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It's better than the alternative.
You watch the Hail Mary grow distant, eyes tracing the white scar it leaves behind as it cuts through the blue sky, trying to keep it in sight for as long as you can, and you repeat that thought again.
The launch went well. Is still going well, moving upwards and away from you. No hiccups, no delays, no human error. Everything is running as smoothly as you could have hoped for, and far better than you expected. It feels a little unnatural to have nothing go wrong. You're so used to working under pressure that you don't really know what to do with yourself now that it has lifted. It's a nice day, cloudless and bright, strangely warm to you after so long at sea. The whole world is watching, celebrating. There will be very little to celebrate in the years to come; you all might as well try to enjoy yourselves while you can.
In this moment, you have an unlimited budget, the full cooperation of every member state of the United Nations, and immunity from prosecution for any crime you commit anywhere on Earth. You will likely lose all of that some time within the next few days. The Hail Mary has launched, and everything that happens now is out of your hands.
Dr. Grace once asked you what you would do after the launch; curiously, as if he had expected you to have a real answer. Something that's very nearly a smile crosses your face at the memory. As if there would be anything after this for you.
You'd told him the truth. It doesn't matter. Your authority ended with this project, you're of no more use to the world. You'll probably spend the rest of your life in prison; the ecoterrorism alone would earn you that, all the rest just means you definitely won't be getting parole. There are plenty of governments that will want to see you on trial - if you're given a trial - it's really just a matter of where you'll end up. France, if you had to bet on it. It doesn't really matter to you. You'll be alright with whatever you get.
This is, despite the knowledge that the next few decades will be the darkest time in human history, the happiest day of your life. You're just grateful to have made it this far. To have given the world a chance at a future, to be able to wonder what will happen now and know that you might actually live to see it if the Hail Mary manages to find a solution. It's a luxury you've afforded yourself rarely in the last few years, imagining the future. In fleeting moments after especially long days, or in PowerPoints and conferences, making plans for stockpiling, rationing, trying to impress upon different countries the importance of continuing to work together once this project was done.
It's strange, having an idle moment. The rest of your schedule for today leaves not a second to spare - you plan to take full advantage of everyone's high spirits to secure as much support as possible, while world leaders are at their most agreeable and too caught up in the success of the launch to realise they should've cut your funding already. But the next half hour is all yours.
You don't feel as restless as you'd expected to, as if you were wasting time. You're unusually at peace. Content to stand and watch for once.
The sun is warm on your face. Your neck hurts from looking up for so long, squinting in the bright light, but you don't want to look away. This is the last time you'll ever see the Hail Mary. The closest you can get to seeing the crew one last time; you saw Ilyukhina and Yáo just before launch, spent the days before it watching Dr. Grace sleep in every spare moment you could find, but you can't shake it, the want for just a little longer. Your chest feels tight; allergies, probably, the pollen count will be terrible until the temperature starts to drop.
Not today. You'll have ample time to mourn them soon, but not yet. Today, you are happy. This is better than the alternative - you hold that thought in your mind as you often do, feel the comforting weight of certainty, of being absolutely sure that you have done the right thing. A clear path to follow which cuts through everything in its way.
It's a numbers game, your job, a trolley problem. Any action that will save a greater number of lives than it destroys is the one you must take, regardless of how high that second number is. Beggars can't be choosers. What are a billion lives against eight billion, against everyone on this planet being wiped out? What's a death toll of millions against extinction? What is a three-person suicide mission against the survival of humanity?
What's one man when it's either his death or the death of every living thing on Earth? What does it matter if you had to drag him kicking and screaming, look him in the eye as he begged for his life? If you knew him, worked with him, believed in him? If you wished he didn't have to die?
The answer is obvious. It's nothing. This is not about what you or anyone else would like to do; it's about what must be done.
Making the decision was simple. You hadn't been lying when you told Dr. Grace that it actually wasn't hard, asking people to give their lives for your project. It was easy. Appalling so, you might think, if you ever let yourself. It was just as easy to take his life from him. You realised you would not be able to find a replacement science officer in time for launch, and you allotted yourself one minute to mourn him as you did the others, and you began making the arrangements immediately. Drugs to induce a coma, others for the temporary amnesia needed to reduce the (small, he was a fundamentally good person) chance of him sabotaging the mission, the very best of care while he was under. You'd known he would run, of course - for everything you like about Dr. Grace, bravery is not his greatest strength.
(You'd known it, but you'd hoped to be proven wrong. You wanted... Not to part on good terms, that would be far too much to ask for, more than you deserve, just- not like that. Anything but that.)
Because you did like him; care about him, even. You would go so far as to call him your friend, or at least the closest thing you had to a friend. He was terrible at public speaking and more than occasionally annoying, but he was funny, and he was smart, and he was very kind. It pains you to realise you're already thinking about him in the past tense. Ryland is a good person. He'll be remembered as a hero, and he didn't deserve what you did to him, but he'll certainly deserve that. And yet. You don't regret it. You cared about him, and it didn't make you hesitate for even a second. Just because he meant something important to you didn't make his life more valuable than anyone else's; if you hesitated for every person you hurt, you'd never move at all. It's your job to save humanity, not just the people you care about. You liked him. And still, you ordered tacky t-shirts for him and gathered his personal effects, knowing he wouldn't be able to pack for the mission himself, because he didn't want to die.
The sky is very blue and very clear, and Dr. Grace is already so far away. You hope you didn't forget anything important to him, that he has everything he wants. There weren't as many pictures of him with the rest of the crew as you'd expected; usually, he's the one taking them for other people. Did you lean too heavily on the fox theme or not enough? He'll never be able to tell you. It will be a long time before he wakes up.
You killed him. He may still be breathing, but he was dead the moment you decided he was your solution. A long shot, a hail mary, a saving grace - you find yourself repeating those three expressions quite often. There is a lot of blood on your hands these days. There are a lot of people who are dead or will be dead because of events you set in motion.
Most of them, you'll never even know their names, but you knew Ryland Grace. You have killed Ryland Grace, and Olesya Ilyukhina, and Yáo Li-Jie. You have killed Martin DuBois and Annie Shapiro. You have killed likely millions of people via the famines and the flooding that will happen because of what you've done to the ecosystem, paving over deserts and blowing up ice caps, climate change on a previously unimaginable scale. You have killed so, so many more people with the disasters that are coming because it won't be enough to stop the Earth cooling. You are the single most destructive person in human history.
And you would do it all again, if you had to. Anything, anything that had to be done to save humanity, you would do it in a heartbeat. The weight of the world is heavy, but bearable. You'd carry it forever if you could; someone has to.
When you stepped up to lead the Petrova Taskforce, you told yourself that nothing outside of it would matter to you anymore. You would have to make terrible decisions. It did not matter if you were able to live with them. There was no time for morals, no right and wrong, no questions to agonise over; decisions had to be made, and so, you would make them. It might feel better to wallow in guilt, but would it get the work done faster? No. Does it excuse what you've done, if you feel bad about it? No. When- if you lose sleep over the lives lost, will it bring those people back? No. Nothing will. It's cold, and it's ruthless, but it's pragmatic, and that does a lot more material good than sentiment or self-pity.
Everyone needs something to help them do their job. Camaraderie, for most people. Not so much you. You? With too few occasions to pray, you allow yourself the luxury of optimism. For so long, the thing that has kept you going is imagining that if you did well enough, you'd be able to pull this off; watching the Hail Mary fly high above you, it's hard not to feel a sense of relief, even knowing it will all be downhill from here. The hard part is only just beginning.
Now, you allow yourself to imagine the best possible version of what comes next.
Humanity survives. Some countries work together to ration food, even if only a few - in the time between now and whenever someone remembers to revoke your pardon, you'll need to lay as much groundwork for that as possible, try and make alliances that will outlast your power. The rising sea level kills countless people, but it's a smaller death toll than if you'd left Antarctica intact. Crops fail, the weather goes haywire, places that have never experienced natural disasters before are devastated by them. But it is less severe than it could have been. For every terrible thing you've done, it is better than if you'd stood by and done nothing.
The world will hate you; that's a given. Standing here in the sunlight and seeing everything you've spent the past four years of your life working towards soar away from you, feeling the weight of everyone's hopes hanging heavy in the warm air, you let yourself hope for the best for you too; that in ten, twenty, thirty years, there will still be a world left to hate you. God willing. It's funny, the kind of thing you pray for when the future looks so bleak. You want, desperately, to be able to live out the rest of your natural life in a prison cell. You want to live; you want everyone to live.
If you're remembered as anything more than a footnote in the history books, you'll be remembered as a dictator. It's an optimistic thought. It would mean there are still people alive to write those books. That's the most you can hope for. You have chosen to save humanity, and you accept what that decision means for you.
Better you than anyone else. Better all that blood on only one pair of hands. Someone has to make the impossible decisions; how could you allow it to be anyone other than you? You have nothing to lose, no one to miss - you don't even have a dog. How could you allow anyone to suffer if you had the opportunity to spare them? This is still a numbers game. You, or whoever else would have to fill this role, because someone would still need to step up if you didn't. You, or councils and committees, hundreds of people working towards the impossible goal of saving everyone whilst hurting no one, and failing. And having to live with their failures. Weighing the right options, losing sleep over moral dilemmas, asking questions that cannot be answered; you don't have to worry about any of it, because you are allowed to be single-minded in your purpose. All you have to worry about is the Hail Mary. Had to worry about. If it weren't you, it would be so many people under such crushing pressure. Some things are easier to bear alone. What's one woman against salvation? If your sacrifice is what ensures that, then you will give yourself.
It doesn't matter, what happens to you now. It's a very small price to pay for the success of this project. Even if humanity blames you for what you had to do to save it, then at least humanity will still exist. Someone has to take the fall; again, why not you? A scapegoat is necessary, and you can do what's necessary, can't you? Better a whipping girl than a coward. Better prison than starving along with everyone else. You've shouldered as much of the burden as you could take on, and now, all that's left to do is hope to God you've done enough.
You have done all you could. There is not a single decision of yours that you would change if given the opportunity, no mistakes made, no regrets in hindsight. No guilt. You have done the wrong thing again, and again, and again, so that no one else would have to. If you've made awful choices, it was because there were no good ones to make. There was no success story, no happy ending waiting in the wings. No one is coming to save you. This was not a matter of winning. This was a matter of choosing how exactly you would like to lose and trying to soften the blow of that defeat as much as possible. Making the best of a worst case scenario.
...That's terrible, isn't it? The absolute best you are capable of still involved so much suffering. You sent Dr. Grace and the others to certain death for a one-in-a-million chance, and there was no more you could offer the world than the tiny hope they might succeed. All of this work and no guarantee that any of it will pay off. There's nothing left for you to do but wait and see.
The world is in their hands now, not yours. You wish, more than anything, that you could carry it for them instead.
You stare up at the brilliant white trail of the Hail Mary's ascent, unblinking, until it burns a bright shadow onto your vision and your eyes water. You believe in him. It beats the alternative.