Restart ✔️

Introduction

"There's no other option, Capt, we have to do this," I told him.

"We can't just put everyone's life on the line no matter how bad the world is, Soluri. We don't have the right to do that." Captain wasn't having it. We'd been preparing for this moment ever since deserts started going up in flames. Global warming was hitting its peak. The year was 2090, and history was repeating itself.

It was 1999 all over again. People all over the world knew the end was near, but no one knew what to do. Except us.

There were 10 of us at the time, all scientists studying planet Earth. We had a pretty big "inner circle", but we all trusted each other back then. We came up with a way to save our home, but it would require making sacrifices. Some would've called it magic, what we were going to do, some would've said it wasn't possible, but the world only had 10 years left. We were going to extend that time. Fossil fuels that contributed to global warming poisoned the air, and there was only one way to get rid of it: suck it out. The 10 of us built the most advanced and powerful vacuum chamber known to mankind. Its sole purpose was to cleanse the air of the particles that would lead to our destruction. We'd planned to send the gas up to space in a shuttle our company, For The Future, built for emergencies like the one we'd come across. We never told anyone what we were planning. Our family, friends, people we worked with. None of them knew what we had been doing. If they knew, the whole operation would have been at risk. So we pushed them away. It was just the 10 of us for those 10 years.  Our plan to save the people we cared about went smoothly until 2 months before our execution date.

Our leader, who we called Captain, kept thinking of all of the ways it could go wrong. The rocket could combust and cause the whole thing to explode, making the situation worse. The vacuum chamber could default and suck out all of the oxygen instead, killing all of the human race. The rocket's path could end up turning around back towards Earth and cause massive destruction. There was only 10 of us. He didn't trust our calculations enough to go through with it. Capt wanted to clue the rest of the company in. After all, we weren't even in the highest positions at For The Future. But the rest of us knew the risks of telling anyone outside our inner circle. Anyone who found out would think the same as Capt, that it was too risky, but these were the risks that needed to be taken if there was going to be any future for the human race at all. Capt said he understood the situation. It was our only chance.

Two months later on the final night, we all went home to our families while Captain watched over the shuttle. Five minutes from midnight, the time at which the process would be completed, a breaking news story aired on channel 2. The headline read, "Plot to Save the World, or Destroy It?". Capt had told them everything. My wife and two daughters paused their Monopoly game to listen. They watched in horror as the story played. They reacted in the same way we thought they would. I was out the door before they could look me in the eye. The 9 of us excluded from Capt's plan arrived at his doorstep not 5 minutes later than the airtime. We knocked on his door until our fists were pink from impact, and the door had dents on every square inch of its surface. That's when we all heard the gunshot.  All 18 of our eyes widen in shock and fear as we peered in the window. Captain lay on the floor lifeless with blood surrounding his head. He killed himself.

It only took us 2 more minutes to break in. We found a letter sitting next to his body. It explained what he did. The rocket did launch. Captain had promised that to the rest of us, he promised to take the risk. But if the project failed, he couldn't let us not be held responsible for the annihilation of our own race. He promised that to himself.  Capt also wrote of a memory wipe serum that could be manipulated into gas. It was his backup plan for us if the world turned on us even though we saved it.

On January 1st, 2100 the world was officially not over. We'd been in hiding for a month, but everyone was alive. Well, except for Capt. His family had been helping us hide from the government because he had apparently given into our "no telling anyone" rule a few months before he killed himself. He only had a wife and a 3-month-old daughter, and his wife understood the stakes we were balancing by going through with our plan. The nine of us, however, had been working on a different plan. Time was running out for us, and the world was tearing itself apart fighting over the correct way to punish us or to even punish us at all. All nine hands were raised for the vote to wipe the world's memories, to save it from itself. We'd been working on converting the serum into a gas when it started multiplying. All of a sudden we had gallons of the stuff. None of us understood it, but Capt must've planned for it. It wasn't until one of our genetic specialists, Tracy Smith, figured out a way to convert the liquid to gas.

We split up across the globe to erase everyone's memories. The world started over on January 7th, 2100.

There was supposed to be no memory of the events of the last 100 years. Life was supposed to seem great for the world for forever. The nine of us promised to give them that. To not let the same thing happen again. To not let history repeat itself. But it did. In a way. Five of the eight others turned on me, Tracy, and 2 others. They didn't believe in wiping the whole world's memories. To stand up for what the beloved in, they injected 26 babies with a different serum than the memory wipe one that would allow them to remember everything about 18 years from now. They even injected their own children.