А spacesuit was floating in Mars orbit among scattered cargo and debris. It was an old-fashioned one, with a name tag saying “J.Fogel” and a little green light blinking right next to it. To any observer it would seem lifeless and deserted but it was actually transmitting looped audio in every available frequency. The recording was of a dry husky voice that was desperately gasping for air in between sentences. Yet through the constant choking and all the pauses one could feel resolve in the voice’s steel overtones.
> suit audiogram
filename untitled 0001
> time 07.36.43
>
We are not explorers. Were the Polynesian mariners explorers? Or rather, were they castaways that had to choose between extinction at the hand of a rival clan and the Pacific void. I would choose the void. We would all choose the void.
So they paddled through thousands of miles of water. With literally nothing to measure the massive ocean currents but their testicles. That’s a fact, by the way. If they lost their way, their men would jump overboard and let their sensitive loins tell them where the flow was taking them. It literally took balls to traverse the Pacific in those days.
The islanders of Rapa Nui. They were convinced all the world had sunk and they were the last people in the Universe. Just like us. The only difference is, we are most probably right. That did not stop us from fighting each other up to the bitter end. We called our clans Unions, Federations, and Empires but we still killed with the same ferocity.
There is no magnetic field out here. No compass. No north. That’s why we haven’t been able to breed a single bird. It somehow messes them up entirely. They either hatch and bang their head to death against a wall or just plain starve. I used to have chicken back home when I was a kid. What I wouldn’t give for some chicken. The Mexica claim they can genetically engineer birds to survive without a magnetic field. The Mexica claim lots of things.
So without a magnetic north we use positioning satellites but in high orbit we are sometimes forced to triangulate star positions. Just like the Norse. Or the Arabs. Or the Polynesians.
Now I’m stuck in orbit in nothing but my spacesuit. Falling in a slow but relentless spiral towards the orange and red of the planet that has been home to the remains of humanity for the past thirty-something years. Some Believers say we are always falling. Asteroids, comets, planets - everything is falling towards the stars, the stars are falling towards the galactic center, and galaxies are going to eventually collapse back to the Origin until one day, a thousand billion years from now, the Universe is going to be no larger than a single atom, and there is going to be another Big Bang and all matter and energy will be reset.
I don’t frankly care for that philosophy, or any other for that matter. All I know is that I’m almost out of oxygen and after I expire, I will be no more. Everything else is simply wishful thinking.
This suit... It has a limited oxygen supply but its electrics run on solar so they should be operational for the next two hundred years. At first I thought, how cruel should you be to design such a thing? A shell that outlives its inhabitant and lasts through the ages with nothing but the sorry remains of a human inside it.
Then I saw this as an opportunity. An opportunity to tell a story just the way I see it without the bullshit sugarcoating of this nation or that. A story of Mars, Phobos, Deimos, the Crawlers and the Orbitals. A story of the Last Nations, the Five Cities, of Kevlaar and the Revolutions.
I can see Old Earth from here. A perfect blue dot among the stars. Home. There is no going back. Ever since the Collapse our best telescopes could never pick up a trace of electric light in the darkness of our cradle planet. Mankind on Old Earth is no more.
It’s almost over now. The massive chain reaction that started near the South Pole about eight hours ago has engulfed most of Mars’ surface. I’ve been watching it. It looks surreal and yet, I almost feel as if I can touch it, that massive wave of death and destruction. I don’t see how anything could survive down there. And without the Crawlers’ food and energy supply, the Orbitals are done for. Some trigger-happy general finally screwed the human race with an unthinkable super-weapon and now... nobody wins.
So if, millennia from now, any form of intelligent life should reach this forsaken corner of the Milky Way and they find what’s left of our last engineering feats, the rusty skeletons of our once mighty structures, they should learn of our very god-like arrogance that led to our demise. They should hear of raktamaya, as the Indians call it, or the Redlock.
My name is Jason Fogel, of the last Earth-born. I now have a few precious breaths of oxygen left and one last story to tell. My own.
