Three weeks before the biosphere collapsed for good, our best and brightest set out for the stars. It was obvious from the start that you would be among them.

When you moved into our street, you were eleven and the bees had virtually disappeared from their last holdouts in Europe and North America, the ones they tried to reintroduce from captivity unable to cope with the heat. I remember being excited. I had friends online, from our school server and from some of my VSR games, but none in-person. You were shy and never left your mother’s side when you all came over to introduce yourselves, breathing apparatus muffling your words as you stood on our doorstep. Wildfire season had started early.

You told me your name, and I told you mine, and it was several months before I saw you again.

It was a bad year, and your folks wouldn’t let you play outside, even when the haze index was low and you promised to wear your breathing mask. It was online where I got to know you. You joined me in myriad worlds in VSR, and I showed you all the tricks of the trade. Naturally, by now I knew how to bypass the parental controls and get to the good stuff: first-person shooters, medieval battle sims, supercar racing and realistic space battles. I took you raiding across Scandinavia, into zero-G dogfights in Saturn’s ring system, and brawling with kaiju in Tokyo. But you preferred the quieter stuff, where you made things, created your own worlds, and the systems that ran and governed them. I didn’t mind—it was a nice change of pace. You opened up as I helped you construct a fully functional space station that linked a loose cluster of asteroids. You’d been lonely all your life, and hated being shut-in all the time. The curfews were creeping closer and closer towards each other, and the final in-person schools had closed their doors the year before we were both due to start kindergarten. The windows of opportunity where we could go outside were getting smaller and smaller—not that you were allowed, anyway. We devoured 2D media from around the turn of the century, watching kids riding bikes aimlessly around their hometowns, getting into mischief and evading bullies.

We made the best of it. As the UN disbanded, and more and more nations abandoned their climate pledges, we carried on with our grand project. Our virtual space station grew and grew. Soon, I realised that the details were beyond my understanding, and as you grappled with the logistics of hydroponics, atmospheric recycling and life support maintenance, I acted as muscle. Other players, bored and sadistic, were a constant threat. What I lacked in architectural intelligence, I made up for in my abilities as a starfighter. I deterred wave after wave of would-be-trolls until one day I couldn’t. They ripped through my defences like a cavalry charge and blasted our ark into shrapnel.

I was devastated, but you just saw it as an opportunity to rebuild, and build better. Sometimes you took my advice on board, but I could tell that most of the time you’d already thought of it yourself.

That winter, the sea retook most of the Netherlands and continued its advance into South-East Asia. COV-64 was running itself into the ground, but what they were already calling COV-67 was starting to show up in more testing centres around the globe.

When we were fourteen, you finally convinced your parents to let you play outside. Your dad had made you wear a ridiculous filter-hood that made you look like some D-tier superhero. I hardly wore mine anymore. As long as it wasn’t the height of wildfire season, or I didn’t play out too many days in a row, things didn’t get too bad.

You were thinner and paler than your various online avatars, but your voice was the same, and so were the expressions on your face. You got out of breath a lot easier—your stamina bar in the outside world was a lot less forgiving. By the end of the summer, though, you could beat me in a footrace nearly a quarter of the time.

On my fifteenth birthday, the global population hit twelve billion, crammed into the corners of the world that were still hospitable to life. Iceland and Greenland had permanently closed their borders.

Your virtual space station—I’d stopped thinking of it as ours a long time ago—had grown exponentially. It was host to hundreds of semi-sentient NPCs, and other players visited to wander the great atriums and geodesic domes full of plant life, asteroids linked by enclosed walkways that gave unparalleled views of the starscape turning overhead. It was fully self-sufficient, and you had made it all yourself. All I had done was make sure no one else had blown it up again. By now, though, you had a following online, and I had help, commanding a small fleet of defensive fighters that guarded the space around the station fiercely.

School was no different. I’d always been in the top classes in our district, but working with you felt like I’d wandered into the wrong lesson. You were coding AIs before I could even program something as simple as a wildfire sentry drone, and your homework made mine look like an afterthought. Soon, you were transferred to another school server, one that was able to accommodate you, and I was left alone. We still talked after class, and on weekends, but it was clear we were on different paths.

Shortly after the Four Minute Exchange across the Indo-Pakistani border, a loose collective of desperate nations announced the Columbus Project. It didn’t make the front pages, but you were transfixed. It was our only hope, you said; to truly gain a foothold amongst the stars before life on Earth was snuffed out for good. All our eggs were in one basket, and the basket was catching fire.

Other people our age, apparently, were sourcing illegal alcohol and discovering each other. But by the time you were nineteen, you’d caught the attention of the grown-ups at the big table. Your space ark project in VSR, and the experience and insight you could bring, had been enough to get you a ticket. You came online one night to tell me you were leaving in the morning to go work on the Columbus Project.

We met on the hill that overlooked the Financial District, the faint glow of distant fires tinging the undersides of clouds far to the south. Drones peppered the skies above and between the buildings like flies above a carcass. Soon the clouds cleared, and a handful of stars were visible, despite the smog. You pointed out Betelgeuse, Orion’s Belt, Polaris, and Sirius. Alpha Centauri was too faint to pinpoint.

You awkwardly thanked me for everything; for being your friend when you were alone, for helping you with your projects and giving you something to keep going for. I was glad it was too dark for you to see my face.

The next morning you were gone, and you didn’t come back online. Your parents wouldn’t answer the door. Two days later, the bike arrived that I’d bought online to give to you before you left for Florida. The delivery had been delayed.

As further resource wars broke out in the Arabian Caliphate and Siberia, I found myself a job providing end-of-life care. It broke me afresh every day, until eventually, I realised it was breaking me a little less every time. It never stopped tearing me to pieces, not fully, and if it had, I’d have been terrified that a part of me had been lost. But death was everywhere: on the news, in the streets, in the air, in the glow on the horizon, on every unwashed surface, and you grew used to it.

Eventually you returned my messages. You’d been busy, you said. The Columbus Project was nearing completion. The first fleet of generation ships would be launching in a few months’ time, crammed to the brim with scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and the brightest young minds the world had to offer.

There were a few final days where we got to talk. You spoke about the things from your project that they had already implemented in real life, and laughed about the things that they hadn’t. I joked about the possibility of joining as the Project’s private starfighter, in case you ran into any aggressive aliens. I wasn’t joking, not really. You knew I wasn’t. You said you had already asked for me, but you’d been told that there wasn’t room. We both knew what that meant—I wasn’t the kind of person the Project wanted.

We never got to say a definitive goodbye—they kept you busy, and regressivists carried out strikes on the internet and global communications networks that seemed to get more frequent and more prolonged as time passed. But I think you would have known that I was there when your ship lifted off from the Cape. I accessed the public VSR cameras just off to the side of the launch pad, and stood there as the ship and ground let go of one another, fire and smoke swirling around me as if I were standing under a waterfall. As the smoke cleared, I looked up and watched the vapour trail fade, the ship shrinking to a point of light and then disappearing, you disappearing with it.

It was only a matter of weeks before it became clear that you had left just in time.

That night, I assembled the bike that had sat in our garage since the day it had been delivered, and took it out for a ride. I’d ridden bikes in VSR before, and the balance in real life took a little getting used to, but within a few minutes I was flying. I pulled my breathing apparatus down, ignoring the acrid smell of the air, and looked to the side, seeing you for a moment flying beside me.

I wondered whether it was the past I was truly mourning, or the future, but either way, it was you.

Dan Peacock is a science fiction and fantasy writer from the UK, with short stories forthcoming in F&SF and Kaleidotrope. He is also a First Reader for Orion’s Belt. You can find links to all his published stories at danpeacock.neocities.org.