Some of us were there on that day. We still remember it late at night, when the Ark sleeps and dreams her alien dreams. Like snakes, unheard and unseen, her memories slither into our own dreams. We remember because we have no choice but to do so. I can always hear the others in their cots on those nights as they cry themselves back into the lull of sleep.

We were there on that day when the world ended.

It was not unexpected, just late. When the gears of the world had finally ground down to a halt, and the hyper-hive cities of Earth, Venus and Mars sent their final words into the blackness of space, the Ark and her fleet had been completed. They were… are the manifestation of humanity’s century long combined efforts to deny our self-made Armageddon. They are as beautiful now, a thousand years since their creation, as they were on the day when they freed themselves from Earth’s gravity and slowly rose into orbit above what had been humanity’s ancestral cradle.

Nobody cheered for us as we rose into the burnt out sky. Nobody called for us to return as we passed through the dark cover of the radioactive storms.

We rose and the humanity that was up there went home, down into the gravity well. Ship by overcrowded ship, our sisters and brothers from Mars and Venus, from the dead cities of the Moon and the poverty ridden space stations around the Earth, joined their human family for their final hours.

I remember seeing the stars for the first time as our fleet passed the clouds and joined into that territory we had sought so often to conquer. They shone so brilliantly, so alive and full of promise. The whole crew on deck watched in silence as the Ark turned its face from the expanse of space to the darkened sphere of the old Earth, ravaged beyond any recognition by our long rule of it. Many ships were still returning, little specs of light flitting past and vanishing into the dark storm cover. No radio hails were received.

One week later the flow of ships had become nothing more than a trickle, and soon even that stopped. Space had become a much lonelier place for all of us. A single hail came from the Earth below, just as every ship of the fleet came into position.

“Godspeed!” it said. One word and the transmission fizzled out, before any of us had the chance to respond. Too much could have been ruined by a single word, at that final moment.

We knew it…

And they knew it.

“Open fire.”

Some of us remember those two words, even here on Deana, half a Universe away and a thousand years after the fact. Like snakes the memories slither back in and, in the dark of night, we are back on that command deck. We watch, same as we did back then, not blinking nor breathing.

We watch Earth’s atmosphere burn away, her oceans boil and escape into space, her surface darken and slowly turn into overheated, smoldering glass.

For the Ark there would be no return from her galaxy spanning journey.

For humanity there would be no slow death in a solar system that we had failed. We wrote the end of that chapter.

Some of us were there on that day when the world ended. It was not unexpected.

But the pain was no lesser for the fact.