With Our Dying Breath

by Unknown

  Oswald was cast high into the air by a powerful shockwave in the air. A sharp, unbearable pain bore its way deep into his ears until it disappeared just as suddenly, taking his hearing with it. Something thick and warm trickled from his ears, nose, and right eye. Earth and sky tumbled by in turn, the new silence a welcome disability. For a split second he was reminded of his free-fall training as he was buffeted wildly, unable to even see how high he was.

  An immense flash in the distance strained the vacc-suit's filter and left an image of the land far below smoldering in Oswald's good eye. He was several kilometers above Earth's broken and bleeding body, flying amidst countless mountains that dripped glowing lava. Those mountains exploded a moment before the final shockwave instantly stripped Oswald's armor from his flesh and his flesh from his bones. No pain accompanied him as flew off into the final black. Earth and her last son died together.

  The End

  The medical preservative was growing cold again; or was it just him? The gentle waves generated by the tank moving along its tracks caused his shriveled limbs to bob slightly. He hadn't used those limbs for over one-hundred years and the movement didn't register. But the cold did. It had been bothering him greatly of late and with a sub-vocal command only legible to his venerable life support computer, he raised the temperature in his tank a few degrees. He couldn't remember if he'd ever turned it back down since the last time.

  The tank stopped in front of a picture showing a crowd of long dead people celebrating some happy event now lost in history. Behind them towering buildings cast shadows on bustling, dancing streets. Long ago he knew the name of the city and even the names of the man and woman carrying smiling children on their shoulders. They were the reason this picture stood where it did; they were his ancestors. Three or four generations? His life had spanned several generations by the reckoning of the people before him. That, coupled with the fact that he was the last generation, made the term obsolete.

  He could look up their names if he wanted to. But like the name he once used, it was forgotten and useless information. That picture was there because he knew their story and it was important to them. They had carried those children to safety before the destruction of his world. And those children had fought to keep their own children alive in deep space, who fought to do the same for the children who had been his parents. Or something like that. But the enemy had destroyed his world fifty years before he was born.

  The tank sloshed again as he positioned himself before shelves of shriveled homunculi. They were his children from long ago, beloved failures from long ago when he still tried to restore the human race. They were curled and shriveled in their own tiny fluid filled jars, looking just like their father. Some belonged to her, and one or two had belonged to him and her from centuries ago when their bodies had still been able to couple. Hope had died bit by bit along with these little ones and his pickled body had lost the ability and desire to spread life long ago.

  He longed to reach out and touch his children one last time, maybe even put their tiny bodies in his own tank to provide at least a semblance of human touch as his last day faded finally into night. It was a macabre vision and anything that touched his long abstinent nerves would either go unfelt or feel like erupting flames. They would stay peacefully floating in their mortuary jars.

  Other mementos of five centuries of failures to save humanity lined these walls, but he didn't care for them. They didn't matter now, serving only as a reminder that even with the generations given to him to bring his people back from extinction, he had failed. She had failed too, and that was why she never entered his chamber. The hatch slid open as the tank approached on its track and he went to see what she was doing on her last day.

  He knew, of course. She'd be staring at the stars. He thought of her as being dead long ago as the hope she cast into the universe had not returned to her. It was dark, cold, and hollow, like she was. Like they both had been for long ages.

  Her tank was on the outer hull as expected. He brought his own tank to the nearby portal. Where she always looked to the stars, he cast his optical replacements to the spinning ruins of the two planets below. Their blood and bodies had merged into a twirling morass of indistinguishable asteroids strewn around the uncaring star that had birthed his people. Somewhere in that mess were the remains—no matter how small—of the man who had crushed both planets in rage and revenge. This was who he had striven against all these years and ultimately defeated him with the death of all mankind.

  The people in the picture had escaped Ay-Ya at the last moment. The woman was sufficiently ranked to earn a slot on a rocket barely ready to launch. Her diaries told that other fleeing rockets had been pulled into the atmosphere of the encroaching planet and burned in its skies.

  Hers was a tale of narrow escapes and luck that she attributed to a benevolent creator. Their rocket had fled to the third planet where terraforming had started. The refugee crisis grew and after several months they were forced to flee by panicked colonial administrators with little choice. Some weeks later the orbital station and the overflowing colony below were pulverized by the ice blocks launched by the Earthmen before their final murderous end.

  He could not hate them, though they had ruined much that was good and killed his entire race. His forebears had after all done the same to his people. If the Destroyer had killed Ay-Ya, he would have destroyed Earth in return. Then the Destroyer would retaliate and so would he. It was his belief however, that his forebears had destroyed the planet where humanity was born. Earth, not Ay-Ya. His forebears would likely have killed him for saying so.

  At one point, he had learned the Destroyer's name. He and she were still desperately flying to anyplace known to them that humans had once lived. Sol is what the Earthmen called their home and it was a beautiful place. He had seen pictures of Earth in its azure splendor and felt sorry for its death. The Earth colonies had mostly been destroyed in the war or abandoned when their own supplies ran out. A few remote homesteads survived a little longer, but they had no way to survive without Earth's verdant grace.

  The same was sadly true of his own people. They had enjoyed fourhundred years of peace after the Earth people were exterminated. Advances in colonial technology and terraforming allowed some colonies to live on, able to scrape by on the meager foods they were able to produce. He and she had been born on such a colony to a live dedicated to the survival of their species.

  But they had died too. Even advanced machines broke down, as did advanced societies. The power plant on their home colony failed and instead of seeking aid, they rashly tried to snatch replacements from another. It was a sad chain of events that left him and her to return to a dead system. That system had been their birthplace and their home.

  As they explored the other logged colonies, they found the same. Desperate raids and bloody gashes in ecosystems so fragile they could not recover. Fear of death led to actions that brought about its realization; self-fulfilling prophecy. Over and over. He and she had to kill more than once as their ambassadorial missions became the target of starving wolves. He and she started avoiding those systems where they did find survivors.

  He moved looked at her tank through the portal. She refused to answer his calls but he knew she was still alive. Her mind was again off in those distant stars. They had agreed this would be their final day and he pushed away the urge to scan desperately once again for some secret human base. He'd looked them over for hundreds of years.

  They had found much information in Sol. What the Earthers had called Saturn Station was largely undamaged. Once power was restored the ancient, rugged computers gave away their secrets easily. It was from these records he had learned the Destroyer's name.

  His tank followed the track into Saturn Station now. He had attached it to their starcraft over her protestations. But even then his secondary plan had included saving all knowledge possible. Despite the crimes of the Destroyer, his people deserved a voice in the repository he planned. It was anoth
er place she would not go.

  The remains of three humans floated freely in their own preservative tanks. They had been given honor in the ancient Ay-Yon way so he assumed they had been considered worthy adversaries. One of their kin had after all destroyed two entire planets.

  His tank slid smoothly on a final tour of the Earth station. It had served well in the war that gave birth to it. It was a place of function over form, its barely concealed equipment, sharp corners, and cramped spaces contrasting the smooth lines and graceful spaces of his and her own craft. It was the fossil of an ugly old dinosaur that once had deadly teeth.

  There was one chamber left that held any spark of hope. It was the repository, planned long ago and realized only within the last eighty years. He and she had gathered every piece of data, every record, and every entry in every journal they had found in their five-hundred year search. It was written in every Ay-Yon and Earth language, converted to binary, and accompanied by many linguistic cyphers to aid any who might find this haunted library of a dead people.

  He had never found any trace of others in the over one-hundred systems he and she had explored. The alien world discovered by Earth but conquered by the Ay-Yon had revealed nothing. It was a deadly world and no trace of the creators of that place had ever been found. Had some ancient enemy wiped them from the universe, too? He would never know. Nor would any human, unless they came from far, far from here, possibly finally hearing the cries of their distant, dying cousins. He accepted it was possible, the feeble yet uncomforting hope that his people would not completely fade away. But his time was drawing nigh. And with him, would pass the last human.

  "I am ready," she said simply. The ancient computers had long ago perfected translating the noises that barely escaped their ancient throats.

  "I am coming." His tank slid back to her hatch. Her tank now faced in through the portal. Though their wrinkled, atrophied faces could make no expression, he knew what she was about to do. "Don't leave me."

  "It is our time to go. I know you will watch. I have not spoken much to you this decade, but you are my beloved. I want to see you at the last."

  "Don't leave me."

  "I love you. I believe I will see you and all the others soon." Her twisted, wrinkled hand wriggled. Her pod detached in a frosty breath of escaping gas and quickly dipped out of sight. He was alone after all these centuries and he was ready too.

  His tank stopped in the repository, up and out of the way of any beings that might discover it. He had worked hard to ensure the solar panels needed to keep things running at minimum power were secured and that the media the information was to be kept on immune to the rigors of time, freezing space, and cosmic radiation. Nothing was completely immune to entropy but he had done his best.

  Before his tank hung the only thing on this station older than he was; an ancient bottle of spirits from the vineyards of his great sire that hung in his memory room. He had tasted the drink from another bottle long ago, in the centuries past when his tongue still tasted. The preservatives in which he floated were disgusting, he remembered, and was glad his tongue no longer worked. Another bottle was stored in the recesses of the station; the rest had been bartered away over the lifetimes of his family line.

  His frail body would not survive the alcoholic shock from the ancient bottle. He would not taste it and it would likely kill him even before he could feel the numbing buzz.

  "Are you there?" Even if she still lived, she had severed all of her umbilicals and wouldn’t' be able to answer. But he wanted to be sure. He didn't want to die if she might still be around. A final check of all the repository’s systems was as green as they'd been for twenty years. She had lost interest in the last decade or so, showing only a passing interest in the designs they had laid out for centuries.

  The flesh around his optical implants began to sting and his throat was suddenly sore. He quickly checked that the bottle of ancient spirits had not been added to his tank. The bottle hung ready in the secure grasp of the robot arm, unopened. Seeing that, he issued a level one diagnostics of his life support tank and interfaces. All tests passed, system normal, despite the growing burn around his optics and the increased pressure of his swelling throat.

  The shock of the realization that his dilapidated body was trying to cry after all these years almost killed the emotion that was causing the effect. The woman he had spent a lifetime of lifetimes with was gone. She had left him so suddenly; so alone. They had loved each other on and off over the centuries—he believed no human was capable of a constant love over a lifetime, let alone many. They weren't designed for it. But he had known her longer than many nations survived.

  He gave into the sobbing. The frame that supported his body didn't allow for much movement and his atrophied muscled weren't capable of it in any case. But his body twitched and a strange, high-pitched gurgle escaped from the audio interface. The cry lasted well over an hour. It felt wonderful. It was a catharsis born of ages of heart-breaking struggle. He hadn't cried like this in over a century, perhaps longer. If she had cried like this in the last two-hundred years, he hadn't seen it.

  He was alone now, completely alone. The combined and verified records of two human civilizations attested to it. There was no one left to share that grief; he was ready to follow her. He didn't share her belief about the hereafter; he figured that if there was one he'd see her regardless of his personal opinion on the matter. It was pure hope. But hope is sometimes what a person needed above all, even against reason. Whatever lay beyond, there was nothing on this side left for him except decaying memories.

  He ran the track a final time around his ancient home. He considered once more grasping his children, and once more left them to their eternal rest. The pictures of his forebears held him long and he could feel his body trying to cry again so he moved on—once this century was enough for him. The humans from Earth waved farewell from their preservative tanks as he passed a final time.

  The thought of tapping into the stations external cameras to see where she was seemed wrong. So he set his tank against the portal she had left him from and gazed at the stars. He replayed her message twice, unable to keep himself from sobbing again as she called him beloved. Twice this century it would be. The tank finally made its way back to the repository and his last call.

  The label on the bottle was peeling away, hiding part of the ancient Ay-Yon script and the once vibrant picture of the long dead flowers that were fermented inside. She was still gone. He knew that she had to have passed into her beyond without her life support and entertained a morbid curiosity about where her tank and body would end up spending eternity.

  He convinced himself that he was ready to go, but they had strove to keep themselves alive so hard for so long, he was finding it difficult to lightly undo all that effort. How had she done it so casually? Perhaps she hadn't; perhaps all that time spent sulking at the dark had actually been her own way of steeling herself to the deed. There was nothing holding him here except an unreasonable desire to wallow in several lifetimes of failure. An alarm monitor went off in his mind, his heartbeat was racing at a dangerous twelve beats per minute.

  A robot arm shook the bottle vigorously and on his hesitant command, emptied it into his nutrition tube.

  The effect was immediate. The colors his optical implants registered wavered and melted, running together like water poured on a painter's palette. The tank spun about him and his stomach screamed. Tiny bubbles escaped from his mouth and nose as his dying body convulsed. The liquid took on a pinkish tint and the extremities that had long wasted away suddenly awoke in fire. Then peace, then the comforting numbness he hoped for met him, as the last human in the universe left, never to know the ultimate fate of his beloved repository.

 

 

 
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