9. The Scourge
The Scourge
Jude
The end of the world fucking sucked. But what was worse? Naming your stupid robot after your dead best friend.
I didn’t have many reminders of before. My grandmother died a few years into the Air Force Academy and my mom never made it to the exodus shuttles, which had been its own special kind of torment. It had been seven years now—or seven loops, as the Order liked to say.
Everyone I slept, ate, shit, and worked beside were people I’d never met before the bombs dropped. They came from different parts of the world, and like everyone else, they’d chosen new identities after it all went to hell.
The Scourge. Such a stupid word for an Earth-leveling event.
I still had Elias though. Mercifully. Not that I’d ever tell him that—his head was already too big. We had already been in space for eight months when it happened. Working on the SOL satellites.
“What is that?” I asked SOL, eyeing the platter suspiciously. I jerked on the dark blue jacket and zipped it up without bothering with an undershirt. They were all dirty anyway, and I was already delinquently late.
“Your daily ration,” SOL’s robotic voice garbled through the room. “Everything you need to maintain proper nutrition to support our civilization.”
Sighing, I pushed the floating orb away. “I should have never changed your voice, it’s creeping me out.”
“Shall I reprogram, Captain? Booting down in three, two—”
“No.”
I ran the towel through my hair one more time before tossing it over SOL and disappearing back into the bedroom.
The switch was necessary because when Elias gave SOL a body—well, a shape—it had come with a female voice.
It was sweet and soft, reminding me of Solace’s.
It had been too much, so I’d cycled through every variation I could find until I landed on an older male voice.
Turns out it didn’t really matter. SOL still sounded like her.
Sometimes the hollow in my chest remembered her as if she was in the room, standing on stage running lines for one of the many plays she’d made me sit through.
Even at thirty-two years old—sorry, I mean thirty-two loops—I couldn’t seem to let go.
There was a roaring in my ears every time SOL spoke and I’d half-madly considered cutting its ability to speak altogether. Everyone on Echelon One and all of the stations wore SOL on their wrists as a glorified smart watch, while I was forced to endure its robot prototype.
Back when the Survival Optimization Logic was first developed, Space Force alongside NASA integrated the system wherever they could manage.
At first it was similar to my original handheld model—smooth and round, resembling a river stone.
It was easy to slip into your pocket. Then it became a larger device.
A tablet-sized scanner that could read anything within five feet.
I was there the first time they tested it, and at the time I thought it was fucking awesome.
Now it floated around as a volleyball-sized orb, annoying the shit out of me and reminding me how lucky I was.
Stupidly lucky.
Though, I wasn’t sure I considered myself that.
I’d gone straight into the military after high school, climbed the ranks, and stupidly ended up in the Space Force.
I missed birthday’s and Christmas. Always between labs and military bases around the world.
Never married. No kids. And then I went up to space, and at the time, I even found that confounding.
Space was magnificent, and I truly mean…was. As in, I’d love nothing more than to hitch a ride back home if it wouldn’t kill me.
Buckled in beside Elias on that rocket was the most exhilarating moment of my life.
The stretch of black, kindred to a swath of velvet, cradled the Earth and each planet in our solar system.
I cried when I first got to look out of the cupola.
I was the youngest astronaut to ever step foot on the I.S.S.
at a whopping twenty-five years old. And then boom.
Nuclear warfare. Earth, once a sparkling gem, now lay buried beneath humanity’s own execration—a self-inflicted winter of ash. Or better known as: nuclear winter.
Fuck us all.
The Scourge wasn’t scary. It was devastating.
I watched grown men fall to their knees and cry.
I saw the black plumes claw their way into the atmosphere.
I split the skin across my knuckles on some poor kid from Novosibirsk’s face before realizing I wasn’t any better than the rest of them.
Hate was easy, nobody had to dig much to find it within themselves.
I didn’t want to be that way.
The months after that are still kind of a blur.
I remember the call, when I found out my mom never made it to the bunker I had secured a spot for her in after it was evident she wasn’t going to make it to the exodus shuttles.
I remember unloading those same shuttles full of civilians we didn’t actually have room for.
I remember sitting on the floor of the control room while SOL was pushed to its limit, and scanned every damn inch of Earth looking for survivors.
Each tick on the whiteboard marking the dead.
I mourned those black marks, because they weren’t only lines. They were graves we’d never dig. They were bodies that had simply—gone. Disintegrated. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, children…
Death did not discriminate, and apparently neither did we.
After that, it didn’t matter what color your skin was.
What language you spoke. What class you came from.
Which political party you identified with.
Not anymore. Now it was survival, and as much as I hated humanity some days, I had to admit something: we managed to pull our shit together long enough to try to live.
I hated putting on the stupid uniform, eating the same slop, and walking the same sterile hallways every day—
They need me and they need SOL, which happens to be the only way I know how to honor her.
I dragged myself off the bed and shoved my pants into my boots without bothering with the laces. “How late am I?”
“Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds,” SOL replied. “If you leave now, you will arrive in exactly six minutes and thirteen seconds, making you twenty-three minutes and—”
“Enough, SOL.” I grabbed my badge and stepped through the oval door, where it hissed shut behind me.
From orbit the planet looked sleepy. After seven years it was still dark and patchy, but some of its brilliance peeked through depending on where you observed it. It was a shame SOL said the atmosphere would kill you in under four minutes.
When the bombs hit, they didn’t only destroy cities.
They ruptured chemical plants, storage facilities, and experimental top secret labs worldwide.
Among them was a classified compound: aerosolized reactive silicate.
ARS-7. Or better known as the Haze—which would fill your lungs with toxic fluid until you choked on your own death.
It was an atmospheric catastrophe and if I was being completely honest…
Was planned.
Even if you survived the blasts, there was still nuclear winter to contend with—and the diseases that slipped their cages when research labs were torn open.
I tore my gaze from the only window in this corridor and followed the path of orange arrows.
The artificial gravity in this ring was only partial once you stepped foot out of your quarters—just enough to keep people from drifting into the ceiling—so every step had a buoyant bounce to it.
My boots thudded against the metal floor in slow rhythm as the station hummed around me: life support, engines, circulation.
The sound never stopped. Up here, silence meant something had gone very wrong.
The hallways of Station Seven curved gently with the spin of the ring.
There were no other windows in this section, only white panels broken by warning strips and maintenance hatches every few meters.
Peculiarly, a botanist from Station Eight floated past the intersecting corridor with an armful of clipped greens, her hair tucked into her dark cap.
She wore the standard station blues—loose flight pants and a fitted thermal shirt with the insignia patch at the shoulder.
Everyone wore some version of it now, even the civilians on Echelon One.
Two mechanics were arguing beside an open wall panel, tools magnetized to the metal beside them.
Nine stations and one command habitat orbited what used to be home.
Ten fragile rings of steel and recycled resources holding the last of us together with math, science, and the stubborn will of life.
The governments of the world had apparently been planning for the Scourge for much longer than anyone realized.
The stations were once intended as research and climate monitoring hubs, where earth's scientists would gather information and knowledge in case of environmental catastrophe.
Station Eight was set up with agriculture, and thanks to a few successful missions, already growing food. Every other station quickly found specific missions in keeping our surviving population alive, and at our center floated Echelon One. The hub of what was left of us.
Thirty-seven thousand humans managed to make it into space. Meanwhile, it had been seven loops since the Scourge and we still did not have an accurate count of who managed to survive on earth. That was my job.
I pushed through the hatch to the command ring and nearly collided with a group of ensigns getting ready to drift through the low-g corridor, their tether cords trailing behind them like comet tails. “SOL, time.”
“Twenty-one minutes and nine seconds late.”
“Fantastic.” The command deck doors were already in sight and lucky for me, Commander Zhang hated when people were late.