ACT ONE - We Have Never Seen the Sea

**SCENE 1 - THE SCHOOLROOM**

*Lights up on a classroom aboard the Perihelion, stark and utilitarian but decorated by students: crayon drawings of landscapes nobody aboard has ever seen. Mountains. Beaches. A sun that is not a pinpoint of light behind triple-laminate glass.*

TEACHER ADISA: *(surveying the room)* Good morning. Today we are going to talk about what we lost.

STUDENT 1: The archive?

TEACHER ADISA: The archive. One hundred and forty terabytes of cultural history. Art, music, language, film. All gone in fifteen seconds of power surge. *(beat)* What do you remember? From before it failed?

STUDENT 2: My grandmother used to sing something. I don't know the name.

STUDENT 3: I had a video of the ocean. I watched it every night to fall asleep.

*The class falls quiet. Something heavy in the room.*

TEACHER ADISA: We have a choice. We can document what each of us remembers. Every fragment. Every incomplete song, every half-remembered film, every story someone's grandparent told them about a place that none of us have seen.

*She moves to the board. Writes: WHAT WE REMEMBER.*

TEACHER ADISA: Or we can do something more ambitious.

*(The lights shift. A single spot on her.)*

**SONG: "BORROWED GROUND"**

*We never stood on the ground that made us* *We never breathed the air that named us* *But somewhere in the dark between the stars* *We carry everything we are*

*Our feet have never felt the morning frost* *Our hands have never turned the soil* *But tell me, tell me — is a thing still lost* *If you can still remember what it sounded like?*

*(The class joins, tentatively at first, then fully — they know this somehow, without knowing they know it.)*

*We carry everything we are.*

*We carry everything we are.*