I, Cassandra

51 | AMADI EZENWA

Adiana's lips touch mine, she pulls back and smiles. We are in the botanical gardens. Our favourite place. It's a Sunday. I remember we made love that morning, twice. She says something as she walks on, my wedding ring on her finger glinting in the light. I can't hear her words. The light is growing brighter, so bright I must shield my eyes. I blink and she's gone, replaced by the logo of G-II flicking past me as I am rolled on a gurney full of chemicals and drugs towards my pod. I'm in the pod now. I'm told to count back from one hundred. I count. Adiana. My love. How I miss you.

The dream ends. Abrupt, as always. I open my eyes and relive the hated memory. Of waking in this vine-infested world of strange, skinny trees, massive lakes surrounded by marshland that take an entire day to cross, and six long months of darkness that abruptly turn into six months of endless light. It's shit. And so far, despite undertaking a tedious search I haven't found anyone else who's woken up, or any evidence that anyone has ever even been awake. I try not to think about it too much.

The few pods I did discover were either never used, or their passengers were already long dead, collapsed into dust. That was when I started to wonder if somehow more than one thousand years had passed for me. The stars were definitely not where I remembered them to be. I also try not to think about that too much, either.

Through the last two cycles of endless night and the one and half cycles I have had of day, I only found one active pod. For an entire month, I deliberated whether to risk waking whoever was inside or not. But fear won that fight. I didn't want to destroy my last chance to speak to another human again. Better to wait it out. Let science do its thing. It would have been nice if they had woken up while I waited five more months—being alone all the time in a strange, empty world is an endurance test made of nightmares. I still can't decide which is worse, endless light or endless dark.

After six months of sitting in the dark debating whether to stay or continue my search for someone else, I decided to carry on. I tried to carve a message into the pod in case they woke up while I was gone to say they weren't alone, but my efforts were futile, whatever the pods were made of made them utterly impervious to my attempts to carve anything into them.

It's clear whatever was supposed to happen at G-II didn't go to plan. So here I am, feeling like the last man on Earth—unless that solitary pod still has someone alive in it. G-II must be gone considering pods buried two kilometres underground were brought to the surface. I also suspect only a precious few of those thousand made it up. I wish mine hadn't been one of them.

The day I woke up from my dreamless sleep, I sat up in a world bathed in warm summer light. Even with the benefit of daylight around the clock, it took me a full month to find what was left of Alpha VII. Beyond a veil of thin trees, all that remained of the city's previous glory was nothing more than a few eroded sections of its shattered dome, and a vine-carpeted wasteland of crumbling structures in between. I covered the long circuit around the edge of the city, searching for others, and for pods, but there were neither. And the entire time, from the ruins of the city's depths: a silence, deafening. The soundless roar of a world long gone, never to return. I couldn't bring myself to go in. Maybe it was a mistake, but I felt like if I went in, the last of my memories of the world I had lived in would be erased. That Adiana would be erased. That it would all become nothing more than a dream, like the ones I have of the life I never had with Adiana. I walked away, with the intention never to return.

Almost a year after I woke up, as I worked my way along a ravine, I caught a glint of reflected sunlight. Nothing glints in this world. I had forgotten what a glint even looked like. With trembling hands, I hauled away the vines and discovered a smooth metal box with a cracked smartscreen panel which I assumed had been the mechanism to unlock it—and the reason for the glint. Whatever could have once opened it was long gone. The only way to get it open now would be to use brute force. The kind of force I didn't have. I had no idea what could be inside, but I didn't care. I had found something which linked this world to the one that was gone. For me, it was proof the past was real and it was the lifeline I needed to skirt the walls of madness.

That little box gave me purpose. I spent hours in speculation, wondering what it contained, trying to figure out how to open it without destroying it. It became my constant companion, an umbilical cord to the man I used to be: Amadi Ezenwa, the son of a president of the United States. The man who loved Adiana. Who still loves her even now.

I clung to that box as I forded rivers, climbed moraines and battered my way through vine-choked forests, as I memorised the land, and created a map in my mind. I talked to it. It became my friend. I told it everything. Adiana. My father. The world of Alpha VII. The whiskey I took from the Prime Minister. Being frozen in time. And eventually, how one million people died a slow and painful death because of me. How much I wished I were dead, too. It was a good listener. It gave me comfort. It gave me purpose