They used to call it the Blue Marble. Now, it sported hues of fiery reds and dirty browns. If one looked closely they might be able to see the entrenched scars of advance civilization under the swirling soot-black clouds. It was hard to believe that not too long ago it had been capable of supporting life, but that was all in the past. A left behind toy broken by one of humanity’s tantrums. Still, it did hold some nostalgia for me and the ten thousand people who had the money and the mind to give it up. Our new toy wasn’t as nice as the old one. It was small, grey, and bland. The only settlement was a series of glass domes connected by glass tubes which were constantly being pumped full of recycled oxygen. It hardly compared to the life we once had, but to the people who were unlucky enough to survive the chaos that changed the world from blue to red it must have looked like heaven. In reality it was only a higher circle of hell.
A bell blared throughout the residential dome signaling the start of the meeting. I left my 8'x8' cube, joining the hobbling mass heading towards the Courtyard, the only dome large enough to hold the entire population. The connector tubes were clogged almost immediately with sweaty, hairy bodies. Many of them reeked of alcohol, or at least what was considered up here to be a viable alcohol substitute. Somewhere a child was producing an obnoxious wail, its pitch only growing higher as the movement grew slower. No other sound was willing to compete. I caught a glimpse of the embarrassed mother trying to calm the little noise-maker down. I didn’t feel the least bit sorry, no one did, she knew that you weren’t supposed to bring children to the meeting. She had likely believed that the rule didn’t apply to her. The rule was only for rowdy children who couldn’t handle adult situations. Surly her child, a prim and proper young man, would be able to handle a simple meeting. How wrong she had been. Finally, someone couldn’t take it anymore and yelled above the wail, “shut that thing up or I’ll come over there and shove a sock down its throat.” Surprisingly, the beastly noise did cease, but only for a moment. Once the child’s brain processed the threat made against him, the wailing returned louder than ever.
It was several more minutes before the tube was able to unclog itself and everyone was able scurry into the Courtyard. There weren’t any chairs, only a stage where people could voice their position through a microphone. Anyone who desired to would have to sit on the grass. It wasn’t real grass—nothing in the Courtyard was real—it didn’t need to be. Fake grass, fake trees, fake bushes, and fake flowers all made to look and feel real like a museum diorama depicting the world of the past. 
A heavily bearded man wearing a baggy, orange jumpsuit walked onstage, causing the already quiet room to descend into silence. “Hello, and welcome to the Courtyard. As I’m sure you already know, I am the current supervisor of this station, and we are here to discuss how this station should be managed and governed now that Earth is no longer capable. I’m sure you all would like to get started as soon as possible, so let me just say one thing.  To keep this as smooth and efficient as possible I encourage you to only send your preselected representatives up to speak.” There was a courteous round of applause, then the representatives walked onto the stage. Mics were handed out and the meeting began. It started civilly enough with each of them giving their name and what group of like-minded people they were a part of. But graciousness had no place in the creation of this new society, and it quickly escalated to a scream filled debate where people lacking the wit to properly use a door would jump from their patch of artificial grass and make their lackluster opinion heard.
Despite the multitude of voices and opinions, there were really only two positions. The Natives with their dull orange jumpsuits, and the Settlers with their sleek black and white apparel. They were children fighting over a toy. The natives were the ones who built, maintained, and lived on the station for a few generations. They were the ones that knew how to keep the station running and fix any problems that may occur, and they believed they had a right to it. The settlers were the people who were rich or important enough to secure a one-way trip from their deteriorating home. They believed that the situation had evolved far beyond what a group of undereducated workers could handle, and that their experience in building global corporations and leading millions of people would make the station prosper.
Then there was me. The lone black sheep. I hadn’t been here long enough to be a Native or rich enough to be a Settler. I was simply a person who saw the future of our planet and took steps to leave it. I spent years saving up money to make the costly move to the Moon. Everyone I knew thought I was crazy. “You’re being paranoid, it won’t get that bad,” they said, but it did get that bad. I left the Blue Marble only a few months before the rest of the world became aware of its fast-approaching fate. When I left my house for the final time, I remember my neighbor telling me, with arms crossed and look of smug superiority, that I spent all my money “to go freeze on that dark, cold moon.” I bet he’s nice and warm next to those atomic fires.
The meeting boomed on. A pressure in my head started to pound on the inside of my skull. Words lost their meaning and became mere screeches. The audience transformed into a blur of color and motion that was only distinguished as human by the farthest reaches of my mind. The only thing that I was absolutely certain of was that this meeting was pointless. There wasn’t going to be a victor or an agreement. There wasn’t even going to be a conclusion. It would only end when people yelled their voices right out of their throats. There was no way of knowing how long that would take and I wasn’t going to stay around to find out. The pressure was already becoming unbearable. I got up, left the Courtyard, traversed the tubes, found my room, and fell to my bed.
The pressure in my head slowly subsided, but my brain refused to forget the awful squawks. The noise assaulted my body, shaking it with viciousness I didn’t think possible. Was there no way escape the noise? Could I not force my brain to silence it? Apparently not, because the assault worsened. I groaned and opened my eyes to see a boy with tears in his eyes and snot in his nose. It occurred to me that I had accidentally fallen asleep, and the shaking had not been a product of my mind but an external force. The boy, who I recognized as the same kid from the tube, grabbed my arm. “You need to hurry! You have to do something,” he wailed. He forced me out of bed and made me follow him to Courtyard, the source of his distress. The meeting was over by the time I got there, but the participates had lost much more than their voices. Corpses littered the floor and stage as other children stood shell-shocked between them. It didn’t take much effort to figure out what had happened to them. All I needed to do was look at their stretched mouths and blueish complexation. Each dome of the station had its own supply of oxygen and its own pumps to recycle the carbon dioxide back into oxygen, but they could only pump so fast. The entire station had been over capacity already, and cramming the entire adult population into the Courtyard had probably pushed the pumps beyond their limit, and all that yelling had only made it worse. All the available oxygen must have been devoured rather quickly, and the fools had been too wrapped up in their future planning to notice the lack of air entering their lungs. The last of humanity had argued itself to death.
The kid who brought me here tugged on my sleeve, obviously asking me to do something, so I did. I disconnected myself from his grip and moved through the sea of bodies. The children, who had not been present at humanity’s last meeting, watched my movements with mesmerized devotion. As I stepped onto the stage, I retrieved a mic, ripping it from the finger of a representative who seemed unwilling to let it go, and told the children how the new world was going to work—how my new world was going to work.