# 1.
The Earth had died, people had died, but the world didn’t end — such was the truth they had to grow used to, and slowly, the Sun rose again.

# 2.
From his position in the space elevator’s gravitational chamber, Adán could see the first rays of light exactly 3.4 deciseconds before it reached that planet’s atmosphere, and between here and there, he got lost counting the infinity between numbers.

Aphelion, apocenter, perihelion, apsis… as those questions of science came back to haunt him again and again, the very tangible space in front of him boiled down to abstractions, shapes and forms, making it hard to gauge what was real and what was not; dreams became scattered memories, and scattered memories became dreams in a far stretching Möbius strip until he lost sign of them, making his head spin in angles previously unknown to men.

As a child, he had fallen in love with language trying to impress the grown ups. He tried to capture lightning in a bottle while ignoring the storm clouds and the weather right above his head, slowly learning the word for the melancholy of young literati — a disease named “love”. So he grew up turning stones, turning that red string into a noose instead.

Now, it wouldn’t be long before he choked in pride and jealousy.

# 3.
His job was to look up to the sky, searching for the lifeblood of a new age, and as he counted shooting stars, he still wondered if there was a heaven he could believe in standing beyond the Roche limit.

So instead, he glanced downwards, to where the elevator’s tower plunged into geosynchronous oblivion — piercing the clouds of a thin atmosphere and stabbing the single mountainous continent of a water world right in the heart, a testament to human prowess and everlasting hunger. In a way, the tower had no beginning nor end, watching over the world like a merciless guardian; ‘twas an old thing, a haunted thing, an ugly thing, for there was no rhyme, no thought, no reason as it spiraled upwards — it simply was, stretching through the stratosphere so one day it might reach the stars that every day grew further apart during the heat death of the universe.

# 4.

commencing system check.
> vitals: green
> black box temperature: normal
> vessel’s inner pressure: normal
> commencing launch sequence . . .
# 5.
“Adán, your time in the gravity chamber has ended.”

“Already…?”

And yet, humanity _survived_.

> docking protocol initiated
> please, stand by . . .