The planet is failing. Catastrophically. Food is scarce. The environment is revolting. Billions died from war, starvation and disease. Cancer, once cured, returned with an aggressive vengeance. We called it neo-cancer. The human race is dying. Was dying. Fourteen hundred Earth years have passed. The Earth, and Mars, still orbit the sun, but the only people they carry are on their way to becoming fossils.
One hundred and twenty three years was the timetable most models projected. One hundred and twenty three years until extinction, not just of humanity, but of most mammals on the planet. Life on Earth would persist, probably still does, but only in its smallest, most resilient forms.
Mars provided a temporary reprieve for a few hundred thousand, but colony life was not without its dangers, and the domes weren’t designed to last forever. The colonies on Mars would have lived long enough to mourn mankind’s extinction on Earth. But they would have followed soon after. I’d like to believe they found a way to pull through, but I’m a realist.
While many people were still dedicated to solving the problems at home, most agreed that humanity’s survival would lie elsewhere in the galaxy, specifically at Cognata. But now? Without the groundwork tasked to the Galahad and its crew, humanity’s future is as uncertain as my ability to carry Tom to the airlock and send him spiraling into space while traveling faster than light.
Will I even be able to open the airlock?
“Hey!”
The loud voice triggers a physical reaction. I kick Tom hard, twice, driving my heel into his spine, hoping to return him to the temporary afterlife, or at least paralyze him. But he doesn’t flail or fight back.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
My eyes flick up.
A naked man, his skin clean and tan, barrels down the hall, fists clenched.
“José, thank god,” I say.
José Hernandez is a funny guy. He’s also our second in command. He’ll know how to turn us around and get our floundering mission back on track. Plus, he can help me carry Tom to the airlock.
I smile at him and say, “Grab his ankles will you?”
“You fucking psycho!” José shouts, lowering his shoulders and gaining speed.
“José, it’s okay,” I tell him. “Tom is dead. You don’t need to—”
With two seconds to go before impact, my addled brain understands. José isn’t looking at Tom. He’s looking at me, the man covered in blood, dragging a corpse with the screwdriver in his back. In his mind, I’m the mass murderer of the crew.
“José! Wai—”
The impact lifts me off my feet.
José screams as the three of us descend, a naked corpse sandwich of flailing limbs and emotions. My head strikes the floor. Something cracks. I expect consciousness to fade. Or my life to end—again—this time at the hands of my commander. But I’m not dead, or even unconscious. Pain echoes through my head, but that’s the worst of it. And José doesn’t appear over me.
I roll to my side, my vision scrolling up one white wall, across the morning-lit ceiling and down the far wall, which hasn’t been marred by blood.
José lies atop Tom. They look like lovers, enjoying a silent snuggle. Except for the blood. The dry on Tom, the wet dribbling from José’s mouth.
“What...did you do to us?” José asks, his voice a gurgle.
“It was Tom,” I tell him, crawling closer, flinching as each movement sends fresh pain through my probably fractured skull. “Tom killed everyone.”
“Liar!” José shouts with enough force to spray my face with flecks of warm blood. And then more softly, “Fucking li—”
He goes limp, eyes looking beyond me.
What happened? I grip José’s shoulders with shaking hands and pull. He comes away, but I feel like I’m fighting a ghost, pulling the body toward the floor. Then he comes free and rolls onto his back. Blood oozes from a hole in his chest.
“Oh... Oh, no...” Driven by the combined force of two grown men falling to an unforgiving floor, the screwdriver was driven up through Tom’s body and into José’s chest.
“Why didn’t you stop?” I ask José. “We could have figured this out. We could have—” My voice falters when I back into the wall.
A warm tear rolls down my cheek and taps against the white floor. I look down at the drop, red with blood peeled from my skin. A second falls beside it. No longer caring if Tom returns to kill me a thousand times, I hiccup a moan, and then sob, beating my fists against the walls and venting more pain and sorrow than I’ve endured in my entire life until this point. Not just because my crew and all of humanity is doomed, but because I know my own personal hell is just beginning.
5
Tom’s lifeless eyes stare at the ceiling. They don’t blink. His life, and killing spree, are over. And through some sort of twisted freak misunderstanding, he managed to take one last victim to the grave beside him. José, like Tom, is perma-dead. The Grim Reaper’s grip on them doesn’t falter, while I seem to slip through his skeletal fingers like a well-oiled pig.
I’m not sure how long I’ve been sitting on the floor, staring at the bodies, lost in a strange kind of shock. I’ve been existing in my own thoughts for the past ten years, conjuring fantasies while awake and dreaming while asleep, and sometimes not knowing one from the other. In all that time, I’ve gone to some very dark places, some of which felt very real. But I don’t think this is in my head.
Because I can smell the dead. Can taste their blood in the air, stinging my dried out tongue.
And it’s not just Tom and José. It’s all the others, too, settling into the first stages of decomposition. They’re going to really start stinking soon. Become bloated. Seep gas from a variety of orifices. Luckily, our bladders and bowels were emptied before cryo-sleep, so the mess is limited to the dead, and their blood.
I’ll leave the blood to the drones. But the bodies...
“I hate you,” I tell Tom. “Someday, I’m going to shoot you out the airlock.”
I picture Tom’s body pin-wheeling into open space. Forever. Alone. Like me.
I choke on a sob. It’s a horrible fate, even for a corpse. “I don’t hate you. Not really. It’s not your fault. Going crazy isn’t really a choice.”
I push myself off the floor, hissing through my teeth as the dried blood peels skin cells and hair from my ass.
Back on my feet, I shake off the feeling of hopelessness inspired by the carnage all around me. I don’t yet know the full extent of my situation. The Galahad is moving, but I don’t know where to, or how fast. Turning around might be simpler than I think. And I’m not entirely alone.
I have Capria. She’s still asleep, and I have no intention of waking her to this mess, but she’s alive. While I would love nothing more than to have a companion right now, a second mind to sort through this shit, there’s a chance she might make the same assumption as José. And the chivalrous part of me wants to protect her from the pain of seeing her friends and crew torn apart. She’ll need to be told the truth eventually, but being told, or even shown the ship’s video log, will hurt less than a single breath of this dirty-penny-scented air.
I stand there, naked and chilled, wondering what to do. I’m good at following orders. I like taking direction. Excel at it. Like a guided missile, I just need to be aimed. But I’m on my own.
Spreadsheet this mess, I think at myself and cringe. It doesn’t seem an entirely human choice to make, but then I spend a lot of my time with non-living and non-human artificial intelligences of my own creation, including those piloting the drones that will scour the walls, floors, and ceilings clean.
There are several tasks that need doing in the next few hours. I need to eat. And drink. It’s been ten years, so if I want to live, I need to... My planning hits a wall of sludge and slows to a crawl.
“I can’t die,” I tell the corpses at my feet. Tom probably figured out as much before he was killed, but boredom isn’t a problem for him anymore. “So let’s tack that lower down on the
list, if only to see if I feel the effects of dehydration.” I unpin the non-existent note and re-pin it lower on the imaginary list.
“Why can’t I die?” I ask José. “Did you know? Did anyone?” I look to my right, down the curved hallway lined by cryo-chambers. Capria’s down there. I could bounce these questions off her if she was awake, but she wouldn’t know, either. The answers are on the Galahad, hidden somewhere within the culmination of all human knowledge backed up, compressed, and encrypted a hundred different ways, on a massive variety of media, to ensure its safe passage. I helped put it there. I can retrieve it. But it will take time. Probably a lot of time.
I unpin the new imaginary note with a pop, and re-pin it below food and water. While I’m curious about my strange new physical state, the why and how of it can wait until bigger problems are solved.
Like where I’m headed and how I can turn around.
The AI guiding Galahad, known as Gal for short, will avoid any obstacles along the way, so there is no danger of flying through an asteroid field or a star, but the longer we move forward, the longer it will take to get back. If I can figure that out. Gal is smart. Tom made sure of it. But she’s also programmed to only obey ranking...
My head lolls back, mouth agape. Tom handled Gal’s final coding. If we’re moving on a course he set, he either left himself a backdoor or added himself to the command hierarchy. Another pin goes in the checklist.
They’re all big problems that require solutions, and solving them sounds almost like fun. I’m comfortable sitting at a screen, or in VR, and manipulating code. Dead bodies, not so much.
But the decent human being in me says that the dead crew is priority number one.
If I was on Earth, I might feel compelled to bury each and every one of them. I’d probably manage a proper grave for the first one in the ground, but the rest would likely lie shallow. They’re dead. Empty shells of the people they once were. And I’m not the pinnacle of human conditioning. But in space...
I see an image of my bloating crew members spiraling out into space as I open the airlock. My mind adds a soundtrack. Stars and Stripes Forever. I remember seeing fireworks on the 4th of July. A marching band played the song while lights lit up the sky. That was the last American Independence Day anyone celebrated, because celebrating it required an America. But the bombastic music fits the mental image perfectly. First the explosion, and then the mass of twirling limbs.
I smile, and even though I know it’s wrong, it sticks.
The song twiddles from my pinched lips as I head down the hall, stopping in front of each open cryo-chamber, counting bodies. The tune peters out when I reach the last open door and speak the number aloud. “Thirty six.” Plus me, and Capria. Twelve people made it off Galahad. Twelve people without supplies, or food, or advance knowledge of what they were dropping into. They could all be dead already. From deadly air, from wounds inflicted by Tom, from exposure, starvation, or even alien predators.
The darkest parts of my imagination spin to life, twisting downward.
What if no one followed us to Cognata?
What if things on Earth fell apart, and the Mars colonies never built another FTL ship?
It’s been fourteen hundred years. What if Capria and I are all that’s left?
I start whistling again. Avoidance is the best medicine for questions that have no answers.
Tom was whistling, too, I remember. Am I going mad?
I know I’m not.
I wish I was.
Then I wouldn’t have to do what comes next.
It takes eight hours to drag the dead, and their severed parts, back to their respective cryo-beds. In that time, I don’t eat or drink and Stars and Stripes Forever becomes a whisper on my parched lips. But I don’t grow any more weary than I was at the start. And I don’t pass out from hunger or low blood sugar, both of which should be striking me down.
Tom goes last. His heels carve two clean paths through the blood-coated floor as I drag him by his wrists. The dried blood chips away from the ultra-smooth, white surface. Compared to my heavy lifting, the cleaning drones are going to have an easy time. Not only will the blood come up easily, but they also don’t feel and don’t care about where the blood came from. They’ll just see red where there should be white, and they’ll take care of it.
Tom flops down into the cryo-bed. His stiff body bobbles to the side and nearly rolls right out of the bed. I catch him under his arms and guide him back, an invalid in my grip. Stiff joints grind and pop as I push him flat. His back thumps, and I realize I’ve left the screwdriver in him.
“No way,” I tell him. “I’m done. With you.” I point at the cryo-beds in the room, four of them holding dead bodies. “With all of you.”
I step back and activate the bed. Like the others, Tom will be perfectly preserved until sometime at a much further date, when I can get them some place with soil. As the machine whirs to life, hissing protective gasses around the corpse, the hatch descends.
And then it stops.
With just an inch to go, a warning light flashes. The screen beside the device blinks the word: Obstruction.
I close my eyes. A manic anger wells. I breathe through it and then bend at the waist. It’s the God-damned screwdriver, jutting up just a little too far. I could try forcing the hatch shut, but there is a chance it would punch through the glass and I’d have to drag Tom to another cryo-bed.
Clenching my fists, I gently tap the digital Open button and wait for the hatch to rise.
When I look down at Tom’s face, the anger, the rage, breaks free.
“Neeargh!” The dull thudding slap of my fist striking meat plays like a metronome for a full four count. Then I grip the screwdriver shank, and pull. Dead meat slurps. Ribs crack. Skin tears. It takes three hard yanks, but the screwdriver comes free. With a scream, I hurl the tool through the open door. It slams against the far wall, stained dark brown, and clatters to the floor, ending my bout with madness. The first round goes to sorrow and despair.
Breathing hard, I reach out and gently tap the Close button. The hatch lowers, hisses as the seal sets, and then goes quiet.
In the seconds following Tom’s entombing, silence creeps over me like a specter. It speaks to me, delivering the haunting message, ‘You are alone.’
6
Hot lashes rip at my back, scouring blood from skin, and part of me wishes it would cut deeper still. The water collecting around the drain swirls with tiny chips of brown blood shifting back to red, like rotten fruit punch. Despite fruit being a rare luxury on Earth, and non-existent on Mars, we still had fruit punch. There was, after all, no fruit in it. But there were synthetic vitamins, minerals, and a chemical concoction meant to simulate a blend of fruits—grapes, pineapple, strawberry, and cherry, if the packaging was to be believed. I had a strawberry once. It was tart. Not quite ripe. But it still tasted a hell of a lot better than the fruit punch. Less red than the blood washing down the drain, where it will be filtered and recycled for a later shower.
When the water doesn’t clean the blood out from every wrinkle and crevice, I use a brush, shushing its stiff bristles against my skin, burning it pink. Designed to clean away stubborn grease, the micro-bristles make short work of the blood, and my top layer of skin.
But I don’t mind the pain.
I welcome it.
It helps stave off the survivor’s guilt rising from the depths like a great white shark, jaws agape, teeth bared, nictitating lenses raised. It will eat me whole if I give in.
When I can’t see any more blood in the water, I scrub for ten more minutes. This shower, upon waking, should have been done in two minutes flat, cleaning the cryo-chems from my skin, and helping me wake up. But the system was prepared to handle fifty people, not one, so there’s time to spare.
I wince and look at my arm. The brush tore through my skin. Fresh blood beads and is whisked away to the drain. I watch the long, red line seal back up. Like new. I lift both arms and inspect them. Despi
te having rubbed both raw, they look smooth-skinned and devoid of irritation.
“What did they do to me?” Water tickles my lips, tempting me to drink, but I’m afraid of getting blood in my mouth. “Water off.”
The stinging spray of too-hot water snaps off. The drain at my feet seals shut as a round vent opens in the ceiling. A vortex of warm air swirls around me, evaporating the water coating the cylindrical walls and my body. The moisture is whisked away into the ceiling. If I still had the long brown hair of my youth, I’d look like one of those weird troll dolls I saw in a pop-culture history digi-guide. I rub a hand over my now shaven head, letting the millimeter-tall bristles tickle my hand.
When the only liquid remaining in the shower stall is hidden within the confines of my body, the door unlatches and slides open. The large sanitation room beyond the door has twenty-five shower stalls on one wall, and twenty-five toilets on the opposite wall, each with a man’s name above it. In addition to cleansing the crews’ bodies, both inside and out, sensors in the drains analyze waste, allowing the automated systems to track our individual well-being and adjust our diets accordingly.
Since I’m still running on empty, I forgo a visit to the all-knowing toilet and head for my locker instead. Inside is a single, loose-fitting flight suit. It’s slate gray and very soft, with built in foot soles, like what kids wear to bed. They’re loose-fitting to avoid looking sexy, and they lack any kind of insignia, rank or name tag. One crew, with one mission, one mind, and now, only one member. I slip into the smooth fabric. Its softness comforts me. A slim magnetic seal up the front snaps together. Tomorrow, if I return to my locker, I’ll find a fresh garment, supplied by Gal. But I don’t think I’ll change any time soon. After all, there’s no one left to impress.
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