Fragments from the Vault #027: The Long Haul

Exhibit A:

Lab Assistant's Journal - Final Entry [date redacted]

____________________

Game: The Last of Us

Location: Outside of Jackson, Wyoming

More information: Jackson | The Last of Us Wiki | Fandom

Relics of another time. Photo credit: FetchQuester

"Look to ourselves: We are the light."

I welcome the darkening hours in my solitude tonight, just hours away from Jackson, packing the last crate. By sunrise the port will be pouring into life, the slippage of old-world vestiges punctuated by the heave-ho of taciturn fisherwomen, unfazed, unaware. A blessing. They will send me down the river... before long, I'll hear your laughter like warm sunlight on my cheeks: A thousand millivolts like the storms of paramecium.

"Is the world too late for change?" I'll hear you query, evading the transient charge of sleep as I drift past the crater-bowls of telescopes guarding the pre-dawn light. And here I'll quietly counter your cynicism, recalling how we survived the early days of the pandemic against all probability, how each lived moment became an act of defiance against the cruelty that consumed this reckless age. 

And without further rebuke, I'll reflect on Sample #9502 itself: Ophiocordyceps, once renowned to mycologists and practitioners of medicine, now reviled by the common world. By its inherent nature, it adapts. It endures. It survives. And it, too, is intertwined by complex networks of seemingly telepathic sustenance that render a potent volatility within the host. Yet we have it at a disadvantage, for it possesses no consciousness or the resilience of sentient life. It does not understand the precariousness of what it is to be forced into the breathing space of one's own mortality, or what meaning can be made from this revelation. Even the notion of destruction - creation's cardinal counterpoint - lies beyond its reckoning.

But we comprehend something even greater in its fortitude: That we exist - and could only exist - under a series of coincidental calculative phenomena yet hold an immutable sense of purpose within ourselves is miraculous. And it is equally miraculous that we have traversed the dark abyss to emerge from the other side with an ingenuity and yearning for life that is beautifully - though not exclusively - human. That is how we endure and survive. And as of tomorrow, when old Sol lights up our hemisphere with a fragile promise, that is how we will thrive. 

I will see you soon, my love. With the new vaccine.

- Lucy A.

***

Sources: 

The Last of Us (Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment); fandom.com; [note "endure and survive" is a direct quote from The Last of Us]

*Dedicated to those we lost - and the parts of ourselves we lost - during the COVID-19 pandemic.