Mission Planet Spargus XPP09

Chapter 3: Requiem for Earth

The white glare didn't fade so much as it curdled into a sickly, bruised gray. For several minutes, the three of them stood in the observation deck of Luna Prime, breath hitching in a synchronized rhythm of terror. The silence was so thick it felt like it had mass, pressing against their eardrums until it hurt.

"Kim," Josh whispered, his voice sounding like it belonged to a different man. "Filter the glare. Give me a visual. I need to see what happened."

Kim’s hands hovered over the console. She was trembling so violently that her fingers clicked against the glass like hailstones. "I... I shouldn't, Josh. The radiation spikes alone suggest—"

"Do it, Kim," Josh commanded. "That’s an order."

She tapped a series of keys. The high-contrast filters on the external cameras engaged, stripping away the blinding luminescence. What remained was a nightmare rendered in high definition. The white mist was thinning, revealing a planet that had been stripped of its dignity. 

"Oh, god," Diablo choked out. He fell to his knees, his forehead thumping against the reinforced glass. "No. No, no, no."

From orbit, the destruction was a ballet of planetary-scale violence. The Antarctic ice sheet, once a jagged crown of white, was gone. In its place was a boiling, muddy brown expanse. The "Seed" hadn't just exploded; it had released a heat pulse so intense it had flash-melted the polar caps. 

"The sea levels," Kim whispered, her eyes fixed on the telemetry. "They’re rising. Not in inches, Josh. In miles."

As they watched, a silver line—a literal wall of water—raced across the Atlantic. It swallowed the tip of South Africa in seconds. Then it tore into the coastlines of South America, erasing cities that had stood for centuries like they were nothing more than chalk drawings on a sidewalk.

"Look at the tectonic plates," Kim said, her voice dropping into a mechanical, detached register. It was her defense mechanism, her way of not screaming. "The impact caused a global crustal displacement. The continents are... they’re sliding. Africa is fracturing."

"Can we get a signal?" Diablo asked, his voice small and childlike. "Maybe someone got to the bunkers? Mount Weather? The Swiss Alps?"

"Diablo, look at the clouds," Josh said, pointing at the screen. 

The atmosphere was a churning vortex of black soot and steam. Lightning, purple and jagged, danced between the clouds in patterns that looked like nerves firing in a dying brain. There were no lights left on the surface. No golden embers of civilization. Just the dull, angry glow of magma where the crust had split open.

"I’m running a life-sign sweep," Kim muttered, her fingers flying now, a blur of motion. "I’m looking for the emergency beacons. Anything. I’m searching the VLF bands."

"Kim, stop," Josh said softly.

"I can find them! I just need to recalibrate the sensors for the particulate interference. If I can just—"

"Kim, stop!" Josh’s voice cracked through the deck. He stepped forward and grabbed her wrists, pulling her hands away from the console. 

She looked up at him, her face a mask of sweat and tears. "There were eight billion people, Josh. Eight billion. They can't all be... they can't just be data points."

"They aren't data points," Josh said, his grip softening. "But they’re gone. We saw it. We saw the pulse. Nothing survives that kind of atmospheric ignition."

"Why us?" Diablo asked. He was still on the floor, staring at the floorboards. "Why did we have to be the ones on the Moon? Why did we have to watch?"

Josh let go of Kim’s wrists. He walked to the center of the room, looking at the two people who were now the entirety of the human race. The weight of it was a physical pressure on his chest, a crushing gravity that made every breath a struggle.

"Listen to me," Josh said, his voice regaining its command. "Our mission was to maintain Luna Prime as a research outpost for the Mars initiative. That mission is dead. As of right now, our only objective is survival. Pure, unadulterated survival."

"Survival for what?" Diablo snapped, finally standing up. His eyes were red-rimmed and fierce. "To eat nutrient paste and stare at a tomb for the rest of our lives? We have a shuttle, Josh. Let’s go down. If there’s even a one percent chance—"

"There is no chance!" Kim screamed. It was the first time Josh had ever heard her lose her composure. "The atmospheric pressure on the surface is currently four times the standard. The oxygen is being replaced by sulfur dioxide. If you landed that shuttle, you’d be dead before the airlock even finished cycling. We are it, Diablo! We’re the last three neurons in a dead skull!"

Diablo recoiled as if she’d slapped him. He looked back at the window, at the planet that was now a bruised, suffocating orb. He didn't speak again. He just leaned his head against the glass and wept, the sound of his sobs echoing in the sterile, metallic room.

"How much air do we have, Kim?" Josh asked, ignoring the ache in his own throat.

"With the current scrubbers and the recycling loops?" Kim wiped her face with her sleeve, her intellect kicking back into gear. "Maybe fourteen months. Longer if we restrict physical activity."

"Food?"

"Six months of standard rations. We can stretch it to a year if we go to half-rations immediately."

Josh nodded. "Then that’s what we do. We conserve everything. We log every change we see on the surface. We become the recorders of the end."

Survivor's guilt, Josh thought. It’s already eating them alive. If I don't give them something to do, they’ll jump out the airlock by the end of the week.

"We need a schedule," Josh continued. "Diablo, you’re on communications. Keep every band open. If there’s a stray signal, a ghost from a bunker, you find it. Kim, you’re on environmental. Watch the planet. If the atmosphere starts to clear, I want to know the second it happens."

"And you?" Kim asked.

"I’ll manage the station. I’ll keep this tin can running," Josh said. He looked at the monitor, where the last of the Atlantic was being obscured by a massive, planet-wide storm system. "We don't give up. Not today."

The next few days were a blur of hollow routines. They ate in silence. They worked in silence. The station, which had once felt like a marvel of engineering, now felt like a coffin. Every time Josh passed a window, he had to fight the urge to close his eyes. 

On the third night—though "night" had no meaning anymore—Josh found Kim sitting in the dark of the observation deck. The only light came from the monitor, which showed a thermal map of the Earth. It was a chaotic mess of orange and red.

"You should sleep," Josh said, leaning against the bulkhead.

"I can't," she whispered. "Every time I close my eyes, I see the tsunamis. I see the way the light hit the Mediterranean just before it went dark."

"I know."

"I did the math, Josh," she said, her voice trembling. "The probability of an anomaly like that hitting the exact center of the Antarctic plate... it wasn't a natural event. It was a strike. A deliberate, surgical strike."

"Does it matter?" Josh asked. "Whoever sent that 'Seed' isn't here to answer for it."

"It matters to me," Kim said, finally looking at him. "I need to know why. If we're the last ones, we have to know why."

Josh didn't answer. He walked over to the main console. He looked at the planet—his home—which was now nothing more than a source of pain. He thought about his sister. He thought about the billions of stories, the libraries, the music, the laughter, all erased in a single, silent flash.

He felt a surge of hot, bitter anger. It wasn't fair. They were the survivors, but they were the ones being punished. They were the ones left to mourn a world that couldn't even hear them.

"Josh? What are you doing?" Diablo asked, entering the deck.

Josh’s hand hovered over the master power switch for the observation monitors. His jaw was set, his eyes hard.

"We can't look at it anymore," Josh said. "Not tonight."

"Josh, we have to monitor the—" Kim started.

"No," Josh snapped. "We need to survive. And we can't do that if we’re staring at a ghost every hour of every day. We know it’s gone, Kim. Looking at the corpse won't bring it back."

He pressed the button.

The massive screens flickered and died. The room was plunged into a deep, oppressive darkness, save for the faint green glow of the life-support indicators. The silence that followed was absolute, a heavy shroud that seemed to snuff out the very air in their lungs.

Josh stood there in the dark, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had turned off the world. 

"Now what?" Diablo’s voice came out of the shadows, sounding hollow and lost.

"Now," Josh said, his voice barely a whisper, "we wait for the silence to break."

But as the minutes ticked by, the only sound was the hum of the oxygen scrubbers, and the terrifying realization that the universe had never felt so empty.