As We Know It

Chapter I

We managed to find a new water source today. Just happened to dig in the right spot outside of our dome sweet dome to find a small reserve. It had a bit of a metallic taste, but it did the job. Not like we exactly have to worry about any kind of cumulative poisoning now anyway.

My best mate Paul just left on a shuttle for Mars today. Sounds pretty fucking pointless to me. We're all going to die anyway. The water's mostly evaporated. Joseph keeps telling stories of how the ground here use to be what early people called an ocean. Apparently as people grew apart from this God person, he slurped the oceans up through a giant straw or something.

He really needs to quit taking every book he happens to pick up so literally. Most of these works are billion year old swamp scribblings from back when people still thought global warming was a hoax.

I keep telling him there's no water because the Earth is just too damn hot. All the surface water evaporated into the atmosphere a few hundred years ago. Luckily, folks then figured out how to snag water from the atmosphere and bring it back down to liquid temperature. They kept doing this until the troposphere got hot enough that the water molecules split into hydrogen and oxygen, which then skedaddled into the upper atmospheres, leaving us to our own problems. Fortunately we'd made these nice domes by then. Although even then, it's getting progressively harder to keep the temperatures down to a comfy 38 degrees Celsius room temperature.

But no, Joe's probably right. We should just pray harder. If I sound bitter, it's probably because I have no idea how much longer we have left. And by "we", I don't just mean us in the dome. I mean we as in all of humanity. All of life in general, really.

For that matter, I don't even know why I'm talking to you. Who the fuck are you anyway? I mean, obviously you're a diary. A much-needed emotional outlet. But is their really any reason for me to keep track of these pages? Sure, it'd be neat to document the end of humanity. But documenting for whom? Even if I were to publish this before we all bake into fleshy meat pies, it would only make my last thoughts known for all of a few days, maybe weeks.

What good would that be? Even if these pages outlived humanity, it wouldn't be for long. Eventually the sun will expand until all of Earth and Mars are inside of it, destroying all evidence that any human life ever even existed, much less mine. 

So what's the point? It's funny, because back in the days that Joe keeps talking about, people were so obsessed with this thing called a legacy. Legacies referred to concepts or ideas you left behind after you died. For instance, a diary. A little piece of your being that outlives you indefinitely.

Well, this isn't particularly indefinite. 

Even back then, folks had to deal with their own mortality. That's why various myths came about so that people didn't have to face it. Even the secular concepts came about to face the issue more rationally.

There was a Neuroscientist named David Eagleman, for instance, who entertained a number of different concepts of afterlives, to include one such concept that 'There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.'

Compare this to the even earlier concept from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, in which he wrote, 

"So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

"This", of course, refers to the sonnet itself, while "thee" refers to his love, whom this sonnet was written for. In other words, as long as this here poem is still being read by someone, his love for her - a little piece of her memory - continues to live on. Well, since we're still here talking about it now, I guess 'ol Shakespear was right.

Unfortunately, she'll likely die with me and my companions in this humble a-dome. Hardly indefinite. Of course, the universe existed billions of years before life evolved on this planet and will continue to exist for billions of years after we all disappear. Concepts of legacies were just convenient ways for us to push dealing with our own moralities to the proverbial back burner. Well, that back burner is suddenly becoming less proverbial.

This is it. We're the last people. We were running desperately low on water until today. We'd been rationing to the bare minimum we'd possibly need to survive. Everyone's excited about this new source, but who knows how long it will last?

"Alex!" A voice from behind interrupted my brooding internal monologue. It was Drew, who embraced me as soon as I turned around. "I missed you!"

"I missed you, too," I whispered. Venturing out of the dome requires us to don full-body suits to keep us cool and to filter the air, which now is thick with all kinds of nonsense. There have been times when teams have returned with fewer people than they started with.

"How'd it go? I heard y'all found water?" She asked, we'll assume hypothetically.

"We did! Enough to last a week or so at least."

"Does that mean you'll be staying here for awhile?"

"I hope so," I replied as I held her closer, swaying slightly to the rhythm of a music only we could hear. 

The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once said, 'We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.' While I'm not much a dancer myself, no days are lost that I'm with Drew. For my heart is constantly caught dancing within my chest, as if delighted to be imprisoned behind its ribbed cage. After all, who would want to be free from such an anesthetizing gaze?

Hey, my life might be a pretty continuous existential crisis, but it's the little things that keep me from waltzing out of this dome suitless and ending this futile account of my life right here and now. 

But what would that do to Drew? Might make them feel mighty droopy. I couldn't do that. When I say 'it's the little things in life', I mean the little things. You know, sometimes the paths of two quantum particles can intersect in such a way that their respective spins and momentums must, from that point on, be defined in relation to each other, in what is known as quantum entanglement. And every so often, two hearts may become similarly entangled: that is, when one's head starts spinning, you can be sure so, too, is the other's. And when one heart beats faster and faster, you know the momentum of the other heart is equally fierce.

Some people around here say I overthink things too much. But hey, thinking like this is what turns making love with Drew into making unified theories together. And I don't need a double slit experiment to observe the waves we make.