New Earth

• Connor Ogilvie, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2013

I lost track of whether the rush I could hear was the atmosphere we were entering, or my blood in my ears. From where I was positioned, I could only see the sky, but even as I looked out the window of the pod, the surface came into view. It was beautiful in a ghostly, rugged kind of way, red and harsh in the light of the morning sun. The edges of the window began to glow with an orangey light as the atmosphere created friction on the outside of our pod. I closed my eyes as the final part of the descent began and tried to lose myself in my thoughts. I hated this part.
“Hamilton? You good?” I heard the voice come through my helmet intercom, and it brought me back to reality. It crackled with static as the radiation of this new world began to come through. I opened my eyes and looked at my three counterparts, my friends, my family for the rest of my life, in lieu of the one I’d left behind. Jonathan, Kimberly, Li, and myself, we were the first humans to ever permanently leave our planet to establish a colony on our neighbour, Mars. It was Kimberly who'd spoken.
“Yeah I'm fine, I just hate this part,” I said with a sheepish grin. She smiled back warmly and turned back to the edge of the pod. We were positioned in a circle, with our backs facing into the middle.
Some called us trailblazers, some fools, some even heroes. But all I felt was afraid. Afraid for what the future would bring. Afraid that I’d made the wrong decision, or worse, that I’d made the right one. There wasn't anything left for me back home. Back on EARTH, I thought. This is my home now. My family had all but abandoned me, and my friends were assholes. I had been stuck in a permanent cycle of depression and drinking. I’d seen the advert for this program, New Earth, and just like that I’d decided I was done. It was a wild outlandish thought at first, an adventure, but soon the practicality of it revealed itself to me. I kept at it, eight years of hard, gruelling training, in the U.S. courtesy of the famed philanthropist, James Hogg, and at the end of it, I was picked. Me. Of all people. I’d done it. I’d turned myself around. But something occurred to me now, far too late, and yet all too soon. Had I only done this for that moment of being chosen? Of put on a pedestal for all to see? Had I only done this to prove to all the people who called themselves my friends, all of my bigoted egotistical family, to myself, that I could?
“Final descent, ladies and gent. This is it,” I heard Jonathan call over the intercom. He was a big man, built like a truck, with a face to match, but he had a kind heart, and was one of the funniest guys I’d met. We had a lot of fun, and we’d made it through from the beginning together. He was African American, and was the only one of us on this trip actually leaving something behind.
“Roger that,” I heard Li say. She was Chinese, one of hundreds to apply for the program, and that fact in itself made her seem like a force to be reckoned with. She was somewhat of an enigma to me, a wildcard on the team, but I trusted her. I had to.
“Preparing final descent commands. Landing gear in position.” The last call came from Kimberly. Kimberly. Beautiful, talented, smart. And insanely dangerous if you got on her bad side. I was falling for her. But I didn’t have time to think about that. Although time was almost all I had now.
When the descent was finally over, and we’d prepared our space suits for a Mars walk, we looked at each other, me and Kimberly, smiled, and opened the door.
We stepped out blinking into the sun. I put a hand up to cover my face, the shadow providing me a moment to take in the view.
“Wow,” Kimberly whispered.
“Yeah,” I said.
Jonathan stepped out behind us and looked out over the landscape, taking in the blood red earth, the mountains in the distance, the rocks that scattered the landscape. Ahead of us a little way was the colonising gear sent up before us. It had food, shelter, some water, all the basics.
Jonathan looked over at me. “Brown! First rule in planet colonisation!” he said, doing his best impression of Sergeant Kent.
I looked at him trying not to laugh and we both said it together “Never forget your toothbrush, coz it a hella long way back!” We both grinned and looked at our new home, and I thought, Ok. Old Hamilton died on Earth. New Hamilton, well, I can work with this.