MOBIUS

My fingers snaked against cold glass, clenched like an infant poised to beat against the walls of the womb. They weakened and splayed, yearning—for what? There was nothing there. Beyond the window lay space, in the fullest sense of the word. Not like the space between my fingers left frail by cold sleep—space which separates—but rather, space as last resort: a label for where there is nothing else.

My breath fogged the window, frosting against the hostile cold just metres away. I wiped it clean with a silk sleeve, sharpening my reflection: black hair, long and unruly, and a still blue lake in each eye. I did not recognise this face. Could anyone? There was nobody around to ask—nobody but the ship’s own vitals, beating, beeping, flickering in displays and surging through coolant pipes a hair’s breadth from my head, escorting me down the cramped corridor to the bridge.

Inside lay an array of systems and subsystems all feeding into each other to autonomously pilot the ship, displays lighting up like stars at play. I sat snugly in the pilot’s seat, sparking a holograph before me:

I hope this letter finds you well. If you are reading this, then there is hope yet for us all.

You ride aboard one of our twin arks—built to endure any test of time.

It carries the genetic material of our species. It holds our legacy.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Bring it to a habitable planet and seed it with life.

Please. Shepherd us to brighter shores.

There is nobody left.

The ship lurched, pulling my stomach with it. My mind was still numb from cold sleep, my memories grey and frayed, but the pieces were beginning to fall into place—we had been wiped out, somehow, and had launched our cells into space as a final gambit. An absurd idea—the stuff of fiction. Though I remembered nothing, I somehow knew every switch, knob, and display in the cockpit as intimately as one counts and remembers the freckles and lashes of a lover. The pod, I murmured to nobody in particular. It replaces memories too. Or perhaps there was nothing left to overwrite. An eternity in cold sleep would glass any mind to a clean slate.

I flicked a switch above me. The shutters groaned, rising like curtains over the windshield, revealing a crack of blue followed by streaks of grey and clumps of brown that grew into a disc hung in space: a habitable planet, rapidly approaching, growing from a cue ball to a football—far too quickly.

We’re in warp—this is FTL! The planet swelled to fill almost the entire windshield. Just as my heart leapt at the imminent collision, the ship jerked, decelerating violently as it dropped out of warp and back into Newtonian flight, the hull screaming in protest. The glass glowed a fierce orange, the ship's reinforced belly burning through the atmosphere. Wind whipped past. Thick clouds smothered us. The cockpit rattled, its joints straining to hold. The severe deceleration anchored me in place, draining blood from my eyes, casting everything in shadow. Just as I thought I might succumb and black out, the clouds vanished and gave way to a monochrome world beneath.

VTOL thrusters fired below to slow our rate of descent. I gasped and sputtered for life as my circulation caught up, restoring colour to the world. The shutters retracted further, revealing everything from the night above to the land below, sprawling, vast, and fertile—a feast for my starved eyes.