The Darwin Effect by Mark Lukens

Humanity had spent tens of thousands of years building their civilization just to wipe themselves out. If he and the others weren’t on these spaceships then the universe would never even know that humans had ever existed.
    Abraham pictured the wasteland the Earth must be now. He pictured weeds and vegetation taking over buildings, some kind of life thriving no matter how bad the radiation was. Life was tenacious, and if humans killed themselves off—along with many other species—then other species would evolve and take over. Life would go on. He imagined mutated insects and rodents as the only form of animal life, and they would probably be the only form of animal life for millions of years to come.
    “Oh God, why did we do it to ourselves?” Abraham whispered and then he closed his eyes.
    He didn’t want to go to sleep, but to his surprise he found that he was getting tired. Maybe he needed to sleep; maybe he needed some real sleep, not suspended animation.

TWELVE
    R olle couldn’t sleep, and he didn’t want to lie on his bed in his room. His muscles felt sore and even his bones seemed to ache. He felt tired, but he also felt like he needed to move. He grabbed one of the white bath towels that he’d torn out of the shrink-wrapped plastic pack and took it with him down the hall to the rec room.
    He thought one of the others might’ve had the same idea about working off some steam, but no one was in the exercise room when he got there.
    The rec room was pretty big. A row of storage lockers took up one whole wall to the left, and against the back wall was some dusty old exercise equipment. To the right was a set of different sized dumbbells lined up on a metal rack bolted to the wall. The whole middle of the room was taken up by sections of plastic-covered foam mats laid out on the floor.
    Rolle walked over to the rack of dumbbells. The wall above the dumbbells was one whole mirror and he looked at himself for a moment. He seemed thinner than he remembered and he’d never had a full beard and long hair like this before. He planned on eventually shaving his beard off and cutting his hair, but he was surprised to find that he kind of liked this look—maybe he would stick with it for a while.
    In one corner of the rec room, next to the rack of weights, was a metal bin with an assortment of workout equipment and accessories stuffed down inside: workout gloves, a jump rope, stretchy cables with handles, hand grips, weighted bands for wrists and ankles. In the other corner there were a few large plastic balls held in place by cargo netting.
    He inspected the four pieces of exercise equipment next. It was pretty standard stuff: a treadmill that was plugged into the metal wall; a stationary bike; a rowing machine; and a four-station exercise machine with stacked weights, a pull-down bar, a leg lift, a pullup bar, and a bench press.
    With a sigh he laid his towel down over the seat of the exercise machine. He decided he would pass on any weightlifting for now and maybe just do some cardio … start slowly and build up his stamina and strength. He had no idea how his body was kept alive and functioning inside the cryochamber these last hundred years, frozen somehow MAC had said, but all he knew was that he felt like shit.
    He hopped on the stationary bike and slipped his sneaker-like shoes into the stirrups on the pedals and the display screen came to life automatically, beeping and lighting up. As he pedaled, the large black screen displayed information in bright green numbers and letters: his pulse, his distance, his speed, calories burned. Just like any other exercise machine he’d ever used, he thought.
    The bike was quiet, the front wheel he powered with his pedaling whispered along. It didn’t take long to build up a sweat and soon his heart was pounding inside his chest. He wished he would’ve brought along some water in a cup from his bathroom, but he didn’t plan on working out too long, just enough to get his