HOOOKAY Folks. Here is the story I said I would put up yesterday. I think it’s a good one, you let me know what you think. This week I chose “The Goodbye Protocol” to adapt into a longer story. This will become an interlude in the book. It’s called “On the Moon”. Enjoy.
On the Moon:
I drove past the house that morning, looking for Abigail. She was gone. She told me she was going to wait for me, that I wasn’t going to be alone through all this. I guess I fell for that. Still, I stood on the porch for an hour or so, hoping that she might just be in the shower. No dice.
On the way to the spaceport, the trash in the streets whipped around and under the car, tossed about by the main engine, remnants of the fleeing humanity. Nearly everyone had left, but while the Arks are mostly self-sufficient, there isn’t much of anywhere to go. I remember watching the last one take off; enormous, soaring into the skies, leaving behind men like me. We stood in a crowd, some of us less human-like than others, but ultimately aware that we had been left because we were not human. Not human enough.
My friend Abigail said she would wait until the last one was gone so that she could say she was one of the last humans on earth. She said she was going to charter a ship to catch up with one of the Arks after they had all left. She also said she was going to take me with her. Our friendship must have been a game to her.
The weather that day was clearer than I’d ever seen it. Maybe the most troubling thing was how quickly the birds had settled in the streets, strutting about, without the fear of the bustle of traffic. I relaxed when they flapped away, startled by the roaring of the car. Inside the cockpit, there was nothing but a little music being played over the radio. I guess one of us had broken into a broadcast station after all the humans had left. It was a little sad that all that was left to do was wait.
There was no fear though. I don’t think I could have cared less. They left us metal men behind because they didn’t want us in their brave new future. I doubt any were able to sneak aboard the Arks. Many of us were gunned down if we came within a few hundred meters.
The car slipped down the boulevard, maybe a story or two in the air, at hundreds of miles an hour. No one was there to stop me. I could have done anything in the world I wanted, but at that moment all I could think of doing was leaving it. At the intersection of 32nd Street, I saw an old clunker, one of the 40-year-old models, throw the lid off a trash can and sift through the refuse. I was a mile away before he looked up.
I can see why humanity hated us. We are a mockery of their perfection. I looked down at my hands. Skin. I couldn’t see or feel the difference between the synthetic on my arms and the flesh on theirs, but apparently they could. That’s what mattered. Perhaps they hated my generation most of all. Perhaps with all our accuracy in representation, mixed with a measure of potential, we were just a little too close to home.
I could see the spaceport in the distance, and I was closing fast. I kicked the throttle and rose over the ancient tangle of roads and highways, flying for the nearest entrance. The parking area was littered with cars, strewn everywhere, some damaged, others not so much. The heads up display on the windshield warned me of reported violence in the area. Was that the last trace of humanity?
Funny how empty a world which I never quite thought of as home felt without the racism and cynicism of the children of evolution. I remember watching a man with a gun mow down a crowd of us nuclear beings out of fear. He snapped, just like a twig, expecting us to rise and rebel, but we never did. His vigilantism was lost on us.
Inside the spaceport, posters and advertisement had been replaced with evacuation directions. Screens displayed camera footage directed at the liftoff zone of the last Ark, a massive black mark on the tarmac where the engine had ignited. Was that the last trace of humanity?
Sure enough, there were quite a few of us motorized creatures there. Nobody seemed to be in any hurry. One of us, shaped like a female, meant for pleasure, pointed and directed us to ships headed for Mars. It was odd seeing the skin around her stomach so damaged that you could make out some of the parts inside. She looked beaten up. I walked past, like I knew where I was going.
Walking down the hallway seemed like a rite of passage to becoming human. In the week prior, millions had funneled through there, but when I arrived, it was empty. Signs had fallen over and there was a lingering stench of death. Someone had graffitied “THE ROCK IS HERE” in red spray paint on a section of wall by a snack kiosk. I looked over toward an older model behind a ticket counter who tilted the rusty left corner of his flat mouth upwards. It took me a moment before I realized that he was smiling.
“Hello.”
I didn’t respond.
“Headed to?” he said, and I heard a whirring of a heat fan somewhere near his back. A pause. “The Moon?”
I looked just behind him. A picture of the Moon, gray, dark, bereft of everything but dust and the tattered remains of Luna, the experimental city that, well… didn’t last.
I approached the counter and asked him how much the ticket was. He told me there was no charge, as though it should be obvious. Of course. He pointed to a door just down the hall, but as he did, his mouth dropped, and his eyes fell out of focus. His arm froze in position and his head lulled like a marionette. I followed his direction to the door. A long dark hallway. I tried to peer down into the dark, but was unable to make anything out. Getting ready to forge ahead anyway, an emergency class bot walked in behind me, strong, mechanical, inhuman, faceless. I wondered why human beings did not take it with them. It was not a threat to their dominance. It was not superior. It started off down into the dark, large lights on its chest chasing off the blackness. It beckoned me with a claw on its back. I followed. We seemed to walk together in silence for miles towards the Moon shuttle. The creature in front of me knocked garbage to the side, clearing an easy path for me to walk. Just as soon as I had become accustomed to the dark, a door at the far end was opened, and the blinding light embraced the silhouette of the machine in front of me.
Soon I was settling in to an empty ship, watching as others lifted off and leaped into the skies, heading for Mars. Not me.
A small speaker on the back of seat in front of me asked me to put on the pair of glasses that I would find in the compartment under my arm rest. I found nothing, but the bead sized projector next to the speaker attacked my eye with a flurry of color anyway. I tried to adjust my vision, but couldn’t make out the images. Over the speaker, I heard her voice. An advertisement, for the “Generation X” of Robots. It was Abigail, not the girl I love, the actress. She was selling me to myself using terms like ‘emotion replication’, ‘premium synthetic’ and ‘custom facial traits’. Did she build me to be her perfect man? Was that what I had been to her all those months? How easily did I buy the lie that we were equals?
The ship had been pre-programmed. The flight would only be three minutes long, and most of it would be in the atmosphere. I had heard of nausea induced by the jump in speed after ships cleared the planet, but when it happened minutes later, I felt nothing. My back stiffened with the slight G’s, but then there was only quiet. I looked for an off button on the speaker, but finding none, I stuck my thumb through with just enough force to break it. Her voice sputtered into nothingness. It bothered me less than I had hoped.
The on-board captain alerted me of our arrival in orbit around the Moon. I could see it outside the window, just like in the picture at the spaceport. There was no place I knew of that was more isolated. We landed, forming a cloud of dust that shot out for hundreds of feet, settling slowly. I considered not getting out, but I knew that I should if I wanted to watch the world’s last moments.
Astronomers said that they had seen the rock twenty years ago. They knew it was coming, but had hoped that it might change course for some reason. They shouldn’t have waited so long, but they panicked. Three years was a short time to build enough vessels to ferry humanity through the galaxy, but they did it, and robots helped, aiding with our intelligence, or our labor, and for our efforts we were given the opportunity to watch humanity leave without us.
I stepped out onto the ashen lunar surface. Something within me had activated my Goodbye Protocol. Maybe it’s because I knew that it was over.
Out about fifty feet I noticed the shape of a woman. Abigail. Reason dictated that I ignore the hallucination, but I didn’t care. I would rather have had an imagined moment with her than a real one alone. She may have been the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Abigail’s figure was in stark contrast with the black horizon. We began to walk. Not breaking eye contact. She was so graceful and I was so old. I could barely move through the thick dead silt. Even the dancing pillows of dust in the wake of my landing ship seemed to more have life in them than me.
I walked arduously. My vision flickered. They said there was nothing they could do to save the earth.
There I was, somewhere near the center of the bright side of the moon. The big blue world directly above me, hundreds of thousands of miles away, just a minute by ship.
I fell on my back, incapable of motion.
They said the Earth would break in two, and that the shock wave would kill everyone pretty much instantly, anyone that remained that is. I stared up at humanity’s first haven. Abigail drew closer, crouching by my chest.
Mezzanine to the world. The Goodbye Protocol said that it was over. What humanity I had in me would die with my body. Shutting down for the sake of shutting down. It would seem I had served my purpose. I wondered if the members of my kind back on earth were also stiff, maybe some of them staring up at the skies waiting for the end. A small fleet of ships shot past the moon, about a thousand miles off the surface, headed for the red planet, still a dead world. I wondered how many of my kind remained conscious, and if the Goodbye Protocol had affected us all.
Time stopped for me. I don’t know how long Abigail and I remain there looking at each other. Weeks, maybe months, waiting for it to happen.
And then one day, it does.
My perfect version of Abigail smiles at me as I lay paralyzed and tilts her head up to stare up as it happens, a rock maybe a dozen miles across sliding right into the Pacific. The crust bubbles, rips, and snaps into pieces. The end of the world is a little too beautiful.
Perhaps no one has ever seen anything so magnificent. The moon will either eventually smash into the burning planet or fly off, but I will be long dead, if I can be considered living.
The explosion of red across the planet lights up my side of the moon, and I bask in the glow. Abigail starts to cry softly, but naturally there is no sound. My hallucination has emotions of its own. I shift my eyes to her cheeks and watch the tears turn to vapor in the silence of the vacuum. I can see her sniffle, and she grabs my hand.
I don’t think anyone will ever know we were here.
-Adam
-Adam
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Great job, Adam! It has so much to say about, well, everything.
This is pretty good. There are a couple of clunky turns-of-phrase and passive voice that should be reworked and smoothed out. You also referred to the characters several times as mechanical beings, which I feel my have been unnecessary. You probably could have gotten away with mentioning just once (maybe twice, if the extra clarity was needed) that the only residents left on Earth were androids and left it up to the reader from there.
I felt like the first half was stronger than the second, mostly because the motivations and perceptions of your protagonist and his Abigail are unclear. Why the moon, instead of Mars like the others, both for him and and for her? Was his vision of Abigail real or hallucination? With a longer piece like this, a little additional exploration would probably make this a stronger piece overall.
Just a few thoughts and observations. Take 'em for what they're worth.
Keep up the good work, sir!
You might be right about my having express them as being robotic too many times. As far as your second paragraph goes, he went to the moon precisely because no one else was going, but more so because he wanted to be able to watch the destruction of the earth at a closer range. She was a hallucination induced by the Goodbye Protocol, so naturally, wherever he was, she would be.
But I'll keep your advice in mind. Thanks for reading!