We perched along a ledge above the Infinity Bridge, hands entwined, gazing across the city we called home. A snapshot in time, of a world soon to be forgotten. Our planet was dying. No brilliant scientist able to stop the inevitable, just rough calculations of how it would all end – the agonising suffocation of life from a nuclear winter.
It had been predicted for Centuries. Our species had arrived and colonised this planet, knowing that it had a finite lifespan. That our two suns, binary stars that keep our planet at a habitable temperature, were dying, their core temperatures cooling exponentially. We watched them turn a sunset orange, and when Arius dulled to a blood red, the announcement was made.
We assumed we were all going, but the silence that followed the second announcement, echoed the pure fear in my heart and in the eyes of those around me.
Too expensive to cryogenically freeze everyone for the journey back to Earth, or the nearest colonised planet six billion light years away, we would enter a points lottery, to give everyone a fair chance.
But there was no fair chance. The wealthy, civil servants and professionals were given precedence. The lottery was for the rest of us. We were considered expendable.
My ticket wasn’t called, so I was to remain, assigned to work in the rest centres, until the bitter end.
Before this, I was a portrait artist; a sort-after trade by the wealthy. I worked night and day to finish commissioned works, watching them pack up and leave around me.
Some offered me money, enough for a final farewell, to drink myself into oblivion.
Others gave me the keys to their apartments and condos – ‘I can’t take it with me, so you might as well enjoy it.’
Their guilt free reasoning for leaving me here, to die.
I’d accepted my fate.
Until yesterday, the moment our eyes met across the room.
And now I want to live.
The prompt for this piece of flash fiction was the picture of two moons, and the subject ‘sky and universe’
On the drive home from my Exeter College Creative Writing class (2018), I had the idea of humans colonising a new planet with dying suns; so decided to just go with it and see where it took me…
This is the original piece I wrote, but I’m reposting (2025) because I’ve taken this idea and am developing it into a novel called Binarii
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