Abiogenesis 
Katherine Wong

Honorable Mention, International Young Writers Prize, Fiction

There’s nothing left for me here, and I know that you won’t be coming back. I hope you’re reading this.

My body snapped like a twig, the tectonic plates sliding out from underneath and fracturing the surrounding silence. The past was a silhouette at the door, watching the guilt flood the rotten hallways filled with remnants of another life. I did come back, and I came back to a deserted ghost town, as if the rest of the world had aged generations while I was still the same. The puzzle had already been completed for years, but I refused the truth until now.

My brother’s messages were seared into my mind. I wiped away the tears, my face hardening with reality as I placed the notebook back on the shelf, never to be read again.

*

The wind’s wheezing gasps cut my cheeks as the car sped across the empty highway. The creature, dismantled in the trunk, clanged against the sides every time we hit a bump. City buildings lined the distant horizon, and I pressed on the gas pedal to accelerate. I was an object speeding through time and light, letting the particles pass through my unbounded, massless body.

As I pulled into the city’s borders, traffic packed the streets and a deep, unanimous murmuring from the walkerbys hung in the air. Thick smog slithered through the maze of jagged buildings. Oxygen was thin, and while my trachea shuddered with its deep, slow breaths, my heart rate accelerated.

I stopped in front of a familiar house, now lined with wilted flowers and barred windows. My body heaved itself up the creaking stairway. I knocked on the door, my knuckles rattling the decaying wood.

A man about my age opened the door. Stress and sleep deprivation lined his face through his undereye bags and gaunt facial structure. He had a hollow stare that looked past me as if I were invisible, until something shifted within him and his face lit up with recognition.

“Dr. Kere,” I said, holding my hand out as an act of formality, “Long time no see.”

*

Dr. Kere’s house was dim and small with boxes littered everywhere, stacked on top of each other, some half opened and some fully sealed. He offered me something to eat, but nothing to drink. I sat down on the couch, scabbed with badly-sewn patches and open wounds to its stringy flesh.

“What brings you back to the city, Gemma?” he asked.

I paused, then answered. “I need your help. I need an engineer to help me with this.”

His eyes shifted to the wall behind me. “You’ve come to the wrong person.”

“The world is dying,” I said, “I’ve already mapped out the logistics of it, and where we’ll go, and what we’ll do up there. You just have to help me with designing the ship and we can propose it to the space agency. They have to say yes. It’s our last chance to save us.”

“Go up to where? Space?” Dr. Kere asked. His face twisted into a scowl, and he stood up. “I don’t want to talk to the space agency, or meet them, or even look at them. There’s nothing we can do at this point. Just accept it.” Dr. Kere took a few steps forward and stopped right in front of me. His metallic breath was hot against my face, like the glaring sun’s rays that I felt everyday at the farm. “Do we even deserve to survive?” he continued, “Think about it. We did this to ourselves. I don’t want to partake in a desperate plan to save a few individuals, or plan out some impossible ship. It’s not going to happen.”

I envisioned my brother crying over the corpses of our parents, the parents that I abandoned in an aimless chase for success. I saw him putting the notebook back on our shelf and walking out of our house, where he would first bury them in the brittle dirt, then hike six leagues out to the canyon. His body would decompose in the drained lake at the bottom, leaving the farm to solar radiation and suffocating gases.

I swallowed the resentment and looked at Dr. Kere sourly. “I’ll pay you,” I said, “However much you want.”

Dr. Kere agreed.

*

The hum of distant car engines intertwined with insect chitters resonated in the air. I put my eye up to the creature and adjusted its face to point up to the darkened sky. Alternating between looking at the sky and my paper, I began to sketch part of our solar system. Perth, the innermost planet and closest to the sun, was dense and lifeless. It was miniscule compared to the other planets, its surface dented with craters from invading comets and meteorites. Our planet was second to the sun, originally swept with sapphire oceans and a blissful warmth. We were the only ones known to sustain life. Now, our atmosphere was a burdening weight dragging existence down with it.

“I think I’m done,” Dr. Kere said, stepping back to show me his design. His cursive lettering looked eerily similar to my brother’s messages in the notebook.

I gave him a nod of satisfaction. “Look up,” I said and pointed to a spot in the sky, “That’s where they’ll be.”

He glanced up at the sky but quickly looked away.

*

I walked through the long hallways towards the two large doors, high heels clicking against the marbled floor, my old pantsuit flowing with the glacial air conditioning. Deeply buried memories began resurfacing, one with each step and corner of the space agency’s headquarters, until I arrived. I smoothed the creases on my tucked-in shirt and straightened the blazer before pushing the two doors open.

Familiar faces packed the large room, uniform in their expressions and staring down at my small presence. Dr. Kere, dressed sloppily, followed behind me. I walked up to the podium at the center of the room, all of their faces pointed towards me and waiting impatiently.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the International Space Agency,” I said, my voice quivering with nervousness, “I’m Dr. Gemma Typh. I used to work here as a leading astrophysicist, and some of you might know me. I’ve come here with a plan.”

I laid out a large poster on the table with the sketch of the sun, Perth, our planet, and Nalara. The three planets differed in composition, sequentially getting larger from Perth to Nalara. I drew out the orbits and held the poster up in the air.

“We can send a spaceship into our planet’s orbital, one that can sustain life for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. The individuals will be put into hibernation, set to wake up at a certain time in the future. I’ve calculated that our planet will take approximately nine hundred years to heal, and once the individuals wake up from hibernation, we can send them back down to repopulate. Our species will live, along with our advanced technological knowledge.”

I took out another poster showcasing the spacecraft orbiting our planet in greater detail. “We have the materials to build this and launch it into space. All we need to do is choose the individuals who will go on this spacecraft. We’ve calculated that it can sustain six individuals total: three males, three females. Someone in good health who’s not a known carrier of any disease.”

Talk was already stirring, and the faces were now turned towards each other instead of at me. I stepped off the podium and gestured towards Dr. Kere, who took my place to discuss the spacecraft’s design.

“Hello everyone,” he started, “I’m Dr. Kere, an aerospace engineer who also used to work here. Spacecrafts for hibernation should be preferably smaller in size, which is why we’ve designed this spacecraft to be compact and quick-to-construct, while still being functional. It consists of six hibernation pods that will be shielded against radiation, along with a common room to store essential items like medical care and food rations.” He held up another poster that mapped out the spacecraft’s structure. Dr. Kere cleared his throat and continued. “Now, we must also discuss the practicality of this idea,” he said, “We’ve never successfully put anyone into a long-term hibernation before. We’ve never sent anything into our planet’s orbit before. We’ve never built or launched a spacecraft of this complexity before. This idea is a huge risk and drainage on whatever supplies we have left. Is it worth it?”

My heart sank, the faces’ mutters growing louder until they crescendoed into a profuse uproar. I ran up to the podium and pushed Dr. Kere off, waving my hands frantically in the air to try to get anyone’s attention.

“I know it’s a risky idea! But it could work!” I yelled, but I was drowned by the other shouts fighting to be noticed.

I turned to Dr. Kere and pushed him against the wall, my voice escalating into a vomiting wail. There was no regret on his face, and even as my hand came down on his swollen cheeks repeatedly, he looked unfazed and almost proud of himself.

“Why did you do this?” I asked, still choking on my own tears. “Don’t you want to survive? Save the world?”

“Technology is a curse, and I know that you agree with me. Isn’t that why you left to stay at your farm in the first place?”

I stopped, my hand hovering over his face. For a second, he looked like my brother—how they both had strong opinions and wouldn’t back down about what they believed in.

“Let nature do its course of work,” he continued. “We deserve to die off, and you know it.”

*

Later, I drove back to my farm and discarded all of the plans. I reassembled the creature on the hill, balancing its bulky torso on the tripod and staring into its obsidian eyes. Perth was even fainter than it was before, but Nalara still glowed persistently. I thought of the goddess who would likely be disappointed with what we’d become, her finger compressing the core of our planet and pulping the life out of it. We were the embryo to her, and she made the whole world bleed like the mother with leftover tissue in her inner thighs and a broken fetus.

*

The once dormant volcano erupted, layering the farm in a crust of magma that wasn’t too different from Nalara’s surface. The creature was gone, an artifact to be forgotten like the farm, the city, the world. I was the only swimmer in a sea of fire, the passionate heat radiating off my cadaver, but I felt at peace for the first time.

Life was gone, and for billions of years the universe would be void of it. I thought about how I was wrong, because our planet would most likely never heal from this large of a catastrophe, how we would be erased from history and future generations would never find traces of our existence because it would all be burned to ashes, devoured by the lava, left as food to the fire. I thought about how in billions of years, abiogenesis would permeate in the future oceans, the organic compounds combining to create the first signs of life. Even though the sky was shrouded with storm clouds and strikes of lightning, I looked up to where Nalara was and envisioned her rich oceans, her fertile soil, her rolling hills—just as our planet had been many years ago. She would evolve into civilizations like ours, industrial enterprises that spread like fever, destined to meet an identical fate. Life was a continuous cycle, with the same origins and the same endings.

I closed my eyes and let providence wash over me.