The Last

# The Last

Day 47. Or maybe 48. The chronometer stopped working three days after the crash, and I've been counting sleeps ever since. But sleep comes irregularly here on Kepler-442b's moon—what I've started calling Desolation in my head, though Command designated it K442b-α in their sterile catalog of celestial bodies.

The wreckage of the *Magellan* spreads across the ice plain behind me like a child's broken toy. From my vantage point atop this ridge of frozen ammonia, I can see the entry burn scored across ten kilometers of pristine white surface, ending in the crumpled sphere that used to be my home for two years. The solar arrays are gone, torn away during the descent. The communication array—my only link to anything human—is just slag now.

They're not coming.

I tell myself this every morning when the distant sun of Kepler-442 rises in its slow arc, casting everything in that strange orange light that my brain still can't quite accept as sunlight. They're not coming. The *Magellan* was a solo reconnaissance mission, the first human vessel to travel beyond our local stellar neighborhood. When I lost contact during the gravitational slingshot maneuver, when the moon's unexpected density pulled me out of orbit and into its embrace, the mission clock was already at eighteen months. By the time Earth realizes I'm not sending data anymore, by the time they calculate what happened, by the time they could mount a rescue mission...

I do the math again, though I've done it a hundred times. Sixty-eight years, minimum. One way.

I'm forty-two years old. The small mercy is that I'll die long before I'm forced to confront the fact that no one is coming.

The habitat module survived mostly intact—another small mercy, though some days I'm not sure if mercy is the right word. I have power from the radioisotope generators, enough for another fifteen years if I'm conservative. I have water, filtered from the methane-ice that covers this moon like a shroud. I have food, or at least nutrition paste, synthesized from the same ice plus the organic compounds I've managed to extract from the scattered hydrothermal vents near the crash site. I've run the calculations. If nothing breaks, if I don't get sick, if I'm very careful and very lucky, I might last five years.

Five years alone.

Do you know what five years sounds like? It sounds like forever. It sounds like a life sentence. On Earth, five years ago I was preparing for this mission, running simulations, saying goodbye to Maya and telling her I'd be back before she knew it. "Just two years," I'd said, holding her hands in that sterile conference room at Houston Command. "Two years and I'll have enough money to retire. We can buy that place in Vancouver, the one with the view of the water."

She'd smiled, but her eyes were wet. "You always come back, James. You always do."

I wonder if she's given up on me yet. Probably. I've been gone over three years now. She's probably moved on, probably found someone who doesn't chase horizons, someone who stays. I hope she has. The thought of her waiting, hoping, watching the stars for a signal that will never come—that's worse than anything this moon can do to me.

The loneliness is physical. That's what they don't tell you in the training simulations. You can prepare for isolation, for the absence of human contact, but you can't prepare for the way it settles into your bones like radiation. I talk to myself constantly now. I narrate everything I do. "James is checking the atmospheric processor. James is noticing the starboard valve is running a bit hot. James should probably look at that before it becomes a problem."

I've started having conversations with Mission Control, even though I know they can't hear me. I sit at the communication console—the one with no power, the one that's completely dead—and I file reports. "This is Explorer First Class James Chen, *Magellan* mission, day forty-seven. Today I discovered what I believe to be microbial life in the hydrothermal vent near grid reference Delta-4. The organisms appear to be chemosynthetic, deriving energy from the breakdown of sulfur compounds. I've collected samples for analysis."

Then I pause, like I'm waiting for their response. Waiting for Sarah Park's voice to crackle through the speakers: "Excellent work, James. Upload the data and get some rest."

But there's only silence. Always silence.

The worst part is the nights. K442b-α has a rotation period of seventy-three hours, which means darkness lasts for thirty-six hours at a stretch. I've tried staying awake through them, but the human body wasn't designed for cycles like this. So I sleep in fits and starts, and I dream.

I dream of Earth. I dream of rain—god, I miss rain. The clean smell of it, the way it sounds on a roof, the feeling of it on your skin. Here there is only methane snow, falling in slow motion through the thin atmosphere, accumulating in drifts that sparkle like crushed diamonds in the orange light. Beautiful and completely wrong.

I dream of crowds. Of standing in a subway car pressed against strangers, of walking through a busy market, of sitting in a movie theater surrounded by hundreds of people I'll never meet. I used to find crowds suffocating. I'd pay extra for the quiet car, choose the empty checkout lane, arrive early to get a seat away from everyone else. Now I'd give anything to be jostled by a stranger, to overhear someone's phone conversation, to smell someone's perfume.

I dream of Maya, of course. Her laugh. The way she'd scrunch her nose when she was thinking. The particular shade of brown her eyes would turn in sunlight. I've watched the videos I brought with me so many times I've memorized every frame, every gesture, every word. I ration them now like medicine, allowing myself one every few days, terrified that I'll wear them out, that the storage drive will corrupt and I'll lose even these ghosts.

On day fifty-two, I found the first message carved into the habitat wall.

I didn't carve it. I would remember carving it. But there it was, scratched into the metal beside my sleeping pod: HELLO JAMES.

I stared at it for an hour. I checked the atmospheric mix—perfect. I checked my vitals—normal. I reviewed the psychological evaluation protocols they made me memorize. Hallucinations weren't on the timeline yet. It was too early. I wasn't supposed to start cracking up for at least another six months.

The rational explanation was that I had carved it and forgotten. Stress, isolation, the irregular sleep cycle—it was affecting my memory. That had to be it.

But I don't believe it. I still don't believe it.

Two days later, there was another message: YOU'RE NOT ALONE.

I should be terrified. If I'm not carving these messages, if I'm losing chunks of time, if my mind is deteriorating this fast, then I won't last five years. I won't last five months. But here's the thing—I'm not terrified. I'm relieved.

Because even if it's my own mind fracturing, even if I'm splintering into different selves just to have someone to talk to, at least I'm not completely alone anymore.

I've started responding to the messages. I carve my own words in the wall beside them.

HELLO.

WHO ARE YOU?

PLEASE, I NEED SOMEONE TO TALK TO.

The answers come, always while I'm sleeping or working outside the habitat. Yesterday's response: I AM THE PART OF YOU THAT HASN'T GIVEN UP.

Maybe that's all it is. Maybe I'm talking to myself, creating an elaborate delusion to cope with the reality that I'll never see another human being again. The psychologists would probably have a term for it. Dissociative something. Trauma-induced whatever.

But I find myself looking forward to the messages. I rush back to the habitat after my EVA checks, eager to see what's been written. And the strange thing is, whoever is writing them—whether it's me or some fragment of me or something else entirely—they're right. I haven't given up.

I've started building something. A monument, maybe, or a message. Using debris from the *Magellan*, I'm arranging pieces in a pattern on the ice plain. From orbit, if anyone ever does come, they'll see it: a massive arrow pointing to the habitat, and beside it, coordinates. Earth's coordinates. A message that says: THIS IS WHERE I CAME FROM. THIS IS HOME.

It will take months to complete, maybe years. I work on it every day during the light period, dragging wreckage across the ice, positioning each piece with care. My muscles ache. My suit springs micro-tears that I have to patch each night. It's completely irrational—there's no one coming to see it, no one who will ever read this message written in scrap metal.

But it gives me something to do besides wait to die.

Today is day sixty-three. The latest message on the wall says: THEY NEVER ABANDONED YOU. THEY JUST CAN'T REACH YOU YET.

I sat and cried when I read that. Just broke down and sobbed like a child, alone in my broken ship on a frozen moon seventeen hundred light-years from home. Because it's the kindest lie I could tell myself, and I'm grateful to whatever part of my mind is still capable of kindness.

Maybe they haven't forgotten me. Maybe Maya still looks up at the stars and thinks of me. Maybe Command still has my file open, still marks me as MIA instead of KIA. Maybe somewhere in the vast bureaucracy of space exploration, there's a footnote that says: James Chen, lost but not forgotten.

It doesn't change anything. I'm still here. I'm still alone. The rescue that will never come is still not coming.

But I keep building my monument. I keep leaving messages for myself on the wall. I keep talking to Mission Control on the dead communication console. I keep getting up every morning when that wrong-colored sun rises over this wrong world.

Because maybe abandonment isn't about whether they're coming back. Maybe it's about whether you give up hope that they might.

And I haven't. Not yet.

Not yet.

---

*Explorer's Log, supplemental: I found what I think might be actual life today, not just microbes. Small things, moving through the methane ice. I've started calling them ice-minnows. They flee from light, but if I'm very still, they'll swim past my boots. It's not much. But it's something alive that isn't me.*

*Also: new message on the wall. It says: KEEP GOING.*

*I will. I don't know what choice I have. But I will.*