"The Silent Testament"
Douglas Shizuka sat there at the controls, engulfed by silence and shadow – simply playing the last transmission from Earth over and over again.
“Theta IV? This is Houston calling...we, uh...we have an update on the problems with your life-support system” The spaceflight director cleared her throat, doing her best to deliver such a meaningless message. “We... think you should restart the main power cells and then re-open your oxygen tanks. I, ah, I know what you’re thinking – and yes, this information will still be useful by the time you get the signal. Good luck Doug... we’re hoping this will give you breathable air for a few more hours. Over and out.”
It was bullshit. At least, Doug reminded himself, they were valiantly trying to comfort him. Plain as the dim, distant sun, he could tell at this point that it wasn’t so much what they said to him, it was how they said it to him.
Looking at the control panel, he saw just how desperately little oxygen was actually left in the tiny cockpit. Doug estimated maybe another fifteen minutes until it totally ran out.
Being alone in the vast expanse of the solar system was absolutely surreal. Five days ago there had been an explosion in the lower hold which killed the other four crew members, and in his long hours of staring at the sun through protective cockpit glass, the pilot often wondered why he couldn’t have been down there as well. It would have spared him from this.
Doug checked his watch for what must have been the ten-thousandth time that sleepless day. Or night. It made no difference anymore.
“Theta IV? This is Houston calling...we, uh...we have an update on – ”
He stopped the playback. Had anyone else been in the control room with him, he would have jabbed at the button angrily, perhaps yelling an obscenity or two. But there was no one to hear his voice or sense along with him the greatest agony a human could experience.
I have to do something, Doug either mumbled or thought to himself, there’s only several minutes left. He decided to send a transmission to Houston.
“Houston… this is Theta IV,” his voice was awkward from being mute for so long, “I… I just wanted to say one thing before the oxygen in here gets depleted.” Doug swallowed hard, looking at a screen that was hooked up to the vessel’s observation telescope. The device was miniaturized and nearly as powerful as the gargantuan old Hubble orbital.
“I’m looking through the scope right now… and you know something? The earth looks really, really small from out here.” The pilot forced down a torrent of wild emotions threatening to jam his brain and continued, closing his eyes. “…It just… just puts it into perspective, I guess – how completely useless it is for a few billion humans down there to be squabbling over something as… as subatomic as culture or some political dispute.”
Pausing for a moment and a few precious breaths, he continued, “My uncle always told me as a kid, whenever he saw me getting mad, to… ‘Step back and just look at the situation,’ he’d say, ‘sometimes you have to distance yourself in order to really see what’s going on.’ …And let me tell you, I’ve stepped way back from all of it… and you realize that – that cooperating is the only thing that makes sense.” For the first time, Doug felt his thoughts and words fully mesh.
“So… I don’t know what else to say. Just know how small the world is – just keep in mind how finite things are…. And if any of you ever feels out of luck, then remember me. Because no matter how horrible your death is…” he hesitated for a moment, then whispered softly, “at least you still get to be a part of the goddamned biosphere.” At that, Doug ended the transmission.
He leaned his weightless head back, waiting for oxygen deprivation to set in. Some of the bacteria in his intestine would eventually take over, colonizing Doug’s body and turning the conglomerate of one-hundred trillion cells into their own realm.
Traveling at the speed of light, the signal carrying Douglas’s voice rippled across space in all directions, one of those directions being toward home.
But for quite some time the sun had been holding something back. Right when the faint signal from Theta IV was nearing the blue planet – and every bit as cruel and unfair as a failure on board a deep-space vessel – one of the sun’s immense electro-magnetic loops gave way, ejecting trillions and trillions of tons of plasma out into space.
That coronal mass ejection drowned out every bit and sound wave in the transmission. Nobody heard Douglas Shizuka’s last words.
And Doug knew it would be that way.
