Left Alone

This is Two Zero Seven Actual.

I've got work to do before I set off for Earth, and sadly a lot of it takes precedence over these updates. The scrubbers in the ship I'm using needed replacing and it's not a small job, as then all the inhibitors needed upgrading. I've got a starport full of abandoned ships to choose from and cannibalise. I'm lucky I'm an engineer.

So. The Salvation is gone.

I remember much about the following few hours. I remember the sinking feeling, then that cold sharp shock of unreality, like I was stuck in a bad dream and that what was happening wasn't actually happening, and that I'd stepped out of my body for a few moments while the drama continued, and that I'd slowly slip back in when everything had worked out.

Then there was the cold terror, then the thought that the ship had moved and I simply couldn't see it, so I spent a few minutes with my face jammed against the cockpit window trying to see around me, until I realised I was the actual pilot of the fucking ship and that I could swing it around. So I did, quite a few times.

Then, as I flew around Charon and then Pluto, I spent an hour screaming down the channels, knowing full well that the Salvation had no doubt already accelerated beyond the speed of my small communications capability and would never hear me. Then I spent a short while punching the shit out of my chair, punching until my knuckles split and the blood smeared the fabric, when I realised that I should have got on the comms straight away, but that it wouldn't have mattered because once the singularity engine is fired there's no stopping it.

But at least I could have said goodbye to my wife, and told my son how much his daddy loved him and that he was going to be okay, even though hearing his voice would have made me tear my hair out as all I would have wanted to do was hold him, even briefly.

At least I would have had that.

Then there was an entire day of sitting in the chair and staring out at the deep dark black, and realising that I was the only one here because nobody had answered my transmissions, even though I'd thrown the channel wide and broadcast my torn soul to the stars.

I managed to get inside the Charon support base quite easily. They hadn't locked it, or left a light on, or even set up any security. I remember a briefing, long ago, saying that everything would be left open and usable in case anyone needed it, or any traveller, human or otherwise, came across the remnants of our civilisation. The stations would be powered by their fusion cores for decades to come.

So that was good news, at least.

I spent the next few days in a kind of stupor, constantly checking the comms for any messages in case my signal had made it, and wandering the huge eight-mile station, looking for nothing. There was plenty of freeze-dried food and supplements, enough to last me a year or so, and for something to do I gathered as many supplies as I thought I'd need.

But what does a man do when he's been left in a solar system stripped of humankind? I couldn't think of the next step, I couldn't see the next avenue to take. It all seemed pointless, without my wife to share it with or my son to experience it with.

Of course, there were a few questions tumbling through my mind, namely why it was I was sent to release a feedpipe when there was obviously nothing wrong with it. How did I get forgotten about? How did they not realise I hadn't returned to the ship? Admin error? A very human mistake?

Could someone have done it on purpose?

I've got to make sure that the supplies are loaded and the ship I'm using will be good to get me to one of the Neptune orbit Monitoring Stations. I'll continue this later.

The End of the World and the Generation Starship

This is Two Zero Seven Actual.

So. Background.

We've been building the Generation Starship for two hundred and fifty years, ever since Earth was bullseyed by the comet Scripture-Horace 3175 - we just called it the Big One. I'm not talking about a slap on the planet's surface and a few years of nuclear winter. I'm talking about the planet getting cracked open and everything on the surface being wiped out. More than nine billion people dead in an hour, with virtually no warning.

Nine billion. We could have died out as a species.

There were still several million people out in space, working and living and supplying an on-it's-last-legs Earth with what it needed to survive. Bases on the moon, asteroid mining stations, orbital habitats, colonies on Mars, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and interplanetary ships as big as cities, carrying thousands of people in relative safety.

So, what do you do? The homeworld is gone and we can't live in space forever. So, the geniuses of the solar system had a look at some extra-solar planets and chose one that seemed the best candidate for possible habitation. They perfected genetic modifications in case we need to be physically changed for new worlds, increased immune systems, all kinds of stuff I can't even begin to understand. I'm an engineer, in charge of an entire fleet of support ships called the Two-Zero-Seven fleet.... at least, I used to be.

Anyway, after they developed these genetic changes they then needed a ship, a vessel big enough to get the human race from one star to another. So the Generation Starship, the GS Salvation, was designed and built, and with engines powerful enough to get it up to one-quarter lightspeed they calculated they could get to the star they had chosen within one hundred years. That's about four generations, so the original crewmembers - probably even my son who is only eight right now - would be dead by the time they got there but it'd be their children who continued the work, land on the planet and make it a new home.

That's more than twenty million people to be put on a ship and sent out into the galaxy. So, the whole human race spent the next couple of hundred years building the GS Salvation.

You should have seen it. I hope you have seen it, or will see it. Forty miles across, three miles deep with multiple levels, great swathes of farmland and even mountains, and pushed along by a singularity engine the size of a mountain range; an engine that gave them power, gravity, propulsion, everything. It was, quite simply, a man-made planet. Well, perhaps not a planet - imagine a huge mushroom flying along flat-head first, with the stalk pushing it along. Not a pretty analogy, and it's a bit bigger than a mushroom.

The entire solar system was focused on this project. Every colony, settlement, station and ship was employed to gather resources, transport equipment, build and build and build... everything was about the GS Salvation. There was nothing that wasn't done that benefited the ship that would save us.

We sent the pioneers out in smaller versions of the GS with the new engine, only about half a mile to a mile in size, to travel to the closer stars to see what they could find, perhaps even find a planet closer to home. Some never came back, some did. Hundreds of ships went out but that single star with the planet of promise, four hundred light years away, was always our best chance.

I came on board as soon as I hit my fifteenth birthday, and worked with my mother as an engineer. She was in charge of the famous Six-Seven-Nine work fleet, she was the Actual, and it was her skill that got the singularity engine working to peak efficiency. When she died I inherited the fleet but since it had been created by my family bloodline to specifically install and test the engine, once it was finished there was little left to do. So, I had to disband the fleet and I created the smaller Two-Zero-Seven, and I became the Actual. We were responsible for ferrying the high-level technology and personnel on board at Pluto Launch, and we got a great reputation.

It was in the last few years of preparation that I met my wife and we had a son.

But I can't talk about that right now.

So, the ship was ready. The human race was aboard. We had genetic samples of every living creature for cloning, we had embryos safely tucked away, and the great flat world we had built, with a city and towns and farms and parks, and even an artificial sun and moon, was finished and ready to go. As a bloodline family we had our own house just outside of Earthtown, and had been given permission to have another child if we could. Perfect.

Yes, perfect. It's like those holodramas, when everything is great and the good-looking guy just got married, and you know he's going to die or his new wife is going to bite it. Melodrama. We love it.

Melodrama can fuck off.

We're a few hours from launch and there's parties and laserworks going off all over. We're leaving nobody behind, except, perhaps, for the few crazies that want to stay. There's nothing left, we've stripped as many resources as we can and the human race is leaving this dying, rotting solar system. And good riddance - nobody on that ship had ever felt what it's like to walk on a world, feel a real breeze or rain on the face, know what it's like to see sky and clouds, or feel sunlight that hadn't been screened by radiation shielding or energy fields. We had all been born in space and there wasn't a single human being that remembered the Earth as it was.

It's then I get the call from Launch Control that a feedpipe from the ship to the Charon support base hasn't disconnected properly. Brilliant. I'm not going to ask one of my (now very drunk) staff to do it, so I kiss my wife and son goodbye - and, thankfully, I told them both that I loved them - I get into my J-Class All-Purpose Support Shuttle and fly down to have a look. Sure enough, an old feedpipe that was sending power and resources to the station before it went self-contained hadn't come loose - to be fair, it had been connected like an umbilical cord to the GS for more than a hundred and fifty years - and I had to laser off the house-sized clamps to get it free, as well as drain it to be sure it didn't pose a threat. That meant flying into the crater to the base of the pipe and sealing the feed before disconnecting the pipe at the GS. We didn't want any residual resources spraying over our brand new ship and potentially damaging it just before launch, so I had to close it off at this end and then bleed off any excess to make sure the feedpipe was empty, before going back to the GS and removing the pipe from there. An hour's work, easy.

So easy, I get it done in half an hour. I call it in and fly out of the crater.

And the GS Salvation is gone.

I mean, fuck me.

This is Two Zero Seven Actual.

This is Two Zero Seven Actual.

My name is Martin Freeborn.

As far as I can tell I am the last human being in the solar system.

I know, right? I've been here on my own for four months and I'm still not sure it's sunk in yet. I'm still reeling from the reality of it all, but I'm not sure I'll truly believe it until I start the journey back to Earth. Or where it used to be, at any rate.

I guess I'm still trying to process the fact that I've been left here in the first place, that out of twenty million human beings it's just me that's been singled out as the poor fucker who got the shit end of the stick and got left the fuck behind. Sorry, it still makes me angry when I think about it. Sorry.

So, now that I'm set and I'm ready to leave Pluto Launch for one of the monitoring stations in Neptune's orbit I thought I'd better keep a journal of what I'm about to do and transmit it out into the cosmos in the hope that someone hears it and remembers me, that someone on the Generation Starship that left here four months ago listens and thinks 'oh, crap - we forgot Martin' and feels guilty. Mostly, I hope my wife and son hears it. My son, eight years old, on the Generation Starship and now millions of miles away, out of our own solar system and on the way at a quarter light speed to what we hope is a habitable star.

My wife and my son, so far away that I can't talk to them, tell them everything is alright and that I'm alive and thinking of them, and that I miss them, and that all I want is to hold them, and mess up my son's unmanageable hair and tickle him and argue with him about things that don't matter, like what time he goes to bed or if he's done his shoes up properly.

Shit.

Anyway. I suppose I had better give some quick background in case this transmission is picked up by a pioneer or an isolationist, and they don't know what's been happening over the last two hundred and fifty years. I also need to get this straight in my head as I've been losing focus on what it is I need to do, and I'm terrified of falling into myself and withering away as all I do is think about my lost family. I just need to do something, even if nobody reads this and the transmissions just travel through eternity. Let the cosmos be witness to my pain, and let generations far beyond my own read this and wonder at who I was and why I felt I had to express my loneliness, my desperation, and my loss. .

Maybe it'll be heard by aliens in the next galaxy, or slip down a wormhole and go back in time and get picked up by someone who'll have no idea what to make of it. I don't really care right now.

I just need to do something.