The Ship at the End of Time

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. There used to be more around to block a scream, to absorb its power, but these days, peeking over the precipice of the end of time, the bygone days of planets, stars, and blackholes, I would wager that I could hear that scream in the great beyond. I would be grateful to have someone else out here in this abyss.

I suppose I should tell you a bit more about me, dear reader, as although I know that this journal will go nowhere and inevitably vanish after my death, it’s nice to have someone to talk to. The ship walls aren’t really doing it for me anymore.

I remember in fragments and shards. I would equate my memory to something like a photo book with pictures missing on every other page. I can remember the mission I was on, who I was and who I wanted to be when setting out on my voyage, but not how long it took me to become an astronaut, what my favorite food was, the people I admired and the faces attached to them, or when my birthday was.

Some might call this patchwork memory system a blessing. Maybe you think the same thing, perhaps you wish that you could forget the bad parts? You wish you were able to forget entire events that were embarrassing, frustrating, or upsetting?

“What a world you get to live in ma’am, how could I do the same thing?” you must be thinking to yourself.

No, my patchwork memory is a curse. I’m not talking about the inconveniences of forgetting what your favorite brand of laundry detergent was, but the skin crawling feeling that you are forgetting someone or something that was worth remembering. It’s the sensation of being unable to find the last puzzle piece. You search thinking that it might still be in the box, you might have dropped the damn thing off the table, but no matter how hard you search, you still can’t find that last piece. The searching is the scariest part. I should at least be able to have the option to push someone out, to bury them deep in the catacombs of my mind, but the goddamned machine stole it from me.

The machine in which I awoke is the reaper who travels through my mind with his scythe, swinging wildly, chopping my beautiful experiences to shreds.

The machine isn’t evil, most machines aren’t inherently evil, they can only perform their jobs efficiently or poorly. Unfortunately for my now dead crew and I as the lone survivor upon this ship at the edge of the universe, at the edge of time, the cryostasis machine has completed its task poorly with the utmost efficiency.

Do you know dear reader, what it’s like to wake up to find your other two companions, friends whom you have stood by with, explored the mysteries of life with, and loved, dead with only a skeleton remaining of them? No body, no blood, all skeleton.

The woman at the end of time put down her pen, thinking back to the day that she had awoken in the cryostasis pod. She remembered the feeling of the water, water that was supposed to be frigid having turned lukewarm, her gasp for air as the water let go of the grip it had on her skin. The rush to get out of the tank blinded her, blinded her so well that she didn’t notice the skeleton that was eroded, hanging halfway out of the cryostasis tank to her right.

She finally caught her breath, and when she saw the eroded skeleton she let out an ear piercing shriek in the empty, decrepit ship. She felt as if she had entered a horrible nightmare, a pain so intense it felt as if every nerve of her body was on fire.

The woman at the end of time looked to the other cryostasis tank, hoping against hope that her second companion had survived with her, that she had someone to help clean up this disaster of a mission with, but she was sorely mistaken.

A skeleton, in the same state of degradation, if not more than the other crewmate’s skeleton, rested completely within the chamber. There were no signs of a struggle, it was if her other companion simply gave up, they accepted their fate.

Her screams echoed against the walls, and she screamed until her throat felt raw. She pounded her fist against the floor, her knuckles bruising, burning with pain, but incomparable to this new pain, this emotional pain. How could this have happened to her? This crew, her crew was supposed to be special, they were to be humanity’s first chance to explore a world beyond their own.

The woman at the end of time leapt from her memory to the present, deciding that it might be best that the journal not know her experience in finding her once companions.

Finding their bodies was an experience that will haunt me for the rest of my days, whenever the last days here amongst the darkness of the abyss end. My last light of existence snuffed out as the universe goes dark for the final time.

I was supposed to explore the stars, to live in a time when humanity could accomplish the impossible by sending their own, casting them into the unknown. I should have been a beacon for humanity to send its first “Hello!” to worlds far beyond, but that damned machine had other plans for us all.

I was the only one that the cryostasis machine didn’t kill. Why? The engineers who designed my ship could have told you that, but I? I could never. The only thing I do know is that while my companions lay dying, their skeletons degrading over the millennia, was that I slept. I slept until sleep was no more.

I was supposed to wake up in one thousand years with the others, with my crewmates that had unfortunately perished once their cryostasis timer met zero, but no I was the one to “survive”. I was the one to travel beyond time itself. Not a thousand, not a million, not a billion, rather one hundred trillion years.

When I sit on the cold metal floor of the ship, sometimes I don’t just wish, but I pray that I will die when I awake from my temporary slumber. I pray that I will find some way to escape the prison that holds my last spark of existence in a universe where I am unappreciated and unnecessary.

The woman at the end of time put down her pen once more, looking at her drawings on the walls of the ship. The distorted lines and shapes were all portraits of the figures that she could remember over her lifetime, simple in nature, but essential to her survival. She had to talk to someone, it might as well be people with whom she enjoyed their company.

A maddening amount of scribbles were drawn on the wall that looked like bizarre versions of humans, the kind of portrait only a shattered mind could make. She knew that she was going insane, how could she not? The simple question was when would her mind completely shatter? When would it break to the point of no return? She hoped that it would be soon, it would give her something else to do rather than think about how alone she felt.

At least now she had discovered this journal, maybe this little book would give her the companionship she longed for, so far it was better than the walls.

I would never consider suicide, self harm does not and will never intrigue me, nor should it intrigue you dear reader. I simply wish that I could escape from existence, as if I never existed in the first place, then I would not know the pain of this isolation, the lack of meaning that my life now has.

I wish to be among companions, not exploring the stars, not demanding some grand purpose, but to simply exist with others, to feel wanted, to feel needed, to feel loved. At least I have you. You may not be able to comfort me, to hold me in your arms, to laugh with me, to cry with me, but you are able to listen. Sometimes, in a universe that is cold and unforgiving, that is all we require, someone to listen, someone to understand.

The woman at the end of time threw the pen against the wall, shattering her lifeline of the journal, her last friend in a world where she didn’t belong.

A single tear dropped from her face and onto the journal entry that she had completed, and then another, and another, and soon there were so many tears that the ink ran over the pages in uneven waves, dripping from the paper and onto the floor.

A thought had occurred to her, a thought so terrifying that it had made her cry for the first time since she had awoken only to find the skeletons of her once companions.

She no longer remembered her name. It was lost to her, lost in the darkness of the abyss.

The woman at the end of time strode away from the journal, away from the machine, away from her pain to the front of the ship. She sat down in the central chair of the command center, the ship’s controls long consumed by time.

She shivered in the last remaining space suit of three. The other two she had already devoured the remaining oxygen from like a vulture feasting on a long dead carcass in the heat of the desert. She sat looking through the viewport of the ship, the view the same as when she had awoken. The same as when she slept. The same as the day she would inevitably die upon this ship. The view that would stay the same long after her flesh and blood left her bones, and her bones crumbled to dust.

The woman at the end of time thought once more of what she could remember: her home on earth, her companions there, sitting in the sunlight as a child, her mother’s hand holding her own, the smell of leaves on a fall afternoon, the taste of fresh fruit picked off of a tree in her backyard, the beautiful symphony she had heard played in a concert hall when she was young, and the day that she had decided she had wanted to become an astronaut.

All of those fragments, all of those moments, all of those memories, they were not lost, they were with her. The woman at the end of time smiled. Those events, those places, the smells, the sights, the people, they had died an eternity ago, in the world that existed before the death of the universe, but she had held onto them.

The woman at the end of time smiled, and as she sailed the darkness in her ship, she realized that she was not alone. The machine may have stolen her memories, chopped some to shreds, but as long as she held onto something, anything in her voyage to the end, she would be the one who won. She would be on the last ship, she would be the last person, the last living thing, the last spark of existence carrying life, love, and memory in a universe at the end of time.