Tomorrow

“What if we kill her?” 

Nadja’s words ring through a groggy Archer as she rises, before the sun can peek through the tall pines and creep into her lonely little cabin. Cold water hits her face like an electric shock to her system and she stands, muddy eyes staring back at her from the cracked mirror above the sink. 

“Are you insane?” Archer’s own hushed hiss had snapped back, fear and paranoia making her swivel her neck around in every direction. But Nadja’s laugh, like a bark, had startled her into meeting her gaze again. 

“It was a joke, Arch. Relax. There’s still tomorrow.” 

Archer shivers, a cold wind leaking through the cracks in wooden walls of her home. 

Relax. 

She breathes in deep enough to fill her lungs and holds it there for a moment before exhaling, hoping this breath will expel her anxieties. A beat. And then a knock at the door. Archer’s heart thumps in her ears.

No. Still anxious. 

“You look like shit,” Fig says as she pulls the door open and steps aside for him to enter. 

“Thanks,” she mumbles as the man practically bounces through her tiny, dimly lit living room. But he is chuckling when he turns back around to look at her so she lets the offense roll off of her. “I didn’t really sleep much last night.” One of Fig’s bushy, red eyebrows lifts as he folds himself neatly down into a couch that Archer doesn’t remember buying. It had just always been there, deep red against the brown walls, backsplashed with canvases that Nadja had painted over the years. The brilliant colors laid out on the dullness of the home that the two women share always brought a sense of comfort to this space, even in mundane days, laced with despair and the lingering of empty days to come. Still, Archer shivers.

“Nervous?” 

“No,” she lies. She isn’t sure if he believes her, but Fig shrugs, letting the lie slip past. 

“I don’t remember how many passes they said they have left,” he says a few moments later as the pair had headed into town, the air thick with the threat of snow. Archer doesn’t mind the chill that hangs on the wind, but Fig shudders with every crunching step against the gravel roads.

If there are left any at all.

She doesn’t say this pessimism aloud, but she can feel the sentiment bouncing between them anyway, unsaid but still known. 

The line for Cob’s Lottery already wraps around the building by the time Fig and Archer find their place in the queue. Soldiers stand at mild attention, keeping watch on the line and on the civilians that exit Cob’s in a huff. Some even weep, holding loved ones close as they attempt to pat each other on the back in pitiful reassurance. 

“There’s always tomorrow. We can try again tomorrow.” Everyone says it every day. And no one had yet to see the promise fulfilled. That is, until the day prior, when Birdy, an older woman, maybe in her sixties, had been led from Lottery building by armed guards and taken straight to an armored truck that would escort her to Denver International. Ouray wasn’t too far of a drive to the airport, but the amount of things that could go wrong after a Pick was exponential, and the guards took no risks. 

“Everyone’s got their hopes up now that Birdy got a pass,” Archer hears herself say as she watches a mother leading her two small children out of Cob’s, hiding her tears as the little girl asks if they can get hot chocolate. Fig holds a puff of air in his cheeks that he lets out slowly, through puckered lips. 

“It’s good to have hope.” The words, said with a shrug, feel like venom. Like a clap of thunder in her ears and Archer scoffs, a white cloud forming in front of her lips against the brisk morning gray.  

“There’s nothing to hope for,” she says with a frown. “It’s the end of the world and no one on Exatros cares about some shit town like Ouray.” Fig doesn’t look at her. He watches his feet as the line shuffles forward. 

“Birdy made it.” It’s hardly audible over the clamor of footsteps and the wind that picks up into howl, but Archer catches him sniffling and she hopes she hadn’t made him cry. That maybe the cold had just nipped him too hard in the nose. Even still, she knows that she’s right. Birdy’s pick had been purely luck and would likely be the only stroke of it here in their small Colorado town. “And if we don’t get one today, there’s still tomorrow.” Archer hears Nadja’s own hopeful words echoed in Fig’s tone and she sighs. 

No one in DC, or anyone on the Exatros project would care if a few small town hicks got passes to their New Eden. And just as likely, wouldn’t care if not a single person, other than themselves, made the trip. Archer had always believed, since the day they announced the eventual fallout of their planet, and subsequent time-skip solution via Exatros, that her life had ended. Hers, and every other sorry sap that had been unfortunate enough to be born in Ouray, or any other small town. 

She remembers when the broadcast had hit every station, in every country around the world, how people had lost their minds. 

Planet Earth had, at most, two more survivable years, and when the clock hit zero and the earthquakes hit, and the fires started, no one would make it. Anyone who did would suffer through an agonizing post apocalyptic life. 

Her mother, crippled by the grief, had taken her own life and urged Archer to do the same. No shame in controlling your own death. No cowardice in not wanting to be swallowed by giant holes of magma that would open up on the earths surface, or crushed by a falling mountain. And when they announced that they would be selling and auctioning passes to take the journey to the far off future through the Exatros portal, hope had been restored for the common person.

Naively.

Stupidly.

Exatros was a secret government time machine that they had supposedly been curating over hundreds of years for the survival of humanity. As the planet's ecosystem had begun to shift, and the footprint that humans were leaving in the soil was getting to big and too deep, science had found a way forward. Literally. Archer doesn’t believe that she has a place in the future, a timeframe that some German scientist named Christian Bauknecht had called New Eden. A time so far in the future, after the planet had folded in on itself and nature ran the course of rebuilding, without any trace of humanity ever having been there. This was where Exatros was going. And where she would never be. And where everyone else so desperately is fighting to make it. 

Fighting and killing. Celebrities spent millions of dollars purchasing passes to this future, although Archer has to laugh at this sentiment. Money, at least not how they know it, won’t be worth anything whenever they get to New Eden, and anyone who stays behind won’t have much use for it for more than another year. Common folk, who had never committed a crime in their lifetime, started killing their own neighbors for a better chance at the lotteries. Anyone with a pass is a target, and everyone knows this. 

The way that Nadja had laughed about killing Birdy the day before, standing in the same line that Archer shuffles through now, had terrified the woman. 

“It was a joke, Arch. Relax.”

But it wasn’t. Not really anyway. Archer loves her wife, with every cell in her body. She would continue to love her in any timeline or circumstance. And for the ten years that the two of them had been together, she thought she knew the woman. She knew her skin, the way it clung to the curves of her body, deep brown and smelling of cedar. She knew her hair and how it hung, like wheatgrass down her chest, in thick, loose braids. And yes, she thought she knew her heart. And maybe she still does, but as Archer pictures the woman she loves, murdering a sweet old woman, just to steal away a chance for New Eden, she begins to sweat, her skin crawling with goosebumps. 

“We’re almost there,” Fig says, and as Archer pulls herself out of her own mind, she can start to feel the warmth of Cob’s Lottery, and the sun as it begins to rise beyond the mountains, painting everything in a light shimmering of gold. It looks like a landscape that Nadja would capture on a canvas and for the first time that day, Archer smiles. 

The lottery machine is the same in every town: a large metal box with a lever on the side, like an old slot machine, that hums like a refrigerator until you yank down on it. Then, it shudders a bit and a tiny, metal capsule slides out of the machine and into a basin. It is fascinating to watch the small, almost missable ticks that people have when they pull the lever. The quick prayers they say, or the lucky coin they clutch in their palm. Step by step, failure by failure. Archer and Fig press on until finally, the orange haired man takes his turn at the slot. Fig smiles back at her for a moment, his hand on the ball of the lever and Archer attempts to return the smile with one of her own.

The machine hums and shudders and a capsule falls into the basin, just like it always does. Fig pops the thing that looks like an oversized pill in half and lets the metal casing drop into the trash can before unraveling his slip of paper. His lip curls in mild frustration and his blue eyes flash up at Archer for a moment as she steps up to the Lottery machine. His paper, just like everyone before him, is blank. The disappointment is hardly evident and truthfully, Archer tries to ignore it as she pulls down hard on the lever to receive her capsule. 

“Always tomorrow.,” she mutters to him as he shuffles away.

The metal is cold in her hands and as the shell clicks apart, she catches a glimpse of Fig out of the corner of her eyes, tossing the white slip into the garbage and crack a joke at the man who had gone before him. Something about “better luck next time,” and Archer almost rolls her eyes. Everyone in Ouray is a hive mind, regurgitating the same hopeful naivety

The tiny scroll unravels in her palm and her eyes lose focus for a moment. The woman behind her lets out a sharp, but soft gasp, and the room stands still. 

Her slip of paper unfolds to reveal the words “New Eden” scrawled in a rich red font, and a barcode. The world ends, but differently than Archer had imagined it would. Fig is at her side again, his mouth hanging open like a trout, eyes wide in disbelief. 

“Arch…” is all he says. He trails off as a solider in heavy gear grips her by the shoulder and pushes her out the door of Cob’s Lottery. The radio he keeps clipped to his belt chatters with activity and Archer turns around to try and find Fig in the crowd of people that has gathered to watch her go, but she can’t seem to spot his orange hair and freckled face. And then, as several more soldiers make a human shield around her, pulling her along through Ouray, her brain comes to a halt. 

Nadja. 

“Wait, I don’t want this,” she manages to say, and one of the guards in her barricade gives her a sideways look. 

“We can discuss that later,” the woman who towers over her says. “Right now we have to get you out of sight."

“No.” No? Defying a soldier? How idiotic. 

“I’m sorry ma’am, but this is the protocol.” 

“But I don’t wanna go!” She shouts now, attempting to pull herself free of someone’s grasp to no avail. She grunts. “My wife,” she starts. “Give this to my wife! Nadja Sallow!” Her eyes burn with tears, and she is unsure if this is from the wind or from agony. “She’s an artist. Please, she’s more valuable than me! If you’d let me find my wife…” Whether or not they hear her, the soldiers make no effort to respond to her pleas and so she has to wonder if she is even actually calling out to them at all. 

The van they throw her in is spacious, but Archer feels claustrophobic here, held down and suffocated by the weight of reality. Is it a long drive to the airport, and the entire time, she imagines herself ripping the seatbelt away from her body and leaping out the back doors. Everyone in the world was fighting and killing each other for the piece of paper that she holds in her shaky, clammy hands. She should be celebrating! She should probably feel honored for the opportunity to launch herself 5,000 years into the future as one of only 30,000 people who are more responsible for rebuilding and  re-populating the planet. But Archer’s heart lays like a stone in her chest, and at the same time, soars miles behind her, desperate to reach Nadja. 

A small television monitor, hanging against the interior wall of the van, flashes with pictures of brilliant quality as a smooth voice drifts through the speakers. 

“Welcome time-traveler, to your first step on the road to New Eden.” The soft, faintly robotic voice is feminine and gentle. Archer’s body deflates a bit as she watches the screen, weariness washing over her. “You have been invited to share in this magnificent journey, 5,000 years into Earth’s future. The Exatros Project is excited to have you along with us, and we cannot wait to see the value that you will bring to our mission. Tomorrow is the start of your new life.” The screen continues to flash, images of what must be New Eden illuminating her retinas. A lush, beautiful, deep green forest, untouched by humankind. And here she is, on her way with 30,000 others to ruin it. Because isn’t that what humans do, and have done since the dawn of time: Ruin things? Every invention has a consequence and each consequence rolls into the next catastrophe until the cycle repeats and the world ends. And the world will keep ending, no matter what era humanity finds themselves in. Archer swallows the lump that forms in her throat. Realization of two things comes to her in a tsunami that seems to suffocate her. First, is that she now has a choice. She can go: spend the rest of her life separated from the people she loves, thrust into a new world, 5,000 years in the future. The other option is that she can give this ticket away and go back to her normal, doomed life in Ouray with her wife, and her friend, and the rest of the hillbillies of the soon-to-be ghost town. Or perhaps Nadja will accept the pass and go on into New Eden without her. Something about that puts a sorrowful smile on Archers lips. Nadja would  be safe. She would last a lifetime and their love would span centuries. But she sure would miss her during her final days. 

However, the second realization that comes is that regardless of this choice and whatever she decides, the world will always end. In two years. In 5,000 years. In a millennia. As long as Archer exists, as long as humans exist, in any timeline, the world will end in fire or flood. Archer scoffs.

But there is still tomorrow.