It’s just a cabinet. And not even a particularly sturdy one. I’m impressed it’s still standing and that the doors haven’t been ripped completly off. It’s not quiet. I can’t get that lucky. I briefly consider lining it with scraps of fabric to insulate myself further from everything that exists outside of my cabinet. I’m not designed for this world. I’m not wired right. The older I get, the more aware I am of not being like the rest. Or at least like the other people I know. They ENJOY the chaos and closeness of our way of life. My sister does her best to never be alone. To never have to face her own thoughts and fill the void that peace and quiet brings with it. I crave the distance. The feeling of space that comes with no one being within reach or brushing up against me. The feeling that makes my skin crawl. The worst part of communal living is the casual approach to physical contact. I can’t give up my cabinet. It’s a space all my own. Well, not mine. But for the 30 minutes I can spare before someone will come to find me, it’s my space. My peace. My slice of sanity between the crush of overcrowded streets, shared beds, and meals with far too many mouths sitting at the table. I can hear people passing through the stairwell like migrating animals. They say this is the way we’re supposed to live. Community based, close family groups, in hordes that keep piling more and more people into limited apartments that are bursting at the seams. People are social creatures. They crave and thrive on constant physical contact. Except me. I crave these moments that I can salvage. There must be something wrong with me if these 30 minute retreats go against everything my family wants from life itself. I’m not sure what they would think about the idea of taking a break for yourself once a day or so. Probably wonder if I needed to visit a doctor. And then lock the cabinet. Or worse, take the doors off.

The city that hustles and bustles. The city that chits and chats. The city that is filled with smoke and smog. The city that fills my nostrils with dirt and hurt. The city that educated either pill heads or mill heads. The city that promotes wealth, but hurts health.

The people who takes and rakes. The people who raves and craves. The people whom are greedy and needy. The people who will take and ache. The people who licks but kicks. The people whom are selfish, never selfless.

And finally I was alone. Away from the city and away from the constant noise.

I grew up in Fionda, one of the new towns the Government had built under their new scheme to reverse the climate crisis. I had lived in a small town on the outskirts of London prior, but as I was forced to move at just 5 years old, my memory is hazy.

In Fionda time alone was rare, expensive. Fionda is one of nearly 10,000 pods built in 2030, each accommodate around 2,000 people. I was lucky really, given the opportunity to live in Fionda. I don’t know how it is out there anymore, I don’t know if the others survived.

Suffocated. Smothered. Strangled by the ever present, ever expanding crowd of people that now inhabit the growing metropolis I call home. I spend my days fenced in by an overburdened infrastructure that was not designed to sustain a populace of this magnitude. Lakeview was a small, some would say sleepy, little town that boasted a population of a little under 10,000 residents. Most recent counts showed the city now housed nearly 500,000 citizens, though that number continued to grow daily. A major fallout that targeted 10 of the United States’ major cities had pushed millions of displaced Americans out of the densely populated areas and into more rural areas, like Lakeview. I’ve heard that we are lucky and it could be worse, but I can’t imagine a more hellish landscape than this. Thousands of our residents sleep in makeshift tents that lined every street in my town. Cars were a thing of the past anyway, so its not like we need the streets anyway.  I shuffle down the sidewalk of my once quiet street and cringe as I unintentionally brush the shoulders of the strangers I pass. I breathe a sigh of relief as I turn up the walkway to my house, but my solace is short lived. The first mandate that came after the fallout dictated that all single family homes be commandeered by the military and soon our home was filled with strangers. First it was military personnel and their family, but they were quickly replaced by all manner of refugees. My mother, being a former refugee herself, would never turn anyone away.  I step across the threshold of my once peaceful home and am met with the stench of body odor and pickled cabbage. _Not Kimchi night… _I cringe inwardly and quickly make my way up the stairs and down the hall to the attic entry. Glancing quickly around I silently pull the small chain that lowers the ladder to the floor. I climb the ladder as quickly and quietly as I can and pull the trap door shut behind me. I let out the pent up breath I’ve been holding since I left work and closed my eyes basking in the silence that surrounds me. I take a deep inhale desperate to simply breathe my own air. My stomach drops as I catch a whiff of something strange and alien to my senses. I groan as I realize my mother has finally given up this last bastion of our home, my one remaining safe haven in a world gone astray. I turn to take in who or what is now occupying my once sacred space. I am greeted by a pair of shocking blue eyes set below dark lashes and above a small pert nose. Her perfect lips formed a small “o” as she scrambled to her feet. She looks guilty as if I have caught her red handed and I am filled with relief to know my mother has not betrayed me.

“I am so sorry…” she begins nervously as she turns and gathers her things including a small journal she must’ve been writing in. I feel a pang of sympathy for the girl who was obviously so desperate for her own moment of reprieve. As she faces me again I take stock of her face once again and realize she can’t be much younger than me. “I’ll leave…”

“No…” I say before I realize the words have escaped me. This girl likely had her life stolen away from her, just like mine was. “Stay if you’d like.” I say to clarify. I take my normal seat on a bench on the other side of the small attic and pull out the book I have been working on. When I glance up at her, her face has softened into a smile. She nods and lowers herself back onto the small crate she was using as a chair. She flips open her journal and resumes writing, and I gaze back down at my book and begin reading where I’d left off. Except 10 minutes later I find I haven’t moved past that page. When I glance up I notice her pen has also stilled and when my eyes find her face her eyes lock with mine. We both smile and immediately glance back down. For the first time in a long time, I do not mind that I am not alone.

The rest of the day was spent deep inside her head. Everything seemed a long way away off; unreachable. Going through the motions with a fake smile so well practiced everyone thought it was real. The posters on Whitaker's wall were so true. You really could be standing next to a depressed person and never know. At work she amused herself on this one.

Sandwiches to the elderly chap on table five; old man, you're now next to a depressed person. A fake smile and she moved on. Table of six, starters delivered; you're all fucking about while a depressed person waits on you. The chef and kitchen crew; hello, depressed person here, anyone noticing? Dave didn't come in though. Much to Rose's relief. She wasn't angry now though. Just sad. No you are angry sad... I think... might not be... fuck it, how am I supposed to be thinking? There was a quirky ‘I'm going mad’ moment in the main bar. Putting glasses back on shelving next to the vacant gunslinger seat.

Derrick was standing behind her as she stood up thinking, depressed person here, the one stocking shelves. Clear as the crow flies into Mystery Ville beyond her staring window she heard, I know somewhere in her head. Voice of Derrick as sure as it was midday in the Oak. She froze and the crash of glass on the floor dragged her back.

“Dammit.”

“You OK, Rose?” The inside voice outside. Rose shook her head, trying to bring herself out of the zone.

“Yes, I was miles away. Sorry. I'll just get the dustpan.”
When she came back, Derrick just smiled. “Seen Dave today by any chance?”

Rose glanced up as she cleared up glass shards. You know I have, don't you? Her phone buzzed. WTF, this pub is bloody psychic. “Yeah, this morning at the cemetery. Why?”

“Not like him to miss out on lunch. Was he OK?”

Why you asking me? Text him. She could feel frustration building. “Not really, he was...” being a twat “... maudlin over the grave he keeps vigil on.”

Lei runs through the bustling crowd, concealing the box under her jacket, and holding the note in her hand.

She glances at her reflection in the window of a small store, and is underwhelmed. How long have I been doing this, she thought. Her brown eyes looked sunken, sad. Her once pale skin was the color of dirt. And her black hair now looked like an old mop. It had been a while since she had seen herself, and it caught her of guard. It didn’t anger her, just surprised her.

“I look like hell” she mutters under her breath.

Lei tip toes past a group of men in suits, and holds her breath to the point her face gets red and bloated like a puffer fish. If there was any time to be paranoid, it’s now.

When she manages to get past them, she turns a corner, and takes out the box from her hoodie. She had pressed it so hard against her, it left a mark around her abdomen.

Lei has spent most of her teen years searching for this. 15 to the ripe age of 19. It almost surprised her how underwhelming the box looked. It’s silver metal covering was not at all what she excepted. The only interesting part of it was a red symbol that looked almost familiar. Almost.

“Oh my goodness Den, why did you buy it if it didn’t have a chip! That’s a waist of 20 dollars!” A voice says from the corner.

Of course. There are people everywhere.

Lei once again shoves the box in her jacket, and look around, but all she could see are concrete walls. Well, not all. A small hole in one of the city’s walls catches her attention.

She can get executed if she even goes near the wall. But then again, they will do much worse to her if they found out she took the memory drive.

Lei throws herself to the opening, and stumbles. The floor, inches away from her face, leaving nothing but a scrape on her knee. She picks herself up again, wanders into the hole, not knowing what she would encounter.

Lei almost doesn’t fit. If she wasn’t a scrawny young girl she probably wouldn’t have. but yet she did. And now she is in a odd place.

It looks like a cave, but there are concrete walls everywhere that expand farther than she could see. It is cold, even cold for her. And there are pieces of medal everywhere. It is probably the inside of the wall, and is where all electric power runs. Of course there will never be a hole in the wall. Of course. But still, it felt weird being all alone. She could hardly remember a time of complete silence. She had this uneasy feeling that there was something still watching. She just couldn’t see it.

She un-crumples the paper in her hand and quickly scans over it.

‘Dear Lei, once you get it, run. You will know what to do after then. And remember, trust the red bird. Much love my eagle, Daniel.’

As she read the word love, her eyes teared up and got overwhelmed with grief.

This is not the time for this she repeats to herself.

Once again, she’s face to face with the strange box.

“Open” she says, but nothing happens. It still lays there like a price of junk.

“Initiate.”

“Code 7”.

“Enter password.”

And then finally when she says that, a robotic voice says in a cold voice “enter password.”

Lei scrambles to find the note, and reads over it again.

Red.

The words red and eagle didn’t make sense.

And Daniel always had a meaning behind every word he said.

Lei hesitatingly puts the box up to her face and says, “Red eagle.”

She stares blankly at the box but nothing.

It sits in front of her, still being a box.

That is until a small bing comes from the box.

Lei scoots away from the box, as the red symbol glows brighter and brighter.

The four sides of the box drop open, and a beaming light pops out.

Frozen in fear and confusion, Lei opens her eyes to see a hologram hovering above her.

She can’t help but let out a smile and sigh of relief. It’s real.

“How can i assist you?” It asks.

“I’ve missed you Daniel” Lei responds, as the hologram smiles.

“I guess we better start looking for your body huh?” Lei exclaims.

“First you know what we need to do” he says.

“I know, I know” Lei responds. “We’re going to tear down this damn wall.”

There was the constant footfall of scuffling feet, the breathfall of sour lips expectorating their hungry bile on the back of your neck or directly into your weary eyes. There was the constant vile touch of everybody rubbing against your body and mind. We had learned not to look each other in the eyes, to lower our heads, only to keep our chins down positioned on the steady movement of our feet.

For ever so long, we thought that we would die from famine, pestilence, a falling meteor or a rampant viral disease.

It did not happen.

Decades ago, our mortal ancestors would have called us lucky. If only they could see us now.

But we were dying from an unceasing immortality. The telomerase stretch was always restored to its youthful order. Our bodies remained young and free of disease. A fountain of youth poisoned with the reality—no one died and more and more were always born. The Restore-nanos could not be stopped. They propagated even faster than our cells—than ourselves.

We had been robbed of all the the other pleasures of good food, fine wine, a vacation on the beach. There was no more room for that, we were over seventy billion on the planet.

And still expanding.

Old Earth had to carry our heavy load. The last pleasure we had was to find intercourse with another. We did in some hopeless ennui way, our bodies biotechnically renewed, still carried their deep, ancient instincts.

I no longer knew how many children, grandchildren and the many grands after that I had. Like the years, you simply gave up on counting.

Every resource was gone and used. Even the super rich lived the lives of paupers now. Poor humans, we mumbled to ourselves.

Full fortunes had been given away to have a few precious moments alone. Wars had been fought over that, destroying the last scraps which could have been used to take us to the stars.

We were now completely earthbound. And every day bound to each other.

But I had scavenged for an ever long time. There were still pieces and parts of forgotten technology. Unlike others who had fallen into a stumbling stupor wandering the worn streets of ages past, I kept aware. Here and there were abandoned chips and wires. I pieced my thoughts together as well as those components.

Everyone else caught in their unaware pain and suffering did not notice that I slowly held a small box in my hands. They shuffled by and bumped me into the next body. Most did not react and went on their way, a very few others still somewhat alive in their souls said, “Hi.” or “Are you looking for a good time?”

I shook my head, all good times were gone for my common humanity.

But I had a hope.

I took one of those wires from what I had made, I pushed it deep into my arm. It found a source of unending energy in one of those Restore-Nanos.

After all those decades and what must have been at least two centuries, I had calculated the formula for a folding of space and time.

My breath was released in a long sigh. I flipped the one simple switch.

None of them noticed I was gone—there were too many.

Yet, I had done it. It was a small space, but it was a place of my own. Finally, I was solely and soully alone.

I took a deep breath, though there was no real oxygen there. It didn’t manner those nanos never stopped fixing the damage.

I went back and forth—to the masses and then to the one. I gathered what was left of that overcrowded world. Scrap metal and forgotten wires. Even some downtrodden trampled weeds and seeds.

I continued to unfold that mini-universe. It expanded and expanded. I made a sun of thermal engines. From my own saliva—rain, rivers, and oceans grew. Those weeds and seeds began to grow. I could take a real breath. From a drop of my blood—which held the whole billion years of terrestrial evolution—I was able to begin to fill my planet with new evolving life.

My cells and the nanos made it easy to fill the sky, the earth, the seas.

I had a world of my own. An Adam alone. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share.

Not even with an Eve.

Maybe one day…

During the third hour of my two-mile commute, I thought of a field trip to a chicken farm I took as a child. Before the Bearing, kids always used to make those random trips. Farms, factories, museums, whatever the school could spin as educational. These days, a trip like that would take weeks. I remember the farm worker opening up double metal doors, and he revealed a room of which I couldn’t see the other side. Every single inch of the floor was occupied by a white chicken. The sound of their chirping morphed into an insensent, ever-present aviary din that seemed like something from another world. They had no room to walk, no room to jump, no room to breathe. The farm worker looked at us and asked if we wanted to see something funny. He grabbed a nearby metal pipe and hit a nearby railing, sending a loud ding echoing through the room. The chickens all screeched even louder. They jolted, jerking and flapping upward in place. It looked like a whole sea of white was suddenly distrubed. An intense pang of stress hit me as I watched how crammed the poor birds were. The poor things didn’t even know how awful their living conditions were. Or maybe, they did. Maybe they somehow, they had visions of a wider world.

I think of those birds a lot now in the Post-Bearing world. Almost twenty billion people in the same world that once barely handled seven.

The bus slugged along a narrow road. Sparks flew as it scraped against the residential quarter buildings on both sides. Steam and smoke and smog rose from the grated metal that comprised the world, releasing gasses from the city’s lower levels. Whenever I’m lucky enough to have a spot near a window I would watch the gases rise through our own “Sky“ to the higher levels above and someday, maybe those particles would even reach the upper echelons of the surface. I remember the surface well. I remember the sun and the white clouds that drifted before a blue sky. I remember flying and fields and the freedom to extend my arms without hitting another person or object. I remember days from the past that are only torment now.

Inside the bus, a woman wearing a technician’s gray jumpsuit uniform pressed against my right side. A man wearing a sanitation’s brown jumpsuit uniform pressed against my left. Behind me three soldiers pressed against us three in the standard camouflage fatigues and gasmasks. Before us, a mother with four children, all identical, wearing non-worker black jumpsuits. I saw next to the mother, a woman wearing a blue mail clerk jumpsuit uniform stare at the children with saddened, longing eyes. Another loser of the parenting lottery. We all assumed the traditional commute position — heads down, screens streaming content on their eyeglass units, and ignoring the twelve rows of other people around them.

“Brace for sanitation,” a computerized female voice said.

Everyone sighed in a uniform fashion as a series of brightly lit disk drones hovered over us, spraying a disinfectant. Most of the adults barely reacted, while some of the children still cried over its slight sting.

“God, I hate this stuff,” I said.

“I’d take the spray over the light therapy any day,” the technician said.

“What are you talking about? Every doorway still has the light bars,” the sanitation worker said.

“Yeah, but how many times do you actually go through a door these days? You usually stay put once you’re at where you’re heading,” the technician said.

“I just hate it all,” the mother of the children said.

“You all should be grateful for the sanitation that our government provides,” one of the soldiers said. “Could you imagine if we had even one-tenth the diseases the pre-Bearing world had now? SARS, rhinovirus, COVID-19, the X-R30 flu, just to name a few. We’d all be a lot worse off.”

“Debatable,” the technician said.

“What’s that?” the soldier replied.

“If we still had those diseases, the population crisis would probably be solved for one thing,” she said.

The soldier turned, the best that the cramped space allowed, to face her. Panic waved through me as I felt his fabric and weight shift against my back. It released some sanitizer that had pooled between us, and it ran down my leg.

“That seems like a radicalized statement to me,” the soldier said, staring at her through his gas mask.

“No, sir,” she said, looking back down.

The scraping of the bus filled the air. The fluorescent lights flickered, revealing the grimy tube the hundreds of us were crammed in.

When I entered the office facility, I looked at my screen and saw I only had ninety more minutes to get through security, climb two flights of stairs, and take the tram to my desk. I scolded myself for getting up too late as I shuffled down the fortieth security lane.

“Do you have any personal electronic devices?” the guard said. He wore similar garb as the soldiers, but instead they were a dingy green, the color of UUR Inc.

“Just my screen,” I said as I tapped the clear device that hung on my left eye. “Same as yesterday.”

He nodded and ushered me along down a tight, tile-encrusted corridor, where an endless line of workers walked in single file.

“Good morning, UUR family,” a computerized voice said. “The time is now zero-five-hundred. Today, as you are all aware, we commemorate the thirty-first anniversary of the Bearing. As you proceed to your designated work station, we are bringing you a special treat—“

“A brief history of the Bearing,” I said alongside the voice and dozens of other fellow workers. It had become an inside joke to mimic these automated messages amongst us grunts.

I rolled my eyes as I heard the recorded audio for the fifteen year in a row. It’s been the same since I joined UUR. As I become squeezed amongst countless other green jumpsuit wearing workers, the voice tells a story like it’s a fairy tale.

“After the three superpowers whose names we no longer utter began the Third World War, a new type of biological weaponization backfired, hyper-fertilizing all the people of the world. Nothing less than quadruplets were born across the world. Unplanned pregnancies went rampant. World hunger spread to first-world nations. Infantcide and suicide rates spiked 670% across the world. The world was falling to pieces.”

I boarded the upstairs tram, a clunky electric train that always acted as if it was about to run out of power. I doubt it’s engineers intended for it to be running day and night, constantly transporting hundreds upon hundreds of disheveled employees. It was hard to breathe, and watching the endlessly expanding space of workstations made it even harder. I asked myself the same question I have to fight myself from asking every day. What if there’s a fire? What if the extremists try to bomb the city again? We would all be obliterated, subjected to a slow, scrambling, trampling, death.

“As the world accommodated for the incalculable amount of new people, the Union of New Nations commissioned corporations like UUR to help maintain our fragile peace, limited resources, and ever-shifting culture. Thank you for being part of the new future, a Post-Bearing Future.”

By the time our little origin story finished, I had reached my work station, only ninety rows away from the tram terminal. I had to push and shove through the constant stream of people to finally get into my four-foot-wide cubicle. I panicked as I saw on my screen that I was four minutes late. As I sat, my keyboard appeared on the smart surface of the desk. The projected screen appeared, synced with my screen, and pulled up my spreadsheets to read.

“Good morning, UUR-E-311. You are five minutes late this morning. These five minutes will be deducted from your lunch hour, leaving you with seven minutes. This action has also been reported to your superior. Today is January 1, year 31. Happy New Year. This is a reminder that this is a no-child year. No children can be born legally this year, even if you were a winner in the parenting lottery. Do your part to lower the human population. You may now begin working,” the same computerized voice as the loudspeaker said.

There was little to my job. I simply had to identify numbers that were either twenty numbers higher or lower than the previous year’s report. Whether it’s data from a piece of the supply chain, profits, or human deaths, I didn’t know. They would never tell us. We were all confident an AI problem already existed that could do our jobs. It probably existed before the Bearing. But for some reason, UUR wanted human eyes on the numbers.

Around me, I could see an ocean of analysts doing the same thing as my job. My neighbors were distorted by fogged glass between our stations, but I could see them, and they could see me. I wondered if I looked as zombified as them.

Yet, it wasn’t all bad. In fact, beyond the gray world I was in, there was a bright star right in my aisle. I looked to the row behind me and eight stations down, and a blonde-haired female worker looked at me. I first smiled, but her worry-stricken face turned my own face into one of concern.

She blinked three rapid times, then a break, then two more. I responded with two quick blinks.

In a few moments, I saw in the corner of my eye that she got up to leave toward the restroom stations. After nearly ten minutes, I followed.

Going down the aisle was like being stuck in rush hour. It was so busy, constantly busy, that it would take at least an hour to get there and back, not counting the time of whatever she wanted to say to me.

Someone firmly grasped me on the shoulder, and I turned around.

“311, I was just heading to your work station,” I heard the voice of my manager say.

“Sir, about this morning,” I said.

“Five minutes is a long time, 311,” he said. His voice was both stern and mocking.

“My stomach hasn’t been agreeing with me, sir. I was sick most of the night,” I said.

“And where are you going now? Shouldn’t you try to catch up?”

“I feel like I may have to go, one last time, sir,” I said.

He scoffed in disgust.

“I’m docking another five from your lunch. Hurry up,” he said and disappeared into the crowd.

Before the world went to hell, I remember going to baseball games with my grandpa. There was no other feeling like it. The roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat, the smell of the hot dogs. Then, chaos would strike during the seven-inning stretch. We’d try to go to the restroom and only to fit a wave of men swarming to get in and out before the next inning began.

That was how the restrooms felt at UUR constantly, every moment of the day. I weaved through the scrambling visitors of the men’s room toward the nineteenth stall. There was a line of eight people, I eagerly waited as all the men before me went in and out. Then, I saw a friend of mine about to pass me on the way out. His eyes met mine and he cracked up laughing.

“Tim, are you two meeting up already?”he said. It was the first time I heard my name all day, and not 311.

“Morning, Hank. Yeah, she seemed sort of upset,” I said.

Yet before we could continue the conversation he was pushed through the line.

It was finally my turn. I got into the stall and without wasting any time, pulled open the service panel behind the toilet. It exposed the inner guts of the building, an endless forest of pipes and valves. I managed to squeeze my body into the forbidden space. Wedged between an arrangement of pipes, I shimmied forward in the darkness. The loud din of the bathroom was starting to fade away. Finally, my hand reached out and felt another. Her hand squeezed mine, it was soft, warm, and shaking.

“How was your trip from the girl’s room?” I said.

“Tim,” she said, trembling.

“Emily, what’s wrong?” I said.

“Tim, I,” she said, her voice cracking in tears.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m pregnant,” she finally said.

The news knocked me out of reality. I couldn’t quite seem to grasp it, like someone trying to catch a fish with their bare hands.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“I know. I don’t know we could’ve let this happen. But it’s true. I’ve taken three pregnancy tests already. All positive.”

“Three black market pregnancy tests,” I said.

“They’re still accurate and you know it,” she said.

Flashes of the last time something like this happened came to mind. I remember Doug and Rosa, old friends I knew even before the Bearing, ended up getting pregnant during a no-child year, and they won the lottery. They disappeared before entering their second trimester. I started to hyperventilate right away. The already-tight space started to close in on me.

“What the hell are we going to do?” I asked.

“Tim, I need to escape before they detect it. I need to get out of the city. I need to get to the surface before it’s too late.”

The idea of the surface once again came to mind. The open roads. The isolation of walking in the forest. Homes with acres of land around it. But, that all might be ancient history if what I’ve heard was true.

“We don’t even know if the surface exists anymore. It could all be just like this now,” I said.

“It’s more of a chance I have than down here. I’m not asking you to come with me, especially if you’re already having doubts. But I’m keeping the child. And I’m not staying here until they come knocking at my quarters with a black bag.”

A child. A child. I never thought it was possible. Since we lost the lottery, the hourly sterilization should also be affecting our fertility, too. Something happened, an anomaly. And, a pre-Bearing Tim would say this happened for a reason.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Looking out the window, Michael stared down at Earth. He revelled in the weightless sensation, but it paled in comparison to being alone. It was the first time in his life, and it was glorious. He let out a loud cheer and stretching out his arms filling up the space around him. He was on his final rotation as they call it back home. To help keep the population in check, when someone gets to 60 years old, they jettison you into space, one final adventure before you drift towards the sun.

As the climate changed and temperatures around the equator began to soar people migrated to the poles to avoid the sweltering desert. The world changed almost overnight, everyone crammed into what remained of the livable space. From space looking down at the Earth, he could see the drastic the changes to once blue marble. The scar of desert banded around the Earth squeezing the life out of it. The land changed completely by the rising seas. It was unrecognizable from the world that it once was.

Six billion people survived the first wave, five billion the second. Crime and illness from living packed together reduced the global population to 4 billion. People learned to be comfortable enough, but you were never alone. Michael grew up in a cramped studio, with his parents, and his grandparent, before they took their rotations, and after that his wife and his kid, as well as his best friend Andrew and his family.

A tear ran down Michaels cheek, he brushed it away and it floated. He watched it drift around the capsule, before he noticed the flashing red light refracting throw the water. He knew this was his time was coming to an end. He took one final look at his home of the last 60 years. He thought back to his friends and family, he was the first to go. It was never easy but they always found time to enjoy being around each other. He smiled down to his family, hoping they were smiling back up at him. The world wasn't pretty anymore, but it was home.

Michael let out a cheer, closed his eyes, and breathed a sigh goodbye before laying back, floating. The sound of gas venting into the capsule began, it smelled sweet almost of cotton candy. He relaxed into the lull of space. His body became heavy in its weightlessness, he knew he didn't have much longer, a smile crossed his face, he took a big breath in, and let out his final whisper goodbye. His hands clutched a photo of his family, and he faded off, full of love.

Im worried About trusting them with my Words Spilling pink contents Onto the couch

Don’t feel around them Don’t slip Precious details Don’t exert your aching bones In their presence Don’t

Find your grounding Hop into a lavish green meadow With spring posies Pocketful Of deceit and forthcoming knives No safe space has to be released Somehow.

Are you safe even in your own Pocket? Do you know Where your children are? Do you know how to sensor Your drippings, before them? Do you know how to carefully And spindling say The right things?

Don’t starve in a crowd Because if you do, young ones, And old ones, and uptight-mind-collapsing- Narcissists, They will feast on your Hunger