“It’s dying fast out there,” Aldrin remarked. “And I don’t get it. Everything that’s happening was preventable. The whole last sixty years has been like watching our business leaders drive us all toward a brick wall without ever trying to turn or swerve.”
They were in the computer lab. They were almost always in the lab these days. The ships’ giant chemical lungs weren’t cycling properly yet. Milo and Kim were pouring all their work hours into a computer model that Aldrin swore would root out the cause.
If it worked, they’d celebrate.
There was a lot of celebrating at ARK, because there were breakthroughs every day. It could rain Nobel Prizes at the ARK compound, and there still wouldn’t be enough recognition to go around. There wasn’t time.
The computer model worked beautifully. Food plants growing in the ventilator bronchia were reproducing too fast. They’d have to be spread out. Maybe some of them could be grown in the coolant chambers, where there’d be condensation.
They celebrated. Their achievement shared the news that night with a team that had discovered how to make radiation shielding out of cardboard and peanut oil.
After a while, tiring of the crowds and the bars, Milo, Kim, and Aldrin found their way to a wide-open space far from the compound, in the middle of open grass, under stars like an ocean of ice and fire.
They signed out a portable fire pit, and brought marshmallows, and sat in the middle of the Iowa night, drinking wine.
Then Aldrin said, “I miss my wife.”
What?
“Did you know I was married?” he asked. “It was a long time ago. She died quite suddenly.”
“I knew,” said Kim. She gave his arm a squeeze.
“It’s not that I would wish her back now, with things the way they are. It’s only my way of observing that this project takes being alone and kind of shoves it right in your face. I mean, being a social species is what this is all about, right? Keeping the chain going. We’re not like hamsters. Hamsters live alone. Know that? They don’t even like other hamsters. We’re more like wolves. When wolves are apart, and then they come back together, they jump around and lick each other and go all crazy. They call it ‘the Jubilation of Wolves.’?”
Something in the fire popped, sending sparks into the night.
“It’s not an easy time,” said Aldrin, “to be a lone wolf.”
He put a hand on Kim’s knee and gave it a squeeze.
Oh, man! thought Milo. What was happening here?
Kim’s mouth wobbled open. She said, “I think I’ve had enough wine,” and stood.
The hand dropped away. Aldrin focused on the fire.
“I think we all have,” said Milo. He gathered up his jacket. He draped Kim’s shawl over her shoulders.
“I’m going to stay out awhile longer,” said Aldrin, so they said their good-nights and left him there.
When they’d gone about three hundred yards, they heard a long, broken howl.
“Drunk, horny bastard,” muttered Milo.
Kim took his arm and said, “Be nice.” Nice? Milo thought about the word.
His depression had turned to raw frustration now. All their work on integration, on building a ship that worked like an organism, had become so promising. And now the great man himself was proving too human. Not only that, but his sense of appropriateness seemed to have slipped.
Fuck.
Might have known it would get complicated, Milo thought.
Problems are complicated, said the Egyptian mathematician in his head. That’s what makes them problems.
—
The night of the first lottery, they prepared Libby’s favorite supper—mac and cheese, extra cheesy, with sliced-up hot dogs in it—and watched Libby’s favorite movie, Beverly Hills Chihuahua 47. After the child fell asleep, they practically devoured each other in their tiny sleep pod.
Their message to each other was simple and unmistakable: They were a family and they loved one another.
They were not chosen.
“Libby, Libby, Libby,” Milo heard Kim whispering over her home laptop, after midnight, as the last numbers flashed. “At least Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby, Libby,” like a magic spell that wasn’t magic enough.
—
The Looking Glass took its final shape, and you’d think they had built some kind of cathedral out there on the Iowa plain. She lay across the hills like a trick of the eye, out of scale and shining.
Watching her leave the Earth was like watching a whale made of fire.
Earth and air both shook, and the whale rose—slowly, at first, still reflecting the green hills and green corn, and as it lifted away, it was like watching the Earth lift away from itself. Then the great engine bells ignited, and she crossed the sky like a second sun.
The weather changed on the hills and blew their hair and their lab jackets and clippings from the freshly mown grass, and they all squinted, the three hundred thousand ninety-two of them that remained, as the ship shot across the sky, and up, and out.
And they all went back to work, and the countdown resumed, a little faster.
—
Finally, some amateur astronomers in Mexico noticed the comet. They were calling it Comet Marie. Other people outside the fence, in different parts of the world, started putting two and two together.
“Maybe this is why all those scientists disappeared,” they said.
So a few of the ARK staff were assigned to get on the Internet and spread disinformation. There was, they said, a place in the Andes Mountains of Peru where you weren’t allowed to go and weren’t allowed to fly over. But here were some fuzzy satellite pictures of what looked like a tent city for thousands of people and several giant rockets under construction.
People swarmed into South America, storming the Andes in search of survival. They were hindered by the fact that it was getting damn hard to get around out there. Luxuries like passenger flight had crashed with the world economy. Ocean travel was expensive and dangerous and mostly under pirate control. Everywhere, law was breaking down.
Up in Iowa, they worked in peace for a while longer.
—
Months passed.
The ships took their final shapes. Their anatomical systems were tested, and the ships breathed and their hearts pumped and their brains crackled and their engines flexed.
Everywhere around ARK, work quickened and peaked. People worked harder, hit the bars harder, loved harder. They watched the clock and the skies, anticipating the reappearance of the Looking Glass and the exodus that would follow.
For the first time, many of the ARK staffers seemed to understand that their lives weren’t going to go on for much longer. They hit the bars, but they were quiet about it. Some of them began disappearing over the fence at night. Some of them wanted to see friends or family before the world died. Some of them meant to survive and wanted time to prepare.