Endling
Endling (n.) The last known specimen of her species.
The first one to go was Alvin. He was a quiet man, kept to himself. Solitary, bordering on reclusive. He knew the computers better than anyone on board. Anele had never managed to tease more than a sentence out of him at a time. She’d been working on getting him to open up. He was a tough nut to crack, but she had been determined. She could’ve done it, given more time. His was a quick death, at least. If only Anele had known how much worse it would get, she would have appreciated the ease with which Alvin went. Maybe she would have saved some tears.
Alvin was working on the computers as usual, with his sound-proof headphones on — which technically were against safety protocols, but no one had ever bothered to enforce the rule. He was just looked so happy, typing and coding away. No one had the heart to pop his peaceful bubble. Because of the headphones, he didn’t hear when the alarms went off in the computer bay. No one realized he was missing when the crew gathered in the headquarters to figure out what was going on. He was just so quiet, it was as if he was never there at all. So it wasn’t their fault when he went unnoticed. Right?
Anele should have talked to him more. Maybe she could have noticed.
They realized that the computer bay was no longer safely attached to the ship. The repeated asteroid storms they had encountered while passing TRAPPIST-1 must have loosened some of the screws, or damaged the vacuum seal. The safest thing to do was to eject the computer bay. It was unnecessary, really, almost everything could be done from the computer in headquarters anyway. So Lucy gave the order to eject it and Anele checked all the readings and everything had gone splendidly. No further damage. It wasn’t until a few hours later, when Alvin’s meal went unclaimed at dinner, that anyone realized he had been ejected right along with the computer bay.
“At least,” Anele had thought, “it would have been a quick death.”
The sudden vacuum of space would have killed him almost instantly. It was perfect really, for Alvin. He would be at the computer forever now, in a perfectly silent world.
The next to go were Margot and Joko. Everyone onboard knew the two were dating. It was an open secret. While others in the crew found their…tactile relationship irritating, Anele thought the couple was cute. Joko had once admitted to her that he had a ring in mind to buy once they returned to Earth. If rings still existed when they returned, that is. It was going to be topaz. The color of Margot’s eyes.
“I wouldn’t mind someone touchy,” she thought to herself sometimes while watching them at meals, sat together with their thighs pressed up against each other, his hand on her waist. But the others turned out to be right; it was their touchiness that killed them. Margot and Joko were both outside, working on the ship’s hull, when Joko tried to hold Margot’s hand, not realizing she was holding the laser cutter. It sliced through his glove instantaneously, letting out all the air in his suit. In her panic, Margot impulsively sliced herself too, to be with him. It was romantic, in a way, Anele supposed. Very Romeo and Juliet. But stupid, considering they were the ship’s only two engineers.
It was this unfortunate lack of engineers that led to the next incident. The botanist and the doctor had taken over Margot and Joko’s engineering duties. But, since they were a botanist and a doctor, they didn’t do a very good job. They must have messed up the filtration system. Later, she would discover they had somehow crossed the pipes for the carbon monoxide and the oxygen. It was lucky Lucy had forced her to leave dinner early to go over course chartings for the next few planets. Ordinarily, she hated being indebted in any way to Lucy. Lucy was the ship’s captain, a role which meant she was free to boss Anele around however much she wanted. She made Anele assist her with tasks constantly, likely as a punishment for Anele being there when Lucy had argued against it. But if it wasn’t for Lucy’s vindictiveness, Anele would have been in the mess hall with everyone else when the gas began leaking. She was headed back to the mess hall, hoping to grab some dessert before it was gone, but paused as she reached the double glass doors. It appeared everyone inside was asleep.
“Weird,” Anele thought to herself. Why were they all sleeping in the mess hall instead of their bunks? Was it a prank they were pulling on her, or maybe Lucy? She was so high-strung and rigid, she made for an easy target. Anele studied them through the glass doors, the way they were all slumped over like marionettes whose strings had been cut. The botanist, whose name Anele could no longer recall, traced lazy circles as his body slowly pinwheeled through the air next to a tray of half-eaten food.
“Are you going to go in or float around all day?”
Lucy had caught up behind her. Anele ignored her question.
“What are they doing?” Lucy asked, cocking her head as she kicked off the wall toward the glass. As she took in the sight in front of her, her face contorted in a strange way. Was it — no, it couldn’t be panic. Anele had never seen her panic before. Not during training, or takeoff, or with Alvin. Even after losing Margot and Joko in one fell swoop, Lucy had no more to offer than a slight grimace and some half-assed words of comfort. Anele wasn’t sure she had ever met someone more emotionally repressed. Maybe this was Lucy laughing. Anele wouldn’t know, she had never seen it. That must be it. Lucy was laughing because of the prank. Just, silently. She was a silent laugher. Anele began to laugh with her.
“Oh god. Oh my god!” Lucy grabbed Anele’s sleeve. “Get out of here, come on! We need to get to the suits.”
“Calm down, Lucy, they’re just playing around. They’ll wake up soon.” A slight buzzing sound seemed to begin, though Anele wasn’t sure from where. Her thoughts felt funny, slow, like they were moving through syrup. Lucy grabbed her wrist, and it hurt, and she wanted to be mad but she couldn’t remember how. She was moving through the air and she wanted to stop but she didn’t have the strength and couldn’t the strangely frantic person pulling her just stop and let her sleep? She didn’t protest as the stranger shoved a helmet on her head, and yanked a spacesuit up and over her legs, forcing her feeble arms into the holes. The sterile, stale air from the oxygen tank filled her helmet. It was like breathing caffeine. Anele’s head began to clear, syrup turning to water, and her thoughts could suddenly swim again. Why was she wearing a suit —
“The mess hall!” Anele shouted. They had to go back and save everyone. Lucy, also wearing a suit now, was furiously typing away at a computer. She didn’t respond. Oh, right. The helmet. Anele turned on her comms.
“Lucy, the mess hall! We have to go back!” Anele pushed off the wall and began pulling herself back towards the mess hall.
“Stop.” Lucy said. Anele ignored her and kept going.
“Anele, stop. You can’t save them. Look.” She flipped the screen towards Anele. Anele recognized the page immediately. Crewmember vitals. She had pulled the page up often before, at night when everyone was asleep, to stare at the red bars that marked Alvin, Margot, and Joko. There were only two green bars now.
Anele and Lucy settled into a routine shockingly fast. They discovered the source of the carbon monoxide leak and fixed it (Lucy had picked up engineering within two days, because of course she had). They pumped new air into the ship. The bodies of their crewmates were stowed away neatly into the travel cryo-chambers. Anele could almost convince herself that they had just tucked in for the journey home early.
There was a brief argument, when Lucy and Anele disagreed on whether to continue with the mission or return. Lucy said that if they returned, their crewmates would have died for nothing. Anele pointed out the sunken-cost fallacy in Lucy’s argument, and Lucy ignored Anele. So they continued their exploration of the galaxies, orbiting planets and testing their atmospheres, collecting and sorting tidy little samples for scientists to study back home. Anele and Lucy ate all their meals together, in silence for the most part. They no longer had sessions. Anele had tried to continue, but Lucy had staunchly refused. She had grown more repressed and withdrawn than ever, but Anele found herself seeking out her company anyway. It was strange, the effects of loneliness on a person. If someone had told her at the start of her mission that she would be purposely spending time with Lucy, she would have laughed in their face. Lucy moved into the bunk above Anele. Neither of them said a word about it. Anele grew chattier than ever, talking between bites of meals and late into the night at her bunk, or while following Lucy around the ship. Lucy still rarely responded, but it was different. Before, it was clear she was deliberately ignoring Anele. Sometimes, she had even caught Lucy sighing as Anele launched into a new rant. But now, it was as if Anele could see her absorbing the words. Lucy’s stony exterior had turned spongy, and she couldn’t stop herself from soaking in Anele’s chatter. Once, Lucy admitted that sometimes, she felt like they were the only two people left in the universe.
Their strange existence as a pair lasted for a year. Then, Lucy began to ignore her again, worse than before. She couldn’t even look Anele in the eyes anymore. She spent all her free time at the main computer, reading a message from Earth that she blocked Anele from seeing. Anele could tell it was the same message, she had gotten a partial peek at the subject title a few times before Lucy could stop her. It read “URGENT: NOTIFICATION OF EARTH’S-”
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Though Lucy never revealed anything, Anele suspected that the message was about Earth’s restoration. The scientists back home must have figured out a solution to save Earth. It was a load off, honestly, it put a lot less pressure on their mission to find a new habitable planet. Anele still remembered the anxiety she had felt boarding the ship as the crowd waved to her. Some of them were crying, some laughing. The SCYLAX crew held the world’s future in their hands. Anele found it hard to comprehend. All those people, relying on her? Well, not her exactly. She was just the ship’s psychologist. Their hopes rested on the others in the crew. They were the serious, focused kind of people that seemed destined to carry the lives of others in their hands. Not Anele. It was her friendly, non-confrontational demeanor and positive attitude that had won her a spot on the ship. Not any kind of competency. She was just there to keep the crew from killing each other. Or themselves. So far she hadn’t done a very good job.
She hadn’t yet found a way to broach the subject of the message with Lucy that wouldn’t result in her shutting down immediately. Then it happened. Lucy had wandered off after lunch, muttering something about checking the course chartings. After finishing her dessert (she was having some with every meal now that there was no worry of running out) Anele went off in search of her. As she passed the airlock, she noticed something strange. A small white pinprick in the distance. They weren’t passing any planets today. Was it a moon? Whatever it was, it was awfully close. She rushed to the cockpit to check. Though not an engineer, Anele knew how to use the ship’s periscopic camera. She used to enjoy sneaking into the cockpit during breaks to observe the planets they passed. She could stare at them for hours. They were like massive marbles suspended in mid-air (there’s no air in space, but you get the picture). She had seen blue and purple and green and orange ones, swirled with milky clouds. She was still waiting for a pink planet. They were supposed to pass one, GJ 504-B, in a few months. She was looking forward to it. She pressed her face up to the eyepiece, scanning for the white pinprick. There it was, to the left of the ship.
“Gotcha now!” she thought, proud of herself. Even Lucy would have to be stoked if this was a new planet. Anele couldn’t wait to tell her. And maybe rub the fact that she found it in Lucy’s face a little. She zoomed in on the white pinprick. It was blurry. She leaned back from the eyepiece, to adjust the focus, and there —
“No.”
She recoiled from the eyepiece. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t- would she? Anele didn’t want to believe it, but she also couldn’t bring herself to look in the eyepiece again, to see that again. The white spacesuit. The focus so clear, so well-calibrated that she had absorbed the initials, L. C., stitched onto the shoulder of it with blood-red thread, before looking away. The mighty, formidable, indomitable Lucy Cortez, gone.
Of course, she panicked. Just for a day or two. She ate almost an entire month’s worth of desserts and cried in her bunk and screamed into her pillow. Healthy coping mechanisms. How could she have missed this?
She found the note tucked under Lucy’s pillow. “I’m sorry,” the note read. That was it? That was her whole apology? For giving up? For leaving her all alone? Icy rage replaced her grief. Fine. She would do it on her own. She would prove to Lucy that she could complete the mission without her. She was capable and competent and —
Anele lasted six months before she gave up. There were still six planets left on her list, in four different galaxies they had been meant to explore, but she couldn’t do it.
“They’ll understand on Earth,” she thought, as she climbed into the travel chamber. They had to. How was any human being meant to go on like this? Besides, she wasn’t a botanist or an engineer or a doctor. She was a psychologist. She wasn’t qualified to do this research. This wasn’t her job.
“This was a task for a team, not an I,” she reasoned, as the icy air began to seep in, the lid of the cryo-chamber locking above her. She took comfort in the phrase. She was an “I” and she had no team, and they had to understand.
Anele spent the week before the return staring out the airlock at the green and blue marble that was steadily growing larger. If only the cryo-chamber hadn’t woken her up so early. It had been planned this way when there was supposed to be samples to prepare, a crew with tasks to complete. Anele had nothing to do besides stare out the tiny circle of warped plastic.
She hoped Earth hadn’t changed too much, though she knew this was futile, considering how many years had passed. She wasn’t a physicist, but she understood time dilation well enough to understand how long it had been since they had left for their journey. She hoped Earth wouldn’t be mad at her for failing their mission. By now, they must have found a way to fix everything, right? She couldn’t read the message Lucy had been so obsessed with. Her clearance wasn’t high enough, and she didn’t know how to update it in the system now that she was technically captain of the ship. She assumed that was why Lucy had decided to…leave. She just couldn’t continue now that their mission was unnecessary. She couldn’t face the thought of returning, almost the entire crew sacrificed in an effort that had been made superfluous by Earth’s restoration.
Anele tried contacting ground control to let them know she would be landing soon, but she got no response. Something must have been wrong with comms. She didn’t know if it was a computer issue or mechanical. It didn’t really matter which it was. She wasn’t Alvin or Margot. She didn’t have Alvin or Margot. But they would know what was happening when they saw the SCYLAX breach the atmosphere, and someone would come and get her.
“Someone is coming for me.”
She comforted herself with the thought as she strapped herself into the pilot’s chair.
“Someone is coming for me.”
She wrapped herself with the words, protection, as the ship began to plummet towards the ocean.
“Someone is coming for me.”
She extinguished the flames of panic with the mantra as the ship hit water.
“Someone is coming for me.”
She repeated the phrase to herself as the ship began to drift.
“SOMEONE IS COMING FOR ME.”
She screamed it over and over as the days began to pile into weeks which formed months as the food ran out and her ship continued to float. The words tucked her in as she lost consciousness, slipping into sleep.
“Someone is coming for me.”
