Sentimentality for dead things can kill you.
And today, as I sit down to watch the haze of sunset on this terrible, beautiful dying world, I am hungry.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 4 Saal 3027
The engineers have cleared the building, for inspection and cataloguing. They were impressed with how this tower was fortified to withstand blasts and cold and swirling storms. Working with our physicists, they have planted buttresses of light beams around the perimeter to hold the building up and stabilize it if the foundational integrity has been compromised or should we experience any seismic shifts. It is unlikely, our geologist assures us, but this planet is waking from a deep sleep and we don’t know how much anger it still holds deep in its core.
I have only a few diin left. I will be returning to al-Fihri, our orbit ship, because Salar is afraid that an extended on-planet mission will be too much for me. Though the air is no longer toxic to life and even though I spend my allotted time on the decontaminant filter each night before I sleep, my return to our orbit ship was always part of the deal. The doctors aboard will want to run me through a battery of tests since I am the youngest to touch this planet’s surface. And it is only dawning on me right now how profound that is. Maybe that’s why the historian had tears in their eyes when I asked them what the young people of this planet did when they weren’t in school or training. Swim, they said, pointing out to the frozen water. Once those depths teemed with life. Long ago, their old and young would walk to the water’s edge, enter, and let their bodies lie still, buoyant on the freshwater surface, eyes transfixed on blue skies.
I couldn’t imagine it until they pulled up an old image archive that had survived, uncorrupted. And there they were. Frozen in time. Hundreds of people on the sand, some shielding their eyes from the brightness of their star. Some floating in the water. Some riding on boards through the waves. Some sailing. I wonder what it must have been like to have all that potable water and then to poison it.
I zoomed in to see a little girl—maybe two or three saal, with saucer-like eyes, and another girl, an older one, perhaps a sibling, who looked to be my age. Brown skin and long black hair running down her back. She has her arm around the little girl, who is focused intently on a collapsing pile of sand before her. The older girl looks protective and proud of the little one. She wears a wide smile and is looking straight through the image, at me, another girl many saddi into the future. She looks unbothered. Happy. Blissfully unaware of the fate of her planet and her people. Seeing her, staring at her, I sucked in my breath, because she looks like me. Now her oval face, the tilt of her chin, the evenness of her teeth is etched in my brain. She looks like she could be my sister, too; she could be a twin.
The historian said this was only two saal before the end came. But what we both know is that when this moment was captured, the end was already upon them.
When I zoomed in again, I saw a trinket, a jewel around the older girl’s neck. It is their letter R. And in their language, that letter would also be mine.
It is not logical to be emotional for a stranger’s life. Sentimentality has no place on a mission. But I want to find R—this proud, smiling girl who looked full of life. Who was once alive. This girl like me, who must have had her own story to tell.
August 7, 2031
I play with my necklace. It is all I have left of Adnan. This stupid fake-gold initial necklace is somehow supposed to represent what we were to each other. The time we didn’t get. The things we never said. Like goodbye. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone. Not to Adnan. Not to Papa-ji. Not to my other friends.
We were all told to shelter in place, because the bombs they were releasing were the last countermeasure. The last hope to cool the planet. Can you imagine? Putting our hope in bombs? Having faith in the same politicians who had gotten us here because of their willful denial of how we were choking our planet. They chose the nuclear option. Literally. There would be three, maybe four, degrees of planetary cooldown, some of the scientists had said—the ones cherry-picked to agree. Almost instantly. It could be a miracle. Like a shot of high-dosage antibiotic for the planet. What they never said, what no one would ever admit, was that we were the infection that needed to get wiped out for the Earth to heal itself.
This is the way the world ends: with guns and plastic and denial about bombs bursting in air.
I have been spending more and more time here, in my perch, away from the others. Hiding. Our rations are thinning, and Ummi looks like she hasn’t slept in a hundred years. And Zayna, she was always small, but now she is the tiniest thing, a small spark, when before she was a laughing, twirling fiery ball of joy and chaos. I gave her my dinner last night and the night before. Ummi tried to force me to eat it, but I lied and said I wasn’t hungry. I’m not anymore. Not really. Not for another protein bar. Not for sawdust. I long for fresh food. But even if it still existed somewhere, even if by some miracle there was a patch of green earth, it would still be poisoned. For a moment, though, it would be ripe and delicious.
In the early days, Ummi would play a game with Zayna, pretending they were actually cooking a meal in the defunct kitchen of our apartment. Together they would get the imaginary ingredients from the cupboard that is mostly bare and from the fridge that has no light, to prepare dinner on the stove that gets no heat. Ummi would sing as Zayna banged around the pots. Ummi has the most beautiful voice—when I was little, her voice sparkled; it once filled me with hope.
I had a theory, once. But I stopped working on it, stopped believing. Early on, I spent time carefully hand-drawing the space vectors of the Cold Spot—charting the great void I thought was a door we could open. I have no way to access my work from my data chips anymore, but I save them anyway. And I have my memory. I have my ideas. For a while, it was a way to pass the time and hold on to the possibility of tomorrow. It feels hollow now, like Ummi’s voice when she tries to sing.
Now I hide from Ummi and Zayna and the reality of what we’ve become. I’m a coward for hiding. Truth is, I’ve been lost for a while now. And no one is going to find me. No one will ever know I was here. We will all be forgotten, and that is the saddest thing of all.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 5 Saal 3027
I found her.
The archives the historian showed me were full of her. She was a champion. An athlete. A scientist. A girl who followed her curiosity. A girl who could be me.
Before the adults of her world set her planet on fire, she studied the Cold Spot in her universe. The bubble where her universe collided with its mirror. She was so close to proving the multiverse exists. Though we have mastered travel at the speed of a star’s light, we have not yet broken the boundaries of the multiverse. We know they are out there. We have seen the trace particles, the barest evidence of quantum entanglement. And here was this girl, R, hundreds of saddi ago in this brutal world with primitive technology, on the cusp.