The Khawla historian says the people of this planet were like a virus—multiplying endlessly, consuming every resource they could wrench from land and sky, acting as if all they could survey was theirs for the taking and the ruining. Every time their planet cried out, they ignored its pleas. Instead of curbing their wasteful desires—their fossil fuels and their petroleum-fueled lives—they simply expanded their settlements, moved to new places, plundered more ground, until their land could bear it no longer and erupted in fire. There were many among the young who had spoken the truth, who gave warning of what their future could hold, but on this planet, old men didn’t plan for futures they knew they wouldn’t be there to enjoy. They couldn’t see past themselves.
July 20, 2031
We thought it would all end in fire. In the ice caps melting and the oceans rising, seizing back the land we stole, abused, treated as an endless resource, when all along it was finite. I wonder if one day we will be the example they use on some distant planet to teach their children about hubris, when they read the morality plays and mythologies, just like we did about the mortals who angered the Greek gods. It was all fiction, of course, the legends we learned, but it was what we should have known. What we knew, maybe, but denied was that for as long as humans have lived, we wrote fiction to tell the truth. Somewhere along the way, we decided telling lies to ourselves was the easiest way to live.
The Earth disagreed.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 3 Saal 3027
The tower was an incredible trove. It feels wrong to be excited about bones of an extinct species, but bones give us information. Our biochemists will be able to test the level of toxins that seeped through the skin and blood of these people. Unlike people, bones don’t lie. They don’t try to make themselves look good by covering the wrongs they’ve done or by twisting them to hide the real truth.
It’s not just bones I found, though. Bones give us facts, but the other vestiges of people’s lives tell us who they really were. What they valued. What they loved and hated. Who they wanted to be. These people tried to save themselves, but they started too late.
As soon as I realized what I’d discovered, I hurried back to camp, and Salar returned with me and a small team of archaeologists and biologists and structural engineers, who tested the building to make sure it was sound for us to enter. Of course, I had already barged in without regard to safety, and, wow, did I get a tongue-lashing when I revealed that I’d breached protocol.
I wanted to rush in, sweep through every chamber and floor, but that is not how scientists work, even if that is what every fiber of our being screams to do. Curiosity may be my calling, but logic must be my guide. Waiting for the engineers to clear each area was tedious, but as I stood in the entry, with the debris and dirt and tiny green shoots that lay ready to reclaim this space, I found a wood-and-metal rectangle—a plaque, the historian called it—engraved with words in their language:
DON’T BE SATISFIED WITH STORIES, HOW THINGS HAVE GONE WITH OTHERS.
UNFOLD YOUR OWN MYTH.
—RUMI
The historian bagged and catalogued this plaque right away. These people did terrible things to each other and their planet, but they were beautiful, too, they said. What the historian doesn’t say is that they have a fondness for this people, more than a historian should. They have been with Salar on all five previous missions to Mirzakhani, and to be unmoved in the face of this tragedy that wrecked the world of this precious, broken species surely would be impossible.
August 1, 2031
We burned through the last paper today. Everything we could find. Everything that hadn’t been scavenged. All the old books in the library. The ones that no one had cracked open in a million years, because physical books were relics. A quaint throwback. They say a story can change your life—those books were what got us through this endless winter. It felt wrong to burn them, so I said a prayer as the ashes of words rose to Jannah. In gratitude, for all the stories that saved us, that helped us live a little longer.
God, I wish I had paper.
It’s a little ridiculous, because we’d all but eliminated paper from the world a few years ago. Planted more trees. A last-ditch effort, hoping they would help suck in the toxins from the mess we’d made, since we’d already poisoned the oceans.
No one missed paper. Except for a few curmudgeons who you could hear mumbling about wanting to hold the Tribune in their hands. As if that were even a choice. Journalism was already a relic long before we banned new paper.
I can’t explain it: longing for something I never particularly thought much about. Maybe the idea of tangible things—of holding someone else’s story in my hands—reminds me that I was once part of something bigger than what we’ve become. Yes, we could be monsters to each other—our crass, controlling politicians telling us who we could love and how we should worship and which of us were more deserving because of the tyranny of demography, while too many silently stood by. But we were also once a people who dreamed. We had moments of greatness, of tenderness toward each other. There were times we were beautiful. Alive in our songs and dances, in our words and our art. We didn’t always exist in this numbing state of deathlessness.
I don’t share this with Ummi or any of the others. It feels too selfish. Too small. But I don’t just want paper. I want my old life. I want homework. I want chocolate cake with too much buttercream frosting. I want my friends. I want Adnan’s smile greeting me in Calculus first thing in the morning. I want his holo-message waiting for me by the time I get home from school. I want to hear his voice.
Sentimentality for dead things can kill you.
And today, as I sit down to watch the haze of sunset on this terrible, beautiful dying world, I am hungry.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 4 Saal 3027
The engineers have cleared the building, for inspection and cataloguing. They were impressed with how this tower was fortified to withstand blasts and cold and swirling storms. Working with our physicists, they have planted buttresses of light beams around the perimeter to hold the building up and stabilize it if the foundational integrity has been compromised or should we experience any seismic shifts. It is unlikely, our geologist assures us, but this planet is waking from a deep sleep and we don’t know how much anger it still holds deep in its core.
I have only a few diin left. I will be returning to al-Fihri, our orbit ship, because Salar is afraid that an extended on-planet mission will be too much for me. Though the air is no longer toxic to life and even though I spend my allotted time on the decontaminant filter each night before I sleep, my return to our orbit ship was always part of the deal. The doctors aboard will want to run me through a battery of tests since I am the youngest to touch this planet’s surface. And it is only dawning on me right now how profound that is. Maybe that’s why the historian had tears in their eyes when I asked them what the young people of this planet did when they weren’t in school or training. Swim, they said, pointing out to the frozen water. Once those depths teemed with life. Long ago, their old and young would walk to the water’s edge, enter, and let their bodies lie still, buoyant on the freshwater surface, eyes transfixed on blue skies.
I couldn’t imagine it until they pulled up an old image archive that had survived, uncorrupted. And there they were. Frozen in time. Hundreds of people on the sand, some shielding their eyes from the brightness of their star. Some floating in the water. Some riding on boards through the waves. Some sailing. I wonder what it must have been like to have all that potable water and then to poison it.
I zoomed in to see a little girl—maybe two or three saal, with saucer-like eyes, and another girl, an older one, perhaps a sibling, who looked to be my age. Brown skin and long black hair running down her back. She has her arm around the little girl, who is focused intently on a collapsing pile of sand before her. The older girl looks protective and proud of the little one. Sh
e wears a wide smile and is looking straight through the image, at me, another girl many saddi into the future. She looks unbothered. Happy. Blissfully unaware of the fate of her planet and her people. Seeing her, staring at her, I sucked in my breath, because she looks like me. Now her oval face, the tilt of her chin, the evenness of her teeth is etched in my brain. She looks like she could be my sister, too; she could be a twin.
The historian said this was only two saal before the end came. But what we both know is that when this moment was captured, the end was already upon them.
When I zoomed in again, I saw a trinket, a jewel around the older girl’s neck. It is their letter R. And in their language, that letter would also be mine.
It is not logical to be emotional for a stranger’s life. Sentimentality has no place on a mission. But I want to find R—this proud, smiling girl who looked full of life. Who was once alive. This girl like me, who must have had her own story to tell.
August 7, 2031
I play with my necklace. It is all I have left of Adnan. This stupid fake-gold initial necklace is somehow supposed to represent what we were to each other. The time we didn’t get. The things we never said. Like goodbye. I didn’t get to say goodbye to anyone. Not to Adnan. Not to Papa-ji. Not to my other friends.
We were all told to shelter in place, because the bombs they were releasing were the last countermeasure. The last hope to cool the planet. Can you imagine? Putting our hope in bombs? Having faith in the same politicians who had gotten us here because of their willful denial of how we were choking our planet. They chose the nuclear option. Literally. There would be three, maybe four, degrees of planetary cooldown, some of the scientists had said—the ones cherry-picked to agree. Almost instantly. It could be a miracle. Like a shot of high-dosage antibiotic for the planet. What they never said, what no one would ever admit, was that we were the infection that needed to get wiped out for the Earth to heal itself.
This is the way the world ends: with guns and plastic and denial about bombs bursting in air.
I have been spending more and more time here, in my perch, away from the others. Hiding. Our rations are thinning, and Ummi looks like she hasn’t slept in a hundred years. And Zayna, she was always small, but now she is the tiniest thing, a small spark, when before she was a laughing, twirling fiery ball of joy and chaos. I gave her my dinner last night and the night before. Ummi tried to force me to eat it, but I lied and said I wasn’t hungry. I’m not anymore. Not really. Not for another protein bar. Not for sawdust. I long for fresh food. But even if it still existed somewhere, even if by some miracle there was a patch of green earth, it would still be poisoned. For a moment, though, it would be ripe and delicious.
In the early days, Ummi would play a game with Zayna, pretending they were actually cooking a meal in the defunct kitchen of our apartment. Together they would get the imaginary ingredients from the cupboard that is mostly bare and from the fridge that has no light, to prepare dinner on the stove that gets no heat. Ummi would sing as Zayna banged around the pots. Ummi has the most beautiful voice—when I was little, her voice sparkled; it once filled me with hope.
I had a theory, once. But I stopped working on it, stopped believing. Early on, I spent time carefully hand-drawing the space vectors of the Cold Spot—charting the great void I thought was a door we could open. I have no way to access my work from my data chips anymore, but I save them anyway. And I have my memory. I have my ideas. For a while, it was a way to pass the time and hold on to the possibility of tomorrow. It feels hollow now, like Ummi’s voice when she tries to sing.
Now I hide from Ummi and Zayna and the reality of what we’ve become. I’m a coward for hiding. Truth is, I’ve been lost for a while now. And no one is going to find me. No one will ever know I was here. We will all be forgotten, and that is the saddest thing of all.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 5 Saal 3027
I found her.
The archives the historian showed me were full of her. She was a champion. An athlete. A scientist. A girl who followed her curiosity. A girl who could be me.
Before the adults of her world set her planet on fire, she studied the Cold Spot in her universe. The bubble where her universe collided with its mirror. She was so close to proving the multiverse exists. Though we have mastered travel at the speed of a star’s light, we have not yet broken the boundaries of the multiverse. We know they are out there. We have seen the trace particles, the barest evidence of quantum entanglement. And here was this girl, R, hundreds of saddi ago in this brutal world with primitive technology, on the cusp.
To be so close but to not have enough time. My chest contracts, thinking of her. She deserved more time. Salar says these people were undone by their own deeds—that this was their qismat, the fate they merited. Perhaps I am spending too much time with the historian, but I’m starting to believe that they were more than the sum of their parts. R certainly was, and records show there were others who fought and worked to save this planet—who spoke out against its cruel inequities. They needed more time, too. As a student archaeologist, it is my job to study the material culture of this people, to unearth and study their artifacts, to catalogue, date, examine. I am trained to tell a story through facts. But what I’m learning is that facts don’t tell the whole story.
The story of R is the story of her people, of this planet. That is the testament I will give. I am not the ancient peoples I study. I can never fully understand them. I lay no claim to a so-called expertise that some anthropologists and archaeologists believe they have. That, to me, is hubris. But I hope I can lift up vanished stories. I hope I can be a steward, so that R and her people are not forgotten.
One day I will be chief archaeologist on a future mission like this one. On Mirzakhani I face a test, too. I want to be worthy of sharing the stories of these lost people—the sacred lives of strangers. But I have to understand my limits because I want to honor them without intruding on what they were.
August 15, 2031
The walls are filled with my drawings and my theories. I no longer have the luxury of computer simulations or the internet or even a calculator to help me. And what am I doing anyway when there is no one to read this? When no one left on this Earth cares about the Cold Spot in space, because this entire planet is frozen. Maybe if I’d been faster, smarter, I could have found it, our mirror. Pushed light particles through from our side to theirs, sent them an image, a pulse, a cry for help. Maybe they could have pulled us out through a wormhole, an Einstein-Rosen bridge. But then what? We probably would’ve wrecked their planet, too.
If only we had more time. If only I had more time. Time and a cold atom lab so I could test my multiverse theorems and run my models. But time is indifferent to our needs and our lives. Once I would’ve said nature was indifferent, too. After all, no one killed by a hurricane or tornado deserved to die that way. What I think now is so different. We had a job to keep this planet alive. We failed. So the Earth rose up and defended itself—from us.
I wish I could’ve seen the planet and its abundance at its best—at its most lush and vibrant. I wish I could have breathed fresh clean air. How good that must have felt. How pure.
I wish I could’ve seen us at our best, too, tapping into the greatest resource we had: us and how we could make dreams real like they used to talk about in the old documentaries we saw in school of leaders who once inspired people to change the world, to overcome the odds through the power of hope; and kids my age who marched and fought for equality and who lifted each other up.
How ironic that one dream would take me to the past that is long dead and one to the future that we’ll never have.
Humans destroyed things, but we were also curious and brave. I think of the first humans we sent to space. That must have been terrifying—the unknown darkness so far from home. I’ve seen those old spacecraft—tin cans with the technology not even equal to our old
microwaves. I watched in awe as Amina Zazzua stepped foot on Mars. I joined every other human being in prayers as the al-Nisa team sped off into the stars from the Chawla Deep Space Gateway in hopes of finding us a new home. They flew with the fastest engines we’d ever created, but they still weren’t fast enough. I hope they survived. I hope they found a new place to call home. They carried our dreams with them. They carried the seeds of our earth.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Morning, Diin 6 Saal 3027
She lived in the tower. I want to discover more than her photo, than her archive. I want to unearth everything she was. I want to find her.
August 25, 2031
Last night Ummi held Zayna in her arms and sang to her in a soft melodic voice, like she used to. It’s been so long since she sang our favorite Urdu lullaby:
You are my moon.
You are my sun.
Oh, you are the stars in my eyes.
I live just looking upon you.
You are the solace for a broken heart.
I listened through the door. I listened with dry eyes and a heart that has already been broken into so many pieces that all that is left is dust.
I mouthed the words as she sang them, over and over. I never imagined a lullaby would be the sound of the end of the world.
Zayna never woke up.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Afternoon, Diin 6 Saal 3027
Razia Sultana.
She had a life. She had a name. And it is mine.
My fathers told me I was named after a woman warrior of ancient myths. A queen. I do not understand how this is possible. The historian explained that these people held strong beliefs about fate and the correlation of seemingly random events. Coincidence, they called it. Synchronicity. No such idea exists in our language.
A Universe of Wishes Page 22