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Delayed information – Flash fiction

They’re leaving the earth. Leaving the lovely planet. Who knew climate change was not the end of the world. It was only the start. Asteroids hit the surface. The land cracked and slowly sank. The sea started to frost. No war broke out because they were isolated from one another. The resources, in the end, were pretty much depleted.

When a forgotten satellite found another habitable planet, humans across the globe started gathering and planning for inter-galaxy migration. A far faraway planet. A million lightyears away. Most of them will be in cryostasis during the flight. A handful of people will change shift every ten light-years. The AI will do the heavy load. Make sure the pilgrims are sustained in their pod and can be woken up when they reached their destination. They would do better on their new fresh and untouched planet, they thought to themselves.

The long-awaited journey finally came to an end. They’re there. It did not like the image. The information was delayed a million years. They’ve just realized what they saw is the image of the planet more than a million light-years ago. Civilization has been built on this ‘earth 2’ as well. The newcomer found characters that could be letters and numbers. They found some indications about a spaceship was built and sent out to space.

It was not long to figure out that the human from earth 2 used numbers based on twelve instead of ten. Their letters were more than 26 made up of 9 types of strokes. It looked like they were planning to leave their planet towards ‘earth 1’.

It seems that both of humanity exchanged their depleted planet. What a piece of luck.

Thumbnail by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash