Passing the Torch

“It won’t be finished in time!” Vesryn, a young architect with large shadowed bags under his eyes, strained to get his voice heard amongst his peers. The room fell silent, a dozen heads turning in his direction.

Ruven an older man than everyone else in the room, at the head of a long table strewn with various papers, stands from his chair, “Thank you boy for stating the obvious, are you going to help us finish it?”

Vesryn looks straight into the old man’s eyes, “No.” The voices in the room erupt again shortly before getting cut off “It’s not possible at the full scale, if we can just get one section going it’ll save ten thousand people, at this rate we won’t save any.” The silent heads turn to Ruven, expecting a reply.

“Then who do you suggest we save?” he spoke in a demeaning manner. As he looked around the room, he ushered his arms by his waist as if waiting for someone to speak.

The loud scrape of a chair echoed out, heads immediately turning to Saida, her glasses smudged and dusty, “Vesryn is right, most of the population is already dead, the Elder race failed and left us instructions-“

“And that’s why we need to finish it, they left us the key but your suggesting to only make a tenth of it!” the old man looked directly at Saida, then at Vesryn “This is my project, my people, we will finish it.”

“Ruven, with respect, we have a recipe for ten people and but only have the ingredients for one.” Saida takes a breath but continues before any interruptions. “At the current rate, we’ll have a half cooked mess and no one will enjoy it. If we scale down at least someone can live to warn the next ones”

“The apes?” Ruven questioned, taking his seat at the end of the table again. “They’ll fail, far too uncivilised.”

Rilitar, a stout and greying man, one of the few with a name tag spoke up, “The Oradun, the race before us. They must have had the same issue as us, a foreboding warning buried in old structures and like us acted too late, they knew they would fail but passed along a message to us, their ‘uncivilised apes’. If we accept our failure and send our own message, one that can’t be ignored, people, with stories and history, not just a vague message in the ground. We can save some of our own so they can save an entire race and put an end to the cycle.”

“So you’re all wanting to doom the rest of our race to save yourselves?” Ruven’s voice grew in harshness as his eyes dart between people, many looking away from him but catches Saida, the analyst with smudged glasses still standing and staring back at him.

“No, no one in this room will be alive or frozen on ice by the end of the year, we’ll find suitable people, not ourselves and our families. We’ve lost our battle but can still help win the war.” As she spoke, quiet chattering began between many in the room.