“Why did you do that!?” I shriek. “Couldn’t you have waited a few more days? Couldn’t you have warned us before launching a civilization-ending spurt?”

Jake walks in after returning the mop and cleaning himself to ask, “What’s a civilization-ending spurt?”

I shout, “Oh, nothing but a mass of solar material that Mother hurled at the Earth to destroy us!”

Jake calmly replies, “Well, she did say that the world is ending in the morning. I guess we now know how it will happen.”

“How can you be so relaxed? Don’t you get it? All this is going to be wiped out in a few hours!”

“Oh, I do understand, and it is scary. But you either have to believe all of what these two are saying or none of it. Either the world will end tomorrow, and we’ll enter the Kingdom of Heaven, or we’ve just been chatting with a couple of drunks, and tomorrow will be another workday.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Jake. You aren’t the one who’s supposed to find the keys and open the gates to Heaven. What if they’re telling the truth and I can’t do it? Did you think about that?”

I can’t believe that just a few hours ago, my biggest concern was a stalker. A hysterical laugh escapes my lips as I consider the absurdity of my life. I turn to Father and ask, “Can you stop it? Can’t you just nudge the solar mass past the Earth, now that you know that Earth Baby is getting your messages?”

Father glances at Mother and says, “No. I can redirect a comet or an asteroid’s orbit over a few centuries, but not something like this. Mother’s ejection is a million-degree blob nearly a tenth of the mass of the moon. It’s going to strike in a few hours, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

My mind races until I find one faint ray of hope. “Wait, you said that, while your slap destroyed the planet Mars, Baby Mars was born healthy. Is Jake, right? Will our souls and memories continue in Earth Baby’s mind even after our world is destroyed?”

Mother is sulking at the end of the bar, so Father fields my question. “No, that isn’t how it works. You see, Earth Baby, as you call her, will be born healthy, but the impact will wipe all her memories. Your collective minds will have formed the structures she needs to live, but those structures will lose their contents forever. That doesn’t matter much when the planet’s inhabitants have the mental capacity of Mars’ rabbits. But we’ve been nurturing your development for millions of years. We want Earth Baby to wake up on her own with the innate intelligence, learning, and experiences of all humanity.”

“Well, why couldn’t Mother have just waited then? Why did she have to destroy us?”

Father takes my hand and leads me away from Mother, who is silently sitting at the end of the bar staring at the ice melting in her glass.

“Let her be, Jeannette. Jake, will you look after Mother while I take Jeannette on another journey. There is something she needs to see.”

Jake is more than happy to sit out this trip after his previous gut-wrenching experience, and my surroundings start fading before I can complain. This time I’m standing in a ruined city unlike any I’ve ever seen when the fog clears. I don’t know where I am, but the architecture looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

We walk down wide boulevards and long avenues between tall skyscrapers whose skeletal remains fade into the low-hanging clouds. I shudder despite the oppressive heat under the shadow of the ruined city. I want to explore a bit, despite my discomfort, but Father has quickened his pace. He has a destination in mind and doesn’t want to linger.

Some buildings have partially collapsed, others rise defiantly upward, and others are leaning, as though slowly sagging as they give up hope. We are continually dodging rubble in the streets. Most of the debris is fallen facades from the upper levels. However, we also sidestep abandoned vehicles and other detritus of an advanced civilization. Father is visibly shaken as he picks up a pitted but once-sleek metallic object and turns it in his hand.

I ask him, “Who were these people? What happened to them?” But he shakes his head and replies that we need to hurry. I trust him but don’t understand the rush. Nothing has changed here for hundreds of years.

We eventually exit the city’s canyons into what was once a large park. Everything is now sand or dust, but at one time, this place was once a pastoral setting. I pause by a massive, fallen tree and pick up a star-shaped leaf larger than my hand. It crumbles to dust at my touch, but, for a moment, it shared an image from a distant past.

Father sees me and grimly notes, “Everything is dead, even the microorganisms. The trees have fallen but will not decay. There is nothing left alive to compost them.”

My guide finally pauses after we crest a small hill and collapses on the ground, patting his hand on the dirt in an invitation for me to join him. I sit by his side and repeat my questions. “Where are we? What happened here? And, why were we in such a rush to get to this spot?”

Father answers in a hollow voice. “I wanted to show you the city up close and to get out here before the storm hits. You need to see this, but I dislike revisiting these painful memories.”

I’m concerned, even though this is a simulation. “Don’t tell me I’m going to go through another meteor strike!”

Father forces a forlorn laugh and says, “No, not this time. And, remember, those weren’t meteors; they were coronal masses. Don’t worry about the storm, Jeannette. We’ll be long gone before it arrives. However, the clouds will briefly clear as the winds draw near.”

He points toward the city we just exited, and I gasp as the sky lightens. The tall buildings I thought were leaning skyscrapers continue reaching skyward beyond belief. They are not leaning after all. Instead, each edifice, the size of a city block, is a curving support for an even larger structure. These massive buildings gradually straighten and join together as they rise to form a gigantic form reminiscent of the Eiffel Tower.

We are unable to see the building’s top floors despite the dispersed clouds. From what I can see, however, it must be at least a mile tall. The term skyscraper utterly fails to describe this architecture, so I choose to call it a skypiercer.

As if reading my mind, Father says, “This is the great city of Eanso-sur. The central building is nearly two miles tall and was home to over ten million Venusians.”

I exclaim, “Venus!?”

Father sadly smiles, “Yes, you are sitting on Venus, about a million years after Mars’ birth and about a thousand years after these people died. None of this is standing today.”

Father hands me the object he picked up on the road, explaining that it was like a smartphone in our world.

He sighs, “Mars was a natural birth, and your mother appeared happier than at any time in her life afterward. However, she had already developed her theory about conscious awakenings and convinced me to help nudge Venus along a more competitive developmental path.

“Everything went well, and civilizations blossomed across the planet. Science, mathematics, literature, music, and art thrived, and the population boomed.”

Father laughed, “Humans have nothing on Venusians for population growth. Our baby quickly matured to the point of being ready for birth. But we failed to awaken her. Your mother sent every message she could to get her attention, but nothing worked.

“Our babies cannot stay in the womb too long, or their growth becomes cancerous. Everyone pressured Mother to awaken our child forcefully, but she clung to the hope that her baby would emerge independently.

“Venus never did awaken, and her death was sudden and unexpected. After a billion years of development, one day, she was still and could not be resuscitated. The planet’s flux-region between the mantle and core vanished, dissipating the magnetosphere. Within a decade, the atmosphere became thick and caustic, extinguishing all surface life.”

The usually-animated man sitting next to me now appears to be his multi-billion-year age. His shoulders are slumped, and his face is a mask of forced expressionlessness. Father picks up a thousand-year-old twig and idly doodles in the dust.

“All of our efforts were lost. All the lives, loves, learning, beauty, and pain were gone in the blink of an eye. Tens of billions of dreams, experiences, and memories vanished forever, and our child was stillborn. All this tragedy occurred because we were unable to awaken her and waited too long in our futile attempt to preserve a society’s culture in her mind.

“Your mother was found guilty of child abandonment and murder. She was banished and isolated from the rest of our kind. Such a heinous act had never happened before, and neither had the punishment. The ordeal took an immeasurable toll on her, and I was the only one who would speak with her. Eventually, she convinced me to try our experiment again on Earth. I agreed, but we both promised not to let another baby die by waiting too long.

“She will never discuss Venus, but our dead baby’s sterile body circles her endlessly as a reminder of our terrible mistake. Mother waited as long as she could before ejecting a coronal mass toward Earth, but she had no choice. Earth Baby is well past the time Mother should slap her and is in danger of dying at any time. If we wait too long, she will be stillborn like Venus, and all life on her will die anyway. Your mother had no choice but to awaken you forcibly. She could not wait any longer.”

The swirling fog thickens again before clearing and returning us to the Chez Juan bar. I stand up from the floor and plop down on my favorite bar stool. No one speaks as we stare at the disconsolate woman leaning against the far wall attempting to stifle her tears. I have to find a way to wake up Earth Baby.