Twins

Welcome to the Spot Writers. This week’s tale comes to us from Val Muller, author of the kidlit Corgi Capers mystery series. This month’s prompt is to write anything involving global warming. 

Twins

by Val Muller

Blue looked at her wristband and could barely comprehend the green color it had turned. Her. The lottery. A winner. 

Emmy, with a plain black bracelet, looked over in shock. 

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding,” Emmy said. “I’m going home.” She huffed out the door, presumably to her apartment. 

The media portrayed it as the most important lottery you could ever win. Their outlook was clear: they had given up on Earth and any chance it had of healing. Their praise of the lottery painted a bleak picture for those who would remain, those like Emmy. Only the lucky few would be spared pain and suffering. And here was Blue, holding a ticket. 

It was almost impossible to believe.

Registration for the lottery was voluntary, offered to those who passed the medical exams, as Blue and her sister had. The population had struggled to maintain its numbers at 3 billion for decades now, and Blue was one of the lucky few to be chosen for one of only 15,000 tickets aboard the Stellar Hope. 

Emmy was not. 

In a few short weeks, Blue would arrive at the medical facility to be cryogenically frozen. As a female, and based on her age, she was given odds greater than others, but as a twin, Emmy was too. It was perhaps the only time in her life Blue had been luckier than her twin. While the residents of Earth suffered in the rising global temperatures and struggled to grow enough food to eat and desalinate enough water with dwindling power sources, Blue and her 14,999 companions would travel through space for unspecified decades—or longer—until the ship’s AI detected a world comparable with life. 

The pessimists—they would consider themselves the realists—worried that those on board would never wake up, would never find a planet suitable for life, would wander the cosmos until some catastrophic destruction took out Earth’s last hope. 

And the optimists agreed this could be true, but the death would be a mere sleep, not the slow, suffering, heat-and-starvation death of being left on Earth. Worst case scenario, it would be euthanasia kissed with the sweet dream of hope. 

And Blue had a ticket for it. 

That afternoon, in preparation for leaving, Blue transferred all her remaining water rations to her sister, accessible through the plain black bracelet that refused to glow green with fortune. And then, of course, all the seeds she’d been saving, all the clothing and resources she’d salvaged. Emmy would be moving into Blue’s apartment—it was larger and more well-provisioned. She’d leave Emmy all her notebooks and scavenged books about crop techniques over the history of the Earth, about desalinization, about digging underground for resources, about strange creatures that had somehow seemed to survive since the dinosaurs. 

But when Emmy finally returned, her annoyance at the mental load involved in remembering all these things countered Blue’s enthusiasm. 

“You want me to continue your garden? Steward your seeds? Dig in the ground for—worms? What difference does it make?” Emmy asked, looking with disgust at the shelves of resources in her sister’s apartment, soon to be hers officially. “You’re trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. I’d rather walk into the flames.” 

“But you aren’t, are you?” Blue asked. 

“Aren’t what?” Emmy flipped open a notebook of seed sketches, skimming over the notes Blue had left. 

“You aren’t going to walk into flames. Because—”

“What do you care? No matter what I do, you’ll be on a ship. You’ll either be sleeping peacefully forever, or you’ll wake up generations from now, in a place we wouldn’t even be able to imagine. How I spend the last of my days—or don’t spend them—doesn’t have any bearing on you, or us. The Earth will be forgotten, a lifeless desert, a new Mars. And you and the other thousands will be free.” 

Emmy huffed down the hallway to spend the night on the sofa. In the morning, Blue would start her journey to the medical facility near the launch site, and the apartment would be Emmy’s entirely. But sleep eluded Blue. She thought about her rooftop garden, about the earthworm garden she was raising in the chiseled cellar under her house, of the trade she had established with cross-town neighbors who lived near the briny river. It was all documented in her notes, the life cycle of water, fish, plants, dirt, worms. They were all things that used to happen naturally and abundantly, but now… would Emmy do anything with it? 

Blue tried to put herself to sleep by imaging the nicest thing she could, the most fantastic vision of the future. She tried to imagine beautiful worlds, lush rainforests, flowing water, humans at peace. She tried to imagine eating to abundance and drinking water chilled and flowing that it dripped down her chin. 

But the image that kept coming to her mind was her own rooftop garden, the small trickle of greenery that sprang from her efforts, and the delight in biting into a single cherry tomato. The cryogenic sleep that awaited was a whitewashed blue Nothing against the warm orange glow of her warm planet. Someone would have to save the Earth, and it wasn’t going to be anyone on the Earth’s Hope. 

In the morning, Emmy was surprised to be woken by a vibrating green bracelet, letting her know the transport would be waiting for her in just two hours’ time. Had there been a mistake? She rushed to Blue’s room to tell her sister the good news. But Blue, with a simple black bracelet, was sound asleep. She’d fallen asleep as usual poring over her notes about seeds and plants and things. The smile on her face was too serene for Emmy to wake her. She tiptoed out of Blue’s apartment, adjusting the glowing green bracelet that was just a little too big on her wrist, letting Blue remain in her dreamlike paradise as Emmy headed toward her own. 

The Spot Writers—Our Members:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/