After Earth

2072 AD Antarctica, Earth

Lily Carmichael is grasping her mother’s hand, hoping not to get lost. Lily, fifteen, thinks herself about seven years too old to be holding her mother’s hand, but there are literally hundreds of people ahead of them, all trying to move in an orderly fashion from the staging area to the actual platform that would grant them access to the Espérer, the rocket that promised them salvation.

“Where’s your father?” her mother, Rebecca, asked, her voice filled with rising concern.

“I’m right here, Bec,” her husband, Paul, yelled. He was always overly polite and as a result, there were now six people separating him from his wife and daughter. Lily knew this was all too typical of her dad, but she loved him for it.

“Catch up,” Rebecca demanded, and he tried to thread his way through the moving mass. There were people jostling back and forth, raising the air of tension, mixing with the cool temperature.

Lily examined the dull silver bracelet around her thin wrist. Somehow it contained her entire life. Her name, height, weight, medical history, school transcripts, and other arcane data that would ensure her life would resume once the transport ship departed Earth. Every one of the teeming masses around her wore an identical bracelet, biometrically encoded for each passenger. The massive ship stood like a silent sentinel in its gantry. Liftoff was six hours away and not a moment too soon if you asked her.

“Finally made it,” a voice said behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, and Lily saw an old woman, wrapped in what seemed to be three layers of outerwear, shuffling behind her. The arctic air was cool, but not so chilly that she needed so many clothes. Once aboard the ship, of course, such outerwear would be superfluous and stored away for their descendants.

“Made what?” the man next to her asked. He was brown-skinned and clearly a stranger to the woman, but he was making conversation, which was better than most of the people crushing them. There was a feeling of resignation and sadness that hung like a thick fog over the people. Lily, though, was more excited about the prospects ahead of her; that is, when she wasn’t weepy about leaving others behind.

“Seven continents!” the woman declared and let out a laugh. “As soon as I received my notification that I made the cut, I booked a series of trips. I wanted to visit every continent while I still had the chance. Got here last night, making this the seventh.”

“Impressive,” the man replied in a deep voice that Lily liked. “Of course, that didn’t leave much time for sightseeing.” He sounded like an actor or pod commentator.

“What about you? How many you see?”

“Well,” he said to fill the gap as he thought. “Born in Africa, studied in Europe, and took a vacation to Brazil, so that’s three.”

“And this makes four, not too bad,” she said. “Corinne Levy.”

“Glen Mosri,” he replied.

The two chatted amiably as the line slowly fed them toward the ship. Their conversation was interrupted as Lily’s father tried to squeeze by them. “Sorry. Excuse me. Trying to reach my family.”

“Slow down, son,” Mosri said. “They’re not leaving without you.”

“Sorry, there’s some sort of problem behind us,” the man said, still scanning the masses ahead of him.

“Right here, Dad,” Lily said reassuringly.

“Oh, she’s a pretty one,” Corinne said, helping herself to a hunk of Lily’s pale blond hair. She stroked it in a friendly way, and Lily let her even though it sort of creeped her out. She’d been feeling this way for the last few weeks; suddenly every little thing bothered her as they prepared to leave their home and come to Antarctica for The Departure.

Her family got word three years ago they were among the precious few selected to leave Earth aboard the ark program. A transport ship would carry them to a docking station just outside of Earth’s atmosphere. There countless ships from every continent would form the six massive arks scheduled to leave the solar system behind and fly for a century to a new world. A new chance for humanity. Lily would be long dead before the ship arrived at the world they named Nova Prime. But her children or grandchildren would be alive and set foot on an alien world they would call home. The remainder of her life would be spent living on the Denkyem, whatever that meant. Her mother kept giving her the translation, but it never stuck in her head.

Paul finally caught up to them, craning his neck to see past Rebecca to ensure their two boys, Max and Zach, were in sight. He made a satisfied sound and fell into step beside his daughter.

“Caught you,” he said.

“You would have found us eventually,” Lily said.

“I know, but I want us together until we’re settled. This is chaos.”

“Actually,” interrupted Mosri, “it seems as orderly as you can expect. No protestors, no panic, not much weeping and wailing.”

Paul looked around once more, absorbing the sight of hundreds of men, women, and children, representing countless cultures and countries, all united for a chance at survival. Lily also took it all in, a sense of awe slowly replacing the discomfort she’d felt moments before.

“That’s thanks to the Rangers, I think,” Paul said. “They’re everywhere. Good thing, too, there are others desperately trying to cut the line.”

Lily saw the brown-uniformed men and women of the United Ranger Corps nearby. They stood at the edges of the gangway, spread out every few yards. The arrival of the Rangers more than a decade earlier meant a unified police force to ensure the ships got built and the selected passengers made it safely to the remote continent and aboard the transport ships.

“What got you the golden ticket?” Mosri asked.

“The what?” Lily asked

“Sorry, the invitation to join the exodus.”

“Oh,” Paul said, still sounding uncertain. “I’m a network engineer and my wife’s a teacher.”

“Secure roles, needed roles,” Levy said. “I’m a botanist. They tell me I am running a hydroponics bay, and I can plant a whole square yard of whatever I please.”

“Wow, that sounds great,” Lily said, finally ready to join the conversation. “What about you?”

Mosri smiled and said, “I am a physicist. They want me working in the astrometrics section, studying this wormhole space.”

“Maybe you can explain it to me, then,” Lily prodded. “I know we’re going faster than light, but how does that work?”

“Magic,” Levy said, and laughed a little too loud for Lily’s taste.

“Feels like magic, doesn’t it,” Mosri said, his voice dropping a notch, sounding like one of her teachers. “The Lightstream engines will warp the space around us. You see, the engines will generate a powerful wave that can compress space-time in front of the arks and expand space-time behind it.”

“Space-time?”

Mosri laughed and paused to consider his answer. Lily shifted the backpack on her right shoulder, trying to find a more comfortable position for the weight. It felt far heavier than it was; her hopes, fears, and memories were packed in there, all weighing her down.

“Okay, you know about the three dimensions.”

“Length, width, and depth,” she said.

“Right. Now imagine space having three dimensions.” He paused and Lily nodded, tucking a stray hair behind her left ear.

“Now scientists like me consider time having three dimensions as well. While space has dimensions that work side by side, time’s dimensions happen one atop the other so space-time combines the two into a singular formula we use to calculate all sorts of things.”

“You lost her,” Paul said. “She’s an artist.” Lily made a face at her father.

“I bet she’s going to see all sorts of new inspiration when we leave the system,” Mosri said.

“So you’re compressing the space in front of us,” Lily said, trying to keep it all straight and refusing to let her father know how right he was. This was just more information than she was really ready to absorb, but it beat standing silent like so many of the others around them.

“Look, it’s like the prow of a boat slicing through the water and creating a wake,” he said. “Can you visualize that?”

“Sure,” Lily replied. That was easy, especially since she loved going out on the family boat every summer. She was going to miss that—the warm sun, the gentle breeze, the sea water, things she would never experience again—so she tried to press the memories like flowers in a book for permanence.

“The arks will actually be floating in a bubble along the wave being generated, literally surfing through space at a speed faster than light relative to objects outside the bubble,” Mosri concluded.

“Wow,” Paul said. “That’s the first time I heard anyone explain Lightstream in a way that makes sense.”

“You’re welcome, all part of the service,” Mosri said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Lily said. The boat imagery really did help her sort of comprehend how they would travel in space. The idea that the trip would last a century, even at those speeds, boggled her mind.

“Mister…”

“Call me Glen,” he said with a broad smile.

“I’m Lily,” she said.

“Nice to meet you.” They briefly shook hands.

“If we’re traveling faster than the speed of light, and the arks will travel for a century, where exactly are we going?”

“Interesting question,” he said. “We’re living along the fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy, on one of the spiral arms. We’re heading inward, toward the galactic center. I’d estimate we’d be about thirty-two parsecs from here when we get to Nova Prime.”

A parsec, she recalled, was a measure for the speed of light, how far it would travel over one hundred years, and it still sounded like an impossible distance.

Lily then realized she was being spoken to, but her mind had wandered and she looked around wide-eyed to see who had addressed her.

“Sorry, ma’am,” she said to Levy.

“So polite,” the older woman said, winking at Paul. “Nice job.”

“What were you asking me?”

“I asked about leaving home. Where were you?”

“Connecticut,” she said.

“Was it hard?”

Was it hard having a chance to live when she knew everyone she left behind—grandmother, cousins, friends, teacher, priest, and so many others—were being left to die a horrible death? Was it hard knowing that her parents received death threats from the jealous neighbors when their carefully guarded secret was leaked?

Damned right it was hard.

It felt impossible. Their carefully weighed and measured belongings had to be shipped ahead, and they were expected in Antarctica within forty-eight hours of departure. In between there were hours spent filling out additional details on the Web, physicals at the military base up in Groton, and determining what they would take. Her dad drove everyone nuts trying to scan and digitize everything they owned—diplomas, schoolwork, family records, whatever. Her mom was a pack rat and had generations of family memorabilia and old print photos that she swore she would one day scan and organize. Now it was being done hastily and she, along with her brothers, were pressed into service.

Max’s pal Lou was unable to keep the terrible secret and when word got out it was hard. There were tears. Lots of tears. Everyone was cozying up to her at home and at school. She got stares, and the family had to turn down requests for interviews. Everything about The Departure was being handled through Project Next Generation, and it was a hassle to gain permission to speak to the press so they routinely said no, ending the discussion.

Her friends, the boys and girls she grew up with, were upset. Why did she get to live and they to die? Some insisted on spending lots of time together, and boys begged her for sex, hoping she’d get pregnant and thinking they would have to let the new father come along. That was tough. She was just thirteen when they got word, and her changing body was just one more nuisance to deal with. Instead, Lily shut down, limiting her time with friends and keeping to the ones she knew and trusted the most.

The extended family wanted their share of the Carmichaels, too. A last chance to tell stories and give them their own mementos for scanning and preservation. Lily could just imagine how many terabytes of material were being collected from families around the world. In her global studies class, she knew there were still parts of Asia and Africa that lacked the technology for such preservation. How much was being lost?

“Yeah,” she said, summing it all up in one word.

“I left behind an ex-husband, two adult children, and my dachshund. So, Lily, you’re far from alone.”

Lily looked at her with fresh eyes.

“Your own children?”

The woman nodded, her eyes starting to tear up. “One’s a museum curator, the other’s a hairdresser. Not exactly high demand jobs on a spaceship. We’re the lucky ones.”

Lily was tired of that phrase. She had been dubbed a “lucky one” ever since Lou spilled the secret, but despite being named a traveler, she didn’t feel lucky. Instead, she felt incredibly sad. She was leaving behind friends and the future she had dreamed about. There was comfort in all five members of the family traveling together; it was incredibly difficult to say good-bye to so many and so often. There were endless parties, sleepovers, chat sessions, and more as the months became weeks then days. Her mom insisted the final week be as family-centric as possible, with just Nana, Paul’s mother, visiting. This way they could hope to just slip away.

Their personal departure was anything but easy. A military transport, protected by three Rangers, arrived in the wee hours of the morning, waking up the neighborhood. As burly men in gray jumpsuits loaded their approved belongings in the rear, the family wandered the house, taking it all in one final time.

Paul shut the door behind them and automatically locked it, which seemed silly since no one was going to take the house. There was little sense for those left behind to move anywhere. There was no escaping the inevitable death that awaited those left behind.

Lily was raised knowing that Earth began rebelling against its inhabitants in the decades before she was born, prompting the plan to evacuate the planet. But despite the best planning by Project Next Generation, they kept losing time. There were now massive storms with great regularity. School was repeatedly being switched to online mode when it grew too dangerous to leave the house. There were shortages that had led to governments falling and people starving. Connecticut was a fortunate location, but even they felt the deprivation.

Creating the United Ranger Corps helped restore some confidence in the crazy scheme to save as much of mankind as was possible. The Rangers were established just when her older brother was little, but she could sense everyone around her exhaling, as if they had been bottling up all this tension and could finally let it out. Not that they were great wizards and could make things better, but they certainly allowed the arks to be built and they were there to make certain her family and all the others could get to ships stationed at various locations around the globe.

Flying over the frigid white land, she immersed herself in the sensations and sights, taking in its stark features and imagining what it must have been like before the shipbuilding began. She knew from her third-grade teacher that it had been the stuff of legend. Mrs. Griffin made it sound magical, but now it was like everywhere else: filled with trucks, rails, planes, and row after row of gantries where the various ships waited. There had been an orientation vid presentation when they arrived at the staging area in Florida before the Americans were taken away from their nation for the last time. A three-dimensional program showed how each transport ship would take up an orbital position, and then all would fly toward one another in a space ballet, coming together and slowing their momentum just enough so they could link up, forming the grand ark.

This odd celestial dance was going to take place five times, following the success of the Exodus launch. A few months before, it was the first to make this attempt and it went off flawlessly. She remembered watching it late one night, holding her breath. She lost count of the number of spacecraft that came together like one of Zach’s toys and formed a colossal singular vessel. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. The Exodus successfully cruised to the edge of the solar system and back. The ship even fired up its Lightstream engine at the edge of the system to ensure all worked according to plan, and then it returned to near Earth orbit where it patiently waited for the other five to catch up.

Before the sun rose tomorrow, something like a thousand ships would start to launch. Within days they would form the arks, and the fleet would travel together. Earth would shrink on the viewscreens, diminishing in size but looming large in their hearts.

Lily felt her own eyes grow wet and hot, as the enormity of this moment settled over her.

She looked ahead, blinking away the tears, and saw the Espérer grow larger. They were nearing the entrance to the point where she could make out the Rangers at the entrance. Zach and Max were talking animatedly to the people around them, but her mother was silent, staring ahead, ignoring the conversation before and behind her.

Lily could not tell who this was hardest on. Everyone, she decided. There was no easy way to say good-bye to friends and family, knowing you were pretty much guaranteed a chance to live while they were all certain to die. Things had grown out of control the last year or so. Something about the planet’s magnetic field collapsing and she supposed she could ask Mr. Mosri about it, but right now she just didn’t seem to care. She couldn’t fix it, couldn’t save her Nana or Mrs. Levy’s dachshund.

She couldn’t save anyone.

There was a loud roar, many voices rising in volume and the sound of something breaking. All the heads turned to look behind them. Lily noticed how close they were to boarding and couldn’t believe something was happening that might keep her and her family from salvation.

Lily was shoved, nearly losing her balance, as a lean man in a rust-colored uniform rushed past her. He was accompanied by three others, and they cut a ragged path through the crowd of passengers. Craning her neck to see past them, Lily saw that one of the barricades had been breached and people were fighting to get into the queue.

The Rangers were not brandishing weapons, but instead were using their bodies to form a barrier, moving the interlopers back. She watched as the lean one was speaking gently to a couple, using words not weapons. Other Rangers came from both ends of the line and worked to keep a full-blown riot from breaking out. There were screams and shouts and more than a few wails of anguish. The teen girl couldn’t help but feel sympathy for people who knew they were being condemned to an unpleasant death.

The lead Ranger waved his arms, creating space between those waiting to board and those attempting to join them. Flanked by the other Rangers, he spoke to the crowd, and, try as she might, she couldn’t make out the words. Instead, her trained eye saw his body move. There was poise and confidence in his actions. He didn’t make broad gestures but smaller, more intimate ones. They invited dialogue, not confrontation. She watched in fascination. Leading seemed to come so naturally to him. Rather than a riot, the crowd listened and understood and willingly returned to the other side of the barricade. As they moved, the Rangers picked up the sections that had been broken and hastily restored them in place.

As quickly and as suddenly as the breach occurred, it was over. Order was restored and the sound dropped in volume but didn’t entirely vanish. There would continue to be complaints and protests until her family was safely aboard the ship. The Rangers made their way back to their posts, and those on line knew better than to applaud their efforts, further antagonizing those unlucky to be left on Earth.

Lily and her father turned around, their backs to the crowds, and continued to wait until processing resumed. There was a murmur behind her, and she turned to see the Rangers returning to their posts, led by the tall, handsome one.

“Are you all right?” he asked her, a gloved hand on her shoulder.

“Sure,” she said.

“I have to apologize for bumping into you like that,” he said.

“Well, you were in a rush,” she said, shyly smiling at him, noticing his large brown eyes.

He chuckled at that. “You could say that. But I didn’t intend on knocking you over, so I’m sorry.”

“No problem.”

“Welcome aboard,” he said.

“Hi, I’m Lily” was all Lily could manage, and she cursed herself for feeling the blood rush through her cheeks.

“I’m Joseph Raige, one of the Rangers assigned to the ship,” he said. “You know where you’re going when you’re on board?”

“Yes, I do. Thanks.” Raige sounded familiar to Lily, and she asked, “Aren’t you in charge or something?”

He shook his head, smiling all the way. “That’s my cousin, Skyler, the Supreme Commander. I’m just a Ranger.”

“Supreme Commander, that’s where I heard the name,” she said, more to herself than the Ranger.

“Yeah, Sky’s in charge of the whole operation, and he can have it. Some of us are born leaders, some of us serve best as followers,” he offered.

“You’ve got some sort of rank, right?”

He tapped the markings over his right breast. “Lieutenant,” he said.

“Nice,” was all she could manage. He had dimples and those brown eyes, the artist in her noted, and she felt herself blush.

“I have to get back to my post,” he said, and moved ahead, nodding to several others.

Her mind wandered and suddenly her family was the next to board. They paused at the entrance, all shiny and new looking, and adorned with scattered decals with pictograms and numbers. Within the cleared passengers were heading for different platforms and elevators while Rangers stood guard, even inside the ship. She wondered if these were the ones coming along.

Lily stepped over the threshold, silently saying one final farewell to the life she had led. The next step would be the beginning of something new.

One by one, her family had their bracelets scanned, confirming one last time that they were who they were supposed to be. The scan matched the passengers’ current weight against their required weight. That had been hard, maintaining a consistent weight to ensure the Espérer could properly lift off. Her dad had to swear off the Guinness, and her mom saved one final bottle of wine for the last night in the house. Zach and Max passed without a problem, and Mom turned out to be three pounds lighter, which made her smile for the first time in what seemed to be days.

Now Lily stood in front of the scanner, handing off her backpack to be weighed separately, as a technician checked the readout on a tablet. He nodded with approval and his eyes moved her along.

It was Raige, though, who handed the backpack over to Lily.

He smiled and said, “Here you go, Lily.” He remembered her name! “We can chat later, if you’d like. I’ve got a pretty rich connection to this whole Lightstream business. But right now, everyone needs to keep moving. We’re on schedule, and I’ll be busted to Private if we fall behind.”

She nodded, intrigued by his dimples and the idea that he’d want to speak with her again. Lily hurried to catch up to her mother, who had been watching with a fresh smile.

Lily took her hand once more, and they walked forward into an uncertain future. There was a flutter in her stomach, a warming feeling that spread up her chest and into her head. It was a comforting feeling, one she hadn’t felt in a while.

She was feeling excited. The adventure of a lifetime, her lifetime, was getting under way.