Page 46 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

He pulled a triple-folded sheet of A4 from his pocket and slid it over to her.

“Ooh,” she said. “Very mysterious. Do I have to burn it after reading?”

“No idiot,” he said. “You just have to read it.”

She sat back and looked at the unheaded and unsigned block of Helvetica on the white sheet.

An Invitation

The world will empty of us. As near as makes no difference there will be no people left in it before the end of the century. But right now it isn’t empty, of us or you or other important things. It is not yet empty of love, or hope, or bravery, or laughter. It isn’t empty of friendships or obligations or surprises, good as well as bad.

Most of all it isn’t and won’t be empty of life, and that is what matters most.

Life, not just humans, is what powers the planet. And in that we have found the answer to the nihilism that’s making others question why we should continue using our skills and our networks. Life is what matters, and while humans are still here there are still debts to be paid to it. There will be an eternity of not paying them once we are gone, but until we are, we believe we are honour bound to repay that life by holding it dear and cherishing it – in whatever shape it comes. Because we didn’t hold it dear, the whole interconnected organism of the planet may be in the process of shrugging humanity off into oblivion. We were so busy thinking we were important, the mighty us, our family, our group, our country, our system, our religion or our secularism, all those things that were so vitally and short sightedly ours not yours – and most definitely not theirs – that we ignored the bigger picture and fought and cheated and stole and countenanced whole wars, declared and undeclared, just so we got ours. Maybe that shortsighted selfishness is the very thing that made us a luxury the planet cannot afford.

Some people think that the tiny lucky remnant of humanity that may survive clinging on by their fingertips needs to honour that luck by keeping quiet and living small in case the planet notices them again.

“I can live small,” the Girl says.

“Carry on reading,” he says, refilling her glass. “It gets less preachy, and more practical.”

“It’d have to,” she says.

We don’t think that. We think the exact opposite. We think living small is what got us into trouble in the first place: small of vision, small of courage, small of heart, small in kindness, so very small in the understanding of what us and ours truly means. Because us is everyone, and more: us is everything.

It’s the planet, stupid.

Us is the whole interconnected life system, self-sustaining and self-regulating and, as we spin through the vastness of space and time, we humans are a guest appearance and not the whole show. Lucky passengers. And we should act accordingly.

If you agree with this, we would ask you to join us.

We have plans and you have skills we could use.

The Dyson Lovelock Project/UNPIG

She put the paper face down on the table between them and took a long pull on her drink.

“Lovelock,” she said. “James Lovelock? That explains the Gaia stuff. But Dyson?”

“Another scientist like Lovelock, same generation, different perspective,” he says. “What do you think of it?”

“Still pretty preachy,” she said. “But then I’m the choir, aren’t I?”

He smiled as he nodded at her.

“On the side of the angels anyway,” he said. “Not sure about your singing voice.”

“Fuck off.” She grinned. “Who are they and what do they want with you?”

“Well, it began as a kind of UN talking shop as the United Nations Planetary Initiative Group, but no one calls it UNPIG and as unaffiliated scientists and technorati and whoever else got wind of it and wanted in, it began to snowball out of national controls anyway, into a more informal and useful… collaboration.”

“Collaboration?” she said. “Collaboration on what?”

“Wild stuff. Crazy stuff. Brain meltingly clever stuff. Stuff that sounds stupid and probably is, and other things that sound stupid and probably aren’t: Everything from teams trying to figure out how to migrate carbon-based consciousness onto silicon – they’d be the Dyson wing – to people planning to seed the oceans with iron particles to kickstart a recovery in the marine ecosystems we’ve destroyed – that’d be the Lovelock tendency, giving Gaia a helping hand.”

“Ocean fertilising?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “You know, kind of clear the place up before we go, give the surviving life on the planet a better shot…”