4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Nothing Else to Do
Paul's vision of a new civilisation dies on Jamie's sceptical stare. After last night's terror, after the fire and the phantom voice and the complete psychological collapse, who could believe in grand futures? But then Jamie appears by the river with words that change everything. What begins as killing time becomes something neither of them expected.
The pitch is ambitious, perhaps delusionally so: a new civilisation, free from Earth's obligations, where they could bring only the family they wanted. Paul delivers it with all the conviction he can muster whilst sitting on a mattress with burnt feet in a half-collapsed tent. Jamie's response is a blade wrapped in a question: "After last night, do you really believe any of that?"
The rejection stings. But Paul clings to the dream because the alternative — accepting that this exile has no meaning, no future, no hope — is unthinkable.
Then Jamie returns. Not with enthusiasm, not with conversion, but with honesty: there's nothing else to do. The admission is almost an apology. Almost a surrender. And from that unlikely beginning, something shifts.
They drag rocks. They draw lines in the dust. They mark boundaries and pile stones at corners and argue about names with the kind of comfortable friction that suggests something deeper forming between them. By the time they step back to survey their work — a rectangle of deliberate marks, the first infrastructure of a settlement that exists nowhere but in their imagination — they're no longer just surviving.
They're building. Together.
