Departure

by Travis Hill

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Epilogue

  Author's Notes

  Extra Nonsense

  Title

  CHAPTER 1

  Cara isn’t next to me in bed, and I panic. It’s my day, my last day on Earth, and I had planned to spend every moment of it doing everything I’ve always wanted to do but never got around to doing. My plans are already awry. I can’t sleep anymore, and even if I could, today is not the day for extra shuteye. My feet hit the fibrene floor and I’m out of bed, heading into the bathroom. I catch a glimpse of a stranger in the mirror as I relieve myself, and do an almost comical double-take. The stranger is me, but I don’t recognize me. It seems I’ve aged another forty years in a single night.

  As I flush the toilet and begin my daily routine of washing my hands and face, brushing my teeth, and making coffee, I wonder where Cara is. Maybe she’s so distraught about today that she can’t see me, can’t bear the emotional burden of what will happen. I decide I won’t hate her if she stays away. After all, she knows the emotional pain that will follow her for the next decade, reignited each time she looks at our children. I suppose I have it easy, not knowing what will become of me.

  Except that isn’t true. I’ve got forty years of my life, forty years of experiences that could fill an entire planet’s data servers, forty years of pain, pleasure, heartache, triumph, countless instances of interaction with other humans within my social circles, and all of it means nothing. For the thousandth time in the last few months, I think about my departure, feel the cold stab of fear from the unknown. I work in the Underjustice Ministry and have access to the records. I’ve spent my working life perusing the records, trying to find some explanation that goes beyond the facts, but the records only contain facts. The records don’t tell me what it must have been like to make such a decision that would affect the entire human race.

  I shut off the sink and head to the small kitchen area. My wife is sitting on the counter, wearing only an apron and panties. Her hair is styled in the way I like, pulled back in a pony tail but with a thick strand of it loose and hanging down the left side of her face. She’s made herself up, as if we were going out on one of our rare night excursions to the Tidewater zone where all of the fancy clubs and entertainment centers are. Cara’s hands are in front of her, cupping a mug of fresh coffee, the smile on her lips a heart-wrenching mix of misery and desire. I put my hands gently over hers and guide the cup to the counter before putting hers on the inside of each thigh, a slight nudge hinting for her to hold her legs open. A light kiss on her lips makes her sigh and I push her chest lightly to lean her back while my kisses find their way down her chest and stomach, then to what is covered by the thin strip of cotton as I pull it to the side.

  It isn’t one of the things I never got around to doing in life, but it is one of the things I would have gladly spent every single possible day of our lives together doing. After she does her best to hold in a cry of pleasure so we don’t give our neighbors any insight into our last day together, her eyes ask if she can return the favor, but I kiss her on the neck and grab my coffee. Her face fills with hurt, but I laugh and kiss her again, this time a long, slow trip through passion and into true love. I want her, but not yet. There are too many things I want to do before my time runs out, and what I just did was one of them.

  Cara makes me a breakfast that would shame a royal cook. She only makes enough for both of us, but the exquisite nature of the culinary treasures she lays in front of me makes my tongue have its own version of an orgasm. I estimate that the food she is preparing cost an entire month’s worth of credits. As I sample each dish, I wonder if it is truly as fantastic as my taste buds claim, or am I the condemned man, knowing my meeting with destiny is at hand, and everything I do today, everything I touch, taste, smell, or hear will be much more real, much more intense? It doesn’t help that she’s still wearing only an apron and panties. Does this happen with all of the Departed?

  I don’t have access to any records outside of the Underjustice Ministry, and departures are sacred, private affairs. I don’t want to become one of the deviants that end up…wherever they end up. The Ministry records aren’t exactly clear, only the warning from the Jurda remains in the files. I want my last day to be as perfect as humanly possible, and I don’t have enough time left to burn up the minutes by letting my mind wander.

  I step into the sonic shower while Cara cleans up. Once I’m clean and dressed, I take the elevator down to the ground floor and start working my way through the streets to James Harris King Academy. JHK is where I went to intermediate school before going on to advanced schooling at The Mason Institute. Even though today isn’t one of the school’s rest days, my eight year old daughter Kelle and six year old son Jason will be allowed to leave so they can spend the day with us. With me.

  I have a moment of annoyance as I reach the academy’s front doors. I’m annoyed that each generation seems to become more at peace with the departures. My father told me before it was his turn, relaying what his father had passed down along the generational grapevine, that in the beginning, it was utter chaos. Families refusing to give up their loved ones when it was time, opposition groups committing terrorist acts to try and sway the people to join their side, as well as sway the human governments to refuse to allow the departures to continue. It worked for the first five generations, but once everyone was born under the new system, those who refused made it clear to the rest of their fellow humans the price to be paid for not departing on time.

  “Dad!” Kelle shouts when she sees me, flying off the bench in front of the office like a derailing train.

  I sweep her up in my arms, kissing her cheeks with exaggerated smacking sounds until her face burns with embarrassment. She tugs at my goatee to get me to stop. I look down from her face to see Jason standing in front of me, his smile betraying his confusion of what is going to happen today. I kneel down, still holding Kelle, and we envelop Jason in a group hug. He looks like he’s about to cry, and Kelle has done her best to hide the fact she’s been crying off and on for the last two days and is barely holding on right now. Both of them are breaking my heart to the point I’m about to burst into tears.

  “Mr. Fremont,” a voice says from above us.

  I look up to see the academy’s dean, Dr. Jayce, giving me a look so neutral that his face seems to blur into obscurity. He reaches a hand down to me, and I nudge the kids loose so I can stand up to shake it.

  “I’m honored that your children followed in your footsteps while I was dean of James Harris,” he says, his mouth giving the slightest hint of a smile.

  I wonder if the kids weren’t around, would he give me a real smile? Dean Jayce didn’t believe in letting his charges know that there was a human being inside the stern shell that stalked the halls of JHK. The dean was a few years younger than me, but his uncle had been the dean here when I attended. Dr. Jayce had the same golem-like quality that all deans seemed to have.

  “Dr. Jayce,” I say, giving his hand a final pump. “I’m honored that you’ve kept the place up to the high standards it had when I attended.”

  I catch a flash of a grin before he starts to turn away. He pauses and leans in to where only I can hear his words.

  “We will do everything we can for them.”

  I blink, almost spilling tears again at being reminded this is the last day my kids will get to spend with their father. I clap the dean on the shoulder and give a short, hard nod to let him know I both understand and am grateful that he’ll do his best to help my two children deal with the emotional trauma. As much as I hate that each generation seems less affected by
it, I feel a slight relief that the departures have become ingrained in us so deeply after only sixteen generations that Kelle and Jason will only have a month, two at the most, where they need emotional counseling. Maybe less.

  I’m also grateful that the good doctor isn’t interested in reminding me that I’m a fool, that Cara and I have possibly hurt my children by being selfish in ways that might never be rectified. Since everyone knows from the time they learn to speak and understand that they must depart on their fortieth birthday and that with accelerated schooling, the proper, prudent age to marry and have children is between sixteen and twenty. This way, when it is Mom or Dad’s time to depart, their children are at least sixteen years old and have had double the time my children have had to cope with losing one or both of their parents. They’ve had at least sixteen years to become desensitized to it.

  I’ve been the subject of many heated arguments, whether I’ve been present or not, about what a selfish asshole I am for waiting until my thirtieth year to marry. At the most, my oldest child could only be ten by the time I turned forty. Ten years old isn’t mature enough to fully understand the finality of a departure, especially the departure of a parent. That Kelle is eight and worse, Jason is only six, means I am robbing them of their father just as their bond to me has solidified. Jason has taken it the hardest, cycling through anger and silence, to clutching and crying for an hour or more. Kelle is a bit more resilient, but she’s had her moments as well. She’s promised to somehow depart with me, even if it gets her arrested or killed.

  I do feel shame for robbing my children of their father, but I didn’t plan it this way. I spent my life focusing on school and then work. I wanted to accomplish something, be somebody, in an overcrowded world where nothing new ever happens and everything is the same, where walking a few blocks in either direction looks like you only circled your own block. Instead of qualifying for the Corps, I ended up with a career at the Underjustice. I worked as much as I could, and when I wasn’t working, I could be found in the archives below the main building searching for information to satisfy my curiosity. I was curious about a lot of subjects, but the departures received the brunt of my focus. I was curious about females as well, and had spent a few sweaty hours here and there during my schooling with a small number of them, but once I’d graduated to the advanced school and beyond, I forgot about them for the most part.

  Then I met Cara in my thirtieth year. She’d just been placed from advanced school to a post as an Underjustice Secretary. The track she was on meant she’d be a Judicial Reviewer within five years, and by the time she hit thirty, she would be guaranteed a spot on the Upperjustice Bench, maybe even the Supreme Justice Committee. She was Pact material, and she was absolutely stunning to look at. She still is. Cara hasn’t aged a minute since I first laid eyes on her a decade ago. She thought I was handsome and funny and even charming. I thought she was the entire universe bottled up in human flesh. I’d been assigned to be her researcher the day she arrived, and within three months we were lovers. Within six, I filed a reassignment notice with intent to enter a marriage contract. Within eighteen, we were laughing, crying, and loving our newborn daughter.

  “Come on,” I say after the dean walks away, linking hands with both of my children and beginning our journey back to our compartment.

  As we walk, I take in my surroundings. I grew up here, twelve blocks away in another PAD. The dull, gray-brown stone of the older Public Address Domains looked almost identical to the newer fibrene high-rise PADs. Like the endless towers lining the seemingly endless streets, the sky never varies much in the daytime. Most days are a dull, hazy brown. Once every few years it turns gunmetal gray and rains for an hour or more. On those rare occasions, the streets overflow with bodies, some trying to get a glimpse of the blue sky that lasts sometimes until the evening, others reveling in the joy of standing in the rain.

  I plan on seeing a blue sky today, and I plan on having Cara, Kelle, and Jason with me when I do it. I want them to remember what it looks like without fibrene towers filtering out most of it. This is the one day in my lifetime that I and my family will be allowed beyond the city limits. This is the one day I get to do almost anything I want.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Why do you have to go, Dad?” Jason asks me as we ride the shuttle to the gates.

  “Because it’s my time,” I answer, ruffling his hair to let him know there isn’t anything to be afraid of. I don’t know if I believe it, but I have to make sure he believes it. Kelle has spent the last thirty minutes staring at me with suspicion. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She’s eight years old and excited that we get to do almost anything we want today, but there’s a simmering anger underneath it.

  “But why? I don’t want you to go!” Jason looks like he’s about to cry.

  I hug him. “I don’t want to go either, but it’s The Law. I have to.” When he looks up from our hug, I feel myself starting to tear up.

  “It’s a stupid law,” Kelle proclaims, the first thing she’s said since we left the compartment.

  “It’s a stupid law,” Jason repeats around the tissue Cara wipes his nose with.

  “That’s not true,” I say. “It’s a good law. You don’t have to like it, or even agree with it, but you have to follow it.”

  “If we don’t like it, and we don’t agree with it, then why is it still the law?” Kelle asks.

  “It’s the law because of what happened to our ancestors. They made the pact to keep us from becoming extinct. Or from dominating the galaxy. It depends on who would have won.”

  “What happened?” Jason asks, his eyes round, tears forgotten about now that he’s heard something interesting to take his mind off the reason we are spending the day doing whatever we please.

  I look at Cara. Her smile has faltered more than a few times today, but right now it is carved in stone. She nods her head, knowing that I’ll get the story right. As right as the archives have recorded it, that is.

  “Almost three hundred years ago,” I begin, rolling my eyes from Kelle to Jason to make sure they are captured by the tale, getting a giggle from both, “we lived in a country called America.”

  “We?” Kelle interrupted.

  “Okay, smart girl, our ancestors. We as in ‘humans,’ not we as in ‘all four of us riding in this shuttle.’ Our ancestors,” I start again, giving an exaggerated glare to my daughter, “lived in a country called America. America was one of the most powerful nations on the planet, and had the best space program.”

  “People went into space?” Jason asks, hooked for sure now. Cara and I know he’ll go far because of his insatiable curiosity.

  “They sure did,” I answer. “Other nations had space programs too, but none were as good as America’s. About a century after they first orbited the Earth, the Americans found a new way to travel through space. The old way that they’d been using for a hundred years was amazing, a technological marvel for the time, but it was incredibly slow, expensive, and very limited. Humans lived in space on a giant station, but any attempts to land people on other planets always ended in disaster. If you had a telescope powerful enough to see the surface of Mars, you would find at least twenty crash sites or failed camps.

  “The distance was too great and too expensive to ship supplies to, and the things that the astronauts took with them either didn’t function properly on Mars, or failed quickly. None of the landings lasted more than a month, and none ever made it back to Earth, their surface shuttles unable to depart from the surface for one reason or another, or the main ship in space malfunctioning in one way or another. It was a complete disaster, and it didn’t help that here on Earth, there were many wars going on. A lot of people died in those wars, but more died from starvation and disease because of the wars.

  “Just as the world teetered on the edge of chaos, the Americans invented the new drive system and sent an unmanned probe to Vega. It would take a ship moving at the speed of light twenty-five years to reach, but it would
have taken hundreds of thousands of years traveling at the speed of the best ship humans had at the time. The probe made the trip in less than two hours, and only ten minutes of those two hours were spent making the journey. The other hour and fifty minutes were spent by the probe taking pictures and videos of the Vega system.”

  “Wow!” Jason breathes, and I can see into his mind’s eye as he pictures a probe orbiting a sun different than our own.

  I’ve spent most of my life imagining what it must have been like. I’ve also spent that time being disappointed as the archives don’t contain any of the media from those days.

  “Exactly,” I say, giving him a quick grin.

  In my peripheral vision I can see Cara almost crack. I don’t know how she’s held it together this long. I don’t know how I’ve held it together this long either. We both know I won’t be around to see how far he advances through school. She’ll watch him graduate without me by her side. She’ll get to spend the next three weeks after graduation with him, helping him get acclimated to his new life, independent of her, until her own departure. At least she’ll get ten more years with both of them.

  “This changed everything, of course,” I continue. “It caused a terrible war, with many areas of the planet becoming uninhabitable, but in the end, America and her allies won, though at a cost that seemed too expensive to ever recover from. The Americans forced the rest of the world to join with them. Then they demanded everyone work together to build more ships that could travel the stars with the new drive system. After another twenty years, traveling to other stars was so common that they had the equivalent of this shuttle we are riding in.”

  “They could just get in a shuttle and go to Canopus or Tau Ceti?” Jason asks. I blink, proud that he knows the names of some of the stars that he might only get to see once or twice in his lifetime unless he puts his focus in the astronomy program.