Hope at the end of the world

#12 | Cli-fi | Future history | Post-apocalyptic

This episode was featured in Top in Fiction

Hope at the end of the world is part of my cli-fi series There Is Hope about life on a planet devastated by climate change and the things that give humans hope.

This is episode #12. You can find an overview of all the episodes here.

Hope at the end of the world is a Letter from the Future written by Shia Santos, a secondary character in the short story The Dust Pirates.

To fully understand this story, start by reading The Dust Pirates here.

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Previously 👇

The Dust Pirates: Children

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Hope at the end of the world

A letter from the future by Shia Santos

Server: The Deep Dive
Date: 3613-09-23
Timestamp: 14:20:16 PM
Memory log of: Shia Santos
Entry no.: 1.1.02

During the long afternoons when everyone in our caravan was asleep, I lay awake in a pool of my body’s sweat, drifting away in the dark and empty universe on a planet that was burning itself to death. There’s still so many of us left and so little of everything else. Perhaps it would be easier if we didn’t have so much digital evidence of all the life there once was and is now gone forever.

By our own doing, we are the loneliest species in the entire universe.

I long to feel the warm presence of a bird, a tree, a blade of grass, a leaf blowing in the wind. I want to feel the embrace of something other than human existence. I miss the ocean, the algae floating in the calm, undulating waves, the life-givers that feed and clothe us.

There’s nothing but dust and humans here.

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As we come closer to the border, we see more and more caravans smuggling goods and people on the other side. The last time I crossed the border, I flew Nova Novikov’s pod with my fiancé, Lusius. The border security interrogated us for hours, but we were finally allowed to fly into the headquarters of The Cooperatives in Siberia. The heart of the Mecca. The stewards of the Taiga, the last standing forest and our hope for the future. I don’t know how we will cross this time. What if they catch us? I am a fugitive. I am a thief of the worst kind, I have stolen a seedling. A precious baby tree.

There isn’t a more condemnable crime. I could’ve killed someone, and it wouldn’t be as bad. There are plenty of humans to go around. But the date tree was one of its kind. I’m not sure anymore if I made the right choice. Finding the Dust Pirates proved harder than anticipated. Almost impossible. Did my date seedling arrive safely at its intended destination? I’ll probably never know. Perhaps the Dust Pirates don’t even exist. Perhaps it is all futile. In any case, what will a date seedling change? There is little hope of survival for the human species beyond a couple more generations. It is an eerie thing, the realization that all is hanging by a thin thread of hope: a few sharks, a date seedling, and the Taiga, the last forest. We don’t have much else to rely on for the last hundred meters of our 300,000-year-old race toward extinction.

At least we are not going alone.

We will take every last tree, shark and algae with us.

Once we’re gone, the universe will be still.

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We made it safe on the other side.

I have no idea how I will find Lusius.

They are taking me to the forest!

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The Taiga.

The first time I entered the promised land, we walked to a forest clearing. I was afraid of stepping on the grass. What if I killed it? It felt like a sacrilege, trampling with my feet on a living being. I took off my shoes and gently caressed the blades of grass with the soles of my feet. It felt gentle to the touch. Sweet and cool. Juicy. It tickled my toes. I opened my eyes wide, drinking in the green of the meadow, and the trees, savoring the sweet sounds of the leaves rustling in the wind and birds singing. And my heart burst open with joy and sadness, tears streaming from my eyes. For the first time, I was glad to give away my body’s water to the wind, grass, trees, flowers and birds. Our sacred water, this interstellar being, carried Earth’s history in every molecule of her celestial body, every teardrop, raindrop, cloud, iceberg, river, sea and ocean.

On the Dust Road, I had despaired. In the Taiga, I wanted to believe. I wanted to hope. Earth was full of life once. I could feel it vibrating all around me, soothing my lonely heart. And I was at once happy and overwhelmed with grief for all the lives lost during the past five centuries. Being in the Taiga was pure bliss under a pile of dead bodies.

I was tired and broken by the time I got here, but the forest stitched me back together. I didn’t care about anything else and I thanked the gods for allowing me to see and experience this. It made me feel hope that Sanse and the date seedling perhaps also found their way to the Dust Pirates.

Then, they came to cut the trees.

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No, I did not believe we could save ourselves until I met them. We wouldn’t have made it without them.

You can try to destroy them, but there are more cruising the galaxies. No, they don’t know about us. Yet.

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Thank you for listening to the second and last entry in Shia Santos’s memory log. This entry is a compilation of her thoughts, collected and curated by her daughters Deya and Sayuri from old salvaged data. Shia Santos was the first consciousness uploaded to The Museum of Life precisely 1,000 years ago at the age of 78. When Shia Santos started this museum, she wished to preserve the human minds that cross in and out of existence. We hope that you’ll enjoy her curated collection of lives.

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‘We liked to listen to our mother’s voice, so we compiled everything we found in this one entry.’

‘No, everything else was lost together with her.’

‘Do we believe in them? Did they exist? We couldn’t tell. We don’t have any evidence of their existence.’

‘There are two more stories and memory logs left in Shia Santos’s archive. Would you like to continue?’

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Next👇

The next story in this series, The Cooperatives, will be published in autumn 2024.

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I hope you enjoyed episode #12 of There Is Hope, a cli-fi series. You can find the series overview here. Please don’t forget to subscribe, like, comment & share. This goes a long way in supporting this independent publication!