All That Remains

In the end it is the silence that she hates the most. She tries playing music, turned up until it sounds tinny and garbled in the cabin’s tiny speakers, but even that can’t fill the silence.

She had thought she knew what it meant to be alone, but now…

It is almost enough to drive her insane.

They sent her alone, and who could blame them? The last mission had ended horribly, so horribly that they refused to release the images of the aftermath to the public. They had thought they could control the crew, through psychological testing and careful planning, they thought they could prevent the possibility of someone snapping. But how could they know what it was like, to hurtle through space in a tin can of a space ship, millions of miles away from anyone or anything? They had run their tests, their simulations of the conditions on the space pod and the team assembled had handled them perfectly. Of course they had. They knew it was a simulation. They knew that at any time they could open the hatch and breath in fresh air recycled by trees instead of chemical scrubbers, and that knowledge carried them through.

But when crunch time came…well, she knows what that first group must have gone through. And when one of them went crazy with a utility knife and butchered the others and then slit his own throat, it was back to the old drawing board for the brightest minds at NASA, and now here she is. Alone. Alone in this space pod. Alone in the universe.

They’d been watching her with their telescopes tracking her progress, but they should have been looking elsewhere. They thought they had prepared for every eventuality, that nothing could go wrong with the mission this time. Oh yes, they had planned for her safety, and here she was: safe, sound, alone.

And they were dead. All of them.

She hadn’t been willing to admit it at first. When the transmissions stopped she told herself there must have been some technical error, a glitch of some kind, that the friendly voice of mission control would be back in a few hours. But the hours stretched on with no break in the silence, and finally she went to look through the telescope that the computer kept focused on that blue green egg called Earth.

She saw the pieces, thousands, millions of them swirling like a gray cloud against the black of space, and she knew beyond doubt what must have happened.

It was unlikely that they could have missed such a thing, an asteroid of such mass that it could obliterate the planet leaving nothing but cosmic rubble in its wake. But they had missed it. She is done trying to convince herself otherwise.

She has considered suicide, but in spite of all that she has lost she does not truly want to die.  So she lives for the only thing she has left to live for. It does not concern her that the specimens she will collect when she reaches her destination will never be examined, that the experiments she will conduct will never be recorded. If anything she shows more dedication than she had before the event. Her schedule becomes a ritual, a daily offering to the god of order in the universe, a god which she knows she has created out of her own mind, as surely human ancestors in the distant past had carved their gods out of stone. She knows it because order, reason is a human thing. There is no order, no logic to the death of a people by means of a stone and iron fist hurtling out of the blackness shattering their cities of chrome and glass, scattering their living world into a cloud of dead and meaningless debris. There is only the meaning she makes.

The days and weeks pass by and now she looks to her destination, a red marble hanging in the view screen growing into a baseball then a bowling ball until at last as the mission clock counts quietly down and she prepares for entry, strapping herself into the deceleration chair, hooking up the electrodes and pressure cuffs that will monitor her vitals and transmit them into empty space. The entry into the planet’s atmosphere seems unusually smooth, she thinks, though she has no real frame of reference to make such an observation. When the computer informs her she has touched down she unstraps herself dons her space suit readying herself for those first tentative steps onto a new world. She thinks she might say something historic and meaningful when her boot crunches down onto the red sand, but the worst thing about the silence is knowing that there is no one to hear you trying to fill it. And now her hand is on the airlock door and she pushes it open.

The light almost blinds her. At first she thinks the sun must be low on the horizon shining into her eyes, but an instant later that thought is gone and she knows that this is not sunlight. It is sick, white, artificial. Fluorescent. And there is a man at the foot of the ladder extending a hand up to her smiling wide his teeth reflecting the unnatural white light and she prays that she is dreaming.

“Congratulations,” he says. “You’ve successfully completed your psychiatric evaluation.”

And then she knows the truth. The last test had failed, because the crew members had known it was a test. But she…

She looks down into the man’s blazing white smile and something snaps inside her, and she screams and screams and screams.