For Zander Black, the day starts begrudgingly, as it always does. He slowly recedes from dreamless oblivion into an uncomfortable half-awake limbo, where he stays for as long as possible carefully pretending to still be asleep. After an indefinable time, when he can fool himself no longer, his eyes finally crack open and he releases a long sigh. He takes a moment to gather his anxiety into an organized knot in his chest. Then, he slowly detaches his skinny frame from the harness keeping him in place and pushes away to float toward the control room of the space station. There he will find out if he lives or dies this day, just as always.
The control room, like all of the station, is covered head to toe in sleek displays, curved shiny surfaces and smooth intertwining mechanisms, all perfectly still and dark. The remnants of a distant past, none have been activated for millennia, except one: where Zander can access the one number that rules his entire existence. A single green light shines dimly from the center of the back wall, casting the unlit room in a ghostly pallor. As Zander approaches, a floating display projects onto the air in front of him, filled with a lattice of blaring red X’s. He ignores the red and looks to the top, where five green panels sit below the one critical number: power input from solar thermal panels on the station. Today it reads 192.6 W, down 0.1 from yesterday. A big drop. Shit.
Living in orbit around a dying star, one quickly learns the value of energy. By the time Zander could speak, he could recite the power demands for every process running on the ship. 0.65 W per ten pounds of living person for air recycling, 4.84 W per 100 calories of daily photosynthesized nutrition, 2.12 W per liter of recycled water per day—every watt must be accounted for, and each process meticulously balanced to meet the essential requirements of life without preventing another critical demand. Alone on the ship, with a diet of 1400 calories and 2.7 L of water, Zander requires a power input of 162.8 W to survive. He chews on the quick of his thumbnail, the pit in his stomach ever so slightly larger than it was the day before. 192.6 W leaves 29.8 W of extra power. But the surplus….
Zander pushes himself out of the control room and through dark hallways along handholds on the wall—lights and artificial gravity are far too expensive to maintain—and enters another cramped room filled with exposed, dead wiring and more scrapped machinery. He looks immediately to the corner, where a small blue light blinks steadily from a dented white machine. A floating display pops up, reading “Download in progress.” Zander lets out a breath he’s been holding since he woke.
The download is still working.
Good.
“Well, what a relief,” a snide voice comes from the hallway behind Zander.
“Oh, hey Amari,” Zander responds blankly, maneuvering to face an old, sawed-off bolt that stares out blanky from the wall.
“Glad you’ve got your precious download to keep worrying about,” the bolt replies.
“Oh come on, we’ve been over this a million times—you’re not connected to the power supply, it’s different.”
“Like you would care about me even if I was.”
“Yes I would care, I care about you now. I was just about to stop by and ask about the kids.”
“Oh sure, the kids—”
“And about you too. Come on now, you know I’m on your side….”
The bolt has been on edge lately since her husband and kids started fighting with her, and Zander deflects her jabs for a while before awkwardly excusing himself to the food hall. He can’t remember how long they’ve been friends—since sometime after his mother died, surely—but with the family drama, it’s been a lot of work. Her husband and kids probably won’t come around, he thinks, if he’s being honest. They’ve already grown so distant. Zander nods an awkward greeting as he passes them—a cluster of three screws—down the hallway.
In the food hall, Zander catches up with the countertops and the old buttons that don’t connect to anything anymore. They seem in a better mood. The countertop is still preparing for his daughter’s departure next week—med school, the first step toward a life spent changing the world! Zander makes plans to be at her graduation and grabs a nutrition bar, mentally noting that the countertop might need some extra attention next week. He peeks his head into the hallway to check that the blue light is still flashing, then pulls himself toward the courtyard, humming atonally and chewing on his thumb. In the corridor, the walls are covered in crude, scratched-out carvings of two figures—one large and one small—that Zander carefully ignores as he passes.
When Zander was four years old, he asked his mother why they were alone on the space station, and it was then that she decided he was old enough to understand the concept of heat death.
When the universe was young, she said, it was filled to the brim with stars, endless beacons of light that spread out farther than you could even imagine. When ancient peoples looked to the night sky, it wasn’t black, but sparkled with a curtain of stars and distant galaxies that shone to them all the way across space. They used to harvest their energy and ride them through the cosmos, hopping across galaxies and conquering planets and spreading their descendants. Soon people outnumbered even the countless stars, and humanity reveled in the eternal heights of their sparkling domain. But one day, the stars began to drift apart and fade. Some died in huge bursts, scattering dust that gathered into new stars that then faded and burst into even more. But this happened less and less, and more often they just faded straight to black, and the sky began to grow dark and empty. Humanity was terrified, and scientists from across the universe spent generations trying to find the one star that would be the last, and eventually that led them here, to the very star we orbit today. They named it Finalis Trinus, the final voyage, and they declared it a universal human heritage to be protected by all.
But humanity didn’t always do well with sharing, and not much later they turned against each other trying to claim the last star as their own. For billions of years there was warfare, and the energy of the stars was funneled into larger and larger weapons until humanity itself began to fizzle. Interstellar lasers became short-range harpoons, planetary fleets became scavenger groups, and eventually there was nothing left to do but try and build a life out of the scattered wreckage. From the heights of gods, humanity grew small and waited for the inevitable end they had ignored for so long.
Among that wreckage were our ancestors, who built a space station to ride out the end of days in. And as our star grew dimmer and dimmer, the station had to shrink, and more people had to leave, until it was just your father and me. And then just the two of us, you and me, today. In the great story of humanity’s long, long legacy, starting all the way back at the beginning of time, we are here at the very end, and we get to see it through longer than anybody else. Zander hadn’t liked the story very much, but there was nothing he could do to change it. Once Finalis Trinus faded, the universe would enter its final stage, heat death, in which all energy had been distributed equally among everything and nothing of any kind could ever happen again. Ever. Just a graveyard of dead stars and space junk floating alone in an ever-expanding eternity, the end to all ends.
The courtyard is the one place on the station with windows into space. It’s split into two massive transparent hemispheres, one facing inward toward Finalis Trinus and the other pointed outward into the fathomless black depths of an empty cosmos. The meridian is encircled by hundreds of portholes, each leading to the ruins of other wings of the station that Zander used to explore before they were vacuum sealed to prevent heat loss. Zander crawls through the porthole from his wing to the inner side of the courtyard, as always. He carefully pushes off the ground to align his slender body against the dome and stare at the star, breath fogging up below his nose.
The star is close enough to the station that its vast horizons fill the entirety of Zander’s wide-eyed vision. It is barely brighter than the black space it exists in, but as Zander stares, his eyes begin to make out swirling eddies and hot spots, like indigo glitter roiling in an inky black sea. He watches them churn for an eternity, far too slow to see them change, and feels a connection pulling at him, like the celestial being is watching him too as they both slowly ride out the last fading currents of existence.
On a cosmic scale, Finalis Trinus is dying in the blink of an eye. It’s been waning for quadrillions of years, but even the slowest fading light goes from on to off in an instant, at the end. On Zander’s birthday—the first one, the real one—output from the station’s panels measured 367.8 W. Now, sixteen years later, output has dropped almost 48%. Zander doesn’t think it looks much darker, but he doesn’t have much to compare it to. Next to pitch darkness, any light can only be described as not black.
Like when he was seven, and the light reflecting off his mother’s goggles made a tiny speck of not black in her unprotected silhouette floating in space. A break in the otherwise uninterrupted image—a body shrinking slowly into the distance, swollen hands outstretched to both sides in acquiescence to the void. She had chosen to die facing the station, evacuating through the escape hatch when it became clear there wasn’t enough power coming in to support two lives. It would have been the first time she ever saw the station from the outside. It was also the last time Zander ever saw another human being.
“Until the end, my love,” his mother had said as tears accumulated around her eyes in the zero gravity of the station. “You’ve made it.”
Zander wonders if his mother could see him through the window as she slowly asphyxiated. What did the station look like from out there? Probably dull, a small patchwork of organized junk against the backdrop of space. Maybe she saw a small kid pressed up against the window, snot smearing below his nose. Maybe she saw her reflection, and realized she chose the wrong direction to look. A slowly dying star or a slowly dying child—at least the star is pretty to look at. But maybe, with that glance, she got to feel like her death was given a purpose. Zander can never have that chance.
After a long period staring at the star, Zander pushes himself away from the window and floats slowly back toward the control room, feeling a bit numb. His eyes have adjusted to the dim light of the star, so floating through the unlit hallways of the station is like existing in a void. He moves past the blinking blue light in the machine room, past the bolt sticking out from the wall, who voices more of her anxieties about being abandoned, about her family growing apart from her.
In the control room, the output panel reads 192.6 W, no change. Zander looks past the swarm of red X’s from thousands of disconnected and nonfunctional machines, to the five green boxes at the top. Air recycling, nutrition photosynthesis, water reprocessing, temperature stabilization, and one unrecognized device consuming 29.8 W. The only machines left operational, consuming—at the moment—the exact power coming into the station. Zander tastes copper from where he chews on the end of his thumb.
Back eons ago, the station could move to a smaller orbit to capture more of the star’s dying rays as they faded. Now, Zander lives at the smallest orbit the ship can withstand without succumbing to gravity. There’s no material left to build extra solar thermal panels, and the miles of existing grids already do little enough as it is. Any other ships nearby, if there are any left, have probably scrapped their navigation arrays just like his ancient ancestors did. Rescue had never really been a possibility—nobody can outlast a universe. Nonetheless, Zander stares at the control panel and silently wills the power supply to hold out for just a bit longer.
After a moment, Zander tears himself away from the panel and crawls into the food hall to grab another nutrition cake. The countertop reminds him of his daughter’s big future plans—don’t forget, it’s gonna be great. Zander returns to the courtyard, past the blinking blue light, past I just wish they would give me a chance. He peeks his head into the dark half of the courtyard and imagines a sky full of stars twinkling in the impenetrable depths of blackness beyond the barrier. Then he presses himself up against the window once again to watch the spot where his mother’s body once floated. And he returns to the control room. Past the bolt, past the blinking blue light, through the food hall, past the countertop, back to the courtyard.
Control room, bolt, blue light, countertop, courtyard.
Control room, bolt, blue light, countertop, courtyard.
192.6 W, left me behind, download in progress, just excited, window.
Energy, abandonment, anxiety, hope, not black.
Life.
Family.
Solid blue light—
Zander’s pulse quickens.
The light is solid.
The download is complete.
As Zander floats through the entry port into the machine room, the bolts around him are silent, forgotten. In the room, he straps his waif-thin frame to a cot and begins to attach several electrodes across his skin. One on each temple, one on the forehead, two on the jaw, and four across the chest. He gently presses an IV into a forearm covered in track marks and reaches over to press a button just below the solid blue light.
When Zander was six, on one of his daily excursions into the ancient depths of the station, he stumbled upon a white machine carefully concealed in the corner of a storage closet. It was dented and scratched and archaic, but the way it was hidden so meticulously—someone had put significant effort into keeping it for themselves. And somehow, it still looked functional. Out of every piece of technology and machinery on the station—thousands of database browsers, story generators, intervessel communications devices—this one dented sims reader had survived. Zander kept the secret for a year, and as soon as he was alone on the station, he connected it to power. A single tiny cartridge was inserted in a port on the machine’s front, labeled “Moments to Forget”.
Immediately Zander’s vision fades to black and the sensations of electrodes on his skin disappear. A panel of white text appears in his vision.
AVAILABLE DATA: 32 SECONDS.
CONTINUE?
He wills it, and the darkness begins to diminish into shapes.
The first thing Zander always notices in the simulation is a sensation of extraordinary warmth spreading across the surface of his skin. It is late afternoon, and a star—a real, fully living star—shines from low in the sky, pulsing energy into him like spreading life itself through his body. It is enough to bring him to his knees, if he had the power to control his movement.
The next thing he notices is a sea of emotions roiling inside him. He is angry, furious to the point of tears, with muscles twitching and ready for action beneath his skin. He is also scared, a tense knot in his stomach quavering in anticipation of an impending loss. And beneath it all, buried so deep, there is a sickening sensation of love, and a kernel of precarious, misguided hope bubbling painfully in his chest.
Zander is standing in front of an open doorway to a modest home with white panel walls. In the doorframe—the yellow doorframe, hand painted—stands a man positioned protectively in front of two children, a boy and a girl. The girl looks scared, hiding herself halfway behind the man’s leg. The boy looks sad, tears streaking down his round cheeks. And the man looks deeply, profoundly resolved. Beside the doorway, a wilted, browning plant sits neglected in a tall terracotta pot.
Zander knows that in the simulation he is a woman, feels it somewhere deep in his identity. He also knows that he—she—owns this house, and the people standing in front of her are her husband and children. She knows the man’s face as an extension of her own being, knows the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles, the smell of his skin fresh out of a shower, how it feels to be wrapped up in his arms and trust that everything is going to be alright. Zander can’t shift her focus to dwell on any of these thoughts, but he feels their presence deep in the back of her mind.
The children, with so much distrust and fear in their eyes—they are the center of her universe. She had given birth to them, after all, and even if she never wanted them in the first place, how could she not fall in love with their charming sense of wonder for everything? She knows they don’t feel the same for her—that she has grown to be a stranger, working long weeks on interplanetary runs while her husband grew close to them working from home. But she’s okay with it. Not always—sometimes she spends long nights crying silently in the bathroom with a bottle of wine next to her on the floor. But most of the time, the good days, she is content to know she can provide.
Although maybe there haven’t been that many good days recently.
Maybe none at all.
“If you think for one second that you can support this family on your own, then you’re a fucking idiot,” she screams at her husband through tears.
Her husband’s face—his stupid, smarmy, composed face—stiffens. “Watch your language in front of the kids, Amari.” “My language?” she spits. He always does this, picking apart her arguments without ever listening to her. She steps forward, enraged. “I THINK THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN MY LANGUAGE, ZAIM.”
Her son whimpers and shrinks slightly behind him. Amari freezes, horrified, and instantly snaps out of her anger.
“No, wait—please, you have to listen to me, I’m sorry.” It isn’t fair, Zaim blindsiding her like this with the children present. They are always on his side, they don’t understand. “Please, listen to me, you can’t do this—”
“This is exactly the problem, Amari,” Zaim says with his steady voice. “You’re too volatile, it’s not good for the kids.”
Amari looks at her children. Nailah, so smart and curious, with a fierce dream to be a doctor and cure every disease that has ever existed. And Kofi, charming and funny, always putting on shows and pretending to be his favorite characters. Acting lessons are expensive. Medical school is expensive. Amari had dreams too, as a kid, and she’d be damned if her children had to give them up the way she did.
“A single parent household isn’t good for the kids, Zaim. Not being able to afford the bills? That’s not good for the kids. You can’t just attack me and tell me—”
Zander’s vision cuts to black. White letters float again.
WARNING: DATA CORRUPTED. FILE NOT SAVED.
PLEASE REDOWNLOAD.
Zander lies there in the cot in the dark room filled with broken machinery, echoes of sensation and emotion rattling through his numb body. Pools of tears gather around his bloodshot eyes, and a fragile pulse races inside his chest. His breath hitches in the aftermath of sobs, convulsing at the intensity of feeling he experienced as well as the complete and resolute emptiness he returned to in the shell of his own body.
Memories to Forget. As far as Zander can piece together, somebody had decided to extract—or recreate, perhaps—a painful memory from their past and store it in a simulation file. The file is undatably ancient, much older than the station, and Zander doesn’t know if Amari and Zaim were ever even actually real people. There haven’t been living full-sized stars in quadrillions of years. And life on planets? Houses?
But they feel more real than anything else he knows.
As he recovers from the simulation, Zander imagines the argument ending in different ways. Zaim giving Amari another chance, and them working it out to grow together as a family. Probably not, he thinks. Amari leaving to follow her old dreams and visiting the children on uncomfortable special occasions. Amari giving in to the anger under her skin, stabbing Zaim and spending her life running from the law with scared children in tow. He knows she considered it, at least a little bit, in the moment. The children running away, leaving Zaim and Amari alone. The house getting struck by a meteor in the middle of the argument.
The uncertainty is overwhelming, with so many paths available. Amari’s choices impacted the rest of her life, and a single sentence, a change in tone, a step forward—all of it could change everything.
Zander imagines making a choice that matters. Today, I will move to a new orbit and find some other ships. I’ll fix the busted batteries and store enough energy to run genetic recombination and make a family of my own. I’ll start a new colony, and we’ll find a way to build a new star.
But he knows he can do none of these things. In reality, he has only one choice: to die now, or to die later. Next to the intensity of the simulation, Zander’s existence is bleak and terrifying. The only thing scarier than the emptiness is the idea that he might be stuck in it forever, that once his life is over he’ll be left with endless, eternal empty. So he watches the simulation. And because the file is corrupted, he redownloads it every day to watch it again. And while it is downloading, he thinks about it. He pretends, acts it out. Makes up characters that he can influence. And all the while, he waits for the chance to pretend he is living for thirty-two seconds more.
After a long moment, Zander unhooks himself from the sims viewer and returns the electrodes and IV. He holds a thumb to the prickmark on his forearm and applies pressure to stop the bleeding, fingers encircling the appendage with room to spare. On the viewer, he presses a sequence of buttons to reinitiate download of the file and waits for the light to begin flashing blue. Nothing happens at first. Then, a piercing beep floats over from the control room. Zander stiffens and goosebumps spread across his skin. It’s the sound he heard just before his mother turned herself into a silhouette with not black eyes. Power output has exceeded input and tripped a reset for critical life functions—there isn’t enough energy to redownload the simulation file.
Zander presses his fists to his cheeks and squeezes his eyes shut, imagining for a small moment that he isn’t here, that he isn’t now. But he is. And he’s been expecting this.
He floats numbly out of the machine room and through the hallway, past silent bolts and into the control room. At the control panel, he methodically inputs a series of commands below the flashing signal for power input. A confirmation appears.
Zander reaches out a skeletal hand to weakly select the option for yes. As the power input display stabilizes to an optimistic green, and a calm blue light begins to flash from the other side of the hallway, the display momentarily lights up with a command log. Only six commands have been entered in the entirety of the past eight years, all of them within the last thirteen months. Spaced out by approximately two months each, a series of entries list a decrease of caloric output to 1900,
1800,
1700,
1600,
1500,
1400,
and now
1300 calories per day.