Memories from Eternity
By Alex HoltThe too-hot orange light bathed everything, and she felt a twang of guilt that she hadn’t been back sooner.
How long had it been even? She’d dropped by when that comet came over to make sure things were secure. That can have only been a short while ago? Shit, that must have been at least 20 piktuns ago now wasn’t it? It had definitely been just before the Third Time War ended? That thing still hadn’t even started yet, surely it must be due about now? Dammit, another thing on her plate.
She sighed. She hadn’t needed to do so since she first stepped through her Balkis Gate, but it was a habit that had somehow stuck with her. Now she floated in the glow of the dying sun and stared down at her old home. At Earth. Or its ruin at least.
It wasn’t really recognisable anymore from this distance. Or if she was realistic, any distance. The continents were all different now, both sea and land now just a swathe of algal green where little else could live.
When she had lived here, the young Olivia Martinez would have been horrified at this. Even as she built her gate, she had not the slightest of idea of what this future would hold for her.... what all of the future would hold for her. But that was before she stepped through. Before becoming what she was now. Before eternity. The district where she had grown up was presumably deep under eons of rock strata by now. She could sense it if she tried, but what would it achieve?
Hopefully it was under the sea. Her Mami would have liked that at least.
She had halted the sun’s changes on that last visit. The transformation into a red giant was beginning to happen deep within it’s heart, but she hadn’t been ready to let go. So she had paused it. Those same energies that bound her to forever gave her all the power she could wish for. And so, her sentimentality averted the end of this ruin of a planet.
The once Dr Martinez spent the next few days surveying her world. The algae smothered everything, stinking in dried out in the heat but here and there more complex life prevailed. The wingless once-flies that crawled over the dry algae. The little crabs feeding by deep geothermal vents. The strange little fish that danced like brass ribbons through the mud. They didn’t deserve this; they had promise still, even if this world did not. A glow of power and across the deep heavens, a forgotten world that had the potential for life but had never borne it, suddenly housed a precious few stowaways. It would be a chance at least.
But this was not her world anymore. As she scoured it, she found nothing to show humanity had lived here but dust. And herself. The too-hot orange light bathed everything still. This was not her world anymore, and nor could it be anyone’s again - just a titanic museum to her own past that she didn’t even like to visit. She sighed once more, and then Dr Olivia Martinez released her hold on the raging heart of the sun.
Piktuns later, when the sun finally bloomed vermillion red, and swallowed first Mercury, then Venus, and then Earth, she was elsewhere, with other thoughts in her head.
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