The End of All Things | Flash Fiction

I met her just before the beginning. Her hair parted perfectly down the centre of her head, demarcating two sets of tumbling curls that ran most of the way down her neck. Her nose jutted out from above her mask. She went up to adjust it, her mask. It would slip down again a few moments later. I imagine it was the chatter, her jaw pulling at the fabric. She would joke that her voice “yearned such to be heard in its fullness” that it would pull down the mask. She would just pull it back up again. You had to sit and admire the resolve, the way one might admire Sisyphus.

Back when it began the nights were all equally long, but could often vary in intensity. I remember this one summer evening that lasted a decade. When the clocks finally ticked over, the previous second had burned into the digital displays. That was when we returned to analogue clocks during long-distance travel. She had brought one on board and promised, promised, promised me it wasn’t contraband. I wasn’t going to make a fuss about it. It belonged to some relative, some amount of time ago. It used the latin numeral system and had a clean wooden frame but highly articulated hands, carved to look like twisting vines wrapping up metal spikes.

The time was wrong though, which was indeed an offence on the ship. As part of the realisation process we were required to keep our clocks tracked to ship time. It was a rule designed to help us adjust to this new form of being. Hopping between timestreams had the tendency to incite madness, and on one occasion a mutiny. That vessel still has yet to be recovered. She assured me that the time was not wrong, it was just unchanged. She needed to stay connected to her home or else she would go mad on this trip. After making her case, she pulled her mask back above her nose.

Some nights were a little easier. We would sit on the grass of the riverbed. Staring up, you can see the birds swooping through the air like fish, and the clouds like a pack of whales travelling throughout the skies. The first time I came here, I sat in solemn silence and ran my fingers through the blades, half expecting to be able to feel something there. Then, for a time, my fingers would meet hers instead of the cold metal of the ship hull. We would sit and watch the sunset. Each update it would get just a little bit more beautiful. The way these digital heavens replicated the colours and gradients of the atmosphere of our mother planet was an art. To think we got to experience this beauty so far from home, it would often bring me to tears.

She was never so impressed. These little trips to riverbeds or mountainsides or beach cliffs would only ever leave her sullen. It was never enough. As we arrived at the end, I found myself going alone and coming back to find her staring at an old clock. When the news reached our ship, that the situation on our home planet had deteriorated and there was no longer somewhere for us to return to, she went quiet. Apart from the first few nights, when we are all beset and felt like we were allowed to cry, I don’t believe I ever saw her mask dip below her nose again.

In the final days, I rarely ever saw her. She would sit in the holoroom and refuse to be disturbed. It got to a point where she might be in there for days at a time, so it wasn’t so unusual for her to be absent from her work or our home. I would walk by every so often to make sure she was still alright. There was a lot of crying at first. Then, rarely but often enough that I remember, there were periods where she would be beside herself in laughter.

I started getting worried when I heard her speak again, calling out names of relatives as if they were there in the simulation. I had the door forcibly opened. She was there, on that cold metal floor. As I went to remove the headset she swiped at me, ripping my mask off my face and leaving scars down my right cheek. Two other officers came to apprehend her, tranquillising her. I begged them for some lenience given the severity of the situation. They were willing to give her some time to grieve, but when they returned her to her room they saw her clock. That was when she had been scheduled for reorientation.

I’m not sure when she got out. I’ve seen her twice since we arrived on Naya Zameen. The first time was by the riverbed we had just finished terraforming. Her fingers grabbed at tufts of grass, her eyes seemed to be set on some point in the sky. Perhaps she could still, through sheer force of will, remember where the Earth had been. I had been told (warned, rather) not to interact with her. Something about triggering old habits and potentiating disaster. From a distance, I waved at her. She turned her head to acknowledge me, then returned to that point in the sky.

The second time was in an obituary. I called in some favours to have a special area set aside for her to be buried, by that river. It has been centuries since then but I still return to see her. The area has not been kept well and has fallen to the nature we had let loose on this land. Moss buries her tombstone, and vines wrap up the metal fencing. Somehow, this makes me feel at ease, as if it is exactly what she would have wanted.