The Last Humans Left, by Thalia James
As the sole conscious medic on our little jaunt, Paul Summers had maybe the most contact with the other crewmates out of anyone. I remember the small chats we’d shared as he patched up one or two of the many small wounds I’d gathered tending to the reactors, he always knew just what to say to fill the silence.
Once he asked me if I ever wondered about the lives of the people we carried. “Think about it, thousands of people down there, their lives just… put on pause. And by the time they wake up, We’ll just be dust. Just a plaque on the wall of the bridge.”
The moments where he shared his thoughts so candidly were few and far between, but whenever they happened I was reminded how contemplative he was. Sometimes I wonder how he did it, dealing with all those thoughts and wonders and so rarely sharing it with anyone, but I think that contemplation brought him joy, in a way.
It was maybe a week after the first power failure that he reached out to me. Thinking back on it I’m touched that he came to me before anyone else, I guess he thought he could trust me. We were both wrong about that. His concern was with Davie, the engineer’s apprentice. He’d been counseling the young man for a few days, and reported that the twitch in her left eye had disappeared for some reason. I was incredulous at first; we were almost constantly thirty seconds away from the deaths of us and the rest of humanity, and he was worried about a missing tic? But, as I said, we were all stressed, and anything could set us off at this point. I told him to go back to his bunk and get some rest. I wish now that I had done something else, anything else. I still haven’t gone back to his quarters to clean up, I just can’t deal with it.
I knew Paul Summers better than anyone else on this ship, and it hurt me the most when he died.
*****
“God fucking damnit, we can’t keep letting this happen.”
Such outbursts were rare from the captain, but the loss of Paul had hit everyone especially deeply. With only five of us left and no medic, our ability to perform our tasks was called into question, regardless of other murders. If we failed to maintain the status quo another round of workers would be woken to replace us.
That’s a hell I wouldn’t wish upon anyone. If I could prevent it, I would. As the captain took a moment to compose herself, I was momentarily struck by her green eyes. They were wide open and bloodshot, and for the first time I saw past the facade that she had put up, that of a calm and controlled captain. Danielle Hawthorne was terrified, and that scared me more than anything else could have. I don’t know what about this shocked me so much, but seeing her, this bastion of calm and optimism, scared for her life, was what made me lose hope. If even she was broken by this, what hope did any of us have?
The others shifted uncomfortably. We had gathered in response to another malfunction with the O2 system. It’s strange, I was passing by the carbon recycling when the meeting was called. It seemed to be working fine, but I wasn’t the engineer.
“Johanssen, can you figure out what keeps happening to our life support?”
“I don’t know what to say, captain, I’ve checked every inch of that machine upwards of twenty times, there’s nothing wrong with it!”
“We have to assume that whoever is committing the murders is also messing with our vital system functions” Kessler cut in. “But why they’d want to do that is beyond me. A failure would kill them as sure as us.”
“We have to consider the possibility that our assailant might not be human, those impact readings are still happening regularly, and with that hole Charles found in the hull…”The silence hung over us for a few moments, as I realized I had to be the one to say what we all were thinking.
“We still don’t have enough information to act. As much as I hate to admit it, we have to keep working.”
It looked like Davie was about to argue, but the captain cut in.
“She’s right. All we can do for now is keep the Odyssey running. If any of you see anything suspicious, come to me immediately.” We split up, scared to be alone but equally scared to be in a room with anyone else.
Maybe an hour later I found the body, green eyes staring into the starscape outside the bridge, and that was when I gave up completely.
*****
Standard procedure for a death on the clock was to just feed the body into the reactor, turns out million-degree plasma will digest organic matter pretty fast, but all of us agreed that this occasion deserved something special. Dani was the only reason that we hadn’t given out to hopelessness weeks ago, and as such she could be considered the most important person in human history. As a genetic engineer, Kessler had been running some experiments in the medbay, seeing what would grow in an artificial environment, and he provided one of his more recent experiments, which I folded into a crown.
I saw her on the stretcher and she looked so peaceful, like after all this time she had finally found peace. I sat against the wall in the back of the room to take it in. The greatest human I had ever met wearing what was probably the last flower in all of creation.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
And then it went into the fire.
*****
A week or so after Danielle’s death I was still waiting for the full realization to hit me. I’d been so close to giving up for so long that I honestly thought this would be what pushed me over the edge. Still, every day I got out of my bunk to do my tasks.
And every day I was amazed.
As I trudged through the halls on my way to the reactor I passed by electrical, in all of its ominous silence. No one had been there since Charles, our electrician, died, leaving us with no one to maintain the wires. So long as the nightly diagnostic reported no problems, we resolved to leave the room untouched. I glanced into the dark doorway, and took a step to continue my routine.
Then I heard something move.
Instantly, I froze. And I waited. When I heard a second, soft clunk I knew it was more than my imagination. Everything I knew and everything I had learned told me to run. None of us had ever seen our tormentor but it was safe to assume that this thing was what ripped Charles in half. Something like that would almost certainly kill me.
So I went right in.
Inside the room, instead of some horrific monster, or the face of a friend, I saw a small figure, dressed in a mini version of the crew’s uniform.
*****
None of us knew that Dani had had such a pet project going, but it seems that during her sleepless hours on the ship she had put… whatever this was together. And what it was was bizarre.
It was about a foot tall version of the crew’s exo-suits, painted to resemble a captain's coloring. There was no discernible face behind the nearly opaque visor. A note left in the tiny outer pocket explained what the little automaton was, and who had made it. After that, it seemed to just go its own way, probably some kind of roomba-like environmental algorithm. It acted almost like a cat, the way you’d see it just around a corner before it darted away.
It seemed to prefer the bridge, Johannsen thinks it might be some kind of memory, but no one wanted to take the risk of dismantling it to see how it worked.
One day, after yet another close call with the rectors, I was sitting there just staring at the infinity that we navigated, just like Dani had been when I found her. I was still coming off that horrible high of anxiety that came when everything was about three seconds away from going wrong, and momentarily I wondered if this would be the time when it all got the best of me and I just didn’t get up.
Then I felt the crewmate hop onto my lap. And as I stared at it for a brief second in shock, I knew this was what Dani had built it for. She knew that we would be put under an impossible amount of stress, especially after her death, and made this to help us cope. It seems like it shouldn’t have worked, and by all means it shouldn’t have. I still don’t know why, as I sat there, I felt calm for the first time in weeks.
*****
That sense of calm didn’t last.
Davie was the next to go, but it wasn’t a murder. Johannsen found him in the cordoned off medbay, an empty bottle of pills in his hand. As his mentor, I think Johannsen took it personally, as if she’d failed him.
As if anyone else could have done better.
It didn’t matter anyway. She was dead too, not one standard day later. Kessler died too, but as soon as I saw his body I knew whatever was killing us had finally slipped up. Kessler was dead, and his body was in the hallway, right in front of a camera. I raced to the comm room. If the ship’s recording system had captured the murder, it would be able to playback, to get dna reading, then finally the ship would be able to flush anything matching that profile out of the system.
My heart was pounding as I clumsily made my way through the menus, trying to remember my brief training on this topic back home. I knew I was the last one left, and it knew the same. I didn’t have much time, or so I thought.
When I finally found the correct file, and the video playback started, my mind refused to connect the dots, the information I was being presented just didn’t add up. Leeman Kessler had fallen in the hallway, crying for his life. And I was standing over him. Axe in hand, delivering the killing blow.
*****
So now we’re caught up. I hope my flare for the dramatic wasn’t too distasteful, but now you know what happened. I expect you’ll be woken up in about four hours, as soon as the computer realizes there’s no one around anymore to maintain it. I’ve left Danielle’s creation deactivated, on the captain's chair in the bridge, please take good care of it.
It’s all that’s left of my crew.
I’m in the airlock now, recording my last thoughts. I don’t know what the fuck it is inside of me, but I hope to any gods listening that it can’t survive the infinite black out the door, and that whatever mess you wake up to, I’m not a part of it. I’m sorry the engines are in disarray, I haven’t realigned it, I’m honestly not so sure I should.
There’s nothing left to say now, I’m mostly just stalling. I’m scared. That’s strange, I think, to be scared after all the things I’ve gone through, no, all the things I’ve put everyone else through. Oh, God, okay. I think I’m ready now. I wish you all the best of luck on your segment of the voyage, and if any of your crewmates turn up dead, just know that I’m so, so sorry.
First mate Maya N. Briggs, signing off.