Author: Majoki
The chair creaked noisily when Sandoval sat at the table with five glasses set out. Even though he’d lost a few pounds since they last met, the old wood complained. Soon the others joined him: Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, Suh.
Five left. Only five.
No others living humans in the history of civilization were like them. At one time, there’d been more. Not many more. A couple of dozen or so, but they were gone. Lost to time. Lost to space. Lost to both.
Smiling thinly, Hurst presented a bottle. “Best I could scrounge.”
Suh nodded. “Getting harder to find a decent drink.”
“You’d think that’s one thing we’d still be good at: making booze.” Sandoval held out his glass for a pour.
“Plenty of booze out there, but most of it is rotgut.” Avrilla sighed. “Not like before.”
After it was filled, Marpreesh raised his glass. “To before.”
They raised their glasses. They knew why they were here, the last members of The Club. “Any old business?” Suh asked.
“Just my damn knee,” Hurst said. “Still glitchy as hell until I can get a replacement chip.”
“Seems more and more unlikely any of us will see replacement parts soon,” Sandoval said.
Avrilla nodded. ‘Yup. The embargo is tightening everything up. Hard to get most anything these days. Especially aug refits. They built us strong, but not to last.”
“We were mission specific.” Hurst refilled their glasses. “We all knew that going in.”
“Did we?” Suh asked
“If you’d read the design specs,” Hurst, as always, scolded.
“I was twenty-four and they dangled a Mars tour in front of me. Like I was going to question anything,” Suh shot back.
“That was the real problem,” Sandoval, ever the peacemaker, offered. “We didn’t question things nearly enough. That’s why we’re sitting here drinking shitty booze and wondering which of us will fall apart next.”
“It’s all falling apart. Us. Booze. Earth,” Marpreesh observed.
“Exactly,” Avrilla said. “Because we didn’t push back on terraforming Mars. We’ve been tearing Earth to pieces for hundreds of years. We should’ve used our scarce resources here to help Mother Earth. Now, look what we have to show for it.”
“Just us.” Suh raised his glass. “To the last of the augstronauts.”
Hurst joined him. “To the greatest fucking kludge ever! Augmenting us was way quicker and cheaper than transporting and building the infrastructure to support normies on Mars. We had our moment. We were the great enhanced hope.”
“Yup. Thought we could have it all. Classic hubris,” Avrilla lamented. “But Mars bit us bad, and we’ve gone from hero to zero almost as fast as Mother Earth. We’re being pounded back into the Stone Age.”
“Can’t blame Mother Earth for our unnatural disasters.” Marpreesh drained his glass. “We thought we could tech our way out of everything. But it was unsustainable. Now, we’re the last living proof of that. A handful of augs breaking down along with all the normies as shit collapses around us.”
Sandoval stood so suddenly his chair flew back and crashed to creaky pieces against the wall behind him. “Is this what we’ve become? Super-human whiners?” He grabbed a leg of his broken chair and clubbed the table. Everything on it and everyone around it jumped at the mighty blow. “We may have been augmented to tame another world, and we’re not what we once were, but we aren’t powerless, and our mission hasn’t changed.” He hit the table again. “We rally. We fight the odds. We build. We survive.”
The room shook as Avrilla, Hurst, Marpreesh, and Suh joined Sandoval clubbing the table with their powerful fists. Soon, the world shook with them.