Last of the Year

It was dawn on the last day of the year. Lavender filled the air around me. Starships ran across the sky like birds taking flight. I can still remember the sound they made when they lifted, traveling into the stars, into the sky and the clouds above. It was a beautiful sight to see on a beautiful day full of invites to parties and people singing in the streets. There were games on TV and even more drinks and food then any one person could eat. Families and friends had come together and gathered in mass inside homes, stadiums, and churches. Church bells rang out across valleys and waves of ocean splashed across beaches full of tourists and visitors from all over the world. It was the last of the year and we had taken our last tests, sang our last songs, and cheered our last cheers. The last day of the year, the last day of the Earth, the last day before a the nemesis would come. The last of the year before we take our last breath. 

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Onboard the ‘starship’ known as the ‘sword of Velham’ stood a woman in her early twenties. She sat in a seat in a row between an older man and a young teenage girl. She smelled of lavender, a perfume she bought one day on an impulse while shopping for organic fruits and vegetables.

“This is my place,” she sighed saying to herself as she began looking around the open space around her.  Beside her to her right stood an older man and then back again towards her left was a young teenage girl.

She had once been a young girl herself she thought staring at the teenager’s blonde and purple braided hair. It felt like a lifetime ago but it was only a few years. Since that time she had fallen in love, graduated college, begun her career. She was making a name for herself as a small time journalist when ‘the discovery’ happened. She once had dreams of writing, she had even finished a manuscript. She thought she was going to change the world with her words. When the ‘discovery’ happened she cried for days not because it meant the end of everything but rather it meant her dreams had been shattered. There would no longer be a world for her to share her thoughts, her stories, her ideas. 

The discovery changed the way we saw ourselves in the universe. For years astronomers stared up into the sky mapping out objects such as far away exo-planets, asteroids, comets, black holes, and more. Then one cheerful morning an amateur was studying some images he and his friends had taken with them on commission from one of the many new space agencies that were working to create a map of objects in the night sky. When he spilt his coffee he burned his hand. He didn’t feel it. He was overwhelmed with shock and fear. Already he had known the object he was looking at was something new. It had taken his interest weeks earlier.  In a black and white photography he had noticed the light of a star. In another image he noticed the star was closer then it had been before. 

Nemesis, first postulated in 1984 to be orbiting the sun 1.5 light years away was said to be the cause for a cycle of mass extinctions which seemed to occur around intervals of 26 million years. Some call it our suns ‘death star’ companion, others thought of it as nothing more then a myth and a silly one at that. It was in fact a red dwarf with an irregular orbit (though others speculated that it could just be a passing star ripped from it’s own orbit long ago and that this collision had been in progress for hundreds of thousands of years). For years it was out of view but now it was closer then it had ever been. It wouldn’t directly impact the Earth but it’s gravitational field would cause a mass extinction that would drastically change the climate making our world inhospitable. 

Before ‘the discovery’ was made public several satellites were put in place to monitor the newly found star and almost overnight plans (more like contingencies) were proposed by various nations and agencies on what to do. Religeous groups called it the breaking of the sixth seal. “And I beheld when he opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great Earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood; And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind, And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places,” a quote from revelations. The quote whether it was what one believed or not summed up the event quite perfectly.  Other zealots quoted from another verse of revelations calling the Nemesis star ‘wormwood’, “the third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter." (Revelation 8:10-11). What the churches said didn’t amount to much in the end. Prayer wasn’t going to save the world. It didn’t help when the arks were built and the lottery was created. Religious figures righteous in their own minds believed that they should be the ones ascending. Riots grew as groups calling themselves the chosen tried to take control of the arks.  They were unsuccessful. Cults began popping up all around the world, led by the greatest speaker in the room. Most began with orgies and ended in suicide. Other groups found a new way of life, a simple way of living cut off from the rest of the world. It was very inviting. Some worked on farms, others built fallout shelters dug into the sides of mountains. Each project and idea instilled a sense of hope in those that were involved. Those groups that forgot about time could spend the last of their days in silence, meditation, enjoying the beauty of the world around them and the value that they placed in themselves. In the end there were only a few that boarded having not won the lottery - mostly engineers or workers that had been a part of the ark project from the start. Criteria for meeting the lottery was simple: fertile, healthy, and mentally stable. The lottery made everything simple, everyone was given a chance.