The End: The Beginning
an excerpt

Today was the day. A billion years of evolution had brought us right here, right now, to this level of technological advancement, in the twilight hours of possibly the last great age of life on planet Earth. Amidst countless starts and stops, awesome advances and staggering extinctions, the world itself tempered us, with periods of relative peace and chaotic destruction alternating as far back as the geologic record could be followed. Yet somehow we eventually found a way to set down our stone tools and reach for the stars. Countless trillions of quadrillions of births, and subsequent deaths, from single celled organisms to the most advanced species the planet could foster, built an ever more stable foundation on which life could thrive and advance.
This timeless march of ever more complex atomic combinations, which began with the formation of simple particles, somehow found a way to arrange themselves so that a new level was reached, lifting them from inert, simple molecular compounds, to self-replicating strings of amino acids, and eventually the very building blocks of life.
And now, billions of years and trillions of experiments later, Earth’s pinnacle of complex creation stood on her fading surface, glancing up at the stars beyond, preparing to leave her dying embrace. She had been mother to all life that dwelled upon her, sometimes generous, sometimes wrathful, but always ready to start anew, to provide for her children. And we, her masterwork, had killed her, as well as all our siblings and cousins, our ancestors, our distant relatives, and everything that swam, walked, crawled, or flew.
Thanks, mom. For everything. Goodbye. Our children will have a new mother, many light years away. They’ll only know you from pictures, vids, books and songs. You’ll never see them walk, speak, grow, or die. Their children will be even farther from you, and their children may not even believe you ever existed. We’d call, but by the time you got the message, we’d be long dead. Not that there’d be anybody left alive on your surface to answer, anyway.
It’s sad, really, when you think about it. I was born into a poisoned world, so I never really saw the Eden the nature vids spoke about, sad and longing for the past. The images that panned across the screen, recorded a hundred years before my time, when the skies were still blue, the plants still green and leafy, water still relatively safe to drink, seemed so alien to me. Images of people swimming in the oceans and lakes, exposing their bodies to the open atmosphere, breathing the unfiltered air, seemed so foreign, but so pleasant, that from my earliest youth I was entranced.
The promise of our new home, out among the stars, is one of a new beginning, in a paradise unspoiled, untouched by man. It is as they said Earth had been, once, long ago. Before man felled his first tree, lit his first fire, cooked his first cousin. Hopefully, we will show that we have learned from our unsupervised infancy and destructive youth. From our wasteful teens to our insatiable tweens. As man matures as a species, one can only hope that our memories are good, and the mistakes of the past will not be repeated.
My name is Darren Deerfield, and I am one of fifty thousand humans selected to board the first colony ship and leave the Earth for parts unknown. It is a strange feeling, knowing that you will never see your birth world, and most of your friends and family, ever again. And it is sad, knowing what so few others know – just how badly the planet is screwed up. Many of those who are glued to their televisions watching us go suffer from some toxic malady brought about by man’s blind eye to the world around them, and will die before we even finish the first leg of our trip. So many have died already. The numbers grow each year. Those that don’t die of cancer or some super-virus risk death by starvation, with the costs of food and pure water so high, and reserved only for the privileged.
And I feel guilt, as well. Guilt at being one of the lucky ones – healthy, strong, lean. My family saw this coming long ago. My great-grandparents saw the direction society was heading, with its processed foods and excessive consumption of unnatural things, and bought one of the few remaining un-poisoned parcels of land, where they grew the things nature intended.