Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
That’s what they told me when I climbed into their van. They didn’t ask twice about the bloodstains on my hands or the ghosts that haunted my inner vision — they didn’t need to. They’d seen it all before. I wasn’t the first doctor pulled from the front lines, but I was, perhaps, the most dedicated. They said something about a way to restore what we’d lost, a way to harness an ability never before seen on Earth, and that only myself and people like me could use it; I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed since the Fall.
They would hear none of my demands to be freed from fairy tales. I fought, thinking to rid myself of them, but they quickly overcame me, and my consciousness faded in a haze of confusion. What madness had taken these remnants of Earth, that they believed in a half-baked scheme based on purely conjectural context? With my skill, I was needed to aid the survivors and lead them to shelter, and these devils had not stopped short of violence and abduction to gain my compliance with their wishes. If I hadn’t believed that Earth had fallen before that moment, it was a turning point to be certain.
I awoke in a room filled with light. They’d put me in solitary confinement after treating my various injuries. The days when my father had taken me out into the fields and taught me to shoot targets in Berlin were impossible to recall when brought to rest against the might and brutality of our enemies. Within a few moments, something akin to food and water were supplied by a silent man, not much older than myself, wearing a lab coat like the one I had recently torn to shreds in the name of supplying bandages to the injured. I didn’t realize I was hungry enough to consider the primitive mass of spoiling food and sour water appealing until it was halfway into my belly.
The silent man returned, bearing another man in military garb that managed to make the tall and lanky doctor appear mouselike by comparison. The speech he gave was free of nonsense in that he spoke in short bursts with no embellishment required, but his words were far from sensible. His song was the same as the men and women who had pulled me from the field with a promise of backup and supplies – a ballad of alien technology, inborn hidden potential, and outer worlds that could save us from extinction. They needed a doctor with my skill, and that was the point that he most returned to over the course of the conversation; each time he reached it, his eyes changed from empty to pleading. Instinct couldn’t lie.
I asked him why, theoretically speaking, I would be a greater aid to those who had decided to take this chance by leaving Earth, than I would be to those still remaining and injured. He shook his head: over 90% of Earth’s population was dead or dying, and our enemy had leaked intelligence that they planned to eradicate the planet once they had finished their slaughter. Most of those left worth saving had been saved; I would just be saving those who could no longer aid themselves or others – and I would be promising them another chance to watch their life slip away between their fingers, nothing more and nothing less. I reacted badly, and he left me to crouch in the corner, my knees locked to my chest and my body rocking back and forth, just as subject to shock as any of my patients. Of all the things I had been in my life, helpless was never one of them.
They called it a choice, but it wasn’t, at least not at the heart. If I hadn’t agreed, and if I’d fought to remain on Earth, they would have forcibly thrust me through their impossible wormhole and dragged me off world; this I know now beyond a shadow of a doubt. It’s absolutely true what they said; doctors and medics are desperately needed out here. And even though I’m not accustomed to choosing a computerized handheld device over a tourniquet and scalpel, I know what is needed to save lives. I can do good for those of us out here learning a new way of life, and making a new stand against those who shattered our lives.
The magic, I still have to get used to.