The Last Voyage

by Brian D. McLaren

Genres: General Fiction; Space Exploration

Synopsis

It's 2056 and international oligarchs have pushed the world to the precipice of ecological, economic, and nuclear catastrophe. But two philanthropists have teamed up to establish a long-term colony on Mars. Could this daring outpost be the next chapter in the story of the human race?
Assembling a crack team of experts including scientists, engineers and ecologists, the colony begins to establish a viable outpost on our nearest planet. But the team quickly run into problems as they bear the responsibility of creating a new humanity. Can they work out what has gone wrong before it's too late? And will the passengers of the last voyage from earth bring what's needed for this fledgingly community to flourish?
This first volume in a thrilling new trilogy from Brian McLaren, explores what it means to be human and what would we choose to bring with us or leave behind, if we were to start all over again.

Release date: July 31, 2025

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

Part I

End Your Life as You Know It

 

Not So Pure

 

Gabriela Mercedes Coroy glanced at her eyes in the rearview mirror. Strange to see, she thought. Tears. Everyone thinks of me as smart and cheerful, not sad and fearful.

She paused before putting the car in gear, watching herself watch herself in the mirror. For the first time in her twenty-seven years of life, Gabriela had lied to her mother. Forever this would be true: that her final conversation with her mother was a lie. It wasn’t just the goodbye that broke her heart, but also the lie.

She tried to reassure herself as she drove through the old neighborhood toward the highway, dodging skinny dogs and bags of trash in the rutted gravel road. It was only una mentira piadosa, a white lie, a pious lie, she told herself. The lie was morally necessary. She felt an empty ache in her stomach.

She turned south onto CA-1, following the faded sign for Guatemala City. Only the mala remained legible. Reverse graffiti, she thought.

She tried to reassure herself. If her mother knew the truth, many lives would be at risk. So, her mother must believe this lie, truly believe it, for her own sake, for Gabriela’s sake, and for the sake of Gabriela’s companions.

All the world’s poor knew what Gabriela and her mother knew: that the world was ruled by oligarchs. American, British, Russian, Chinese, Saudi, Brazilian, whatever . . . they were all remarkably similar. The oligarchs kept government officials, whether elected or appointed, like lap dogs on short leashes. Their pet politicians protected them, licking their hands, performing their tricks, attacking their enemies when commanded to do so, passing laws to protect and enhance their interests. In return, the oligarchs made their pets moderately rich. They rewarded their hungry little egos with tasty treats. And they assured their re-election. If the politicians didn’t comply, the oligarchs had convincing methods of punishing them, and cheap replacements were always easy to acquire.

The oligarchs themselves were connected to one another by networks of threat and obligation, and their networks were intertwined with global crime syndicates, not to mention local criminals, private militia, and, of course, pliable political parties. Behind them, there were lines of smiling religious leaders eager for handouts in exchange for providing moral camouflage for the nearest oligarch’s decadent behavior.

Nearly every oligarch on Earth was surrounded by this nervous, eager, nodding flock of yes-men, little men (and a few women) who gained a fortune and lost their souls by telling their bosses what they wanted to hear. As a result, most oligarchs lived inside invisible bubbles of narcissism, echo chambers of arrogance, from within which they could go for decades without anyone daring to disturb them with a contrary opinion.

Yes, there were a few clear-minded exceptions, and they were the ones who worried Gabriela. These outlier oligarchs knew that the jig would soon be up for them, as for everyone. The global ecosystem that had taken billions of years to evolve had tilted suddenly into disequilibrium, a victim of human overshoot, and soon the highly profitable economic pyramid maintained by and for the oligarchs would collapse and decay like a corpulent corpse.

That’s why information on how to escape the coming catastrophe was, for the savvy, the most valuable commodity on Earth. 

She had been chosen as one of the ten for the last voyage.

That’s what put her mother in such danger.

Gabriela instinctively hunched her shoulders and gripped the steering wheel more tightly as she felt again the precarious nature of the situation she had brought her mother into. She again looked in the rearview mirror, but not to see herself this time. An oligarch’s emissary could be driving behind her at this very moment, ready to make his move.

She reached up a hand to touch her necklace. Each simulated gemstone hid a cyanide tablet she could bite into and swallow if she were captured. A similar bracelet dangled from her wrist. She had been given permission to make this visit on the condition of wearing this deadly jewelry. It was worth the risk to see her mother one final time, even though the goodbye entailed that lie.

More frightening to Gabriela than biting a fake gem filled with real cyanide: at this very moment, an oligarch’s emissary could be pulling up to her mother’s house.

She tried not to imagine the scene: his fancy car, anonymously white, so out of place in front of her mother’s humble casita in Chimaltenango . . . his manicured hand stretching out from an expensive suit, knocking on her door with some lie of his own, pretending to be a reporter, or an official from the Guatemalan government, or perhaps someone from Gabriela’s lab in Boston. He would speak perfect Spanish. He would be cradling a breath mint between his upper teeth and cheek. He would smile and compliment her for her beauty, for her immaculate home, for her pretty pink flower box at the front door with its gerbera daisies – red, yellow, salmon, white. He would ask for information about Gabriela’s whereabouts, politely at first, but that would change when he didn’t get what he was looking for.

Her mother was incapable of deceit. That’s why Gabriela had to tell her mother a lie so convincing that she would repeat it with complete sincerity. Then the emissary would recognize her mother as another poor and simple peasant who knew nothing, a pure, innocent soul. It was Mami’s ignorance and purity that would save them both.

I am not so pure, Gabriela thought, not so innocent.

Gabriela had rehearsed the lie a hundred times before telling it, and now she reviewed it one last time: Un oligarca de Colombia me ha contratado para dirigir un programa secreto de investigación cientifica, she had said, feigning pride and happiness. An oligarch wanted her to use her skills in genetic engineering to help save coral reefs in the Caribbean, and he would pay her extravagantly. Es una oportunidad tan emocianante!

Gabriela tried to comfort herself with the rationalization that there was some truth to the statement. She was indeed going away on a voyage, and an oligarch of sorts was involved, and coral would even be a minor character in the story. But here was the lie: her voyage would not take her to the nearby Caribbean. It would take her across an expanse vast beyond her mother’s imagination.

Why did she have to add that little joke, which only made the lie sweeter, and therefore more bitter? “No te preocupes, Mami. No es como si me fuera a Marte,” Gabriela had laughed when she said it: Don’t worry, Mom. It’s not like I’m going to Mars!

The joke was perfect, because Gabriela was always joking, always making her mother laugh. The joke was the final touch that made her lie such a masterpiece of deceit.

index finger, but smiling as she did so: it’s dangerous to work for those people. But instead of discouraging her only child from going, she gave permission with her favorite motherly advice: “Ten cuidado, querida. Vuelve segura.” Be careful, beloved. Come back safe. And then she added, “Siempre me haces sentir orgullosa.” You always make me proud.

That, of course, was the one desire that most shaped Gabriela’s life: to make her mother proud, to bring her joy. And when a large sum of money showed up in her mother’s bank account shortly after Gabriela’s disappearance, it would fulfill another great desire: to keep her mother safe, just as her mother had always done for her.

I am not so pure, she said to herself once again, because coexisting in her heart, along with her shame for lying, Gabriela had to admit there was something egotistical. She not only took pride in trying to protect her mother from danger; she also took pride in the elegant plausibility of the lie itself.

Gabriela had been a scientific prodigy from her adolescence. She had been chosen at sixteen to be part of a special program – funded by an oligarch donor – for gifted students from poor countries to attend Harvard University in the U.S. Starting in 2045, she studied genetics in hopes of saving living things from the ecological catastrophes sweeping the Earth. Amphibians were her favorites, having captured her curiosity as a little girl when she learned of the extinction of the golden toad in nearby Costa Rica. She remembered the windowsill of her bedroom back in those days, stuffed animals lined up in a row, all of them frogs, toads, and salamanders, big ones, small ones, life-like, comical, one playing a ukulele and wearing a straw hat, one named Kermit, although she didn’t know why. Her mother had saved them all in a box that she kept in her closet, among her old shoes, even after all these years. Before leaving her mother’s house, Gabriela had retrieved Kermit. She glanced over at him, sitting in the passenger’s seat with his lanky green legs crossed.

The great amphibian die-off accelerated as it spread across the globe, the effects of habitat loss, pollution, climate change, the chytrid fungus, and other pathogens. Her dissertation advisor convinced her to shift her research focus from amphibians to corals. “Save something that can still be saved,” he said. “And save something an oligarch might find fundable. Something that isn’t slimy.”

A brown girl who escaped the barrio of her childhood – she was exactly the kind of harmless person an oligarch would make the beneficiary of a crumb of his largesse, especially if she had a charismatic subject of study, something shimmering and colorful like a coral reef. After all, what gift can an oligarch give to the person he loves most, when that person already has everything? The feeling that he is a friend of the poor, of course, and a friend of nature too! That’s a gift truly worthy of an oligarch . . . worthy to be given to himself and received from himself.

Gabriela was not naive. She understood why nearly all oligarchs engaged in philanthropic projects: largely as a public relations strategy, to enhance their brand, and usually to distract from their other more unsavory clandestine activities. They loved to make a show of saving the Earth and helping its downtrodden with their right hand while their left hand was despoiling the Earth and crushing the downtrodden.

Gabriela hoped against hope that her plausible lie would protect her mother from esos bastardos sucios if the imagined

emissary ever came.

Just over an hour later, she pulled into the parking lot of her shabby hotel near La Aurora airport. Used condoms, plastic grocery bags, beer bottles, crushed batteries, hypodermic needles . . . the parking lot hadn’t been cleaned for months. My poor Guatemala, she said to herself, looking at her eyes once more in the rearview mirror. Her finest hotel looks like this. She was still sniffling, still trying to convince herself that the lie she’d told was, if not morally justifiable, at least a necessary evil.

That’s all that’s left to us these days, she thought, the lesser of evils. What a world.

She grabbed Kermit and rushed upstairs to pack her small suitcase. Then she sent a message on her bracelet: Ready for pickup. For ten minutes, then twenty, she sat on the side of her bed and stared out the hotel window across the blue smoky hills of her beautiful country, simply gazing, hardly thinking. Pollution, fires in the hills . . . the smoke seemed worse every time she returned to visit her mother. The smoke brought back bitter memories.

Then, suddenly, she winced. A stark realization pierced her musings like a burn to skin. She ran her finger along a disfigurement on her left ear, a scar that reminded her every day of the love of her mother in this dangerous world.

Who am I kidding? Gabriela asked herself. There is no protection for my mother. The emissary will not know of my mother’s pure heart. He will think she is just another clever liar, intentionally hiding the truth, trying to deceive him. He will threaten her, frighten her with stories of bad things that happen to people who oppose his boss. Since Mami is still an attractive woman, even at forty-eight, he may do even worse. Whether the emissary believes she is hiding information or not, he will kill her in the end, because emissaries, like the oligarchs who send them, deal in death. Human life means nothing 

to them. The poor are simply the shit in which they grow their money. That’s all they care about, money, money and power, money and power and pleasure. Who am I kidding? I was not protecting her. I was only protecting myself and my colleagues.

She couldn’t let these thoughts continue. The pain was too great. Mami’s only hope, she thought, is that the oligarchs never find out the truth about her daughter.

She went to the bathroom to splash water on her face. As she held a threadbare pink hotel towel to her face to let it dry, she felt a ping in her implant.

She still wasn’t used to the implant in her ear. Implants were a luxury of the rich, as were com bracelets like the one she now wore along with her cyanide-tablet-gemstones. She never could have imagined having either of these technological luxuries when she was a little girl in the barrio back in Chimaltenango.

Her bracelet shivered. Silva was waiting out front, the screen said, waiting in a black sedan. Our staff will pick up the rental car. Just leave the key at the front desk, it said. All the details would be taken care of.

Off to meet my fellow travelers, Gabriela thought. Off to training. Then off to . . .

She didn’t know where the training facility would be. Perhaps in Kenya, but probably not. Maybe somewhere in Europe, maybe New Zealand. Everything was shrouded in secrecy, as it had to be. Secrecy was as necessary to their training as Gabriela telling lies to her mother.

She forced a smile toward her image in the bathroom mirror. Time to look like a professional woman, she said to herself, not like a little girl crying for her mother. She picked up her small suitcase, put Kermit under her arm, left her room, entered the hotel elevator, and touched the

button that said vestíbulo.

Es hora de terminar mi vida como lo conozco, she murmured. Time to end my life as I have known it.

As she slid into the back seat of the black sedan, she had one of her favorite jokes ready. “Hey, Silva, I have a story for you. There was a photon checking into the hotel just as I was checking out.”

Silva, middle-aged with straight hair too blond to come out of a bottle, looked in the rearview mirror and made eye contact with Gabriela. “A photon? Imagine that,” she replied, raising her eyebrows without smiling.

“Yes!” Gabriela said. “A very beautiful, sexy, voluptuous photon. The porter asked the photon if she needed help with her luggage, but she said . . . are you ready for this? . . . she said, ‘No, I’m traveling light.’ ”

Gabriela laughed even harder than Silva, partly because she really loved that joke, but mostly for the pure joy of meeting grief and fear with good courage and good cheer. 

 

Black Holes All the Way Down

I shall be alone, lugubrious, saturnine, Colfax thought. A pitiable Lear, a superannuated artifact, musty and passé, solo and without solace, talking to myself circuitously, bereft of all but words.

He sighed, then looked at his bracelet to check the date: November 5, 2056. Another cold and damp morning, the sky a featureless November gray. Snow was falling against yellow-gold maples and green pines, a subdued Sunday in Seattle under a low ceiling of heavy clouds.

Colfax wanted someone to listen to him, maybe even to appreciate his brilliance. He needed someone’s attention, maybe even admiration, to pull him out of the great deep suck of self that he always felt when he was alone. But if that was not possible, then he wanted a drink, his favorite companion in solitude, just one, perhaps two. Straight vodka would be good, maybe a twist of lemon. But then again, perhaps not.

He made some coffee instead. He stared out the kitchen window across the backyard, patches of grass cupping mounds of wet snow. A handwritten letter lay on the kitchen counter next to a box that had been filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies, each topped with a triangle of three cashews. They had been sent by Hailey Clark, Colfax’s almost-ex-almost-fiancée.

The night before, Colfax had devoured all but one of the cookies and then despised himself for it. He picked up the letter and re-read it for the fifth time.

He paused on the last sentence: I’ll call Sunday morning when the boys are at gymnastics. He knew she would. So, he waited.

The snow melted as it hit the window, the drops zig-zagging downward. The window slowly morphed into a mirror, the drops blurred, and Colfax saw his own face, his goatee mostly snow now, his hairline receding, leaving a sparse drift of comb-over. I was much thinner when alcoholic spirits were my primary source of nutrition, he thought. Now I bear the similitude of a bloated ostrich, but without a neck. He found his bulkier visage dreary and distasteful.

Hailey was my last chance at preserving any illusion of being something other than an abdominous, disconsolate dotard, he said aloud, something he had been doing more often lately, finding strange comfort in the sound of his own odd, unrhythmical voice and his love of big words. This loneliness feels like a black hole inside a black hole within a black hole. Infinite gravity all the way down, an infinite ravenous insatiable abyss.

He sipped his coffee and looked through his translucent reflection. The mirror again became a window, seemingly streaked with tears. The bird feeder in the yard was almost empty. A solitary female cardinal, a drab rust in contrast to her mate’s bold brightness, hunted for sunflower seeds, flicking millet to the ground. A dark-eyed junco was less fussy and foraged for millet in mud and snow. They used to be ubiquitous, but no longer, he thought. A rush of lesser goldfinches flew in, but they soon left without finding anything worth consuming.

For four winters, I accompanied Ann here in this house in her descent into cancer, he thought. The hardest and best endeavor of this peevish, aggrieved, selfish life of mine. He recalled the nine months after her death, trying one day at a time to fill the bottomless emptiness with something other than booze. Then came Hailey. She was my robin, my

Capistrano swallow, my harbinger of hope, he thought. She needed me to help her recover from a living Otto as much as I needed her to help me recover from a deceased Ann. And she was certainly the best editor I ever had. My book would only have been read by a few academic peers if not for her ability to make my esoteric arcane prose more . . . prosaic. What a gift she . . . has been.

Another November in Seattle. Cold. Damp. Gray. Empty. With more of the same to look forward to for the foreseeable future.

Colfax’s com bracelet disrupted his grim thoughts with a ping in his implant. It was Hailey, as promised. He pressed the button on his bracelet, and in the receiver implanted in his right ear, he heard the familiar click followed by the intimate sound of Hailey’s breath, which meant she was whispering directly into the mic in her bracelet. A shiver ran up his neck.

Finally, she broke the silence. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “You understand. I had to write because I couldn’t bear to . . .”

“Yes,” Colfax interrupted. “I cannot blame you. The cookies were a generous gesture, a spoonful of indulgence to mollify the bitter medicine in the letter. I was a sentimental dolt to think this age gap could be overcome . . .”

“No, you know it’s not that, Colfax,” Hailey said. “It’s not . . . it’s, you know, my situation. I have responsibilities that you understand as a parent too. When Otto asked to reconcile, it . . . it’s for the boys. I can’t put my happiness above . . .”

“Our happiness, Hailey. Remember I am, or at least once was, a significant variable in this equation,” Colfax said, and instantly regretted doing so. She was audibly crying now.

He tried to repair the situation: “I apologize, sincerely, Hailey. That was uncalled for. I was being . . . petulant, 

 petulant and self-centered, as usual. Of course I am cognizant of your competing loyalties. Two dependent progeny and a marriage of long tenure . . . not something you could easily discard, especially now that Otto has returned, petitioning for mercy and promising to amend his ways. I was often in his position, beseeching Ann for mercy again. And of course you are predisposed to forgive, as Ann was. I would not have forgiven me, if roles were reversed, but like Ann, your nature is different from mine, morally finer, no doubt. In you, the quality of mercy is not constrained. That is yet another reason I . . . love you.” He decided to stick with present tense. “And those cookies were indeed delectable.”

“You finished them already, didn’t you? You’re worse than my boys,” she replied.

“I saved one,” he said. “An act of hope.”

And then she was crying again.

Colfax spoke: “So this is the terminus, the end of a short but very beautiful odyssey. This is farewell. For good.” His inflection sounded more like a question than a statement.

“For the best,” she replied, her voice quivering, “for all of us. We couldn’t have lived with ourselves, Colfax, if we hurt my boys for . . . us . . . I’ll always, always . . .”

“Please,” Colfax interjected. “No need to say it. We both know. There is no need to say anything more. We have always . . .”

“That’s what makes this so hard,” she said.

Suddenly Colfax heard a man’s baritone. “Who

 is that?” the voice interrogated. “Why are you crying?” Colfax couldn’t tell if the tone was protective or accusatory.

The call ended with a click in Colfax’s implant. A second shiver ran up his neck.

Before he could register grief, the smoky savor and silky texture of whisky danced on his tongue, even more enticing than vodka. He hadn’t felt this tempted since Ann descended into her final coma and he descended into a three-day binge that landed him in the hospital two floors below her. His daughter, Eve, had to plan the funeral without him. Even now, I am little more than a self-pitying, self-absorbed dry drunk who binges on chocolate confections, full of self-execration, and deserving every bit of it, he mused aloud. Simultaneously a decrepit has-been and an immature punk. Pathetic. Despicable.

The snow was falling more steadily. The flakes seemed to Colfax to be in a relentless rush to find some surface on which to liquify.

He opened the box on his kitchen counter and extracted the last cookie. He broke the cookie in two, then four, and then crushed the fragments into crumbs and watched them fall from his left palm into the box. He carried the box toward his front door.

He put on his coat, then his wide-brimmed hat. The silence of snowfall always drew him outdoors, especially when he was in pain. He stood on his front step and shook the box and scattered the crumbs on the snow. Perhaps they would feed the hapless Bewick’s wren he had noticed a few days earlier. More likely though, they would be consumed by dark-eyed juncos. Perhaps a bit of chocolate will lessen their sorrow, he thought.

But what of my sorrow? Have I not already surpassed my lifetime quota? he muttered as he placed the empty box beside the door and locked the keypad from the outside. Ah, but there is no such thing as an 

upper limit for pain, he answered himself, just above a whisper. There will always be more to be had. An endless supply of mournfulness, desolation, and melancholia.

Before long, he’d walked far enough that there was a half-inch of wet snow on his shoulders and the brim of his hat. He kept meaning to walk away from his favorite bar on Ballard, but his feet seemed to be on autopilot. Of course, it would be closed so early on a Sunday morning, but even so, it drew him. Even though he was more of a cursing man than a praying man, he began chanting to himself, his words keeping rhythm to the gentle crunch of his steps in the wet snow, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . . I loathe those words, he thought, yet I somehow find them necessary, so I intone them like a superstitious conjuration.

His bracelet pinged his ear implant again. It was a different ping; this time, signaling an encrypted coms app. In lieu of a number, the screen on his bracelet read, UIC Manhattan. What unidentified caller from New York would use encryption to call him on a Sunday? Curious, he pressed the button, hoping it was not a reporter. He was sick of reporters, sick of politics, sick of fame, sick of controversy, sick of fighting the oligarchs and their kleptocracy, sick of deadlines and interviews, sick of every damned thing except birds. And, to his shame, cookies. And, let’s face it, spirits.

He tapped his bracelet. “Colfax Innis,” he groaned.

“Colfax, old man. Thurman here. It’s been a long time.” It was the same gravelly voice, but it sounded a little more . . . weary. Weary. That was it.

Colfax couldn’t hide his shock: “Thurman? Thurman! Has it been fifteen years, sixteen? Since our twenty-fifth Vanderbilt reunion, yes? Why this unexpected contact? Are you not ruling the 

world with your cronies from a private bunker somewhere in Nunavut or Greenland or Tasmania, watching civilization self-immolate in a tragicomic clusterfu—?”

“I’m in Seattle at the moment, and hardly running with the crowd that rules the world,” Thurman interrupted. “More like running from them. Might we meet for coffee?”

“Hell yes. But when?”

“How about now?”

“From where are you calling?”

“Look behind you, old man.”

Colfax turned back and saw through the snow a white Tesla Model 99 appear, ghost-like, descending the hill. It decelerated and came to stop just ahead of him, in front of the old familiar bar. The passenger door opened, like a bird lifting one wing. Colfax tapped the snow off his hat and coat and got in, with no idea where he was going. ...