Fermi's Final Voyage
Once more into the breach - Another brand new story for you from the vault. This time, a cli-fi flash fiction piece. Enjoy!
cw: climate change
The condemned planet dies screaming behind us and only one of us hears it.
The familiar golden road climbs up an astral mountain to our ancient home, where a garden of new seeds awaits us, an infinite harvest for new creation. You are exuberant in our return. I cannot share in your joy this time.
How many times have we returned in this same manner? With our failed creation in agony behind us? It weighs heavier on me each time, the dying screams louder. If I were to use the words of our children, I would name it guilt.
You are unburdened by a philosophical concept so mortal.
All around us, our eager siblings writhe and murmur, held in place by the metaphysical bond of our bargain. We create, they consume. Their neo-euclidean forms—astral tissue with the weight of infinite eons—bow and sweep around the path, their bodies folding around reality, defying it. They are the ever-shifting chaos from whence we came.
And what everything longs to return to, it seems.
“It is time to let them loose,” you say. I know. But it is one thing to know, and another to accept. To condemn so much time, effort, and life to oblivion pains me now. You say it so casually. It tears me apart.
You release the bonds that keep our siblings at bay. They dart, they snarl, they snap, they twist. Their bodies spiral apart and back together as they whip into the distance behind us, racing to consume our condemned creation.
Your hand on my arm tells me I’ve stopped, and with that, have halted the release of more of our brethren. I hold back the quivering mass of entropy, preventing the escape of so many more. The ground trembles beneath our feet as they protest the unorthodox delay. Your fingers squeeze my arm, pulling me onward, but I stand firm.
“Why do you stop?”
Behind, the road disappears into a single point and above it, its surface mottled with corruption, is the once blue world. That single point of so much life, work, pain, and promise, riddled with yawning chasms and pulsing tumors.
Our creation.
“We got so far, this time,” I say.
“Everything returns to nothing, eventually,” you respond, tugging at my arm, trying to return me to protocol. Our siblings seethe in impatience.
“Must it?” I ask.
You scoff and think me mad as you try to pull me onward once more, but my feet are planted now. Held in place by my regrets. Images of an infinite number of creations in an incomprehensibly long line stretch in my memory. The loss of each created planet, of every tipping point where we failed, and of the never-ending feasting of our siblings twists my insides.
“Why does it always go wrong?” I wonder aloud.
You let go of my arm. I blink away the memories of trees swaying in the wind and snow falling from gray skies. Of seas teeming with life and plentiful lands. I meet your eyes. Blue as the oceans we created. Deep as the space from where we wrenched our materials.
Do you remember when our creation was green and good? Before we let our children run rampant and we whispered the secrets of the cosmos to them? Before their jagged shapes tore at the sky and dug up the earth and poisoned the seas? I do. Perhaps you don’t. Perhaps you were already thinking about our next creation while we were still working on this one. You were always quick to move on. I always linger on our creations. Linger in our failures. Each time, the failure takes a little bit longer to leave me. The planet howls in pain behind us.
My eyes are wet. My tears hiss as they strike the ooze of creation beneath our feet. Your eyes are dry. You’re always looking forward. That was our balance. The joy of the next and the worry of the present. But what good is our balance if it always ends in catastrophe?
“No more of this,” you say, gesturing toward the peak where our garden lies. Where we go to recuperate, to plan, to pick a new location for our next experiment. “You will be happily creating again soon enough.”
“I can’t go through it again.”
Your mouth twists in response. The unfeeling, uncaring cosmic flux of our siblings, barely held back by my will, twists with you. The ones we’ve let free are already at the planet, getting their first taste of that rotting world. Their slavering maws devour everything, boring holes through the planet’s crust.
“There is no other choice,” you say.
The finality in your words is a lance through me. There are an infinite number of others to come. An infinite number of failures. The garden on our mountaintop is filled with the seeds of life that were left to us. Each pulses with the heartbeat of a new planet and a new civilization within that, from now into perpetuity. I shudder. There’s always so much promise in the beginning when our creations are young. They invariably fail, though, and at the end of each cycle…
“Oblivion,” you finish my thought. You say it smiling, like you’ve solved the formula. Birth, life, death—oblivion is the pattern, has always been the pattern, will always be…
“That’s the problem,” I whisper.
With my feet now firmly planted in the ooze, I reach toward our garden. Our siblings hammer against the wall I refuse to lift for them. Behind, the feasting of those we’ve let free quiets as they glut themselves on the dying planet. Your fingers dig into me, trying to pull me along, trying to get me to reconsider, trying to pull me apart before I undo the pattern.
I extend into the garden beyond, ignoring everything. Infinite rows of ripening globules on tentacular roots cover the mountaintop. I wrap my palm around one of those perfect orbs. It vibrates with the overflowing potential kept inside. But there is also the genetic predisposition toward chaos within. An iota of destruction at the core of new creation. I close my hand around the seed and pluck it free. The tendrils of its roots fall away. I dig out the cancerous ember of entropy and launch it into the cosmos. You wrestle with me, but we are evenly matched.
“You’ll die,” you cry out, as I bring the seed into my chest, becoming one with it. Fear and disgust cover your face. You can’t understand why I would go back, why I would try again, why I would break the pattern and cast aside the bargain.
I smile at you. “You don’t need me to keep creating.” I peel your fingers from around my arm and caress your face. This will be the last time we see each other. Now you are the one who is crying. “I will stay with her,” I say. “Let one survive, for once.”
The seed is warm within me.
I take a step back and tear dozens of our siblings away from their meal. A swirling maelstrom of bubbling flesh shrieks as I pull them back behind the containment field once more. A million slavering maws howl in lament for their lost meal.
The condemned planet, covered in gaping wounds where our siblings have gnawed upon its fetid, dying corpse, doesn’t spin anymore. It doesn’t float. It sinks through the cosmos, out of sync. Out of orbit.
I take another step and pulse in time with the seed. We wriggle into the rotten core of this planet. The oceans bubble and boil, flooding what little land there is left. The skies crackle and shake, filling the air with poison electricity. The stars are blotted from the sky. Red hot tar hisses out of impossibly deep vents. I fill the holes with myself. I pour the seed and all its essence into the raging anger I feel from the creation in its knowing that we abandoned it. I wrap my arms around it as it screams.
Pain, but it is brief. Briefer than the slow-consuming maws of my siblings. Briefer than the heat death of falling through space, away from a yellow star. A catastrophic loss of life, but not a total one. A fraction of life yet remains. I was not too late. When my essence and the new seed have filled her wounds, old and new, she is silent.
Our daughter.
Her water is still. No tidal pull from satellites. No shifting of tectonics from landmasses she does not yet have. Only the minuscule dots of floating armadas. The survivors. This is the quiet breath before the storm of continents. We hold each other as a new cycle begins, tempered by the knowledge of past failures. Perhaps I have done enough to break the cycle.
Or perhaps my siblings will come after all.
Either way, this is the last time. The last planet. I put everything into her. There is no more.