The ship is leaving, with half your world on it, and half staying behind. Time to choose.
It's an odd feeling, watching distant rockets climb away to meet the orbiting Continent class ship. Nearly a moon in and of itself, all the world's resources poured into crafting the ultimate escape vessel. Like the sailing ships and ocean liners of yore, except the shipyards are all closed. The last one to be built, the industries winding down, the others already heading out past the moon to catch the first gravitational boost toward the colony cluster.
They tore the steel mills and the power plants down as they left, siphoning materials off the planet. Plenty of room for all, as long as you paid your ticket or took a contract. Mass production, industrial farming, mass power generation all petering out as the manpower and will to run them boarded rockets and left. The world was going dark and quiet.
Now it's just us. Gone are the industry leaders, the investors, the political figures, the law enforcers, they've all packed it up and fled. With the world's population halved by the climate crisis, then halved again by the wars that broke out over what remained, there was no way of counting how many were left alive and most of them were on the ships. At least those judged worth keeping.
Now it's just us.
The poor, the unwilling, the unwanted, and the halflings. The failed generation, we were, the ones modified to survive in the world they had created before the orbital miracles were developed. The miracles that would save them all, the miracles that weren't for us. The half humans, the tainted ones, those still fully human but imperfect, the adversaries, the ones willing to look after each other. Word came back that when the last rocket left the pad, the automated security systems all shut down, then the scrappers and the looters took over. Some warlord would claim the launch complex soon enough, they can have it.
I look up to the sky in the fading day's light, the stars rising slowly as the final transport rockets are emptied into the great ship and jettisoned to disintegrate in the atmosphere. Finally the great engines light, throwing blue-green light back towards us like a false aurora as she pulls away. It will probably be the last artificial light anyone will ever see at that scale. I turn my eyes down to the ruined suburbs below, stripped out husks of human prosperity already falling in barely ten years after the population collapse. Something warm across my shoulders, soft flannel. A mug pressed into my hands, steaming wild mint tea. I put my arm around my spouse and offer a kiss. Look into sparkling eyes better than any electric light, whisker to whisker we relax together on our simple wooden garden bench.
"That's the last ship" I say, bumping muzzles with my love. The quiet hush of our sleepy village behind us. "Now it's just us."
"Do you think they'll come back when they realize the climate is recovering?"
"I hope not. Someone would have to tell them about it anyway, and last I heard the launch control center burned down."
"Pity. They don't know what they're missing."
"Mm. Not a single soul aboard that ship can purr like you."
