Facing the door to the room that contained what remained of humanity, I stood, trying to build up the courage to step through and address them.
Phillip squeezed one hand and Phoebe held the other, whilst Jennifer and Amelia stood in front, either side of the door.
They all spoke words of encouragement for my heart and advice for facing an large audience.
I heard very little of what they actually said.
My mind was only just about maintaining coherent thought, teetering on the edge of wiping itself completely.
My stomach felt as though heavy metal butterflies were trying to burrow through my gut.
I was shaking so much that I was becoming increasingly concerned that I was about to vibrate into another dimension.

The door slid open.

Orthus stood on the other side.  Having captured everyone’s attention, he was now calling me forward to speak.
One step after another lead me back into that large white room.
On the left hand wall was the view of what was left of the Earth.
For a few seconds I could do nothing but stare at it.
That tiny, dark ball. 
It had once supported trillions of living creatures.
Now there was nothing.

Nothing, except the people now staring up at me, waiting for answers.
Waiting to learn their fate.
As, yet again, I was the one to give it to them.

“You,” my voice squeaked so I cleared my throat, “you have all been waiting, to find out what is going to happen to us.  I’m not going to beat around the bush.”
I took deep breath.
“You, we, all have three choices to choose from.
“There is a planet called Virrion in the same system as the tharat’s home-world.  It is a world almost completely covered in water, however there is one island.  It’s about forty square miles and is very fertile.  Until now, it has been used as a holiday resort, so there are places to sleep, apartments I believe, with catering and medical facilities.  We have been offered it as a place to start our first colony.”
Murmurs started to circulate throughout the space.
“The second,” I cleared my throat again, as the words had come out a lot louder than I had meant them to, “the second choice is to remain here.”
Puzzled silence followed.
“This section of space is empty.  There are laws which forbade any races from even traveling through our star system.  Those laws are now no longer in place, which means that, beings will start to travel and explore this area.  Humanity has a claim over our own planet,” my voice faltered, “what’s left of our planet.”  I had to take a deep breath before continuing, “nothing can live on the surface, but Orthus tells me that, if we wish, his people will help us to build a space station within its orbit.”
The murmurs began again, I was beginning to ignore them, “signal is a precious commodity out here.  Until now there has been no way to pass any kind of signal through this system, but now…  Now the galaxy is looking to shorten connection times.  With a transmitter built here, humanity will actually be able to profit from its existence.”
Skepticism flew through the room like wildfire, why would the tharat do something that generous, there must be a catch. 
I held up my hands.
“The tharat have offered to build it for us on the provision that we return ten percent of the profit until the building costs have been paid off and we must have at least twenty five percent of the beings that work on the station as tharat.”
I waited for certain people to pipe up, however no one did.
“And the last option…” Phoebe whispered to me.
“Erm, okay,” I lost my pace for a moment, “the final choice has limited places.  There is a planet that is basically a world of colleges and universities, called Kenglowe.  We have a chance to learn as much as about, well, pretty much anything we want.”
That time, the murmur was excited.  The need for knowledge was great indeed.
“Who gets to go there?” a voice that I recognized as my cousin Felix, spoke up.
”Well, there are only twenty six places available, so we need to figure out, firstly, who wants to go and then who we need to go.”
I could feel the apprehension of each and every one of them, as well as no small amount of fear.
There were, however, more than a few who were radiating genuine excitement and desire for this new future.
They all began talking at once.
Questions began to fly at me from every angle.
I raised my hands again, this time to no avail.
After a few polite attempts at quietening them down, I fear I may have snapped a little.
I climbed up onto the thin wall that I had previously hidden behind and jumped into the air, holding myself my own height above where I had been stood.
Silence fell so suddenly that, in any other situation, I would have laughed.
“Please,” I spoke with all of the patience that I could muster, “I know you all have questions, they will be answered, but we can’t make out one voice from another if you all talk at once.”
“Now,” I lowered myself back down to the platform, “on this side of the room, there will be information about Virrion.  In the centre of the room,” I pointed, “will be information about Kenglowe, and at the other end of the room, will be where you can find out about the new space station.”
I lowered my hands, knowing that all they really need was reassurance, “take your time, find out as much as you like and give all of your consideration to making the decision that you deserve.”
I wracked my brains for some sort of inspiring speech, yet I wound up just making it up as I went along.
“We’ve been given this chance to start again.  I know every person in this room.  Maybe I don’t know every name or what job you did, but I know that you are all wonderful people who will make humanity proud.”  It was all I could do to stop myself groaning at the cheesiness of my own words as I continued, “you all have the potential to be amazing, so let us now live up to that.”
For a few sickening seconds, silence continued to echo around the room.
Then I heard it.
A slow clap.
I did not see who started it, but it was joined by another and another and so on until most of the crowd were cheering.
Forcing a smile to hide my tears, I gave an emphatic nod and turned back to Orthus and the others.
They were all grinning at me like idiots, which only cause my tears that I had been holding back, to spill out and down my cheeks.  They all took it in turns to hug me and tell me how well I had done.
With Phillip’s arm around my waist and my arm linked with Jennifer’s, we descended the ramp to decide upon our future.

After many auxes, much fewer than I was expecting, everything was decided.
Every person had decided where they were to head to.
Twenty-six individuals and myself would be taken to Kenglowe by Orthus on board the Piti.
Forty-three were to stay in Earth’s orbit with seventeen tharat, to begin work on the space station that had been rather stoically dubbed Rapture.
The other four-hundred and forty-nine humans would be transported to Virrion.  The Screnac housed thirteen space crafts capable of transporting up to fifty beings each, nine of those would be the metaphorical arcs that carried the bulk of humanity to its new home.

Amongst the Twenty-six was Phoebe, whose capacity for absorbing and retaining knowledge are only matched by her thirst for it, Julie, who had been training as a nurse and saw no point in stopping now, my cousin Felix, who had been recently qualified as a doctor, my cousin Vernon, who had had business within Parliament, my aunt Poppy, who was a genius when it came to making music, and Jennifer’s husband Jim, who I had once witnessed create a miniature working steam engine from space parts.
Jennifer was to go to Virrion with their children.

The majority of people who were to build Rapture were engineers and those who had knowledge of broadcasting.
One of the primary projects for the station was to be a visual radio broadcast to share news, stories and music with anyone willing to listen.  The only music that had survived the earth was whatever had been loaded onto people’s mp3 players, tablets and phones.  Due to the successful rise of streaming, the majority of music had been lost along with the servers that housed them.  Somehow, one guitar made it onto the Screnac.  When my childhood friend, the elder of Jennifer’s younger brothers Jeremy, had been caught by the light, he had grabbed onto his guitar and gig-bag, and held on to them with everything that he had in him.
Amongst the people that I knew, there was a surprisingly high number of very talented musicians and singers.  The majority of them chose to stay with the engineers to establish a new collection of music.  Aunt Poppy had decided to come to Kenglowe to investigate what new instruments and sounds there were to discover.
The team working on Rapture included my dad and his girlfriend’s son, Jeremy and his girlfriend, Terry, Amelia’s dad, Henry, my cousin and aunt Poppy’s daughter, Sienna, and Phillip.
As much as I wish wished that he would have come to Kenglowe with me, he considered himself past his educational peak.  He did however, have a decent amount of practical broadcasting knowledge in his head, so it made sense that he chose to offer his help to Rapture.
At the time, we thought that our ‘conversations’ would only be postponed for the ten units that the training was supposed to last, which, compared to how long we had waited so far, did not seem like such a terrible amount of time.  We would speak regularly, the digital signal would take a couple of hours each way to travel, which would certainly allow me the time I usually require to plan out my responses.  It could take many, many drafts of a message before I sent messages in general.  Messages to Phillip would promise to be a lot more stressful when trying to find the exact words to acknowledge, respond and express myself with any kind of coherency.

Virrion was a seven unit journey from our star system of Helios-Sol.
Upon arrival at the new settlement, that had been named Dawn, the tharat had offered to instruct everyone of the most effective ways of living and thriving with what we had been provided.
The island resort housed approximately one thousand guests and several hundred employees.
It had catering facilities that gathered all of their resources from a rather large farming facility which covered almost a third of the island, as well as the local sea food.  A few of the people traveling to Kenglowe would be instructed on the in-depth processes of growing, harvesting and reseeding the crops, and how to prepare them all in a way that humans could digest and receive nourishment from.  There were machines that could create basic protein food from the inedible parts of the crops.  Those were what would be used in times of shortage.
A water purifying plant was part of the farming facility, designed in a way that allowed for minimal maintenance, so that would be straight forwards to keep running.
The majority of power came from solar panels that coated the roofs of every building, wind farms that were designed to blend into their surroundings in the hilly area and the docks which harvested kinetic energy as they moved with the waves and the tides, which turned three times in one local unit.
The medical facilities were housed in small buildings, which held equipment and tools that made them as effective as a full blown hospital.  Thanks to nanotechnology, it was possible to print tissue and bone from within a person’s body in a matter of minutes.  There were even nanobots that were capable of keeping a body alive for up to 15 lals after a fatal injury, by stimulating the brain and keeping a certain amount of blood moving before they expired from lack of the kinetic energy that powered them.
The majority of the facilities were designed to be usable by all races.  The few that were only for certain species, were advised to be kept.  In the interest of generating income and improving interspecies relations, it would be an advantage to have such facilities available.
The first orders of business, would not simply be to acclimatize to the new environment, but to establish some sort of government, or chain of command, assigning jobs and setting up schools and childcare for the few children that I had known as well any more, hopefully many more, that will likely come along over the next few years.

There is so much work to be done on every front.
There was on the unit when we all went our separate ways and I am sure there will be plenty left to join in with when we rejoin everyone.
Whenever that may be.