The Last Bloom
Flash fiction Sc-Fi for Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Amber’s footsteps echo through the cavernous hallway. The air is cold and dry, and they can’t help but think of the inside of a long, hollow bone. The femur of an elephant, perhaps, long dead and empty of marrow, once part of a living, breathing thing, and now as lifeless and as sterile as this hallway in the ‘Kive. Amber remembers a scene from one of the ancient horror movies they used to watch, cuddled with Sol, and their footsteps pick up a notch.
"Seismic event. Category... uhn... can’t see it. It's red under the ice...no ice."
Amber reaches out a hand to grab the solidity of the ‘crete and metal wall, as much out of the renewed shock of hearing Sol’s voice as the AI, as for the warning itself.
The overhead lights flicker twice, for just a second, and they slide their body up against the coolness of the wall just as the first low rumble rolls through the steel floors, like a benthic creature surfacing for a long exhale.
“Amber, love, hold on. Don’t fall…like I…like I did.”
It’s longer this time, and the shaking seems deeper somehow, like it’s being driven by a motor buried far within the earth.
Which is true, Amber thinks, a massive volcanic motor, awakened by the continental rebound of Antarctica, freed now after endless eons of being trapped under the weight of oceans of ice.
A klaxon sounds, late, as if bewildered, caught unawares during a nap, echoing in the empty space off into an infinite distance. Amber presses a button on their pad, and the alarm falls silent, the sound dissipating into the distance like a wave they can imagine rolling off into forever, a pebble dropped into a pond.
The tremor reaches its peak, and a surge of adrenaline courses through Amber’s veins. For the first time, they truly understand the magnitude of what’s happening. The Arkive is going to be destroyed in the coming eruption, and a hard physical crush in their chest is a fear of death that Amber has been drowning in since losing Sol five weeks ago. Since he…uploaded himself into the machine, without telling them.
Off in the far distance, there is a metal-on-metal screech and a loud crash, echoing through the cavernous gloom. It’s perpendicular to Amber’s path in the scheme of things. Not back in Housing and Administration, and not forward into the Labs, where they’re heading. It sounds like it might be from Deep Storage, which—is that fine? Deep Storage finished scanning and uploading months ago.
Any seeds still in that section just got planted, they suppose, in the most catastrophic way possible. If they can escape the fire and lava, perhaps they will bloom in a year, or a hundred, or a thousand.
The tremor stops with a sudden jolt, and a drop that makes Amber’s stomach lurch. The floor, they think, is not quite as level as it used to be. They know they’d normally turn around at this point, if Sol—the damned AI with Sol’s disjointed voice—hadn’t told them what he did. There is no time, and yet, they have to see it for themselves, if it’s true.
Small shudders tickle for a moment, and then fall back into quiescence.
Amber picks themselves up off the floor, not remembering when they dropped into a crouch for safety.
They dust themselves off and pick up their pace, as the AI, in Sol’s voice, sings something off in the distance about springtime, half-remembered.
The translucent glass of the single active pod glows a warm reddish light, like a long Antarctic sunset. The growing lab itself is cool and dry, the highly regulated environment of the ARCBio facility still kept to precision by the AI that has had Sol’s decaying mind written on top of it.
Amber still doesn’t know why he did that. Or, rather, they know why he wanted to do it—he imagined that they would be lonely without him, and that, perhaps, they needed additional coaching. Amber can barely begrudge him this. They know themselves well enough to know that both things are true.
But the mystery to them is why a smart man who knew his brain was being erased by amyloid plaques would be so foolish as to write himself into the operations layer of the complex machine.
Had it been a mistake? A wrong button pressed by a man desperate to escape his degenerative brain disease, maybe? Or something more, they wondered, even as they didn’t know what that could be.
Amber steps closer to the glowing incubation pod, and sees something green through the translucence. They hold their breath, stepping closer still, drawn as much by their deep genetic longing for that color of life as much as for what Sol—the AI pretending to be Sol—has hinted they might find here.
They push their hair back behind their right ear, a gesture that Sol found endearing, they know, and cast a quick glance at the ceiling camera, as if expecting Sol to wink at them.
Amber can’t open the incubation pod. Only the AI can do that. They hold all the charms for the facility now—all of the passcodes, challenge phrases, authentikeys—everything. But they don’t want to interrupt this delicate process.
They can, however, pull the pod out a bit on its sliding tray, and look at it through the transparent top.
Before they can do it, the quake strikes.
“Amber. Amber! Amb….you must wake up. Amb, please……please, darling….oh, please….”
Sol. Sol must be standing over them, shining a light on them. They can see their blood, red through their eyelids. Klaxons and alarms are creating a tintinnabulation that makes their head feel like the inside of a garbage recycler set to grind.
They brush their hair back and feel the sticky fluid on their hands. Blood, oh, shit. Amber tries to open their eyes, hard at first, as if fighting out of a dream, and then becomes aware of the splitting headache, pain interleaved with the pain of the sound, the different pain of the bright, overhead light.
They sit up slowly. Sol isn’t here, of course. It’s the AI twittering on in his voice, strangely not a solace through this pain and confusion.
Bots are out, halfheartedly cleaning up the shattered mess of the lab. Amber looks around, taking in the destruction. The floor of the lab is tilted in a way that will make walking difficult, and they wonder if it’s just in here or throughout the whole complex.
They wonder briefly why the fools built the Antarctic Repository for Catastrophic Biodiversity Loss here on top of the volcanoes of the stupidly names Executive Committee Range, before remembering the near infinite supply of geothermal heat and energy, and how different the world looked, back before they were born. How dormant the volcanoes had once been.
High above the ninety-meter sea level rise, safe in Marie Byrd Land, but oh, only if the volcanoes stay sleeping…
They flinch, seeing a glimpse of lava on the floor, and then immediately relax and can’t keep a plosive laugh from bursting forth.
Not lava. The pod. Still plugged into its power, glowing reddish in the flickering light. Nearly overturned, but not broken.
Amber crawls over to it, shaky at first but feeling stronger by the moment. They’re careful to keep out of the way of the bots scurrying about, and the small shards of some unknown broken thing they can’t see.
Amber settles next to the pod, tilting it upright—or as upright as they can, considering that the floor has a tilt to it now.
They slide back the cover to gaze through the transparent top and gasp.
“…Sol…you fool,” they are crying now, hot tears streaming down their face, a cascade of salty water that should by rights flow like a river to the dead, grey sea beyond.
“I planted it for you. For….us….to bloom before we had to…”
It’s the most coherent thing the AI has said in Sol’s voice, and it adds up.
At some point, seventy or eighty days prior, Sol must have come down here without them, overridden all protocols, and planted it, knowing that it would bloom for the first time right at the moment they were scheduled to finish their work and upload to the rest of humanity.
Uploaded, and squirted as data out into the black—onto one of the massive, circling ships, or the moonbase, or the Galilean colony.
The two of them, ten billion other humans, and the billions and billions of other plants and seeds and creatures whose genetic code had been cracked and scanned in this place, the last archive of the life of the planet Earth.
And this. A single perfect, resilient poppy. Papaver somniferum, rising up towards the false sun of the incubation lamp, green and fuzzy, its full bud ready to burst—just the tiniest sliver of vivid red.
“I planted it…for you,” Sol says again, slowly and solemnly, as if it is a benediction.
Amber misses him; his body and his warmth, yes. The intimacy, oh god, yes, how much…but also…him. His humanity. His flaws. His perfect imperfection, his care, his humor.
Lying in bed and watching old movies with him. Especially their favorite—that old tale about a girl lost in a strange land, asleep with her friends in a field of poppies. About how she found her way home, trials and tribulations solved and sorted.
Amber knows they need to get up. It’s only been minutes, but the warmth of this incubation pod and the shimmer of life that surrounds the poppy compel them to stay, just a moment longer.
They have time. Their work is done, and they have time to limp their way back to Hab Sciences in Admin and load themselves into a different kind of pod. One that will scan them to atoms, and upload them into the cloud with their people, the rest of refugee humanity. A chance to wear a body that fits, perhaps, or none, or several.
The future doesn’t scare them, not really.
For now, there is time to sit and to wait.
A tremor rocks the massive complex, but slow this time, like a lullaby.
The bud sways in the motion. Trembles, and then…begins to slowly unfurl.
“It’s beautiful, my love. Like you.”
Amber is weeping, but they can see through the tears.
A perfect red bloom. A picture-perfect poppy.
The last bloom on Earth.
The poppy blooming at the end was perfect. I loved this story
"a cascade of salty water that should by rights flow like a river to the dead, grey sea" My hat is off to you