19-06-2021

June 2021: A Planet For Two by: ScienceFiction

Prompt: Two people who thought they were the last people on Earth end up meeting by chance.

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The last thing I remember, was someone counting down. Three, two, one, you know the drill. After that ... nothing. And that was how it was supposed to be. At least, for no more than ten minutes. The buffer was not built for lasting storage and me, as test subject, should not have been in the thing for long.

As my body started to disintegrate, my mind was being stored into a separate container. Two small black boxes on either side of the tube I was standing in.

For months and months me and my team had hid ourselves away in our tiny bunker-laboratory, trying to crack the code to science fictions most wanted feature and that day I had done it. Before a colleague had pressed the button, I had even yelled at the top of my lungs: "Beam me up, Scotty!"

How was I to know that the next time my mouth was in one piece again, I would only be able to scream?

In front of me, on the other side of the three inch thick glass cylinder, a layer of gray dust covered every little surface of the room that had once held a table filled with notes, coffee mugs and litter, rolling chairs, the second disintegration unit – suprisingly still active – and machines with blinking lights. There was no more blinking, only eerie red emergency lighting. The room was dead silent, safe for one spacesuit with a shiny golden helmet, that scared the crap out of me.

There was air in my cylinder, but only a little bit and I already felt a little faint.

"What happened?" I yelled, hoping with all my might that the suit was not empty.

After what seemed like forever, the golden visor lifted and revealed a shocked expression on a bearded face.

"How are you alive?"

That voice ...

"Anthony?"

"Wait here." He walked away with as much speed as one could master with the added weight of 280 pounds. He came back, holding a second suit.

In the end an explanation didn't matter much, I mused, as we stood side by side, looking out over a world of devastation. In the air above our heads hung the culprit. A broken moon.

An impact crater had formed a cloud big enough to block the sunlight for too long.

"So", Anthony's voice shook me from my reverie, "the units work."

I snorted. Yeah, above and beyond. Ten minutes had turned into ten years. Five for Anthony, my High School sweetheart, who'd managed to survive the first five, until he'd found a way to store himself in the buffers.

"Soon the sun will show its face again." His voice was soft and I pouted.

We would be the only ones to see it.

"Wanna go back inside?" I asked, thinking about the sudden uselessness of my invention. The spacesuits mocked us, as did the Mars-like surface of our once inspiring Earth. Perhaps we should sleep for another ten years.