The Waters of Lethe

An original story by Lillian Wang Selonick

Storm in the Mountains by Albert Bierstadt (1870)

When the solar storm hit Lethe, I was in the water tank, trying not to think about sea monsters. After almost a year in the narrow corridors and toddler-sized accommodations of the space station, the Olympic swimming pool–sized tank felt as vast as the ocean, and I kept having visions of some pissed-off Cthulhu rising up from the deep to punish me for my unbelief. I tried a pranayama breathing exercise I learned from an Aleister Crowley PDF I downloaded from the dark net in grad school. I was counting on the RPI eggheads one astronomical unit away to be right about these space suits holding up underwater. Water can be just as deadly as vacuum, and it’s even more difficult to engineer around. Hence why we still don’t have any human settlements in the Marianas Trench, but I’m stuck on this goddamn microgravity pharmaceutical factory-slash-luxury-medspa in a tadpole orbit around LaGrange point L4, probably for the rest of my soon-to-be-shortened life.

It’s just my luck. Every time something good happens to me, I can expect the other shoe to drop right on top of my sucker skull. One minute I’m acing my qualifying exams in molecular engineering at the University of Chicago—the first person in my downwardly-mobile Appalachian family to go to college, much less grad school—the next I’m getting called into the Dean’s office because some Psychology major undergrad claims I “touched her inappropriately” during office hours for the Chemistry 101 section I was forced to TA. The Dean didn’t see the way she showed up to office hours, tits out, crying about her midterm grade. I may have placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Or shoulder-region. She would’ve let me do a lot more if I hadn’t had the integrity to give her the grade she deserved. But the Dean and the disciplinary committee weren’t convinced by this line of reasoning, so out I went. No one stood up for this poor boy from the hills of southwest Virginia, the scion of a dynasty of delinquency and degradation. Not a single backbone to be found in higher ed today.

So I didn’t even get to start my dissertation, but it turned out that Red Plan-It!, Inc. was so thirsty for qualified applicants that even with just a master’s degree they were salivating to send me into space. Not Mars, of course—Mars is where they send their A-team, the PhDs and the mega-influencers. In addition to the political prisoners housed on contract for the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes in nice comfy camps to perform invigorating terraformation labor.

But RPI has its fingers in every pie from DC to Titan. When the Sabatier Process Technician job opened up on the jointly owned RPI-BW Group space station Lethe, RPI admin moved me from the general pool of applicants to the front of the line. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a dream job, but the pay was decent and it got me off terra fucking firma for a while, thank god. When all that went down with the girl, I didn’t just lose my program. My girlfriend left me, too, and I lost my university-subsidized apartment. Earth was dead to me. I took the gig.

The job itself was easy, and the food wasn’t too bad, considering. The problem was that I turned out to be the only competent person on Lethe, so all of the responsibility landed with me. I started taking on tasks way beyond the scope of my little technician job pretty fast, mostly because I couldn’t trust any of the other morons to keep all thirty of us alive and breathing, much less to maintain the expected level of luxury and comfort that our ten highly-paying guests demanded. Isn’t it utterly fucking predictable that I was holding the station together then and now I’m probably the last one left to keep it from falling into the goddamn sun?

At least my competence was recognized and I was promoted to Section Leader within a few months. I guess the pay bump could’ve been worse. But with the toll it took on my blood pressure, who knows if it was worth it.

What am I saying? Of course it wasn’t worth it, because that promotion is what put me here, in this godforsaken water tank, alone.

---

The AI aboard RPI’s observatory at L1 determined near-instaneously that the developing solar weather had a high probability of giving the global telecommunications network a world-historic ass-fucking. It then took five minutes for the human scientists to double-check the figures, another five for them to report it, fifteen minutes for them to impress upon RPI executives the severity of the coming storm, and then almost two hours for anyone to remember about Lethe and cobble together a plan that would keep us from getting roasted alive. I reconstructed the timeline from the event logs they sent over, the sneaky fucks.

I got the call in the middle of my sleep cycle. The Station Manager, a useless, gangly bureaucrat named Lyle who had an obnoxiously crisp BBC accent—despite emigrating to Florida as a 7-year-old child—heard the news first and pinged me to join the call in a panic.

“…of the guests and crew is our top priority, of course, but the station itself is an extraordinarily valuable asset,” the suit was saying.

“How long until we get hit?” I asked, ignoring the ongoing conversation. Onscreen, Lyle visibly relaxed as I took over.

“Current estimates say two hours, give or take 90 minutes,” the suit said. “For the initial flare to form and begin transit. A wave of solar energetic particles will follow shortly, and the coronal mass ejection is expected to be both fast-moving and long-lasting: 60 hours at a minimum, with fluctuating levels of radiation probably tapering off around hour 72. Our models are projecting little to no breathing room between the first wave of SEPs and the proton storm pushed out by the CME. The crew should plan to take cover for the full duration of the event.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Couldn’t give us some more warning?”

“We contacted you as soon as we had a reliable projection,” the suit lied. “We are now expecting a Carrington-level event. Earthside impact on telecommunications is likely to be moderate-to-severe.”

“Boohoo, your magnetosphere will protect most of your satellites,” I said. “We’re the ones with our asses out. I guess Lyle better go round up the kids and stick them in the hole.”

I raised a finger to switch off the screen. As Section Leader, it was my job to operate the station thrusters to reorient Lethe so she was ass-up to the sun: water tanks and propellant and several layers of hull between the deadly solar radiation and the little sealed cave where the inhabitants of the station would huddle and wait for the storm to pass. I would be busy right up until it was time to duck into the shelter.

“Wait…” Lyle said. “There’s something else.”

I waited. Lyle squirmed. Eventually the suit sighed and spoke.

“There isn’t enough room in the shelter for everyone,” he said. “Someone will have to stay out.”

“What do you mean, not enough room?” I said.

“In the last resupply, two of Mr. Bach’s grandchildren joined him,” Lyle said, “but only one guest departed.”

“Well, then I guess Mr. Bach will have to decide which of his grandkids he wants to write out of his will,” I said. No one laughed.

“Are you saying that we really have no redundancy built into the shelter?” I asked. “Can’t one of the kiddies sit on grandpa’s lap?”

“They’re adult grandchildren,” Lyle said.

“That’s not how it works,” the suit said. “Lethe was originally designed to accommodate only twenty people. When we added the medspa expansion, that was increased by ten, but not all its systems were, ah, adapted. The shelter’s life support will be taxed to its limit as it is. We were hoping that one of the crew would volunteer to stay outside of the shelter and instead put on a pressure suit and immerse themselves in water tank A. The amount of extra radiation exposure would be somewhat mitigated by the water. We’ve run some projections and it should be within acceptable limits.”

“So, all we’re needing is a volunteer,” Lyle said.

They both shut up and I could feel them looking at my little square on their screens. I didn’t say anything. At the very least, I would make them feel uncomfortable for asking.

After a very long thirty seconds, the suit spoke up again.

“RPI feels that you, as the highest ranking sanitation technician, are the best candidate to weather the storm inside the tank,” he said, with the exaggerated patience of someone explaining to a petulant child why they couldn’t have a second ice cream cone.

Just my fucking luck. Using my competence against me. The last thing I wanted was to be stuck in a pressure suit, swapping out cans of O2 for three days while the CME crapped SEPs all over Lethe. I could tell the fuckers expected me to nobly volunteer for the honor of pissing into a suit and sucking protein shakes from a straw like a space-age gerbil while the others played yahtzee in their bunk beds. I did not go quietly. With the clock ticking down, I negotiated a hazard bonus that would be enough to retire on—provided I relocated to a low cost of living, high political instability region. Hell, I thought. I’m only 36. That’s still young, for a man. I can take the risk of living in a gated compound in the Filipino highlands. Might even find a decent wife there.

So that’s how I ended up in this fish tank, more or less out of the goodness of my own heart, after I spun the station to ensure that my tank and I would absorb the brunt of the radiation. At least they’d put me in the freshwater tank and not the untreated, pressurized sewage in the adjacent tank. That would’ve been a special kind of hell.

Of course, getting myself in and out was a pain in my dick. The tank was designed for dry human maintenance, but there was no time to drain and then refill the tank. Instead, I had to enter through the port meant for robotic maintenance tools. To prevent water loss in zero G, the standard procedure was to spin up the cylindrical tank, which was mounted on a large hydraulic turntable, forcing the water to the edges of the tank, creating a dry pocket of air in the center along the tank’s axis. A hatch on the short edge of the tank could then be safely opened and the robot inserted.

Lucky me, the hatch also fit a standard-sized human male—just barely. I should’ve hit the gym more, bulked up. Once I was in, Lyle handed me tank after tank of oxygen, which I ferried down along the long axis of the cylinder and strapped down to the bottom, where I would huddle under the protective mass of potable water. Then Lyle braked the tank and the water continued to slosh around chaotically for a while, until it gradually reconfigured into the column-shaped blob it wanted to be at rest and swallowed me whole.

Lyle promised to keep me company over the comms so I wouldn’t wig out, but after about an hour of him narrating the progress of the solar storm and what the whole crew were up to, I was about ready to open my helmet, so I cut the receiver on my end without signing off. I liked the idea of him droning on and on into his microphone, pissing off the VIPs, before he eventually realized that I’d turned him off. The flare was already hitting us but our shielding was holding up fine and I didn’t need a status update every two minutes.

Instead, I piped in an audiobook I’d been chipping away at for a few days. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. A real classic, almost 100 years old. My ex had told me that I needed to get more cultured, so I’ve been taking the opportunity during my long exile on Lethe to do some reading. I never saw the point of literature before, but I’ve been finding that a lot of the books have sexy bits in them. Especially this one. In fact, when he started talking about licking this girl’s cunt in a convertible, I started to get a little hard. This was unfortunate, since there wasn’t much I could do about it in the pressure suit. I strongly regretted not rubbing one out before leaving my bunk to deal with this crisis and save the day, as usual.

I turned off the audiobook and willed my erection down. It had been several hours at this point, so I swapped out my O2 can and decided to get some sleep. In zero G, sleeping in the suit actually wasn’t too bad. I made a mental note to exaggerate the unpleasantness to Lyle and the rest of the crew. Maybe some of those billionaire VIPs would throw me some extra scratch or introduce me to their hot trust fund nieces or whatever in gratitude for my sacrifice. I switched off my helmet light and closed my eyes.

---

I awoke some time later in total blackness, disoriented. I thrashed around for a moment before remembering where I was and why. I didn’t feel anything around me; I had floated free from the edge of the tank, where my extra oxygen was strapped down. Had I really forgotten to tie myself down before closing my eyes? Fucking idiot. I fumbled with the switch on my helmet; my headlamp wouldn’t turn on. Fucking SEPs fried the LED. I started to hyperventilate. My HUD was down. I couldn’t see the analog oxygen gauge on my wrist. No way to tell how long it had been.

I tried to raise Lyle on comms. Nothing, not even static. I guess the storm was worse than RPI predicted. That, or they knew this would happen and just didn’t tell me so I’d agree to get in the fucking tank. I’ve always been such a chump. Always get stuck holding the fucking bag.

I took a deep breath and tried not to ruminate that it could be one of my last. Panic raises heart rates and increases respiration. Panic depletes O2. I shut my eyes tight to ward off fear of the dark.

I picked an arbitrary direction and did an awkward doggie paddle with my stiff limbs. After several strokes, I bumped into the side of the tank. I followed the ridges of the wall, pulling myself along, until at last I felt the ladder that ran along the tank’s long axis. Pulling myself in the arbitrary direction I designated as “up,” I felt the airlock hatch, which was on the sun-side edge of the tank. That meant my air was directly opposite. I kept pulling myself “up” until I reached the far end of the tank and all of my remaining cans of O2. I nearly pissed myself out of sheer relief. In fact, I probably did piss myself. It was kind of hard to tell sometimes, in the suit. The maximum absorbency lining always felt a little spongy. I was so happy I almost forgot to curse the station architects for not including some little shielded hideout on the outside of the tank. I strapped myself to the ladder and cried a little.

The next problem was time. Without a working HUD, I couldn’t tell exactly how much time had passed, I couldn’t raise Lyle on comms for a sit-rep, and I couldn’t rely on the emergency oxygen level alerts to kick in. All of my electronics seemed to be fried, which didn’t bode well for my internal organs, but I tried not to think about that. Hypoxia is a tricky phenomenon; one of the first symptoms is euphoria, not-caring about one’s imminent suffocation.

I decided to meditate, hoping that my enhanced awareness of my body would alert me to any tell-tale tingling in my extremities before the happy apathy kicked in. Meditation had been one of those things I got into as an alternative to mental health treatment when I lost my health insurance, my job, my girlfriend, and all sense of purpose in life. I moved back to Blacksburg in defeat and spent a lot of time in my childhood bedroom just breathing, mostly as a way to avoid eye contact with my diabetic parents, who shrouded their contempt for me in saccharine concern. I achieved some pretty wild altered states that way, which was convenient because I didn’t have any money for drugs or alcohol. Besides, with the Mo-ist Regime being what it was in those days, it didn’t seem worth it to risk the death penalty just to catch a nod off of some Nepalese 5-MeO-fentanyl, the hallucinogenic opioid that more or less permanently replaced good ol’ heroin in the 2030s.

When it came to meditation, I was into the visualization style pioneered by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—none of this touchy-feely Zen bullshit. I wanted personal results, not loving kindness. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Floating in this vast, watery casket, I commenced a meditation on Tiferet: a golden sphere at the center of the Tree of Life. Visualizing an orb of golden light above my heart, I intoned the divine name, YHVH Eloah ve-Daath, until the orb grew in brilliance and consumed me. I contemplated the beautiful light around and within me, watching as it pulsed with every breath. Gradually, a faint veil shrouded the pulsating light, diminishing its radiance by degrees. It was then that I knew I was drawing less oxygen than before. I swapped out my empty can for the next refill.

I kept myself in this meditative, hypnotic state for two more cans of O2, which I estimated to be about 16 hours. At intervals which I had no means of determining, I sucked down swallows of fortified protein fluid.

The greatest challenge was preventing my focus from wandering. I was effectively in a sensory deprivation environment, and the tendency is for the mind to flee such yawning blankness. But the only way to ensure that I didn’t become hypoxic was to remain embodied, even as I practiced the solar visualization centered on Tiferet. My consciousness was being torn in two; the psychic pain was immense and yet only distantly felt. Time stretched and contracted into meaninglessness. Panic, that ancient panting mammal, was never far. Physical relaxation of my muscles turned to spasms of agony as I drifted. I could no longer tell whether my eyes were open or closed. Phantom lights and shadows of terrifying leviathans swam before my visage.

Four cans of air later, I was jolted back into time by a faint banging on the side of the tank. For a moment, I had the terrible certainty that it came from outside, not just outside the tank but outside the station itself, some hideous beast of the void come to claim me as tribute. The banging continued, and I realized with a start that it must be coming from the hole; human hands slapping the bulkhead between the radiation shelter and the water tank.

I had, in all honesty, forgotten about the others. It seems they had forgotten about me, too, and were only now attempting to communicate.

I banged my hand against the side of the tank a few times.

Yeah, I’m still here.

They kept banging. I tried to discern a pattern, not that I could remember any Morse code aside from SOS. The banging seemed random, and at times it sounded like more than one person. I hesitated. Were they trying to signal that the storm was over? That RPI suit had said the bulk of the coronal mass ejection plasma, along with its accompanying blast of toxic SEPs, would take days to pass.

If it were over, then they could leave the shelter and come bang on the tank’s airlock, which was the agreed-upon all-clear signal in case of comms failure.

My mind spun through the remaining possibilities. There was some kind of problem inside the shelter. Maybe one of the VIPs had gone crazy and started mauling the others. I had always regarded billionaires as something other than fully human, so it seemed plausible. They were trying to subdue him but couldn’t manage on their own. The solar storm may or may not be ongoing, so escape would be fatal. They wanted me to take the risk to expose myself to hard radiation to come save their pathetic asses.

Shit, let them rip each other apart. As much as I wanted to be anywhere but at the bottom of this tank, I was not willing to leave the relative safety of my watery shield and venture unprotected into the main body of the station. Not for those assholes.

The banging grew increasingly frantic. It sounded like half of them were in there, scratching at the wall. After a couple of minutes, the vibrations grew weaker.

I wavered slightly in my resolve. It was clear that something terrible was happening on the other side of the walls. Radiation levels ebbed and flowed during a solar event of this magnitude, so it was possible that the danger was low at this moment. Or even that the danger had passed. I could exit my aqueous safe haven, play the hero, get a promotion, and maybe even go viral enough to get Mars as my next assignment.

All at once, the muffled banging stopped. Whatever crisis had transpired in the shelter had passed, it seemed, one way or another. I banged on my side of the tank, but there was no reply. Either they got bored of waiting for me, or they were all murdered by a rogue billionaire with a microgravity fetish. I imagined them lying there, bleeding out in big floating globules of arterial blood, for a while, which was fine until I got a little spooked at the thought of being so close to all those corpses. I decided that it was counterproductive to imagine such silly worst-case scenarios; they were probably just over there having a laugh at my expense. They would come get me when the storm was over and it was safe to come out. I put my brain back into meditation mode and resolved to override my curiosity and see the thing through.

---

But they never did come for me. I made it through all but four of my cans of air—72 hours total, by my reckoning—before I broke and decided that it must finally be safe for me to emerge and check on the assholes next door. I gave the side of the tank a good thwack and received no response. Possibly they had received an all-clear call from HQ, or at least the solar observatory at L1, and retreated from the shelter hours ago, forgetting all about me.

I made my way hand over hand “up” the ladder to the entry port. I had no way to spin up the tank from the inside, but I gave approximately zero point three fucks about wasting water at this point. In zero G, it’s not like there would be a flood from the open porthole—just whatever water I carried through the surface tension with me. It would be a pain to recapture the floating globules of water, but that was a problem for later. The port hatch was manual, so its functionality had not been impacted by the storm. I swung open the port and squeezed through the opening, pulling it shut quickly to minimize the water loss. This corridor, on the sun-facing side of the station, was also in total blackness; the emergency lights were burnt out by the storm.

I considered keeping the suit on, but my revulsion at the prospect of staying in the onion-and-urine-smelling body condom overpowered my sense of caution. Besides, it was obvious that air pressure had been maintained, at least in this part of the station. I was finally free to remove my helmet and breathe air from the giant can that was the station, rather than the can on my backpack. I shed the rest of the suit and stowed it in the locker outside the tanks by feel. I pulled myself along the rail that ran the perimeter of the water filtration chambers towards the shelter nestled between the two huge tanks.

A red emergency light was on outside the shelter airlock. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. My mind had conjured dancing lights and nightmarish visions in the dark. But this, the bloody glow of the emergency lighting system drawing the corridor into focus, this was real. I opened the outer door of the shelter airlock, sealed it, then tried to open the inner door. The door wouldn’t budge. I consulted the screen on the door mechanism, which was still operational. Looked like their extra shielding paid off. It was alerting some abnormal pressure reading, but it seemed pretty insistent that the shelter wasn’t de-pressurized.

I rang the doorbell and croaked a greeting through the intercom on the door.

“Hey!” I said, “You in there?”

No response. I tapped a few buttons to broadcast to all comms stations and handsets and asked for a sitrep.

And waited. The silence gave me a bad feeling.

I didn’t trust whatever delusional information the pressure gauge was giving me, so I pulled myself back into the darkness to collect my vacuum suit. At this point, my arms and back were screaming at me. No physical exertion—other than panic-cramping—or solid food for 3 days, and then suddenly I was dragging myself all over the station.

Once I was back in my suit—really the last place in the world I wanted to be, piss-receptacle that it was—I forced a manual override of the lock of the shelter’s inner door and braced myself for vacuum. Perhaps a microasteroid had struck the station and penetrated through to this inner chamber, and the idiots hadn’t sealed it up in time.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the tsunami of sewage that swung the door open and flooded the airlock. Within seconds, I was floating in a vile mixture of human shit, urine, scummy wash water, bloated corpses, and vomit.

No, the vomit was inside my suit; that was mine. I tasted whey-flavored bile and it splattered and floated around my helmet. I coughed and choked as I inhaled little globs of my own spew-up. It burned my eyes, my nose, my throat.

I thrashed around for a few moments, losing my grip on the wall, bumping into something that was once Lyle, or maybe it had been Sarah, the lab tech I had hatefully whacked off to on a few occasions, the one that reminded me of a younger version of my academic advisor at Chicago, the old cunt who hadn’t stood up for me when the pitchforks came out. It was hard to tell their waterlogged bodies apart. I clocked one of the billionaires sailing past me by the thick silver hair plugs he had been so proud of. It was hard to see through the murky sewage that filled the chamber, but the density of bodies was such that I felt certain none had escaped.

The shelter was small and cramped, with corpses floating in what felt like every cubic foot of space, and now the contents of the room were rushing to fill the airlock. I grabbed hold of the railing on what was designated as the ceiling and pulled myself up the filthy current. I reached the far wall as the water pressure was beginning to equalize and found a softball-sized hole in the wall separating the shelter from the untreated sewage tank. That tank was pressurized as part of the treatment process; even still, with an opening that size it must’ve taken minutes for the shelter to fill. Why hadn’t they been able to override the door lock in that time? Or patch the hole with something—surely there was an emergency breach kit somewhere in the shelter. Maybe the radiation had penetrated this far and wreaked havoc with their controls.

I inspected the hole: roughly sheared, punctured from the far side of the wall. My best guess was that some electronic element of one of the nearby Sabatier pumps failed explosively during the CME storm, igniting a tank of O2 that we used to oxygenate the treated water, sending shrapnel bursting through the shelter wall. The shelter was roughly equal in volume to the tank, so no more sewage flowed through, now that I had expanded the volume by opening the airlock.

I worked my way back to the airlock, warding off the human detritus with defensively raised forearms. Whatever pressure alarm had kept the inner airlock door locked while they tried to escape from drowning in shit had vanished, and I was able to open the outer door without a problem. I let the foul mixture spill out into the corridor, the great deadly wave sloshing into ankle-deep filth, disgusting but harmless. A handful of bodies spilled out, too, some of them still immersed, others floating freely in the air, watery debris clinging to their doughy flesh. I pulled my way through the corridor, rushing to open a new corridor and slam the door against all of the sewage and death.

I was breathing heavily through this exertion and starting to feel lightheaded and giddy. As I floated there, braced against the corridor hatch, panting, I started to laugh. It was all so ridiculous. Their bloated faces looked like painted clowns.

A thought drifted lazily from one corner of my mind, overlaying itself upon the hilarity that consumed me. My fingers are tingling.

A second, seemingly unrelated notion: It might be time to take off my helmet.

I unlocked my helmet and breathed in deeply, flooding my oxygen-starved bronchioles with what passed for fresh air on Lethe. The fetid, faintly sweet smell of sewage and rotting corpses that clung to the outside of my suit hit my nostrils and I vomited, again, rivulets of bile shooting down the corridor. Coughing and sputtering, I convulsed in mid-air. I felt a rush of exhilaration. I was alive.

---

After I stripped off the profoundly soiled pressure suit and made a rudimentary pass at cleaning myself up, I made my way to the operations console and reset all the workstations. A few of them responded; most were dead. One of them gave me a radiation reading: slightly elevated, but within normal limits. Another showed me that internal and long-range comms were back up after a lengthy outage.

I sent voice and text queries to every console on Lethe: Anyone alive?

I waited, but this time I didn’t hold my breath.

I found a protein bar stashed in a cabinet next to Noah’s workstation—God bless that fatass, rest in peace. I masticated it with pleasure, the first solid food to pass through my maw in days. My jaw ached. In the tank, I had ground my teeth on phantom steak and potatoes.

Chewing lustily, I pinged the solar observatory and RPI ground-based mission control. They should’ve been ecstatic to hear from me. After a few minutes with no response, I determined that I could manually control the telescope and swung it towards L1. The observatory wasn’t there. I swung the telescope around and finally located it: it had become unmoored from the unstable LaGrange point, probably due to some failure of its thrusters, and was settling into some random orbit at approximately 0.8 AU.

Next, I re-aimed the telescope at Earth, just to reassure myself it was still there. There she was, a glimmering blue marble in gibbous, three-quarter profile. The Western hemisphere was angled towards Lethe, with the East Coast in darkness. Not that I was ever one to cream my jeans over natural beauty, but just laying eyes on Mother Earth gave me a little dopamine hit.

Until I noticed that the night side of the planet was in total darkness. The Eastern seaboard, usually a crowded spiderweb of light, was completely black. My stomach lurched. I refocused on the illuminated daylight side of the globe. Layered beneath a sparse, lacy white cloud cover, I could make out the indistinct outlines of dark grey smoky clouds. They had drifted and merged with each other to form a bleak umbrella over the continent, but I could still count at least a dozen distinct loci of clouds.

Not just clouds. Mushroom clouds.

Drawing thin, ragged breaths, I tried again to raise ground mission control. There was no response.

I closed my eyes, reconstructing what must have happened in the confusion of the solar storm. Phantom alarms tripped, cascading failures in century-old systems, secondary and tertiary strike capabilities triggered by human and inhuman agents. I wondered if my hypothetical mountain villa on Cebu would have survived the blasts. Maybe in the short term, but if that’s what happened to the United States, there was no way the other side of the globe wasn’t struck a hundredfold. The environmental chain reactions would be catastrophic. Even an uncontacted tropical band of pygmy savages would croak eventually, faced with imminent nuclear winter and the whims of wind and ash.

And here was I, on this improbable ark peopled with the dead, safe from the fallout—perhaps not just safe but saved by some indifferent trickster god. An Adam without an Eve. I could fix the water treatment system. I could convert the now-useless pharmaceutical labs into a hydroponics farm. With a little ingenuity and thrift, I could survive almost indefinitely with the supplies meant for thirty people. To bear witness, to bear the weight of remembrance and grief for a planet and a species that, all my life, couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

Or I could forget. I could choose to abandon the memory of an entire planet. I felt a thin, electric thrill, a twitch in my loins as the enormity of the catastrophe dawned on me. A couple thousand on Mars, a few hundred en route; they would soon die out without the umbilical trade route back to Earth. The Martians were a rounding error. I was—finally—alone. Gloriously alone.

The moment passed and I slumped over on the console, resting my forehead in the crook of my elbow, struck with profound exhaustion. It sounded like an awful lot of work. I felt depleted and raw. I was certain I would never get the aroma of bile, sewage, and death out of my hair; it was a permanent new fixture of my olfactory cortex. I thought about the fruity shampoo that Sarah the lab tech used and wondered if that would help. Then I realized that I would never smell a living woman ever again. I closed my eyes and fell into a deep and dreamless abyss through which hulking shadows swam with insensate menace.

***

Hours passed like seconds. I came to, suddenly wide awake and aware of a persistent beeping. I was being hailed by ground control. I hit accept and was greeted by the unshaven face of the MBA-PhD suit who had sealed our fates at the start of the solar storm. The connection was patchy.

“….you read?” he said. “Oh, finally,” he said, as I turned my camera on, numb. My sluggish mind raced to determine how this guy, of all people, had survived the deluge.

“Storm rocked us pretty good, so I’m glad to see Lethe in one piece. I guess they pulled you out of that water tank alright,” he said with a dry little laugh. I gaped at him.

“We’ve sustained some serious casualties down here. Thirty thousand in the US alone, and the number is rising,” he said, shaking his head. “We did everything we could, grounded all the planes, told everyone to shelter in place, shielded backup generators at major hospitals, you name it, but there were still some unavoidable complications, downstream effects, plus all the dumbasses on the road who didn’t realize the storm would brick their cars as surely as an EMP.”

“Thirty… thousand?” I said. I had been counting on ten billion, give or take.

“Yeah, we’re just barely getting the lights back on now,” he said.

“But I saw the mushroom clouds,” I said. “All over the Western hemisphere. I thought—”

“Mushroom clouds?” The suit was confused. It occurred to me belatedly that his name was Scott. “We’re getting reports of wildfires all through the West and Southwest—sparks coming off power lines and blown transformers—but I haven’t heard anything about any nuclear explosions. Tom, you got anything about nukes? Some silo malfunction or power plant blow or something?” Scott spoke to someone off-camera. “No, nothing like that. Must be the wildfires. They’re a real problem. Our ability to fight them is severely compromised. Thousands of people are being displaced, dozens already dead in the fires.”

“Dozens…” I said. “How sad.”

I didn’t feel anything at all.

“It’s a real shitshow down here,” he said. Scott paused as though struck by a thought. “How’d you guys do up there?”

Sunset on the Sea by John Frederick Kensett (1872)

Lillian Wang Selonick is a writer and science communication professional in the Washington, D.C., region. Her work has been published in The Metropolitan Review, Futurist Letters, The Republic of Letters, Joyland Magazine, Variant Literature, Ricepaper Magazine, and others. She writes about classic literature and science fiction at The Lillian Review of Books. Find her on Substack or at lillianwangselonick.com.