a dying world

A Story by Julia

a man is trying to save the human race by travelling threw parallel universes

This land is filled with dust and dead trees. The ground is rough and hard, the sky is grey and the river is dried up. This land died years ago. I write in my log book describing the white leafless trees, and the cracked dusty ground. Describing the lack of life as I have the past 49 times I’ve travelled to the parallel universes. Why have all 50 universes been lifeless and dead, but our world is not. This is why I was asked to be put on this mission. I am one of the only people left in our disease ridden world, a dyeing land driving humans to extinction. I need to find a place for us to live. The 10,453,000 people who inhabit Mars were sent to escape the loony plague. This plague does exactly as its name implies. Turns people into loonies. No more people can be sent to Mars, so my colleges and I, as highly famous research scientists, can finally put our work to the test and go through parallel universes using my portal gun, that I invented and named after the game I got the design from (portal), and we have been threw 50 universes each. 250 universes and no habitable land. Tomorrow I hope for a better chance at being the one to find the world where we can sustain human life, and escape the plague.

I wake up, take my food pill, and type my passcode into my ‘cell’. My room is basically a cell. Its metal all over, its cold, it’s got a single small bed on a metal frame and there is a large metal door with bars in front of it so it can have ‘extra protection’ according to the people who chucked me here, so that I don’t get ‘contaminated’. The only way to get threw my door is if I put in my 28 digit code (so long so no one can get in and ‘steal my equipment’ but I believe the ‘research directors’ hope I will forget it and get locked in forever). The head lady doesn’t particularly like me. I unlock my door and step into the solitary changing room and watch the robot strip off my pyjamas and strap me into baggy shorts and a tight singlet that shows, all too well, my muscle and hairy chest. I leave and walk over to the experiment room. I am the only man in this group of four. The other three are identical triplets, blonde hair, shaved military style to make sure nothing happens on a trip, blue eyes, slim figures and no curves. There is only one difference between each of them. I turn to the one on the right, she has a freckle under her left eye, ‘hey Alexis’ next I turn to the one in the middle, the one with a speck of brown in her left eye, ‘hey Jaime’ and finally the one on the right that has nothing but a clear face and pretty smile ‘hey Sarah.’

‘Hey Jack’ they say in unison, which always scares me.

I pick up my gun and point it to my designated wall, turn the dial to 51 and leap through threw the wall.

WOW. How different this land is from the others. Flowing fresh water through a forest of green fresh trees, long glossy grass swaying under my feet, strangely shaped birds flying over the tree tops, and animals that look like monkeys swinging threw the canopy of the forest. This might just be the place us humans will escape to.