September 29, 2086. Aurora Harris is 40, Zach is 9. Meadow Lind is 71, Brady is 72. Happy 3rd birthday, Rebecca Harris.
A year later, Aurora still had nightmares about the explosions. She saw some of them with her own eyes, large enough, close enough, that they looked like big orange stars, wanna-be suns.
Pop, they would go, and people would gasp because they knew it had been a ship full of human lives. Almost everyone knew someone up there, a brother, a daughter, a husband. And all they could do was to stand underneath them in terror. Helpless.
There was a choice—try to fight back even though our troops were too weak and too primitive to stand a chance against the alien technology, knowing that we wouldn't win on our own, or else don't fight and let them suffocate the planet. Of course, we fought.
That was how he died.
Aurora didn’t see his exact explosion, probably. The command center was able to pinpoint the last known location of his ship and the moment they lost contact. He was entering the atmosphere somewhere above Mongolia. She couldn’t have possibly seen that from Michigan. The explosion she saw was someone else’s brother or daughter or husband. There were so many.
Most of the bodies could never be recovered. They had splintered into dust. So they sent the families an urn full of moon dust instead, along with their loved one’s personal belongings from base, and a folded flag.
