, the whole of Earth united behind this plan.

Volunteers, rigorously tested and prepared, frozen into a deep hibernation, were placed in the Pods. Two in each. Man and woman. Adam and Eve. We were the Last Hope for humankind. We had long since given up on any possibility of mass evacuation from the planet. We simply didn’t have the resources left to build the ships and stations that would be needed. So just a few then. A scant few, sent out in all directions. So that maybe, someday, some of us would start over again. Would survive.

I’ve no idea how long my Pod floated, slow, minimum propulsion, through space. I know nothing about the other Pods, nothing about Home. The Pods didn’t carry anything other than the Pairs — and the means to keep us barely alive in our deep sleep for as long as….well, until they couldn’t do it any more.

Before we left, I had gone out to the ruins of the family farm. Abandoned long-since for an air cooled apartment complex in the closest metropolis. I travelled out late in the day to avoid the highest heat, took a mirrored tent to set up in the minimal shade cast by the remains of the old building, scavenged for salvage as it had been by the roaming Packrat groups.

That night I lay outside, on the still scorching, scorched earth. Looking up.

All I could make out was the faintest twinkle of one or two of the very brightest stars in the deep dark blackness. We had done that too, hidden even the promise of the wider universe from ourselves. Destroyed that sight, that hope, for the coming generations of children (dwindling in numbers though they were). So much pollution, belching out of factories, manufacturing plants, energy producing towers.

Constant, evil, cloying blackness, filling the skies, darkening the clouds, and finally forming a barrier, thick and inky. So that, one by one, the stars winked out in the velvet sky.

A week later I presented myself to the scientific sector at Mission Control.

Sunk into a tube of conducting gel, wired and intubated, I was ‘frozen’. Or at least that was the term the governments had given out for use in common parlance. In reality, it’s too far advanced a process for me to be able to understand fully what the doctors had told me; yet I would imagine it comes closer to stasis, suspended animation. Body nourished with basic nutrients, brain waves monitored, muscles stimulated with minute electro-pulses, core temperature kept so low that it mimicked death, but wasn’t death.

We were never introduced to the other volunteers. The Chosen Ones (as people had taken to calling us) never attended social mixers, or even trained together. The World Council had made their decisions. Only two from each major power. One man, one woman, chosen from the vast numbers of volunteering masses, narrowed down by rigorous screening to those — us — two. Our names and faces were closely guarded secrets. Everyone working on the last steps of the programme of the highest security level possible. Those left behind were not to know who we were until we were gone. Safety and the already volatile and teetering peace of the world was at stake. More than that. The entire chance for continuation of the human race was at stake.

So, I, lucky Chosen One, was ‘frozen’ — and the Pods, containing Adams and Eves, were to be taken up through the poisonous pollution clouds in one large container shuttle. As the shuttle maintained orbit, at regularly marked and calculated intervals a Pod would be dispersed. Like seed pods, from which they took their name, floating out to the far edges of the universe and perhaps beyond.

I knew nothing more until I awoke. Not knowing when and not knowing where. I was disoriented. Wouldn’t you be? My tube, within the Pod, was lying at an angle, my head diagonally downwards. Which made for an awkward exit, weak and dizzy as I was. It was dark in the Pod, the last of the power in it’s banks of tiny cells programmed to be used for reanimation. At least the Pod seemed to be still, no movement. If I was lucky, when I used the manual door-lock on the outer shell I would emerge onto a planet with at least minimally breathable air and not an atmosphere-less asteroid where only imminent death awaited.

First though, in the dark, wobbling and confused, I tried to locate the second tube, the second person. My Eve.

It was an easy enough task. There was only really room for the tubes and two emergency packs for exploration and settlement, holding everything we were told we would need, in packs small enough to be easily carried on our backs. Nowhere to hide on Emergence.

Yet, it took me a longer time than I had expected. For she had not Emerged. Her tube was still sealed, all small signs of life being maintained switched off when the power cells had drained their last.

I felt for entrance to a survival pack. Located clothing. Next a torch light with which to examine the second tube. I wasn’t yet thinking clearly enough to feel any fear and trepidation before flooding the tiny Pod with light. What I saw when I did broke through that haze and filled me with horror, despair and pain.

My Eve. Whoever she had been (whatever original nationality, as the World Council had decreed we would be mixed and selected at random), she was no more.

Who knows at what point in our journey the mechanics of her tube had failed. Long enough that much of her body had decayed, liquid components oozing into the supporting, cushioning gel, mixing by osmosis. The occasional small patch of gel remained clear enough to see through to bone.

My terror rapidly gave way to sorrow however. Wherever the Pod had landed, I would now have to face life — or death — alone. The dwindling reserves of air within the Pod were urging me on and out. I had to steel myself and turn the locking mechanism, push open the hatch and look without.

With a sob of relief I realised that I could breathe. The air wasn’t perfect, but perhaps with a filtration device it could be sufficient. Crawling inelegantly out of the Pod, dragging both packs along with me, I sat upon the surface of this new planet and looked around me. It was neither dark nor light. Only time would tell if it was day or night (turned out it was neither, I’ve had to leave that concept behind me as this planet remains constantly bathed in a red light). It seemed neither particularly fertile nor barren. Not lush with vegetation and watering holes, my new home is perhaps most akin to desert, or Serengeti-like.

I discovered there was animal life, but nothing large and predatory. There were edible varieties of vegetation; and nothing I ate has killed me yet, though there are one or two plants I will never touch again. Not even with a bargepole, were I to have access to such a thing. In caverns below the surface there are small pools of liquid. Not water, but sweet and quenching, life sustaining just the same.

I remember as a very young child, my grandmother telling me a tale she remembered from a book read to her by her own grandparents. A story of a man, Robin’s son, though who Robin was and his significance to the tale was not held in her memory. The man was washed up upon an island and learned to live alone with the resources he found round him. I am like a space age version of him. Only nobody will ever tell my tale. There will likely be no-one to tell it to.

So I’ve lived. Below this strange reddened sky, with no idea where I am. I’ve lived alone and I’ll die alone. I don’t know how old I am, I have no clue as to days passing here, let alone years, but I feel myself aging. It’s been a pleasant life, in it’s way. Quiet, stress-free; I’ve slept when I’ve felt the need to sleep and I eat when I feel hungry. Yes, I’ve felt the lack of human companionship, but there are some friendly little souls among the creatures I’ve met here, who often visit and keep me company. I’ve always been somewhat self-contained anyway. By virtue of growing up an only child on a remote rural farm I guess.

That’s where my thoughts take me more and more these days. My movement is restricted now, I sit or lie in my small camp and all I have left to me are my own thoughts, my memories of home. So I look up at that red sky and close my eyes, imagine in the darkness the blinking and sparkling of a host of tiny, pinprick lights. Then as I drift away, I see again those stars wink out in the velvet sky of my youth.

The Prompt

Happy New Year to All, and welcome to January 2023.

For this month’s prompt here at Rainbow Salad I’m asking for a piece of Science Fiction — and over on Counter Arts, we are similarly looking to the future:

So write poetry or fiction here, nonfiction goes over to Counter Arts please!

Tagging a few people to hopefully get us started with our sci-fi:

Will Hull — Arthur Dewson — Reece Beckett — Asterion — Carlos Garbiras — Marc Barham — yesnodunno — Pam Saraga — Jackie Olsen — Napoleon — Raine Lore — Aimée Gramblin — Alan J. Schwarz — Vic Spandrio — Fox Kerry — Joe Merkle — Lisu Mei — Harry Stefanakis — aleXander hirka — Angelina Der Arakelian — Mariam Dalhoumi, PhD — frnkflwrs — Hermione Wilds Writes — Amanda Laughtland — Lover Boy in Space — Mia Miller — Miyah Byrd — Moony Thinker — Zed Fender — Roo Benjamin — Sieran Lane — Skye Mo'ipulelehua Kahoali'i

Thank you as ever for reading!

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