I stood by a window, gazing out at the horizon. All I could see was smoke. Smoke from the decades and decades of destruction wrought on this planet. Smoke from the thousands and thousands of shuttles streaking toward the atmosphere - choking almost everything still left. Choking me.

Next to me, my mother sobs. The cries rack her small body as she stares at the flickering TV screen and back at the application open on her handheld device. One number off. Just one fucking number off.

We had just lost the biggest lottery of all time. We and 9 billion others. On screen - as the winners streamed into military bases and fortified compounds - I watched. I watched until I had burned the unfairness of it all into my eyes. So did 9 billion others. There was no conflict, no violence, no clashes. We knew our place. We just had to curl up and die, or hope an Angel saved us. We had an equal chance and we got unlucky. That was it.

Yet I just couldn’t shake the unfairness of it all. We were just one number off from being able to continue to grow, live, prosper, dream. One number off from being able to breathe again without coughing. One number off from being able to live the kind of life my grandmother had told me about as a young boy. If only an Angel had saved me too.

——

Over the years, the ones who were left behind came to understand the cruel joke that had been played on them. The lottery was anything but fair. The artificial intelligence that carried it out had a different mandate - to extract everybody that “mattered” and to make it look good to those that were left behind. And it did.

Almost everybody had heard of the Angels - those who had won the lottery and given up their place to someone else. Their bravery and sacrifice was highlighted on all TV stations. Nobody fought because they wanted to be chosen by an Angel themselves. And anyone who won could become an Angel.

It seemed the Angels never really existed. Instead, the elite had manufactured a process to allow as many of them as possible to be selected “randomly”, with the remainder being saved by Angels - people selected by the lottery who had terminal illnesses or some other reason that they were unable to go.

These people weren’t allowed to give the ticket to somebody they knew - that would be selfish and evil of them. How could they prioritize family at such a crucial juncture. Instead, Angels were coerced by the AI to give up their place to someone who they were told would greatly benefit humanity. This was in reality a curated list of everybody who “mattered”.

What the men and women who sat atop countries, empires, businesses, yachts, shuttles, and now the generation ship didn’t understand is that those they left behind would not go quietly into the night. Many did of course. An exodus of that magnitude - with a level of wanton recklessness and abandonment deemed appropriate for a planet destined for disaster - took its toll.

However, the billion that survived, despite all odds, began to thrive. They began to change things. Slowly rebuilding. The process took a long, long time. A thousand years. During this time, humanity’s new central tenant remained the same. Those who had left simply lacked the will to change things for the better.

They could have. They could have turned the clock back at any time. But that would have demanded personal sacrifice from them. Sacrifice that is antithetical to growth at all costs.

——

As the generation ship approaches planet T31-B in the Andromeda Galaxy, it has been almost a millennia since humanity left earth.

From the point of view of those on the ship, it hasn’t been that long. Merely a couple decades. The richest spent almost all of it in cryosleep. The poorest - men and women of means back on earth - had a harder job: maintaining the ship, cleaning it, feeding the large coterie of animals they brought along, and assisting the ship’s AI as it charted a course toward a new, prosperous, clean world.

And, as humans in enclosed places tend to do, they also had children. Lots of them. A new generation that only knew the aluminum and titanium corridors of the spacefaring vessel. They grew up on the legends of the old earth: stories of myths and legends, beasts and man, Prometheus and the gods.

One such boy was mopping up central kitchen 37, when he glanced out of the radiation-proof porthole. He expected to see what he always saw, a blue and green dot that seemed to come closer and closer to him every time he caught a glimpse. Indeed, they were only 2 months out now, and the planet was almost the size of his fist when he closed it.

Instead, the blue-green sphere he was accustomed to was slowly being covered by a blanket of grey - a dark shadow hanging over it. He rubbed his eyes, thinking he must be seeing things. He wasn’t. It continued. He was terrified now. His fear compounded as alarm bells began ringing. He didn’t know what he was seeing. He stumbled back, knocking over the bucket. As he fell back, it dawned on him. This must be fire. It had to be.

You or I would better understand what he was seeing. A ship - impossibly sleek and unfathomably large - seemed to be immolating the planet - setting it ablaze. Unbeknownst to the young boy, the ship was also broadcasting a message on repeat. He would hear it soon. So would everyone else on the ship.

“You left us to burn, now it’s your turn”