Under the Sea

            When Billy began the day, she didn't think she'd also have to save it. It was a normal day on Mars, or as normal as you could get on a planet where you had to wear a spacesuit just to walk next door to your best friend's house. She hates the 30-minute process of making sure all the valves were sealed and all the zippers zipped for the 30-second walk. It was in these moments when she really started to hate the previous generations. They had been warned hundreds of times by everyone from doctors, to activists, to even kids that if they didn't change things climate change would inevitably make Earth inhabitable. And rather than fixing the planet, they did have the governments of the world invested hundreds of trillions of dollars to assure that Mars would be inhabitable when the ozone of Earth finally crumbled.

Billy thought about this for the thousandth time as she made her cursory knock on the door which altered all those inside that someone was coming in from the outside. She stomped through the mudroom, which was now a mandatory room in every house to re-establish gravity and stabilize the air quality, and sat on the bench waiting for Adaline, her best friend to come down.

"What's wrong with you?" said the voice of the woman who was like her second mother.

"It's nothing, Mom," Adaline said, "She is always pissy when she comes in. She spends the entire walk thinking about how fucked up it is we spend more time getting ready to go than we do actually walking to each other's house or school, or almost anywhere really."

"Don't use that language with me!" Adaline's mom kept the straight face for about one second before we all started laughing.

"Okay, hurry up and go to school, you don't want to miss your trip to Earth today." She stared off into the distance in a wistful state remembering what it was like to live on Earth. Adaline's mom had spent her childhood there before the great exodus to Mars.

While Adaline finished sealing her suit, Billy double-checked hers, making sure everything was secure. "All clear," Adaline's voice came through Billy's suit, "let's head out."

Both deep in thought they remained silent not only on their walk to school but through the whole process of getting on the ship. It was there Billy could no longer hold in the question she had on her mind, "What do you think it will be like?" Billy asked.

"Do you remember that old, old movie that we found at your grandma's house? The one about the robot on earth who escapes to space. It was called Ball-E or something."

"Oh, you mean Wall-E? Yeah."

"I am thinking it's going to be something like that."

"I was thinking more like mountains pouring lava and torched earth. Or if the sun hasn't yet evaporated the water then everything is covered in water but it's warm, like when James Lewis peed in the pool that was only like four feet wide and thought we wouldn't notice," Billy mused.

As they arrived on Earth, all of the students' faces were pressed against the glass, or as much as they could be in their suits. The Earth they had seen in pictures from their parents and grandparents was gone. There were no exploding volcanoes and it wasn't covered in trash like Wall-E. Water was all they could see for miles with little bits of buildings barely sticking up out of it despite the fact that they had supposedly landed in Barcelona, Spain. The teacher called their attention toward the front with a shout.

"Okay class, as part of your year 16 (school now started at 1) you're allowed to spend the day on Earth with minimal supervision. As such you will be writing a seven-page paper on the environmental differences between Mars and Earth. You will have six hours at which point I will send out an alert and you will have one hour to get back to the ship before it leaves. If you miss it another ship will be back tomorrow to pick up stragglers. Remember while the atmosphere has breathable air the water is toxic, so don't remove your suits in case you fall in the water."