Emma’s Echo

 Remix of photo from JPL_Caltech

Emma’s Echo

by Zack Goncz

Log Entry 60-5: Lt. Cmdr. Atwell’s personal recorder
Resource Discovery Mission 1 to Star System HD 219134
Salvaged by Rescue Officer Maj. Sayed

The atmosphere wouldn’t allow my companions the dignity of fire. The ship instead collapsed like a house of cards. There was barely a sound. I might have imagined the sound for their sake, since, though eulogies may be given, they’ll be delivered from a distance even ghosts can’t hear.

That was eight hours ago. I sit now in the waiting room of infinity, alone at the frontier of existence, hoping to leave something behind. I don’t know enough about the recording device in my suit to know if it will survive long enough to carry my final message. So, this is not my final message but only the context for it.

We came to this far off planet to determine what resources were available, having exhausted those closer to us. It’s a job I’ve done before, but I’ve never been this far beyond human space. The planet was too hot to inhabit and had no atmosphere. It was in the direction of Cassiopeia, a constellation I had once described to someone unfamiliar with Greek mythology as the letter E.

We ran the tests, took the samples, and were loading up the ship for the return home. As I was outside gathering the last of the equipment, something inside of the ship must have malfunctioned or caught fire. The oxygen rich environment within turned to flame instantly but found no nourishment outside. So, the ship didn’t so much as explode but crumble unceremoniously. I watched it happen, helplessly, like I was watching someone else’s dream.

The seams burst and the ship fell apart. By the time I comprehended what had happened it was finished. There was no warning, no stalking, no drums of battle. The universe was walking by and stepped on us. It’s gone now and there is no one to be angry at. Everything laid there in the sand like it was already ancient history, like it was over, which it was.

Yet, I remain. I stood unmoving, as if to not alert the universe to its oversight. As I stood mouth agape, I could see how hot it was around me. I looked forward, in the direction of where my ship once stood, ready for departure, to take me home. I would return on a Wednesday, debriefed by the weekend, and encouraged to go to the beach. And while I may have had my fill of sand, I would have given in.

The shore of the beach I’m standing on now though, abuts a black void, the sand much hotter. I couldn’t feel the heat because of the temperature controls in my suit, but I could see it in the ground and in the rocks. The empty orange planet glows in silence around me, smothering me.

With my ship gone, I thought about how long a rescue mission would take. I thought about how long I could last if I turned the temperature controls off periodically to conserve energy. I knew the answer. It was a stupid thought.

I realized my mouth hung open still, my eyes wide and eyebrows arched. Everything was frozen as if my lack of acknowledgement could make what I saw unreal, as if reality could not proceed on this course without me. I closed my mouth but otherwise remained.

I briefly ran through scenarios in my head. I didn’t have to for long. I continued to stand there and look at the wreckage, contrasting what I had in front of me with what I had left behind.

Eventually, I resolved to dig through the mocking metal sculpture. Why? I could not tell you. Protocol I suppose. If only I follow the manual, then one step would lead to the next and then… I don’t know. Whatever action I was talking myself into faded. While my mind may have been comforted by the prospective distraction that professional diligence might provide, my body wasn’t up for the farce. I’d given enough, everything, and one last diagnostic report on top of it was too ridiculous even for me. I continued to stand there instead. It made me feel like I was waiting for something to happen, preferable to acknowledging what would.

After a while, I allowed myself to move, not seeing what harm it could do to at least straighten my posture and face my maker with a modicum of comfort. Then I looked down at the sand. Just blinking. Being very conscious of my blinking and how time was passing while I blinked and starting to feel a little anxious about it, even knowing that everything was futile. My blinks and breaths were finite now, escaping from me and melting away in front of me. I couldn’t stop it. My heart beat faster. Every beat brought me closer to death, further from home.

A reflexive raise of the head and a deep inhale was followed by a long exhale, clearing the way for a forced sense of peace. My salvation was beyond the power of my expression, so I lingered in the calm, what little there was, for fear that in stepping out of it I would lose it forever. There was silence but for the labored sounds produced by my lungs and suit in combination, the doomed marriage of which now struck me as sounding, appropriately, like gasping. In and out like a metronome whose song had entered its coda. Though many a doomed marriage has produced something beautiful, no such beauty will reverberate out from the final note here.

I pushed those thoughts away, as I had too often on Earth, selfishly. I had to focus on important things. Having salvaged a measure of, perhaps not calmness but, awareness at least, my gaze fell again. I had trained myself to ignore everything but work too well.

I focused on breathing. Not too excitedly. Why rush things? I wasn’t looking at anything. I was kind of meditating. I was zoning out. I was looking in a direction though and, when my meditation waivered something took my focus.

I noticed a rock. It sat there. That’s all it did, and maybe all it had done for thousands of years given the lack of wind or atmosphere. I stood still as well, as if it was some creature I feared disturbing. I watched it for a while, not thinking about it particularly but having it enter my focus over and over again. It had nothing to say, other than perhaps that it was hot, which I didn’t need a reminder of. You could see how hot and inhospitable it was on this planet by watching the heat radiating off of the rock, flowing through it. I wouldn’t be able to deal with these conditions so easily.

Alone, I am less than even the rocks I came to conquer. Would it be better to just run out of air, rather than face the elements? Better I chose while I could. I still had the power to do that at least.

A slow panic began to rise up within me and my heart started beating faster. Reality gripped my shoulder from behind and its long fingers dug into my chest. Damn. It wouldn’t let go. I angrily clung to the rock with my gaze so as not to face what reckoning waited behind me. What was in this rock? What precious mineral did it hold? Calcium? Aluminium? What does calcium want for its birthday? Shall I hug the aluminium? Should I hold it in my arms and watch it sleep and hope it doesn’t wake up suddenly so that, without the use of my arms, I would have to hide the tears welling up in my eyes?

The rock taunted me. All the glory I ever wanted was right here. The thing I sacrificed everything for. I wanted to be a footnote in a history book that strangers would read. Now, they’ll find me starved like the corpse of King Midas surrounded by my treasure. Why couldn’t what I had have been enough?

And so, I stood, holding back tears, while I spend my final moments with this rock. This damn rock that keeps interrupting me, taking my focus, just as it had so often, from a distance, when I was home.

The rock continued to convert the energy saturating it into anxiety for me. Everything did. Everything was indifferent to what was coming for me. I wanted to come here, but was struck by how irrelevant I, the conqueror, am to here, so far away from where I mattered.

The executioner forgot me and left me to starve in my cell. The very dust beneath my feet had been there for millions of years, undisturbed, and could possibly remain so for hundreds of millions more with me disintegrated and absorbed within it like a drop joins an ocean, an ocean that neither hates nor wishes malice on the drop but will go on the same regardless, having annihilated the drop completely but without changing the slightest as a result.

My heart was pounding. A tiny fragile heart pounding against my chest, fighting with all its might, reminding me not only to conserve my energy and oxygen, but that I am something that an ocean or a stone or the overwhelming power of the stars could foster or destroy, but never understand, let alone be: alive. I couldn’t allow myself to be overwhelmed. I am not a drop. I am alive. And even when I’m not, I will have been, and memory can defy mortality. But what memory will I leave? This? Is this the sum of me? Who wants to carry this in their head?

I let the doom flow under me and carefully balanced myself atop it. I knew the stone wasn’t on my side, it was merely a vessel for the infinite to heckle me at the end and chide me for my hubris, or rather, for me to imagine that at least in some desperate attempt to summon defiance in the face of the inevitable.

What bothered me was knowing that when they find me and my ship, however long it takes them to come, this rock will be staring at them just like it’s staring at me, indifferent to what it was an audience for, unable to relay what it witnessed, it having not been notable enough to remember. I hated this rock and the minerals within it, essential to the survival of humanity no doubt, which I had wanted so badly so that strangers might know it was me, so that I might feel like I left something to the world for having lived, ignorant to the fact that my greatest legacy and the thing I loved most was home waiting for me, waving to a letter in the sky each night.

And through my tears came the rock. The rock that taunted me. It asked me if I was done yet, if I was ready to join it. It sarcastically beckoned me to come have what I wanted. I took a deep breath, a precious thing now, offset by how irrelevant it was to my ultimate fate. I wanted to smash the rock to show how little it meant to me. I wanted to destroy this whole planet and fate itself as penance, as if all the love and life I’ve forfeited could be unleashed in an explosion the whole universe couldn’t ignore, and it would know what it took from me, and she would know I was thinking about her. And the rock kept whispering that nothing leaves this planet. It won. It trapped me. I let it. Everything that comes here freezes in the stagnant windless heat. My corpse will be a monument to my greed. There is so much I want to say, but I don’t know if this recording will survive, and the rocks can’t deliver my message.

Then, eyes locked on this rock, hopes and hate tethered to it, I came to an understanding. Maybe this rock doesn’t care about my fate. Maybe the immortal and the ancient need not notice something as transient and temporary as life and love. It didn’t mean it as an insult. It didn’t notice I was there. It didn’t care. But someone did.

And so, having come to terms with the state of things, I turn with a clarity and peace, a resolve and strength I’ve never felt before to fight the inevitable. I’ll lose and I’ll die. And the rock will continue on in the very same place, never having lived at all. But now, arranged in such a way with other rocks and debris, as large and firm as I’m able, as to read: Emma.