Chapter Two - Here We Stand

"Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike."

J.K. Rowling -

Somehow I knew, I knew this all might as well be real. "I'm happy that you're still, alive my Dear" 

The very notion of accepting things as they are, seemed genuinely horrifying. 

"I can't imagine what I'd do here, all alone, without you." 

I desperately tried to put it aside, put aside the fear that crept out from the bottomless pit of my mind.

"I know what you're thinking "Will this woman ever stop blabbering, for God's sake! I just want peace of mind!! ", but that's not happening, not unless you strangle me to death by asphyxiation. "

But you can never escape reality, no matter how hard you try to build a wall of illusionary comfort, it always comes back, at the end, to pulverize you like a wrecking ball with a force of a gazillion mammoths. 

"And the chances of that happening are pretty slim, you're not a mindless ruffian, unlike other men." 

When it hits you, you just slowly accept it or you suffer a mental breakdown if you're of a weaker kind. 

"That's why I'm quite fond of you, still I can't stress my contentment enough, if only you knew how I felt after you collapsed, you'd be kissing my hand and treating me like a Queen, as you probably should" She teased him with a mischievous look on her face. 

But now I'm ready to move forward, regardless of circumstances, and things that have happened. I only need to look ahead. I only need to protect her. That's all that matters. She holds the answers, after all, but there's more to it. 

"Your look says it all, so I guess it's time for me to give you a quick rundown." 

We entered the building, which had an automatic front door triggered by the sensory lights, quite the contrast to medieval mansion so to speak. Upon the entrance, there wasn't much to see, just a minimalistic interior, except two things, a humongous binocular telescope and a tesseract-like object that floated a few meters above our heads.

She gave a nod and the Telescope's interface activated. Black sofa transformed from the ground and spread before us.

Now it's even more clear, this was a highly advanced human observatory. I said human because this isn't what a usual observatory looked like. It was fully automatic, transformable and worked on voice command. "Deneb, run coordinates, on 473.0664 ° = 33.0664 °, I want the visuals immediately."

'Yes, Ma'am'  responded to the giant telescope before  it made a half-turn and elevated itself diagonally towards the sky, roughly about 200 hundred meters above the ground. 

"This, my Dear, was our lovely home, or the remnants of what it used to be. A precious utopia turned into a post-apocalyptic pandemonium." 

"Come and take a closer look", she beckoned him with a gesture. He leaned forward as she ushered him towards the binocular telescope. There it was, our blue planet, our lovely planet, except it didn't look lovely anymore. The color seems to bore resemblance of a murky sky. 

That wasn't a habitable planet no more, that was just a hell's den hardly deserving to be called Planet Earth. "What happened there!?" He asked with a groggy tone. 

"Human foolishness at its peak, when greed and war take the best of humanity, we are left with irrevocable repercussions." 

She made a sorrowful smile, her words holding the bare truth and heaviness only she knew of. 

"After the huge technological advancement of A.I cities, and antimatter armaments, the top leading powers wanted to technologically enslave humanity via HiveMind chips that had a strong magnetic force and brain-controlling capabilities. Basically they wanted to control people like robots without emotions, they failed to do so, as many A.I turned against their will and civilians regained their freedom in return. However it didn't stop there, everyone stood against the tyrannical totalitarianism. After the death of a dictatorial regime nobody wanted to form a new one. There were suggestions that we should let A.I govern our societies, but that idea fell flat on the surface, because not only were they prone to being subjects of hacking, but they also made poor judgment and choices. So if there are no rules or orders what are you left with?"

To which he replied, "A post-apocalyptic scenario, where Anarchy is ruled by blockheads who are hungry for power?" 

"Bingo! There were countless deaths on both accounts, the loss was tremendously immeasurable. And If people's suffering wasn't enough, 99.9% percent of animal species were at the brink of extinction at that time. The Flora and Fauna were in shambles, our earth's crust was ruined by the incessant wars that threaten to cause cataclysmic eruptions of volcanoes that furthermore generated intense forthcoming earthquakes. The final stage of Armageddon was the climate change itself, i.e Global Warming, that engendered the melting of glaciers which as a result completely flooded the mainland. The survivors who bravely stayed in the boats died due to pollution of radioactive water. While people who decided to live in huge mountains were doomed by impoverishment. The people who stayed in bunkers also couldn't sustain themselves long enough to tell the tales, so what was humanity's last hope?"

"Space" he replied, she nodded happily as she squeezed his hand with both of her palms. 

"Yes! Sending humans in space to sustain our lives and colonize exoplanets was our only resort."

We were one of the few prototype pilots of a "Warp Drive", to ever explore space out of the Solar System. Well since you lost your recollection, I'll explain briefly; Warp drive works by annihilating matter (in the form of deuterium, a kind of hydrogen gas) and antimatter in a fusion reaction mediated by dilithium crystals. This produces the enormous power required to warp space-time and drive the ship faster than light or that's how it should work in theory, but reality is that we approach near-light speed"

"You and I are most likely the only humans alive in this Universe. Doesn't that sound amazing!? We're the ones who will write the history, although nobody will be there to note our accomplishments. " 

"So our exploration was successful?" he questioned her doubtfully. 

"Partially, yes and partly no, you see, we crashed into an edgy asteroid that we couldn't evade at impossible speed, so during that accident you lost your memory and we crashed on this exoplanet, luckily we're alive and everything else seems more or less operational". 

"How do you explain the mansion and this giant observatory on this planet then?" 

she giggled and leaned closer to him "Well, as the technology developed we perfected the ways to make our space more compact and mobile, the technology I'm talking about is SNOC or Super Nano Object Compression, it works similar to data compression just with physical objects and they're completely mobile, which makes them extremely convenient, I'll use even  simpler analogy to illustrate how this tech works; think of pokémon trainers storing their pokémons into a poke ball, they can carry, release or trap their pokémons inside of that poke ball, that's what we're essentially doing with inanimate objects, as we manipulate the property or a mass on a quantum level, in all honesty there's much more to this tech than just nano, but no one really knows since the inventors of this tech wanted to keep it a top-secret"

"That sounds, bizarrely ludicrous." 

The last and most important, who am I?" 

"My lover!"

"Huh? What are you talking about? Get real!"

In that moment she pushed him on the sofa with her right feet, jumped on him so skillfully that he had no room to evade, She couldn't hold her feelings any longer, she had to show him the body language of lovers and intimacy they shared firsthand.