The ships were gone, finally gone, having escaped the surly bonds of Earth’s atmosphere and off toward the one theoretically-livable planet within the Proxima Centauri system. Once their stellar armada moved past our moon, their Nicolani star-drives would accelerate to roughly ninety-three percent of the speed of light and reach their new homes in approximately five years. In that small moment, however, the contrails of the near-Earth boosters still hung high up in the clear blue sky.
Twenty-thousand or so of the richest people on Earth and a small set of pilots and support crews, up and away to some new frontier. Not out of any kind of explorative spirit or anything like that, that’s not how rich folks operated. That’s never how they operated. They fled from fears focused through the extremities of privilege, as always. Twelve billion others were left behind, of course.
Seven years prior, there had been news of a great and terrible asteroid coming to wipe out Earth in eight years’ time and instead of looking for ways to shoot the invading rock down or deflect it away, the people in charge, that’s to say the people with money, decided they’d be more assured of survival going elsewhere than they’d be by saving the planet. They poured years and years of world’s resources into their escape, developing near-Light engines and finding the best situation for comfortable repopulation. They had all the money, they had all the weapons, there was little for a common person to do than help build the insanely complex infrastructures for their rockets and to wait for the inevitable death. The rich sold it as humanity’s best chance at continuation, a shame we couldn’t go with them but there was only so much time and only our betters could go.
They were, after all, our betters. The ones needed to re-start humanity in space, they said. Now, the actual message “fuck off and die, poor people, we kings and gods will live on without you” was never actually said out-loud, but it was certainly understood. And what could we do, right? The rich reckoned we’d rather live seven or eight years more than be shot immediately, for not doing our serfdom duties for that inheritance class, for those barons and dukes, for our betters.
The parties started when the contrails faded from the skies. The idiots bought it. There was no comet, no meteor coming, no near-death experience for our Earth at all. We had convinced the stupidest cowards on our planet to go away and leave us alone, no longer working us to death, for the sake of their goddamned yacht parties. We had to ensure a culture like that could never rise again, of course, but in the moment, we were finally free. We could have sent off missiles toward their rendezvous with Mars, to nuke them for good, but we reckoned they were gonna starve to death on Proxima-One within six months anyway. Let ‘em taste their own medicine.
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