The Last Ship

The hull shuddered as another wave struck, and through the porthole, Earth spun away like a discarded marble. They pressed their palm against the cold glass, watching the blue-white curve disappear behind a veil of orbital debris—the graveyard of all the other failed departures.

They had paid everything for this ticket. Not just money, though that had evaporated first when the insurance markets collapsed in ’31. Then came the assets: the Manhattan penthouse flooded by the third storm surge, the Napa vineyard burned in the endless fire season, the Swiss bunker that proved no sanctuary when the refugees numbered in the hundreds of millions. Finally, the promises—shares in mineral rights on planets that might not exist, futures contracts in a future that might never come.

The captain’s voice crackled over the intercom: “Navigation systems are experiencing… difficulties. Estimated arrival time to the colony has been… revised.”

Through the thin walls, someone was crying. Someone else was praying in a language they didn’t recognize. The ship’s manifest read like a who’s who of the former world: tech moguls, defense contractors, pharmaceutical executives, oil barons, cryptocurrency kings—all the architects of the machine that ate the world, now fleeing its wreckage.

But machines don’t care about their creators.

They remembered the morning it became clear. Not when the Amazon burned or the ice sheets collapsed or even when Phoenix recorded its seventieth consecutive day above 120 degrees. It was smaller than that: standing in line at what used to be a grocery store in Manhattan, watching a mother count and recount her handful of bills, trying to buy formula that cost more than most people made in a day. The mother’s face—that exact moment when hope dies and something harder takes its place.

That’s when they understood. The collapse hadn’t begun with climate or war or pandemic. It began the moment they convinced themselves that some people mattered more than others, that distance could insulate them from consequence, that wealth was a life raft instead of an anchor.

The ship lurched violently. Emergency lights bathed everything in red. Through the porthole, they could see other vessels in the convoy—sleek private craft that had cost billions, government arks loaded with the “essential” personnel of dead nations. One by one, their engines were failing, their navigation systems corrupted by the same electromagnetic storms that had made Earth’s surface uninhabitable.

The irony was perfect: they had made the planet unlivable for everyone, but it turned out there was no “everyone else” to escape to. There was only the same closed system, the same physics, the same consequences following them into the dark.

The captain’s final transmission was barely audible through the static: “Mayday. Mayday. This is… this is all of us.”

They smiled—the first genuine expression they’d worn in years. Through the dying ship’s hull, space looked exactly like what they’d always known it to be: empty, infinite, and utterly indifferent to how much money you had when the air ran out.

The last thing they saw before the lights failed was Earth in the distance, still turning, still burning, still the only home any of them had ever had.