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.
