The windows cast the walkway in iridescent blue, shimmering and scattered, an elegant light show. If you hadn’t seen it every day of your life, you’d call it beautiful, but it’s just normal.
It’s a reminder that you’re trapped on a ship in the middle of space, surrounded by nothing but distant, dying stars. The universe is much too cold for you to survive in.
But Clover’s hand is warm. Not as warm as yours, but its chill is distinctly human. He’s real.
You turn your gaze toward him and admire his hair, a halo shining in the infinite light.
“I love you.”
You can’t tell if you said that aloud, if you even said that at all, if you were talking to Clover or some secret other, but nobody responds.
You reach his room. You’ve been here before, you think, but you can’t remember when. He unlocks it by tapping a finger to the latch, and it slides open smoothly, just as smoothly as yours.
The room’s identical to yours, too. Except for a pathetic little potted plant. It must be plastic, of course, since the only real plants are in the parks every five levels. You stop looking at it; it makes you sad, somehow.
It’s lonely, an imitation of what it should be. Like you and Clover, you guess.
The door slides shut, and you both collapse on his bed.
“The people you mentioned earlier, the ones who you’ve talked to about blowing this thing up,” you say after an awkward silence. “Who are they?”
He smiles, and you start to melt.
“Of course! There’s fourteen others I’ve talked to that would be interested. You are, too, so that’s sixteen. I’m the only one who has any knowledge of making explosives, but Daniel’s a mechanic, so he has a map of the entire ship. He knows the best place to put them. Not everyone’s as useful as him, but the more we have, the better distraction we can make.”
To be honest, you aren’t fully processing everything he’s saying; you’re too distracted by the way his hair fans out around his head. You think you understand, though.
“Daniel’s a mechanic?” you ask slowly, unsure of yourself. “I thought the androids took care of all that stuff.”
“It’s what keeps him from losing his mind. Most people have jobs, didn’t you know? Meaningless, redundant jobs, but jobs nonetheless,” he says. You catch a hint of condescension in his voice.
“He’s going to help us destroy where we live. I wouldn’t call that ‘not losing his mind.’”
“Ahaha, you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He sighs and starts twirling his hair idly. You almost ask him to stop, since he’s messed up his angelic halo, but he’s not an angel. An angel of destruction, maybe, but not an angel. And anyway, he can do whatever he wants.
“Can I meet them?” you ask impulsively.
“Maybe. If they want you to join. The Leftovers of Humanity are quite picky, you know.”
“With a name like that? Guess they aren’t all that picky about titles.” You know the name doesn’t matter, but it’s fun to tease him.
He hums and begins staring at you, his eyes boring into your soul.
You don’t mind at all. You almost like how his piercing gaze feels, a reminder that you’re real after all, that maybe you matter to someone, just a little bit.
“Sure, I’ll bring you along. We’re pretty close to being ready, though, so I’m not sure what you’ll be able to do,” he finally says.
“I’ll look pretty. Or maybe I’ll be your plus-one for the apocalypse.”
“That sounds like something I’ve read.”
“Was it good?”
“No. It was rather derivative.” He laughs suddenly, then stands up.
“What?”
“Time’s almost up.”
Your face falls. You stand up, too, and make your way to the door. There’s still a few hours before you’ll be tired enough to go to bed, but you can’t spend any more time with him. It’s the rules, rules made by people long-dead who should by all means hold no power over you.
But you aren’t a rule-breaker. You aren’t the type of guy who sticks out of a crowd. Not that you’ve ever seen a crowd before.
The irony of that thought only fully hits you when you’re trying (and failing) to go to sleep that night.
He sends you a message the next day. Well, you assume it’s him. Clover’s the only person you know who’d randomly send you a message, even though your tablet claims it’s from an unknown sender.
“Meet me at the park on Level 20 in an hour.”
There’s a smiley face after it. A few seconds later, you get a picture of his smiling face in front of a familiar tree.
Of course the tree’s familiar. You’ve been to that park countless times before. Never for planning a sinister deed, of course, but you recognize the tree nonetheless.
You wonder if you’ll recognize the places you’re going to blow up. You probably will recognize every inch of this ship, even when it’s bent and twisted, drifting in the emptiness of space.
You watch the lights go by for an hour, just wasting time until you can see him again. Him, and the rest of the Leftovers of Humanity.
What an awful name, truly.
You don’t have high hopes for them. But if Clover thinks that they might be able to end this rotten world, then you’re going to believe him. You trust him much more than you’d ever be able to elucidate.
A lot of that trust probably comes from his ethereal beauty. And the fact that you’re in love with him, and the fact that you think he loves you, too, even though he’d never admit it, trying to explain that ‘trash like him’ (his words, not yours) could never experience something as hopeful as love.
You think he’s just afraid of experiencing something good in his life. You are, too, that’s why you’re trying to destroy everything you’ve ever known. But oh well, it’ll be fun anyway, and maybe dying will make both of you admit that you care about each other too much to live.
The appointed time comes, and you take the elevator down to Level 20. You realize you don’t know how elevators work. You don’t know how this ship works, either.
You’ve spent your whole life here, and you don’t understand anything about it at all.
You’re kind of pathetic, you think.
And then the elevator dings, reminding you that you’re at your destination, and you step off into the (relatively) fresh air of the arboretum. He’s waiting for you underneath the same tree he sent you a picture of, and you wonder if he’s moved at all.
What was the point of both of you waiting for an hour, if neither of you had anything better to do?
As if he can read your mind, he says, “It’s more dramatic like this, don’t you think?”
And you agree. There’s no point in doing something that isn’t fun, after all, since you don’t have anything else.
“Yeah, of course.”
Then, you notice something. Or more accurately, a lack of something.
“Where’s everyone else?”
“Hm, well, you’ll figure it out soon enough.” A smile plays across his lips, and he kicks his feet, as if he’s a little boy on a swing set.
You’re so focused on his feet, kicking back and forth and back and forth, that you don’t notice what’s in his hand, that you don’t notice his thumb moving up, up, even higher, to rest on a big red button you’ve never seen before.
“Oh,” you have time to say.
He presses it, and explosions reverberate throughout the ship, giant clouds of red and orange puffing up everywhere you can see, ripping through the beautiful metal catwalks all above you, tearing the world to ash.
And above it all is the sound of his laughter cutting through the chaos, a requiem for your lives, a requiem for this doomed voyage, the doomed hopes of the humanity that wanted your descendants to make it somewhere.
You watch him, utterly transfixed, as destruction rains all around both of you. Screaming metal, screaming people, screaming androids. They’re all the same, aren’t they?
They’re all going to be dead soon, dying or dead, so who cares?
You walk over to him, your beautiful love, grinning and kicking his feet like a little boy, his eyes the color of ash and blackened betal, and hold him tight as tears fall down your face for the first time you can remember.
And then you kiss him, his lips melting into yours, as the world ends around you. You think he starts crying, too, but you don’t care. It’d be hypocritical for you to care, after all.
