Unity

Forward

She could see it.

The wilting flowers, the crisp burnt grass, the scorching sun.

She could see it.

The high tides, the roaring winds, the wreckage after.

She could see it.

The dirt in air, the melted caps, the rare buzz of a bee.

She could see it all under her eyelids. Every time she closed them the image of her trashed world lingered.

Every time. 

She had wanted to see Earth from up here, but they had already knocked everyone into stasis by that point. So instead, her mind drove her crazy with imaginings of what her home must look like from space. She imagined its oceans small, the ice caps gone, the grounds dry and cracked and yellow from drought. She imagined swirling layers of fluff hovering here and there down below, looking so innocent from all the way up in the stars. She imagined it all.

That included the billions of people who had been left behind, just waiting for their dead planet to eat them up whole. That included her teachers and  grandparents and aunts and uncles.

That included her parents.

She scrunched her eyelids tighter together. No. She could not think of them right now. She would not. Instead, she would think of happy things, like every good girl. Like how her father had told her to. Right before she had been ripped away from his arms.

Forever.

 "Be brave, my throne,"  he had whispered. His voice was soft waves lapping against a seashore. Back when soft waves existed, that is.

"I can't father," she had whispered back. "I'm not strong enough. I never will be. I will land amongst the stars, yet my soul will still be trapped under this roof. Even when I'm a rotted corpse stars away and our home is crumbled to dust down here, I will remain. I won't be able to move on, to live without you!" The tears were harsh waterfalls crashing down; she hadn't even known they were coming until they were there. But when they were, everything else became bokeh dots spinning around; the noise of people blurred into the wind and dust; all she saw and all she heard was her father's voice, her father's strong arms encasing hers.

"Shh, shh, my love. My throne, my daughter, my soldier, my queen. You will dance like ribbons round and round the perches of the galaxy for what seems like eternity, but we will never forget one another. I will die while you still sleep, and you will live only in a time when I am gone, but that doesn't matter. Because, in the end, we will both pass on; then we will both be lost stars drifting throughout space — stellar anomaly amongst stellar anomaly — and we will continue drifting until we find one another. Then we will link arms and move on to the next ring of consciousness, and no longer will we be stars away."  He had pulled away from their embrace to seize her up one last time. Rainfall sprang from his stormy gray hurricanes — gray eyes just like hers. When he spoke again, his voice was choked; it was cracking ground underneath lava and ice:

"My beautiful, beautiful throne, I will wait for you when my time comes. I will be the brightest star to your north. I will shine down on you every night. And I will wait. That is my promise. I will wait. As long as it takes, I will not continue on without you. This isn't goodbye for forever. I refuse to believe that." He clasped her hard — they both did, clinging to one another for support, for love. This would be the last hug. The final, the omega. 

Her heart screamed and weeped, blood and sweat and dirt mixed with her tears. Sweat from the fear. Dirt from the mistakes. Blood from the guilt. 

 "I love you, my throne," he gasped, the anguish in his face that of a man crippled by grief. He then whispered one last fragment into her ear before the men pulled her away from him, breaking into the force of forever:

"'Till death do us part."

Then she felt his earthquake hand against hers, pushing something warm and metallic into her palm. She looked into his lost eyes one last time before she was whisked away into the whirlwind of strangers and phantoms and haunting voices. Shadows — glimpses of memories past — clouded her vision. Illusions of friends and family drew herself near. False hope shattered in the tinkling sound of thousands of layers of glass crashing down on all she had known, on the entirety of her life. Intimidating men held her so hard she saw fountains of blood sprout from her arms, blood that dripped and gushed and oozed out below her.

But it didn't matter.

None of it mattered.

Not anymore.

Let her bleed; she didn't care. Why should she?

Why should she care at all?

Her father's words didn't warm her. No, instead they just made her feel more alone. She didn't even dare look at what he had placed in her hand; she was afraid she'd lose it completely if she did. No, she couldn't think of her father. Any thought relevant to him would be the end of her sanity.

As she was dragged onto the spaceship, the ice hit her. It was cold and sharp, eating away at her flesh and heart. All happy feelings were gone; it was just pain. Pain and an empty coldness. Frostbite and hypothermia came soon after. She kept waiting for the warmth of fiery, angry lava to fill her, to give her the rage and fury that only one who suffers receives, but it never did. She wanted it to; oh, believe her — she wanted it to. Any feeling — even hatred — was welcome in her soul by this point. It was better than a hollow inside. It was better than her being a shell.

Yet, no matter how much she prayed and pleaded, all she felt was emptiness, meaningless, no purpose. No will to go on. Through the many stasis chambers they passed, into her own she went, into the blackness of the deepest sleeps, into the virtual reality known as Unity. Into it all she fell, and there she lived. 

Only she didn't really live.

No, her mind kept working, making her move and think and talk and walk in this virtual reality while her body slept on in stasis, but her heart had stopped beating when they had left Earth's atmosphere of breathing. Her soul had been lost somewhere in the mesosphere.

Somehow, her father's gift had travelled with her mind into the virtual safe haven, but she still had yet to look at it. Days had danced by — twelve, to be exact — but all that while she had simply kept it balled up in her right fist. That's all she had done for those twelve days, actually.

She had sat.

She had breathed.

She had blinked.

She had held her father's gift.

But she hadn't slept.

But she hadn't ate.

But she hadn't drunk.

But she hadn't talked.

But she hadn't walked.

But she hadn't agreed to see anyone she knew, nor any stranger.

She hadn't even opened her eyes once since entering the virtual reality.

It didn't matter; she was in stasis; she didn't need to eat or drink or sleep here. She could waste away these eighty years doing exactly this, which was just what she planned on doing. After all, how could she go on enjoying her life while knowing her father was back on Earth, suffering?

"Cyra Johnson?"

She did not stir. Perhaps this was the first voice she had heard in almost two weeks, but it didn't matter. This would not change anything. She was not moving. She was not changing a single thing about how she was living life as of right now.

"Cyra Johnson, you must get up. It is time to move on, and time for you and all your fellow humans of this generation to learn to function properly in society."

The voice paused.

"Cyra Johnson, it's time."

With a start, the girl's eyes blinked open.