Final Destination, Chapter 1: March 11, 3093

“We’re dying,” he said.

“I know,” I replied.

We were standing in the airfield outside of town on a cold, wintry day in March. The sky was low and overcast, and a bitter wind blew across the arid, barren landscape. Behind us was the hangar, sagging with age; in front of us, about 300 yards away, was the Silver Star.

I tore my gaze from the ship and turned to my friend. “You can’t be serious, Gene. It’s a fool’s errand.”

“We’re dying,” he repeated. “Look at us. Our cities, our factories, and our infrastructure are all dying, and we can’t fix any of it. We don’t know how to build replacement parts for our factories. We can’t reproduce the quantum gates that are burning out. We can’t restore the transporters that have shut down. Everything on this planet is wearing out, and we can’t do anything about it.”

“I saw what happened last week,” I said. “The heat exchanger in the reactor at Albright died, and the entire city is now without power. Is there any hope of getting that replaced?”

“I’m afraid not, Miles. There just aren’t any replacement parts left.”

“Do they know that yet, Gene? Do they know that their city is dead, and that no one will ever be able to live there again?”

Gene looked into the distance. “They will soon, and so will everyone else as the power plants in other cities start to die. The war took too much out of us, Miles; it destroyed our ability to produce the essentials we needed to keep our cities running. Now that things are finally starting to wear out we can’t keep them going.”

“But can’t we – I don’t know – rediscover whatever we’ve lost? Somebody had to invent all of this. Can’t we do it again?”

“Maybe if we had five hundred years to work with, but we don’t have that kind of time. It’s already started, Miles, it’s already started. In twenty years we will be back in the Stone Age, and tens of millions of people will die. There just aren’t any other options.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I replied. “You’re not the one who is going to have to spend three long years in solitary confinement.”

“I’m sorry, Miles, but this is the only ship we’ve got that is still in working condition, and it’s not a two-person ship. We just don’t have any others.”

“Three years, Gene: that’s thirty-six months spent in the void of space, with no other humans around for trillions of miles. There’s not even a guarantee that they’ll still be there when I arrive. Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve been in touch with them?”

“Almost four hundred years,” he said. “I know. But what other choice do we have?”

I looked at the Silver Star again. She was a three-hundred-year-old mass of rusted parts that was supposed to be my home for the next three years. It was a small ship, as starships go; a round, saucer-shaped craft not quite fifty feet in diameter. I was amazed that it could still get off the ground.

“But look,” I said, “there are lots of other planets out there. What about Earth, Gene? There has to be somewhere else I can go.”

“We’ve found 37 worlds that survived,” he said, “and we’ve contacted them all via tachyon communications back when our equipment still worked. None of them were any better off than we were.”

“You do realize that the Silver Star uses tachyons to communicate and has no working alternative on board. If we don’t have any working receivers then you won’t even know if I’ve found anything until three years from now, assuming I survive the trip.”

“I know,” he said. “It can’t be helped.”

I took one last look at the horizon. There was nothing growing as far as I could see; only miles of brown, cracked dirt stretching out in all directions under a low sky. “I suppose not,” I said.