When I was 16, I dreamt of watching a sunrise on a new planet. It was a strange dream for someone of my circumstance to have, and I would not share it for quite some time. You see, I was born in the gutters of human civilization, on a continent whose leaders had no humanity to speak of. I was lucky, raised in a lucky family, spared the worst of the squalor that festered all around me. We never starved, and enjoyed a few fleeting periods of comfort and dignity, but for most of my childhood, that was it.
When I was 18, I got accepted into the best university in my country. My father had died the previous year, and to honor his last wishes, my mother resolved to do everything in her power to get me into that school. The fees were several miles north of our economic class. My first semester was a roller-coaster of debt and anxiety. But all that ended when a compassionate administration offered me a full scholarship to continue my studies as long as I kept my grades up and eventually paid the small fortune I still owed. I would not take any of it for granted. I learnt as much as I could about life, the universe and everything in the semesters that followed. I fed my insatiable curiosity with the massive library, the free internet, and the unbelievable privilege that had fallen right into my lap. I connected, grew, aced a lot of tests, wrote a lot of papers, had a lot of laughs, won a couple of awards, and contemplated an uncertain future.
When I was 22, an adventure was over. I had spent 4 years in what to me was nothing short of a dream; a paradise carved out of the misery around it, an oasis in a dessert of woe. But I was back in that dessert now, no longer a boy, but a man bearing the weight of his many burdens, ready to stare the future in the face and earn his place in a world that owed him nothing.
This, of course, was easier intended than done. When I was 23, I had gone through a hard year, trying my hand at self-reliance, and completing a mandatory national service program, an outdated farce perpetuated by my country’s government for the sole purpose of exploiting its youth, before ultimately casting them out into the cold reality of mass unemployment – a reality it also actively perpetuated. It wasn’t all bad, though. I met some new people, made new connections, even dipped my toes in the waters of a better life. And all the while, I held on to my dream, learning, evolving, creating, hoping that eventually, something would stick, and give me the boost I so desperately needed. The luck of my younger years had ran out, and a global recession left a better tomorrow even less certain.
When I was 26, the storm had passed, for the world and for me, the tragedies nothing more than haunting memories now. For reasons that remain a mystery to me to this day, the world cared what I had to say. It listened, it read, it marveled. The resources gave me the power to go further, to learn more, to become more, to invest and innovate in the sciences and technologies that would bring my dream closer. And gripping at every rock, catching myself at every fall, I soon found myself at the top of a mountain I once feared I would never climb.
When I was 52, a new storm was on the horizon. Hubris and sickness had dug their claws too deep into the heart of our global civilization. A world on the brink, a world tearing itself apart. We had helped build so much, I and the visionaries I had met and befriended along the way, the very best of our generation, the Advent. We had fixed so much. We couldn’t fix this. The powerful had gone too far, sacrificing tomorrow on the altar of their greed, and time was running out. No one really knew how many people died before the first Exodus. No catastrophe in history held a candle to it. Words failed again and again to describe it. For those who survived, the calling could not be ignored. We toiled day and night, the thinkers, inventors, and builders across what was left of our world, united against the dying of the light. The masses endured, helping in every way they could, even the youngest. Old systems did not matter anymore, politics did not matter anymore, only survival, a mad fist thrust in the eleventh hour at the face of extinction.
When I was 64, the final Exodus happened. What a treat that it happened to be my birthday that day. The Advent were among the last wave. We remained until the very last innocent life was on a one-way trip to the Red Planet, now our new home, our new hope. Sparse savannas of habitat domes had since grown into metropolises bustling with life. We watched it all from afar, from the ruins of a planet our species had called home for over 200,000 years, and so many species before it. And then, we left, a once-flourishing world made barren by our folly receding into the cosmic distance, as a humanity forever changed waved it a final farewell.
When I was 83, I awoke in the early hours of morning, slipped into my environment suit, and took the long walk out of my district’s dome. A vast expanse of land that was only just beginning to bear the first fruits of over 2 decades of terraforming stretched out in front of me. I took a deep breath. It wasn’t quite the same feeling with the recycled air in my helmet, but the gesture was just as rewarding. I watched the Sun peek over the horizon of Elysium Planitia, as I had done for many dawns before, and thought about that boy all those years ago, about his thoughts, his hopes, his mistakes, his pain, the dream that had kept him going through it all, the world he would eventually help change, the millions of lives he would help save, and the billions who would know no such hope.
“End simulation.”
I was back in reality, gazing into the constellation of gaping eyes before me. My team and I had turned the entire UN General Assembly Hall into a fully-immersive holo chamber. I had taken them all into my mind, into my story, the story of the last 40 years of my life, and with the magic of the Entropy Engine, further into a catastrophe there was still time to avert.
“So…” I said, unhooking myself from the console’s umbilical and rising from the control pod to face the world leaders again. “Are you convinced now?”
Read – A Place Yonder – A Short Story by Linda Achiaa Awuah, Ghana
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