Ama Kit Xmas Gift - 12_2020

shoes behind him.
As he became visible, the techs looked up at him, the head pilot standing up from the other
side of the room. “Sir?” He asked, a tremble of fear penetrating even his steady timbre.
Calaway nodded, mind behind him, acknowledging the unspoken question. “We know what’s
happened,” he stated, mournful. “I’m sorry, but we can’t-”
“What happened to the landing site?” A tech besides him asked, volume rising.
“What the hell are you saying, ‘I’m sorry’”?
“Is all of Earth really like this?”
“We landed in the wrong spot didn’t we?”
The voices rose, panic breaking from the control of even his well-trained crew.
“Shut up!” Alkathet strode past him, making careful use of the voice she used on Patrick Jr.
when he misbehaved. “Listen and you won’t have so many questions.” Her snap effectively
silenced the crowd. Cooly, she continued: “My husband and I, after reviewing the data, have
come to the conclusion that we must leave Earth, go find another Goldilocks planet to inhabit. It
seems-” she held her hand, silencing the growing confusion, “-that the space phenomenon we
were caught increased our speed to the point where the normal time gap created by fast space
travel was lengthened considerably. The stars have changed slightly, the moon is farther away
from Earth than it has ever been, and Earth we have confirmed is a wasteland. No one is left; we
are moving on.” The icy silence in the room thickened, becoming not a fragile sheet as it had
been but a thick glacier, an object no voice or reason could break.
Patrick Calaway and Janine Alkathet met the passengers already gathered in the auditorium,
waiting nearly half an hour for the conditions to be suitable to relay their message. The crowd,
consisting of nearly a thousand people, was chaotic in the least, but the news was handled
without any deaths. The people cried only, weeping for the ones whose fates were lost and
unknown, for the life of comfort they had left, and an overwhelming desperation to learn of the
end. What had happened? How had the human race fallen? They guessed, but none could see
through the veils that their wealth had brought them the true answer.
Over the next twenty-four hours, the miracle that got twenty people speaking together on the
bridge stage and agreeing on a plan occurred, and it seemed they had managed to avoid the
mistakes their peers previously on-planet had made. They discussed rationally (for the most
part), and when it had, in fact, been confirmed by another physicist (who by chance happened to
have been among the passengers) that there was no way of return, they prepared for long-term
habitation. Nothing but a few raw metals and sand for glass were scavenged from Earth, for the
water that was indeed found at the poles was found to be poisonous beyond purification, but that
made no difference. The people were stranded; a drifting Noah’s arc in a vast and deadly sea.
Maybe not an islandless one, they hoped, but one filled with more unknowns than Earth’s oceans
could ever have concealed.