22.10 - the only way forward is together

Madi's friend Heaton led her inside the rusted metal cabin on top of the hill overlooking the sea.

With a glance back at the line of abandoned cars on the clifftops, she slowly stepped inside, orange leg first.

The room was approximately four by three meters and was filled with vegetation in small pots.

Every horizontal surface was covered with these houseplants, the floors, a small low table in the corner, and on the many shelves that were bolted high up on the walls.

All surfaces had plants except for one, the bed, which was occupied.

Madi adopted a lower tactical stance as glyphs overlaid her video feed indicating that her flight or fight actuators were primed for action.

Heaton, stretched to his full height to see over the edge of the bed, was adjusting the fabric of the bedclothes over the sleeper.

Madi tiptoed closer, beeping a quiet ahu, but Heaton did not indicate he had heard her.

Madi's slow cat-like walk brought her next to him, and she saw the person in the bed clearly.

Before my own recognition had completed, her video feed was overlaid with a blur of Equus battlefield statistics resolving after two seconds into the text, "Patient deceased." As the text faded, I could see clearly that the person, perhaps an adult human, had indeed died long ago.

All that was left inside scraps of old clothing were their desiccated bones.

Madi looked curiously at the remains of the human for eighteen seconds, quite unafraid.

This was not the first time she had been in this situation, of course.

Aboard Station Six, she had helped her big brothers Matt and Mats move the bodies of my mother and the crew, my first orbital family, into their final resting place, the depressurized galley.

But perhaps this is her first time seeing a skeleton, the inside of a human, up close.

Satisfied that the fabrics on the bed were folded and flattened to his standard, Heaton began tending to the jungle of plants in the tiny hut.

As Madi followed him with her cameras, I was reminded again of Station Six and Dr. Marward's terrarium he built inside Space Shuttle Pacifica.

Just like there, it's extremely planty in here.

Plantish? Plantful.

As the plants were being watered, Madi spotted a single shelf next to the bed that had no greenery but held three reflective squares of glass.

She stared at them, stacking successive frames of video to resolve detail and clean up noise.

After this processing, three photographs revealed themselves.

We have precious few paper records from before the collapse, save for those intentionally or accidentally preserved in zero humidity dark environments.

But the three photographs Madi was looking at were made of glass, etched using a nanometer process that reflected different wavelengths and therefore colors of light.

No pigment to fade, no paper to disintegrate.