Quincy
Part I
He sat there. Staring at the endless white expanse through the large observation window. There wasn’t much else for him to do. Quincy had remained at the remote station in Antarctica because someone had to stay. There’d only been time for a short discussion about someone staying behind. Actually, it was more of an argument, really. Someone suggested drawing straws or lots. Someone else said Mark should stay behind since it was his fault in the first place. Mark couldn’t stay because he needed medical attention for his concussion so he couldn’t be the one that stayed. Janet, as the team leader, said she was ultimately responsible for the base, so she’d stay.
“NO!!” Only Janet’s voice was missing from the chorus.
In the end, Quincy said he would stay. None of the others could talk him out of it. He didn’t volunteer to be a martyr. He had remained behind for a much deeper and personal reason than any simple heroism. The rest had families waiting for them to come home. He did not. That’s the reason he gave them. Quincy truly hoped it would assuage any guilt they felt for leaving him in the station. He knew it wouldn’t.
Quincy McFadden was only forty-seven years old. He’d lived a good life. He had grown up in New Orleans, as one of six children, before climate change forced the population to abandon their beloved city. The government had tried to save New Orleans. A plan to raise the city above sea level was discussed, but that hope was quickly dashed when the technology that had worked elsewhere proved to be ineffective for the Crescent City. Not that the plan or equipment had been faulty. In fact, the city was raised seventeen feet above the previous average of negative one-to-two-foot elevation. The Army Corps of Engineers raised the levees to thirty feet above sea level, but the rising waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the increased rainfall were impossible to overcome because there was simply nowhere for the floodwaters to go. January 17, 2089, was the day that Quincy’s parents moved their family to New Houston, Texas. The people of Houston, tired of the annual flooding and the encroaching Gulf, had decided to move their entire city to a site forty miles further inland to a location with an increase of seventy-four feet in elevation. By the time New Houston was completed most of old Houston’s single-level buildings were underwater. The city wasn’t built with tourism or aesthetics in mind. New Houston was a functional but joyless city.
Quincy’s mother, Nyota, had been a remote corporate accountant for a New York firm while living in New Orleans so she’d been able transfer to New Houston with ease. His father, Leonard, had been a planetologist with a special focus on Mars, worked for NASA as head of the research team that laid the groundwork for full colonization. The team’s research would be the catalyst for change on a global scale. And, as Quincy knew all too well, change is never easy.
When his father’s team published their research, most governmental bodies on Earth finally realized they needed to work together to establish permanent off-world settlements to reduce the pressure on the Earth’s ecosystem. Within ten years of ratifying the United Earth Global Treaty, the International Space Agency, the amalgamation of the world’s space agencies, became the first organization to have a permanent lunar presence. The new global cooperation was not without its opponents, however. A terrorist group calling itself Earth First formed to challenge the colonization movement. They spread disinformation and fear about the goals of Mars and lunar colonization. One of their most insipid claims had the poorest of Earth’s population being left to fend for themselves with little to no resources while so-called essential personnel, as well as the rich and powerful, received preferential treatment in the selection process. A rising number of people were buying into the false narrative. Despite the concerted efforts of the world’s governments to be as transparent as possible with their selection process, a majority of the world’s citizenry didn’t trust their governments to be completely unbiased in their choosing of who would be granted a new life on Luna or Mars…and who would be left behind.
Three months before the space agency moved its headquarters to their new lunar base, Quincy’s parents were killed by a drunk driver. For Quincy, their loss was devastating, because he had always been very close to his parents. If not for Arthur, Quincy would have been crushed under the weight of his grief.
Quincy’s younger brother and his two sisters were able to attend the funeral before they all left Earth, possibly for the last time. They had qualified for the initial settlement on Mars with their families and moved to the lunar training facility shortly after the funeral. Quincy’s older two brothers, who owned the construction company that had built the residential section of the lunar base, were on Mars doing the preliminary work for the settlement. Quincy was the third of four boys, named for a character in a broadcast drama that his father had seen as a child. His twin sisters were the youngest and had been a surprise, but they were also doted on because their parents had all but given up on having daughters.
Quincy had shown an aptitude for fixing the seemingly unfixable, in his youth. He’d found an old-style locomotive sitting in an abandoned warehouse and, with his father’s permission, restore it almost single-handedly. The locomotive was now under water with the rest of Quincy’s beloved hometown. After graduating from high school, a year early, Quincy attended Georgia Technical Institute, a leading school of engineering. He met Arthur in one of his classes and discovered he was everything that Quincy wanted in a man. He was a kind and generous person with a witty sense of humor. He was a brilliant and innovative student whose creative designs generated early interest from several notable architectural firms. The two of them were almost inseparable after their first few dates, even though the first date was a near disaster.
