Melancholia's Elegy

Part V

The Weight

The council chamber lay blackened as the final meeting began, conservation of power at its highest concern. Portable light packs were set up around the room. The councilors' eyes avoided one another, each pair dulled by and gaunt as if stripped of humanity. Councilor Vega stood slowly, but when she spoke, her voice cut through the silence like a tremor: "We have come to a point of decision. No maps will guide us from here—just a question, and it's one that may cost us all we've tried to save. Stay here, or risk everything for Earth." She let her words settle, as though hoping they might awaken something forgotten.

A pause hung over the room before Councilor Maya broke it, her voice soft, as if meant only for herself. "I've seen our city from the upper dome. The lights, once like stars, are fewer each night, and beneath them, people gather in the dark like vermin. What are we to them but distant figures in this great game of survival? If we tell them we're staying, who among them would dare hope any longer?"

Dr. Thorne's gaze turned away, distant. "Heh, hope, yes. It's a funny word isn't it. We seem to think it has power, as if wishing could stop a thing from falling apart. But how much of our 'hope' has only brought us closer to this precipice? We cling to Mars and Earth as there are still our havens, paradises we've ruined and think we can redeem. But what if we go back just to find that what we've left in ruins cannot be reclaimed? We might leave, yes, but what exactly are we returning to?"

Elara's face was taut, her words brittle with frustration. "Maybe that's just it—we're not talking about hope, not anymore. Hope is what gets people killed; it convinces them they'll be saved when they won't. But what are we without it? If we keep them here, we're dragging them into a long death. If we go back, maybe it's a faster one. But at least... at least they'll be somewhere that feels familiar, a graveyard of their own making." She looked away, her voice tapering into silence.

Councilor Lee shifted; his eyes fixed on the dark table before him. "But perhaps we're too quick to make decisions on behalf of others. We hide behind 'strategy,' 'survival,' but what we're really talking about is our own failure to grasp the meaningless cruelty of it all. We're not leaders; we're caretakers of a colony on the edge of collapse. Mars, Earth—it's all a wasteland."

Vega felt the weight of his words, an echo of a thought she couldn't shake. "So, we're just prolonging the inevitable," she murmured, almost absently. "But maybe that's all that's left for us—to prolong it, to give our people some semblance of purpose, even if we know it's a hollow one. Or is that the worst cruelty of all?"

Dr. Thorne tilted his head back, staring at the ceiling as though it might hold some kind of answer. "Sometimes I wonder if cruelty and kindness are even worth distinguishing at this point. We're asking people to trust us while knowing we're lost ourselves. Our decisions are empty gestures, and yet they'll still die by them. There's something horribly... absurd in that."

Maya gave a soft, mirthless chuckle, a ghost of something that could have been humor. "Absurdity. I suppose that's the only truth we have. We do what we think is right, but it's only right in our own minds. Let's not lie to ourselves here; there's no 'right' or 'wrong' left. Only a choice, as hollow as it is inevitable."

The room fell into a silence, thick and unmoving, before Vega finally spoke, her voice hollow. "Maya, that's all we can do—make a choice, not because it's right, but because it's all we have left. Perhaps that's what it means to be human after all: to live as though there's meaning, even when we know there's none."

One by one, they cast their votes, their voices soft and weary, each one an acceptance of an end they could neither define nor prevent. When it was done, Vega counted them in a whisper, almost as though unwilling to make it real.

"Five for Earth," she said, feeling the words fall like stones into a void. "Four for Mars."

A silence thicker than before settled over the room as the councilors sat, not daring to move, each person contemplating the consequences with a solemnity that felt closer to mourning than relief. In their eyes, there was no celebration, no satisfaction, just the strange, shared realization that they'd become spectators in a tragedy of their own design.

Each member in silent content, turned off their light packs one by one and as they began to file out, Vega lingered, watching them disappear into the shadows. The future, now decided, felt less like a path forward and more like a simple drift toward oblivion.

Standing alone in the dim light, she let the silence consume her, knowing that this was all they had ever been: echoes in an empty universe, voiceless, powerless, and as inevitable as the silence that would swallow them all.