Some of their ideas might come to pass. Once you’re capable of harvesting exotic matter and building a warp drive, it’s hard to imagine everyone gleefully using fossil fuels and coal again. But borders would be drawn. Not every community would be able to produce everything they needed—trade and some form of currency would be required. The Outer Space Treaty could be broken. Instead of grand, large countries, due to the planet’s islands and small continents, perhaps it’d be more like the city states of ancient Greece. People would find ways to disagree, to squabble, to fight.

They all knew that their rosy picture of Cavendish was just that—a fantasy. And so much of the inequality would happen before the ships came. Earth had so far only managed one interstellar ship and was in the process of building more. Valerie had sent them plans for the ark ships, but it’d be impossible to build enough for everyone on the planet.

So who went?

The tickets weren’t going to be free. Hawthorne had been planning on a sliding scale—a percentage of income.

Lockwood would do no such thing. Tickets were going to be dear, most people going into debt to the government or whatever company built the ships. And what of those who couldn’t afford the ticket?

They’d almost certainly be left behind.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

7 Years Before Launch

UN Climate Change Conference

Orange County Convention Center, Florida

Naomi stood in the middle of Cavendish.

Well, not quite.

She’d created two biomes. The larger one was in her lab at the Hawthorne headquarters in LA. Once a week, at least, Valerie threatened to move it into the lobby. She wanted everyone who passed through the doors of her company to walk through the tunnel, gazing at the alien plants like people stared at sharks gliding over the walkways through aquariums.

“I’m not going to do my work with a bunch of people gawping at me,” Naomi had said, and she’d compromised by creating this smaller one that usually stayed in the lobby but was portable enough to bring anywhere.

Valerie insisted on taking it to the UN Climate Change Conference that year, in the convention centre not far from the Kennedy Space Center, and that meant Naomi had to tag along, looking after her biome.

Naomi’s smaller creation was the size of a large living room. A six-foot-tall tunnel led to a round centre big enough for five or six people to stand comfortably under the dome of Perspex. They couldn’t touch any of the plants, walled off as they were, but they could stare at them through the glass for ten minutes, taking in the tiny echo of the new world. There had been a waitlist all day.