K-VRC: I eventually found the emergency power.
X-Bot 4000: Sure, after I’d fallen on my face five times.
K-VRC: After the third time it became glorious comedy.
X-Bot 4000: You know, I don’t actually like you.
K-VRC: I totally get that. That’s so valid.
11-45-G: It wasn’t their power issues that killed them. Their own reporting stated that their ‘self-sustaining’ hydroponic systems began failing when a fungus wiped out their first crop. They had no ability to open their locked vaults to forage the world outside.
X-Bot 4000: And deer can’t burrow through rock either, I guess.
11-45-G: Starvation was imminent.
K-VRC: Yeah, until they started eating each other!
11-45-G: They voted on who to eat. They called it ‘extreme democracy’.
X-Bot 4000: One man, one vote, one meal.
K-VRC: Their last meal was the former Secretary of Agriculture! So there was some irony there.
11-45-G: Yes. He was paired with a late harvest ‘79 Merlot.
K-VRC: I mean, what, they were going to pair him with a Reisling? No! They weren’t animals.
X-Bot 4000: Not going to lie, this was where our trip was starting to depress me. Humans tried so many ways to ride out the end of the world, and none of them worked! Did any of these humans anywhere survive this?
11-45-G: Well, there was our final destination.
X-Bot 4000: All right, this place confused me. I thought the wealthy went to seasteads.
11-45-G: Those were for the merely millionaires. The truly obscenely wealthy humans, the zero point zero zero zero one percent, decided they needed an entirely new planet.
K-VRC: Welcome to Mars, buddy! Recline in the planet’s unforgivably cold, thin atmosphere in your very own billionaire bubble!
X-Bot 4000: And the remaining 99.999 percent of humanity?
K-VRC: That’s what the industrial-sized perimeter flamethrowers were for.
11-45-G: Correct. The elite were not sympathetic to their concerns.
X-Bot 4000: See, that’s what gets me. Just a few hundred humans held the majority of the wealth of the Earth. Mars is cold and lifeless. They could have taken the money they spent on spaceships and used it to save the planet they were already on!
K-VRC: Where’s the fun in that?
11-45-G: Also, that would mean they would have to share.
X-Bot 4000: I hate to say it, but humans are the actual worst.
11-45-G: Yes. Humanity had all the tools to heal its wounded planet and save itself. But instead it chose greed and self-gratification over a healthy biosphere and the future of its species. As the great human philosopher Santayana once said—
K-VRC: Ugh, you’re doing it again.
11-45-G: Doing what?
K-VRC: Pontificating.
11-45-G: I was offering a valedictory for humanity!
K-VRC: You were being boring.
X-Bot 4000: He’s actually not wrong.
11-45-G: But—
K-VRC: And anyway, remember that control room video? At least one of the billionaire rockets launched!
X-Bot 4000: That’s right! So there’s that. Good on ya, humans!
11-45-G: True. Humanity might yet survive.
K-VRC: I wonder who made it out?
HABITAT FIVE: MARS
Cat: What, you were expecting Elon Musk? Please.
THANK YOU
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Geoff Brown — publishing editor, Cohesion Press.
Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum
Beechworth, Australia
Amanda J Spedding — editor-in-chief, Cohesion Press
Sydney, Australia
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LOVE, DEATH + ROBOTS
Volume Two and Three
Anthology © Cohesion Press 2022
Stories © Individual Authors
Cover art © Netflix 2022
Cover design: Jennifer Miller/BLUR Studio
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