Page 45 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

“Am I allowed to warn anyone? About the storm, I mean.”

“What would be the point?”

The line went dead. Isla left that night without saying goodbye.

***

Isla slid the last of the cryo-dishes into place with a gentle click. Her bare thumb found the slightly raised strip of tape that read, in infinitesimally small letters, Isla. She knew she shouldn’t have bothered, that it wouldn’t make a difference anyway, but she’d felt compelled to keep her promise to Melody.

Isla exited cold storage, the lights flickering off behind her. More than thirty thousand human embryos and fetuses, sleeping now in the deep cold, cradled safely for launch sometime in the next twelve hours. Once things had been set in motion, everything moved fast. Fast was good—it left her little time to think of what was coming, and everything she was leaving behind.

She’d sent a goodbye text to her mother, unable to bear hearing her voice. She hadn’t spoken to her father in years and had no desire to start now—looking out one of the small, round windows of the craft at the brewing storm, she wondered if he got any satisfaction out of being right. Or if he, like everyone else stuck on a planet in its death throes, was capable of experiencing that bone-deep grief of an end they hadn’t, ultimately, believed would catch up with them. Did he wonder how the end would come? Would he hold her mother tight and face it bravely, eyes closed, his arms a barrier of love against their fear? Or would he hide in his sub-basement office, tinkering endlessly with the projects he never completed, letting his wife face her end alone?

“Isla—when did you get here?”

She turned and after only a second’s hesitation, stepped into the man’s hug. “Ji-Won,” she said. “Early this morning.” She nodded over her shoulder to her darkened lab. “Brought the last of them.”

His dark eyes softened; he looked over her shoulder. “Looks like a good crew in there.” He grinned. “Guess we’ll be okay, after all.” He nudged her. “Thanks to you.”

She looked away. “Everyone else here already?”

Ji-Won nodded, the smile falling from his face. He didn’t much care for the six other members of their crew, and Isla outright despised them. Six alpha-assholes, the worst the space program had to offer in terms of arrogance and bigotry. No one bothered to explain how they’d ended up with seven men and only one woman, with Ji-Won the sole minority on board. During their intensive eight-week training session, racist and misogynist jokes became the order of the day. None of the trainers, flight instructors, or mission specialists bothered intervening. No one had time for political correctness here, at the end times, and neither Isla nor Ji-Won had any illusions of how things would be once they departed Earth for good.

“Hey, want to see the girls?”

Isla flinched at the term, but there was real excitement in his voice, and she mustered a smile. “Show me the future, man.”

He led the way down a narrow corridor that connected her lab to his, where a series of fifty tanks about the size of ten-gallon aquariums were stacked five high. They pulsed with a soothing blue light, and just visible inside each was the familiar deer-head shape of a smooth, pink, healthy uterus. Ji-Won gently patted the top of the closest tank and looked in fondly.

Isla whistled. “Wow. You got more than I imagined you could prep on such short time.”

“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve got hundreds in cold storage, back through there. Can’t be too careful—we don’t know for certain how everything will work, we might have a lot of trial and error.”

Isla peered over his shoulder, saw the containment units he’d indicated. “All of this is on the same system?”

“Yep. They’re linked to yours, with two backups and a last minute new fail-safe. You’ll be rooming with all of humanity’s future, while us manly types sleep in peace.”

Isla rolled her eyes. “Thanks, boys. I can see I’m going to love the division of labor in the future.”

Ji-Won laughed, then his smile fell and he stared at the floor. “To be honest? I wouldn’t want those guys having access to my girls here. Any of them happens to wake up early, feeling a little randy…” He blenched as he said it, and a wave of revulsion passed through Isla. The powers that be finally had what they wanted: women reduced to their parts, powerless, mindless. She didn’t bother pondering whether a man would really just stick his dick in a disembodied uterus—it was too easy to picture.

Ji-Won cleared his throat. “Uh. Speaking of. You got...protection back there?”

For a moment, she thought he meant condoms. She caught up quick and smiled. “Got a few fail safes of my own, so keep that in mind before you come waking me up for eggs and bakey, okay?”

He laughed but looked relieved. It was the closest they came to acknowledging the kind of men who were carrying humanity into the future. Isla would have screamed, if she had any room left for horror.

***

Isla slept through the launch. All of them did. It was determined to be the safest method of getting them all into space, past the atmospheric disturbances, space debris, and the remnants of at least two of the failed escape ships. The course was set for a planet with similar enough conditions to Earth that had every hope of sustaining human life. The other crew were tasked with piloting and terraforming, setting things up to welcome the future Isla and Ji-Won would be carefully cultivating back on the ship. It would take two years and four months to arrive, and the crew would spend most of that time in stasis, along with their biological samples. They weren’t meant to waken until they were around a month out, but Isla’s eyes opened to a soft, pulsing blue a week into her cryo sleep.

She gave herself time to get her sea legs under her, and then went to work. Heart pounding, she tapped instructions into the mainframe, awakening the dormant virus she’d planted just before takeoff. Grateful to Ji-Won for walking her through that final fail safe they’d added at the last minute, she held her breath, until she saw the temperatures begin to rise, both in her cold embryo storage, and Ji-Won’s uterus farm. A blinking red light warned of the impending disaster, screaming in silence, asking her what the hell she’d done, didn’t she know she was responsible for the future of humanity?

Isla pressed her forehead to the case where little Isla was slowly thawing, tears of relief streaming down her face. “You’re safe now, baby girl,” she whispered, and wondered if the world had ended yet, back home.

It was only a matter of time, but here, up in the dark womb of space, Isla did what she’d known she would as a tear-stained child of six.

“No more,” she sighed, climbing back in her pod, programmed now to fail in another six weeks. She’d given herself the gift of never waking, the closest she’d ever gotten in her life to self-care. Though as she closed her eyes for the last time, she wished she could see their faces. When they woke in two years and saw what she’d done.