Jenny is sitting hunched on the foredeck of the icebreaker Lucida, staring out at the static expanse of Antarctic ice that has been her lot now for more than a month. There is a seemingly endless expanse of severe solway blue-grey, slowly giving way to a glacier blue sky across the approach to an indistinct horizon. The land-ice is flat, punctuated here and there by small, unassuming rocks, which reliably fade under scrutiny into the blank face of the continent. The one exception, to the right, is an ice shelf that rises hundreds of metres up into the air, ending in jagged edges that puncture the sky. The cliff continues for a few miles before curving off to an unseen vertex beyond the line of sight - stark, focal, and looming in an otherwise sparse and featureless landscape, and providing the only visual cue to a sense of discrete distance and shadow.

Lucida became stranded here four weeks ago, having apparently run aground onto a patch of indistinguishable land-ice on the final approach to the cliff, which was Jenny's intended destination. The rapidly melting permafrost at the poles had been revealing new contours of the antarctic continent for years, baring patches of Earth's skin that had not seen sunlight for hundreds of thousands of years. The appearance of a new form on the continent was typically not of much interest to the small community of polar scientists on Earth, and certainly not to anyone else, with the underlying shapes having been revealed decades before by ground-penetrating radar, and contemporary satellite imagery being enough to track and measure the newcomers as they emerged.

It was the satellite imagery that brought Jenny's attention to this cliff in particular. Though it had the usual outward appearance, yet more layers of ice over layers of ice, suggesting an eventual rock promontory, the shape it suggested was slightly unusual around the edges. It was nothing quantifiable, but it was enough of a draw to finally take Colin, her PhD student, on a fieldwork mission, to collect ice cores and samples they could ostensibly use to explore the history of life on the planet, but more practically to fulfill Colin's graduation requirement of a fieldwork trip.

Their journey started two months earlier from Perth, a small expedition of academics having bribed their way onto a journey chartered by the spacing company Bartok, which Jenny had heard from a colleague was heading past the shelf on a circle journey around the pole to perform some prospecting work for the future extraction of radioactive precursors. Outside of the occasional eccentric trillionaire with a special interest, ship-hopping tended to be the only way scientific fieldwork at the poles took place. Since the second space age began in the 2050s, and moreso since the great egress began in the early years of 2100, the institutions of a space-frenzied and now quickly depopulating Earth no longer saw it as a priority to fund or in any way encourage research of the Earth itself. The spacing technologies having been developed by giant corporations using government funding models more abstracted and less scrutinisable than public grants seemed to provide a final proof for the prevailing belief in a capitalistic model of research. Likewise, exploring any uncomfortable truths around the mass strip-mining and burning of rocket fuel was not especially appreciated. After all, why did it matter, if we are all leaving, have left, for a colony on a distant, unspoiled planet? This all occurred as an acceleration of the general decline of academic funding and interest that, as Jenny's colleagues at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge often joked, seemed to have started some time before the Enlightenment.

The kind of research Jenny and her colleagues were here to perform, that of observation and exploration, rather than towards development of some technology supportive of space travel or habitation on distant planets, was now vanishingly rare; its vestiges centered around the few remaining ancient big-name institutions, which subsisted meagerly on tourism and a continued legal protection of the title "doctor," still a sought-after vanity across some strata of the ultra-rich. Accordingly, the few scientists left mostly filled roles that fell somewhere between actors employed to bring the last moments of Pompeii to life for a steady stream of gawkers from the colonies, and daycare chaperones for those irretrievably corrupted by generational wealth. The science, as ever, was performed in the margins.

Jenny often found herself lost in these thoughts while staring out at the ice, her own decisions dissolving into the billions of decisions of others that always led her right back here. Nothing to do but stare out at what is, remembering what has been. The great circle snake that seemed to eat up more and more of her time: never full, never depleted.

Her awareness of another presence on the deck was eventual. Turning her head around, she saw the captain - a tall, wild-bearded, pink-faced man called Sequil, who Jenny imagined would have been at home as a lone hillside woodcutter in tales of an old America, covered by trees and life. Sequil spoke rarely, and he did not speak now, though he inclined his head forward in acknowledgement of Jenny's gaze, his eyes remaining fixed on the horizon. She liked the captain - she liked that he was quiet, seemed to understand. She turned back around to look out, as if to join him.

Lucida was home now to Jenny, the two other researchers, Colin and Soren, the captain, a small crew, and Gellan, a Bartok man, apparently the person charged with performing the materials analysis. They were a strange bunch - anyone who chose to remain on Earth was viewed by most with a palpable degree of suspicion, as if such a choice were evidence of a kind of unincorporated madness; a sign of an alien value system inconceivable to a society that has grown up to believe in an inevitable starbound apotheosis.

The crew of Lucida were composed of the kind of people who would otherwise have been crew on a starship, mostly polite but serious academy engineers, who would likely have been barred from the egress on account of some criminal background. Barring was now the primary form of punishment for crimes considered more serious by the dwindling Earth government, a punishment levied in the absence of a state with the kind of organisation and labour force to be able to maintain a prison, with prosecution generally only pursued at the behest of a powerful individual or the pique of collective outrage on the galaxy social media channels. A few others chose to stay.

There was a camaraderie shared amongst all of those who remained on the planet. Those who were not barred by any legalistic mechanism nevertheless shared the air of fatalism, as if they were just as permanently bound to the Earth. It was considered impolite to ask, and lines of social division tended to be drawn more between the earthbound, as they were increasingly referred to, and the visitors.