2052: An Existential Crisis

Spring

Spring

The Abyss of Nothing: Part I

The year was 2052. Life was dying. Earth was a sphere of lava. They looked at the screen in their spaceship and wondered in despair. Sometimes the light is as dark as the darkness itself. Amidst the dripping distant dim radiation of the stars and galaxies, the cold realities of life dawned on them. That they were mortal and time was running thin. There is the dark in this world and then there is the darkness. They looked outside at the damp loneliness of the universe; the hollow dots of starlight were submerged in a pure tight emptiness. They looked at Earth burning on the screen inside the space ship and wondered about the friends and family they had left behind. The blue planet was a sea of fire. They saw rivers boiling to a steam, mountains crumbling and forests burning. Was this the retribution of God?

Now they questioned the future of man and what was to become of the animal that could use language. They could only wait for death to slowly choke them. The oxygen could only last another week and the food was running short. Yet despite this death sentence, there were none who were equipped to take their own lives and they had that choice. They would fight till the end, clinging on to a vague hope of eternal life. On Earth people killed themselves every day despite being free and perhaps that is why they did kill themselves, because they were voluntarily permitted to do so. They would look at each other and look out into the recesses of space and they could see their lives flashing before them and they saw their youth and their adolescence and their transformation into manhood and it made them sad that they were facing the possibility that life would be no more. Each of them came to recognise that time was precious and that they were human. They lay in gaze at the reality of it all with the dark reaches of the universe piercing the corners of their imaginations. They would laugh and talk and recite their heroics in life and smoke cigarettes knowing that nothingness was impending. Some were calm and were resigned to their fate, while some were anxious and worried about eternal negation. They looked at the burning planet and sought answers for its flamed fate. Maybe it was because the people had been so selfish. Maybe it was the needless wars, the gratuitous violence or the abuse of animals. Maybe it was the pollution of rivers, the destruction of rain forests or the melting of the ice-caps. Maybe it was because of the corrupt hearts of men. Or maybe, just maybe, it was life. They looked at each other and gazed into the mistakes of their retrospective souls and saw the limits of their intuition. They discussed all the living they had done, the beers drank on the hot humid days, the fights, the parties, the joys and worries of living when they were alive. They realized how foolish they were to be distressed when on Earth, given that in truth a certain death awaited them no matter how they approached life or how they lived. The silence became a release from the expectations of society. The darkness awoke a beacon of knowledge within their anxiety ridden hearts. They finally saw when they actually could not see, for it was the bleak universe that ambushed their last refuge before they perished in the sands of the abandoned.

The ships were about the size of a grocery store. They had provisions for food that could last eighteen months and that was only prolonging the inevitable. They had been built in space as it was too heavy to launch from Earth such was the weight they exerted. There were dorms for beds and a kitchen area and a sort of day area even though there was no longer any need for such things in space. They were housed with a sizeable amount of distilled water which was rationed to every person. Why they rationed the supplies was bewildering for the supplies would run out at some stage regardless.

There were many ships built, for when the Earth was destined to be no more, the minds and hearts of men looked for an escape no matter how futile that escape would turn out to be. It is said that the animal always fights to the bitter end to maintain its survival. The gazelle will kick at the hyenas that devour it; the mouse will bite and scratch the snake whose fangs penetrate its neck and man faced with a terminal cancer lives on as if he will live perpetually. Thus, these magnificent feats of engineering were built in a desperate attempt to prolong the durability of the species that is man. It took three years from initial concept to the finished article that was tested and deemed safe for use. The designs had been in the vault of an engineering firm for some time but it was only when the end was nigh and man's desperation reached evaporation point that the construction was fast tracked. Some men or I suppose most men were convinced this would be the road to heaven or to a greener pasture just like the conquistadors who landed on South America all those years ago in search of the riches and freedom that those undiscovered lands possessed. Men have a habit of only seeing the gold when it is in fact pyrite they clutch in their tight grasp. The ships were initiated into production quickly. Men slaved themselves with the promise that their family would be taken care of. The governments provided the finance for such an expedition on the same premise, that they themselves and their loved ones would be some of the few lucky inhabitants that would make the trip into space. Space was the last frontier of the troubled soul. Men were blasted into the outer echelons of space to piece together these mother ships. Many of them never returned to Earth again. Many of them never saw their families again.