It Was The Year a Man Climbed Into a Glass House and We Watched Him

It was the year a man climbed into a glass house and we watched him. The year we tried to be gods without permission

The world was collapsing into itself and we wanted to run. Wanted…no, needed to escape caving into the holes we had dug ourselves. It was futile; we knew this but we wanted to believe. Wanted to hope that there we were deserving of something more than this fragile bubble of rock and earth. The media called it giving ourselves a second chance, making the life we wanted with all the lucks we had sought

The wars had since stopped. Everyone knew there was no use fighting over a dying star. While some called it world peace, others recognised it as what it truly was; the end. Or at least, the beginning of the end.

We knew what was happening and we saw the signs. The countries uniting in panic, the rich with their joy rides to space and the scientists finding ways to keep them orbiting longer every time. A day became three, became a month and finally it seemed we were ready. We had figured it out. How to house bodies and souls in bubbles of glass and steel.

Looking back, we should have realized how fantastical it all was. How stupid we were to think there was any escaping but again, we wanted to believe. Everything we had ever become had been born of belief but this wasn’t like everything else. This wasn’t like when we learnt how to preserve people in their entirety as data, their memories as mere binary codes we carried around in our homes and heads. This was by far bigger than our hope, our beliefs, than our everything

We should have just never tried. Acknowledged that we deserved this end after everything we had done. How we had brought the end to our very doorstep with our constant world shifting and our unending want to exceed impossible limitations. We had done this to ourselves, paid for our doom with our money, our labour, our everything.

We declared the men who achieved wealth off the backs of the poor as great, disguised senseless rhetoric as insight and exchanged publicity for vulnerability. Maybe that was why we could not see the futility of our actions. We had built our world out of dishonesty, it was no surprise that we looked for answers in the same unending web of lies.

The beginning of the end came quickly. Quicker than our analysts could foresee and maybe it was because we were happy. In the certainty of our escape plan, we had forgotten how happiness clouds things and we carried this happiness to the takeoff.

Crowds of people gathered that day in the place were 4 countries met to watch. A momentous breakthrough the engineers had called it while the rest of called it the beginning of a miracle. Miracles are miracles because we disbelieve in the possibility of an outcome but it happens anyway and it almost happened for us.

We watched the astronaut the world had dubbed “the first” climb into the rocket; sturdy bubble of glass, steel and everything. He was going to 479X…we all were. Eventually. The scientists called it Earth’s sister planet when they first found it. Space probes had gone and come bearing soil samples, data and hope. We were going to be okay it seemed. 479X was a new world, one we would take care of .

The rocket thrummed to life, a low sounding hum courtesy of the new sound absorbing tech that was made for the new world. We did not plan to leave with a bang. In the end, we wanted to give this world the respect we never did. We watched the man in the glass rocket rise further into the atmosphere and like nothing short of a miracle, we saw the sky become a wave of fire and the rocket fall to the ground; a blazing comet of metal. Miracles are miracles because we disbelieve in the possibility of an outcome but it happens anyway. This was a miracle.

There were many more takeoffs after that. We watched many men and women enter bubbles of glass and steel and we watched the sky send them back as blazing comets of metal. It was almost like the wars again. But this time it wasn’t against each other, it was the Earth versus us and we had no way to fight back. It almost seemed like the planet was trying everything to keep us in. Telling us that it would not go down alone. Like the world herself knew there was no peace in a solitary death.

insert rambling here