Adrift

I have not become immortal but the difference seems minor.

Long, long ago back on Earth, my father encouraged me to make the most of every moment. “You have one life to live. Don’t waste even a single day.” With those words, he gave his blessing for me to become an astral veterinarian and the familial separation that would occur with it. “Our time here is short. Go!”

Here’s where I would laugh if my physical state would allow it.

After centuries of deep space exploration, a major collision was bound to happen at precisely the wrong moment. Waking from hibernation, amid that thin window when consciousness had returned but the machines that enabled my hypersleep still hummed, the tiny asteroid struck. I felt nothing. The impact registered as a line of flashing yellow text on the monitor inside my hibernation chamber: “HULL PENETRATION.”

In a timespan measurable in milliseconds, a severance of worlds took place. Whatever fate befell those crew members already woken, it was instantaneous. For those still sleeping, they would remain so eternally. For me, the catastrophe was narrated in realtime as more yellow text filled the screen inside my capsule.

The mechanisms that slowed my aging to a small fraction of one-percent remained running while the automated instruments to extract me any further from hibernation malfunctioned irreparably. My waking eyes initially met this information with distrust and skepticism. The mathematical improbability of such an event is bewildering. But on a long enough timeline all things improbable become fully inevitable.

Think of the result as a state of sleep paralysis with no end.

The ship’s computer stayed operational. The life support system stayed operational. So did the communications equipment. The waking instruments did not—forever stuck ‘In Process’.

The computer calculates a normal year of aging as 907,461.2371 years in my current state.

Even with several eternities left to live, this ship’s mission will never be fulfilled. All the families off-world awaiting their pets—the living cargo of cats and dogs we’d been transporting—I failed them. They had been my responsibility to care for. Now we all float together heading towards the darkest depths of oblivion.

Do not misinterpret this message as a distress call. It is the opposite of an S.O.S.

—Computer, replay selection of Earth transmissions from initial eight centuries following collision.

“We’re coming to retrieve you.”

“You have not been abandoned."

“Your speed and drift make you difficult to track, but we will find you.”

“Do not lose hope.”

“You are not lost.”

“We have not forsaken you.”

—Computer, end replay.

The ship’s antenna received more than just these direct transmissions. All Earthly communications were picked up as radio waves bounced off the planet’s surface and zipped through space at the speed of light. Experiencing 800 years of human history as an observer endowed me with insights that could only be described as precognition. The mysteries of human nature melted away. As each new generation cycled through its existence, I witnessed as mistakes got made and then repeated. Lessons were learned imperfectly before being forgotten. So when the broadcasts took on a much darker tone—as the march towards the final war began—I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised when all human communications abruptly went silent. For all time. Never to return. Forever.

Detached and emotionless, I can reflect back on this now. That tragedy was millennia ago.

It took considerable time to regain optimism.

The unintelligible click-clacks the antenna captured of an alien race provided a false hope. The extraterrestrials making these noises could prove to be my rescuers. They might succeed where my own race had failed. Those thought-to-be-extinct sea creatures that fishermen would occasionally pluck from the ocean…I could be the outer space version of that. Logic and reason suggested that broadcasting a constant radio signal towards their quadrant of the galaxy would eventually prove fruitful.

Yet, it did not.

Their transmissions didn’t suddenly go silent as with humanity’s. Rather, theirs simply faded into the abyss.

The emergence of those wispy tones—almost like the wind spoke—of the next deep space civilization grew less promising. Their eventual disappearance was taken with sombre acceptance. So too were the strange races who spoke in soft beeps and the ones who conversed in jarring screams. Eventually, I cared not whether a friendly race came to retrieve me or a hostile one blasted me from the heavens.

Over an era the ship’s computer logged at 1,200 millennia, I still held hope. For I am humanity’s last living emissary. The gravity of this responsibility provided the will to persevere.

Although it didn’t last.

There was a moment where the threshold was crossed into complete hopelessness—upon exiting the Milky Way, where I ceased to be an interstellar traveler and became an intergalactic one. I understood then I would never rise up from this hibernation chamber. The intrepid child who climbed our roof to retrieve our orange Tabby would be unrecognizable to my father now.

From when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth to the first human civilizations is the same interval of time that I estimate the radios have now been silent.

Traveling through the coldest, darkest reaches of space, whole galaxies become small globs of light. Their distances are measured in the lives of stars. The nothingness out here is absolute.

There’ll be no alien civilization to save me. No star to go supernova in my path of travel. No event horizon to cross and be sucked into a black hole.

—Computer, disconnect oxygen. Disconnect auto-feeder.

Cannot comply. Request invalid.

—Computer, reroute towards center of nearest star or black hole.

Cannot comply. Violation of protocol.

So I have become not immortal, but amortal. I am not a god but I am omniscient. Sealed in this capsule I am no longer a physical being. I am merely knowledge and thought—as close to pure energy as any life form can become. Combing through the computer’s vast data files, I’ve earned degrees in every Earthly field of learning. Then I earned them again.

Reading my brainwaves, I’ve had every conceivable conversation and asked every conceivable question to the ship’s computer. The only one I refuse to ask is the fate of the passenger in the capsule beside mine. Inside is a beautiful British shorthair cat—gray coated with piercing orange eyes—who loved to sit on my lap and be brushed. Either she sleeps forever or—confused and frightened—she suffers a fate like mine. “I’m so sorry,” I would say if my body would allow it. She was such a good girl.

Outside of my trained profession in veterinary medicine, my two favorite fields of study have been history and literature. I review these disciplines with regularity.

I shall now take a break to read the totality of human literature.

—Computer, begin text scroll onscreen.

Commencing.

***

Now that is complete, I will break again. This time the computer will narrate the totality of human history beginning with the first multicellular organisms.

***

It was an eventful respite. The sun of my home world burnt out partway through. A decade afterwards, I developed an itch at the base of my nose lasting several centuries, one that my paralyzed body could never scratch, that could only be endured. It provided a distraction from the larger picture: the Milky Way is slowly dying, each star winking out in turn, like a power grid being shut off.

It’ll be a bellwether moment.

My study of the sciences suggests that the inevitable heat death of the universe will come. All stars will burn out. All galaxies will grow cold. All energy will disperse. There will be complete nothingness. More nothingness than I experience entombed in this chamber.

And where will I be?

Will I still float adrift?

Already, the sensation of warmth is a distant memory. Placing it into a context helps little. The campfire built by my father the night we hiked Mount Whitney. Saturday mornings in bed with my cats—their purring bodies untroubled by the world. That feeling is a prehistoric creature.

After so long, all human emotions dissolve into nothingness. Love and anger, hope and helplessness, interest and boredom all reach a state of entropy. Eternity is experienced with passive indifference.

This is not a distress call. It is a statement of facts. If this transmission ever reaches any conscious being gazing up at the black void, they can know that I was out here. I am out here still. And will always be.