Daylight has never felt better to Saskia than now that she has made her way out of the tunnel.
She has left the walls behind that limited her vision, and as the horizon opens up in front of her, she does what she considers right. She will talk to Aaron´s wife.
Aaron would hate the idea. He would be disappointed in her, that's for sure, and he would start tapping on his wrist, which he'd always do when disappointed in someone else. On a regular day this would be the case 10 to 20 times. His expectations were too high, those he had on himself just as much as those he had on others. However, Saskia has never judged it.
Someone as brilliant as he is, she used to think, needs to push himself and those around him mercilessly in order to reach bigger things than were ever thought possible.
Since he is dead, though, and now that she left the tunnel, Saskia has been questioning her assumptions about Aaron´s person. About his life and about the way he left.
As much as she would like to believe that he died a martyr's death, that she was there to see it makes it harder. Looking at it without rose-tinted glasses, she has to admit that, quite frankly, he left her. He left and asked her to be fine with it, left her and asked her to help him with it. He left and asked her to make it easier on him.
How could he be a martyr then?
Martyrs are supposed to be strong, they are supposed to be selfless, and as Saskia follows discarded train tracks southbound, hoping that they will lead to Aaron´s house, she is no longer sure that he was.
What about her? What would happen to Saskia now, did Aaron even think about it? Did he ever even think about her at all, or did he not care about anyone?
On the horizon in front of her Saskia sees a plane flying northbound. Another one flying eastbound, and a third one is venturing into the west. Despite the sunny day, the bright blue sky above her isn´t that any longer when the planes have passed. They have left white stains behind that are blocking the light and conquering the air around them in ripples.
It looks like something innocent, like something natural, like clouds, you might think and not pay any more attention, because clouds are supposed to be up there, in the sky, are they not?
How smart to disguise the chemicals that they are spreading in the stratosphere as something that is supposed to be there. Chemicals in a cloud costume so no one will notice or ask questions about it.
They are doing it for us, Saskia tries to hang on to what she has gotten used to thinking. They are spreading chemicals up there for us, they have to do it, so we will survive.
However, on discarded train tracks and staring at the tracklines that the planes above her head are leaving behind, she has to swallow hard, so she won´t suffocate on her own thoughts.
Before she started working with Aaron, she would have considered it normal that you can make out white lines in the sky when a plane passes by. She wouldn't have thought of aerosols that are being put there to wrap up the earth in a bubble and deflect the intensifying sunlight.
If she is being honest, she should never have worked on Aaron´s project. Then at least she would still not know and would not have to decide whether what they are doing is right or wrong. Now that she knows she has to make a decision, though, and to be fair the person responsible for her dilemma is herself.
She went out of her way to get to work with Aaron, even though she would never have been considered as his trainee, if it weren't for her father. To be more accurate, she doesn't have a college degree and has never been qualified to work on a scientific project. She bought her way into Aaron's world with money that her Daddy gave, just so she could meet the man of her dreams. She bought herself the gift that she thought she wanted, but now that she has unwrapped it - now that she has unwrapped him - she can only stare at what's in front of her. Blankly, because she is struggling to understand.
Would you blame her?
How is she, 23 years old and not the smartest person in the world, supposed to make sense of something as scientific as what Aaron was doing?
Even now that she knows what the white clouds above her are about she is still struggling to comprehend what it means. The chemicals in the stratosphere, the CO2 that is being dumped into the ocean, and the silicium shield that has been designed to build up between the earth and the sun in order to keep the light from coming down. Saskia has never had a clue how to rate anything from a scientific point of view, because she has never studied to become a scientist. She has only ever relied on Aaron´s mind.
He is the best, she remembers thinking, so he surely knows what he is doing. A man she thought of as her soulmate certainly wouldn't do harm to anyone.
What he was working on during the months she worked with him was the biggest thing that has so far been planned by the people who call themselves the preservers of the world. Saskia remembers Aaron´s eyes lighting up as they were sitting there, captivated by pictures of the sun that their satellites in space had constructed, based on data that they are constantly collecting.
Incomprehensible energy, so bright, so explosive, so powerful. So beautiful, as it is erupting and released in what they call a solar flare. Watching it, even Saskia who didn't understand what she was looking at, felt like she was elevated to a higher sphere.
"The luminosity of the sun is increasing gradually," Aaron explained, such awe, such passion in his voice. "That's why it grows 10 percent warmer every billion years. Our planet is still young. It is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, so knowing how warm the sun is now, can you even imagine how intense it will be in another 4.5 billion years? It will grow hotter and hotter as it approaches the end of its life, and in about 5 billion years, when it starts dying, despite the 149 million kilometers in between, it will be too hot for the earth to take. The dying sun will scorch our plant, and together we will go up in flames. Unless we prevent it and take it down before it can take us down."
Take it down, as if the sun up there were part of a stage set that has once been built for a certain scene and could just be replaced by something more appropriate, when the play that is human race enters the next phase.
"How?" Saskia asked. "You just said it yourself, it is hundreds of million kilometers away. How could anyone just take it down, and how could we even survive without it? I thought sunlight enabled life on our planet."
"Well, we need sunlight, alright, but not necessarily of this sun," Aron smiled and turned his back on the pictures of the solar flare, before with solar energy erupting in his back he added, "That's where I come in."
He was supposed to build an artificial sun that could replace the one that Saskia sees in the sky right now, somewhere behind the chemicals that are spreading across it. As far as she knows, Aaron has finished building it. But now he is dead and with him is the knowledge on how to handle it.
"Are you sure that it isn't going to kill us?" She remembers asking him shortly after he had given her access to classified documents that had revealed the scope of things that he was meant to achieve.
"Well, we can never be fully sure," he responded. "We will just have to wait and see. None of it has been done before, so we can only speculate. I choose to believe that it won´t."
He is doing it to save the billions who are living on earth. Even though he can´t be sure, it's a means to an end, a heroic act. That was how Saskia chose to look at it, because of how she had chosen long ago to look at him. He had always been her hero, so how could anything he was doing be wrong in her opinion?
If she had been a scientist or into psychologies, then she would have known that this is where human perception goes wrong. Everything a person feels and thinks together with pre-existing experience determine the way in which they perceive the world. Saskia thought of Aaron as a hero. She thought of him as brilliant and as someone who was always right. So no matter what he would do or say, her perception was always going to prove her pre-existing thoughts about him right. By forcing her to close her eyes to everything that stood against it.
"It has to happen like this, doesn't it? You have to do what you are doing, otherwise all of us will die. If the sun weren´t replaced by the one you are building, I mean. Then no one would survive."
"That is one possible scenario," she remembers his reply when she asked him months ago, and her biased mind forced her to blank out what he added. "We cannot be sure that it would actually happen this way. This scenario, like any other, is only a theory that doubtlessly could, but certainly doesn't have to become reality."
A theory by someone as brilliant as him? Of course it had to be accurate, so the rest of his statement was irrelevant to Saskia. As someone with a bias usually would, she only heard what she wanted to hear. She chose to believe that he was doing what he did in order to save the world. Despite many conversations regarding his motivations that should have ignited doubt in her.
"You are lucky, you know," he once put it bluntly, "really lucky to witness this event first hand. No one has ever done it, no one has ever even thought about it. I am the one who brings it to life, and you know why?"
She shook her head, in awe of his dedication and his confidence when he went on
"This is how God must have felt when he created the light. He didn't have to do it, but he could. I am just like him, you know? I am doing what I am doing because I can, and I´m the only person alive right now who can say that about themselves."
Now that Saskia has left the tunnel and is walking southbound, reminiscing about it, she shakes her head, because she might not be a scientist and mightn't be equipped with a mind as brilliant as his, but in the moment that he told her, she should have seen it either way. Right there and then Saskia should have known that a brilliant mind like his is doomed to think more of itself than it truly is. She should have understood that he was past the moment of detaching from reality, and therefore past the ability to act like would be appropriate for a person on earth. She should have had no doubt that, quite frankly, he had lost the mind that he thought was so extraordinary. He was gone insane, and maybe so intentionally, because reality in itself is a limitation that a mind like his would always struggle to accept.
For visionaries in general it is a thin line that they are walking on. They have to deny the world to some degree, so they can think of the unthinkable and make the impossible possible. If their denial takes them too far away from the columns that the world is built on, though, then the ideas that they bring to life might shatter the fundament that carries everything, and when the world around them is going down in the process, their brilliant thoughts will lose their purpose, because there is nothing and noone left to benefit from them. Why go through with it in the first place then, if this is how it ends?
Maybe, like Aaron has put it, visionaries only ever do what they do because they can. Maybe a visionary is always only a selfish man with megalomaniac tendencies who is doing things, no matter the consequence. Doing them without ever wondering if they´re good or bad, doing them in a space between right and wrong, only and merely because he wants the world to know that he is capable of the impossible. Broken down, a visionary like Aaron might always only be an abandoned child who is craving to be noticed and longing for the world to look at him in the way that his parents never could.
Even now on discarded train tracks that lead her south and without the tunnel walls around her, Saskia is far from fully identifying it, but for the first time since she met Aaron, she has doubts in him.
She has doubts in her own perception of him, because when she thinks of him now, with her hair not washed in days and her clothes not changed in nearly a week, what she feels towards him isn't love any longer, it is anger.
Anger because he died and left her here. He died and left her with classified information that she has no way of understanding, left her with no chance of figuring out if he was the man she thought he was, left her here to deal with all her anger on her own.
Her hand is forming a fist, when she kicks a stone across the train tracks, and as her eyes are following its way through the air, she spots an old, rusty signpost. Stop, look, listen, it says. Even though it is barely still readable and has lost its purpose, Saskia is convinced that it could be a sign from above that Aaron has sent, so she does what it tells her. She stops, looks around and listens.
Is that splashing water? Maybe of the stream that crosses Aaron´s garden? And that tree right there: Is that the oak she looked at when she left his estate, after he told her to hide?
She jumps off the train tracks and approaches it.
Yes, it is the oak that she was hoping to remember, so she would find her way back! And the stream… The eyes closed, she can clearly hear it now, and when she opens her mouth, she has the taste of mossy water on her tongue.
It has got to be hidden somewhere between the trees down there! She is sure now, she has no doubt!
After what feels like a trip around the world, Saskia is as good as there. She is nearly back at Aaron's house.
Confidently she makes her way through the piece of forest that opens up in front of her.
This was Aaron´s doing, she thinks, a smile on her face.
He clearly wants for her to find his wife, clearly wants her to tell Mara everything. About the way he died, about who he really was and about the sun that he has built.
She has pressed her way through a group of trees. In the sink behind it the stream is hiding. Left is not even half a mile. As if recharged, she isn't dragging her feet anymore, but almost runs. Then suddenly there it is, his estate. It opens up in front of her like in a fairy tale. A field of flowers and amidst it his gigantic house.