[ 49 hours, 15 minutes, 18 seconds before impact]

After the game of war, his secret was out.

Almost every engineer on the ship had witnessed it, and all of the crew had heard about it within two rotations afterwards. He wasn't certain how secret it had really been to begin with, but the way the crew interacted with him now, was in vast contrast to before. Suddenly, he found himself being spoken to directly, gestured to, and bombarded by questions almost any time a crew member found themselves with an opportunity. Especially the newer ones.

He disliked it.

Interacting was still a strange process, and it took effort to use the translator and not feel nauseated. As far as he could tell, whatever had been given to him was physically altering his brain- something Di'her had actually laughed at when he had brought it to discussion.

“Of course it is! What, did you think you would need to wear that forever?”

He did not find that nearly as amusing as she did, but she had repeatedly reassured him that it was fine. In time the device would dissolve, and any linkages and connections he had made while using it would stick.

This had driven him in the nervous habit of speaking his own language when he was alone.

He still remembered that, after all. It was the one real link he had to his past that was tangible, and he didn't want to wake up one day and realize it had been replaced. The thought had kept him away from sleep more than a few times.

The one thing that truly did grind at him was "why?"

Why did he think it mattered so much?

He couldn't even see a clear reason, because as far as he could tell, he was the only human left. No one he had spoken to, not even through Yitale's connections, had ever heard of humanity. None of the machines he'd asked Di'her to interact with seemed to be able to match him as anything, or identify him in any significant way.

As far as anyone knew, it was as if humanity didn't exist at all. That it never had.

He supposed that would make sense, considering the Union had probably exterminated them a long time ago.

Through talks with Syzah, he had come to understand a small fraction of the history around him. Or, at least understand a small fraction, as viewed through the eyes of a young aspiring trader. The young Siren had traveled since the day he was born, and had many things to share. Sometimes far too many things, which made them difficult to put into a meaningful order, but the man knew he meant well.

The Union was old, for starters. Apparently, so old it was impossible to accurately say with exactly how far back it went. Easily hundreds of thousands of years from what was described, but their strange manner of time keeping didn't help much. Syzah said he was fifteen cycles old, and Sonat admitted she was only seventeen. Apparently to Sirens- this was very young, and they could live to be over two hundred or more.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The more he had tried to decipher how this worked, the more confused it left him. The best he could assume, with nothing to compare it to, was that a cycle came to be around a year, or the alien equivalent of a year. It was a personal time, or a rate of time that you, specifically, have existed. Apparently traveling faster than light could make time keeping difficult. It seemed that if anyone was curious, they could always check the medical bay machines, which seemed to keep track regardless.

Besides the point, though.

When he had learned about the quarantine, and what it was, some things started to make much more sense. As far as destruction of the Humans race, Syzah didn't know a thing, and the man never pressed the issue on young Siren. What Syzah did know, though, was trade. He explained everything from that particular view, from what the “Lines” were, to what it meant to the crew and the ship. He didn't approach it from a military description, but instead from the perspective of why they were heading near them, and how they mattered economically. How the prestige of being allowed to do such work was considered an honor...

Apparently this was of serious importance for a trade-ship and crew. If they could make it out here along the fringes, they could make it anywhere. Though the trade aspects of these things didn't seem relevant at first, it put the pieces of the puzzle together for him rather quickly.

The end result, was a rough outline of what likely took place.

So far as the man could understand, it seemed that humanity had the ill luck of being on the wrong side of the galactic fence: the side with the cancer-like, planet killing, infection. The so-called "Consumption" that spread about the galaxy. And from there, it wasn't much of a jump to understand why they had been removed.

Humans, in the act of defending themselves, had unwittingly broken the line protecting trillions of individuals, and a giant galactic bureaucracy had grossly overreacted.

Or perhaps, they'd reacted perfectly logically.

Honestly, if he looked at it from the other side, and stood in their shoes, he could almost comprehend why they had done it, even if he couldn't forgive it. Certainly the needs of many would outweigh the needs of a few, but... he could never understand the cruelty and fear required to do something so terrible. And then to simply let it be forgotten, washed away by the sands of time?

It was as if his people had never even existed.

He couldn't understand if he wanted revenge, or if he just wanted closure. Everyone who had been involved in the whole affair was likely dead and gone a long time ago. Thousands of years, for all he knew, and there were just too many things coming at him at once.

Trying to make sense of it all was just painful.

There was no true way to deal with it.

Truthfully, he had always felt that way about loss. With his memories still sometimes bubbling up, he knew he had lost many things he cared about, before. Now, though, it just seemed too much.

He'd truly lost everything.

Every memory he could ever hope to get back, and they all reminded him of a place and people that no longer existed.

They ran by him, as if tiny tremors of recognition and knowing. His mind the only record of a species that was wisped away, like photons into the black.

It hurt to accept.

He had lived, laughed, and loved- but he didn't remember who these things had been with. He only knew that they had been everything that mattered, and there was no way to ever find out more.

That was how he often found himself walking the ship when most of the crew was asleep.

In the depths below, he paced the halls quietly, singing songs he could barely remember, in a language long dead, from a species that no one knew existed.

“If I could start again, A million miles away

I would keep myself, I would find a way”