Day Zero

Cosmo Erickson was, perhaps for the first time in his life, totally alone. Twenty-three years old (not counting time in cryosleep), he sat at the ‘porthole’ visual display and watched his last communications microsatellite crash and burn into the atmosphere of the world thirty-six thousand kilometers beneath his feet. With it went his last tenuous connection to the rest of the explored galaxy. He no longer had a way to reach out to anyone else.

He was, also for the first time, unsure of what to do. Since joining the Survey Corps six hundred years ago, and having spent five hundred and ninety-nine of them in cryosleep aboard a Torch Ship, he had had a job to do, a dream to chase. Now he could no longer file his reports with the Home Office, and he hadn’t even been able to send out an emergency signal before the Gravitic Anomaly had ripped his microsats from the sky.

The mappers in their low orbits had gone first, tumbling away. That had been his first and only warning. The weather-watchers had tumbled next, the signal-scanners soon thereafter. The communications microsats had lasted the longest in their geosynchronous orbits, but the last of them had failed not three minutes after the first mapper. Only Cosmo’s habitation module had the thrusters and redundancies needed to stay in orbit.

It was a small blessing and a monsterous curse, Cosmo thought to himself, to live when all of your friends and colleagues thought you dead. They would assume him dead with the failure of his communications links, wiped out by a solar flare or some such. Instead it was a Gravitic Anomaly, of all possible things, that had left him alone. The Home Office might notice the absence of his reports in a few days, if he was lucky. FTL communications were wonderful things, after all. But any rescue operation would take years to reach him. Less than six hundred, Cosmo wagered, as engines must have progressed somewhat while he was in cryosleep, but by how much?

Cosmo shook his head and stared at the world below him. It was just him and the planet now. It looked grey-black, almost like a charcoal sketch on slate. Cosmo set that notion aside. He needed to do something about his predicament. It was either that or go mad and write poetry about his situation. Truly awful poetry that he would be glad that no other would ever get the chance to read.

Day Eight

Cosmo looked down at his latest sketch and then up through the porthole at the world. The colors were off again, but he expected that at this point. He thought it might be something to do with the cosmic dust slowly settling on the portholes’ cameras, or some other fault that he couldn’t do anything about. He thumped the side of the porthole again for good measure and this time it actually started to self-calibrate. Cosmo shrugged. It would probably pop up the same achromatopsia error it always did.

A few minutes and a ration bar later the porthole did indeed pop up with an achromatopsia error message, with its ‘Abort, Retry, Ignore’ prompt. Just for the heck of it, and because he had literally nothing better to do, Cosmo hit ‘Retry’ instead of ‘Ignore’. The porthole chugged and chugged, doing something Cosmo knew nothing about, and eventually flickered back to life.

“Visual color sensors misaligned. Recalibrating. ETA: overflow error.”

Cosmo shrugged and discarded his sketch. He wouldn’t be getting any art done today afterall. He decided that may as well fill out some of the official paperwork, even though he had no way of filing it. The music in his head played on.

Day Fifteen

Cosmo blinked. For the past six days the porthole had displayed the same message, and now it wasn’t. Now it showed a totally unfamiliar world. One that was coated in the blue-green of a life-bearing world, fluffy white clouds flecked across the sky. Cosmo was stunned. The soundtrack in his head skipped a beat. This was something that the Home Office needed to know about! He rushed off to fill out the paperwork. First had to be the error correction form, then the…

Cosmo stopped and sat down on the ground. There was no point in filling out the paperwork. There was no way to send it to the Home Office. There was no one coming, because no one knew that he needed help. No one knew he needed help because he had no way to get a message out.

He couldn’t even figure out what caused the Gravitic Anomaly. He had the sensor readings, but not the education to make heads nor tails of them. Nor could he transmit them to the Home Office for review and analysis.

Something popped in Cosmo’s head. For all of the wonder before his eyes, none of it was his. He no longer had the microsats to scan and survey this world. He didn’t have an escape pod to land upon it and look at it with his own eyes. He didn’t even have the communications links to tell the Home Office about it.

Cosmo was alone, in sight of one of the greatest prizes in his life, and yet so far from touching it. He couldn’t tell anyone about it. He couldn’t do anything about it. It was just him and the world.

Cosmo had never felt more alone. The music in his head was a somber funeral march.

Day Twenty-Five

He stared down at his latest drawing. It was decent enough, he supposed, capturing most of the colors of the World. He wished he could breath its air and walk its ground, but he was trapped aboard his little home. He had even gotten so bored, so tired of listening to the endless funeral march, that he had filled out all of the paperwork that he was supposed to have sent back to the Home Office. It would make no difference in the end, but it had been something to do for a few hours.

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The slight thump of something hitting his home shocked him. He scrambled to his feet, view and sketch forgotten, and set off to find out what it was. A few moments later, for his home was not large, he had his answer. It was an automated supply ship. Frantically, he searched its hold, but he could not find any cryosleep chambers, or other people with which to talk. Resignedly, he unloaded the food, water, and other things that the Home Office had sent him. In its place he loaded the paperwork he had filled out. He wasn’t sure why he bothered. Even though it was automated, the supply ship still used a sublight Torch Drive, meaning it was sent out only a month after he was, and would take another six hundred years to get back to the Home Office.

He mused on it while he worked. In the end, he guessed it was so that he had something to do beyond just watching the World and drawing endlessly. He included some of his better works, in his opinion, alongside the paperwork. Perhaps someone at the Home Office would appreciate them. Perhaps they would simply go into a historical file when the supply ship eventually returned home.

The music in his mind played a jaunty working tune as he went about his business.

Day Twenty-Seven

The automated supply ship faded from view of the porthole as it exited the system. He was sad to see it leave, but not really. He had managed a few drawings of it before it left. It was something besides the World to draw while it lasted. But now it was gone, and he was alone again. The music was back to a morbid dirge, but he didn’t mind much.

He was more worried about the treadmill. The belt was wearing thin and the motor was catching every so often. Probably from all of the hours he had spent walking its length. He supposed that he could try taking it apart to fix it. He went in search of a toolkit, the World and the drawings temporarily forgotten.

Day Thirty-Two

There was something else in the system, he decided, staring out the Porthole. There was a moving speck of light, not quite as dim as a distant star, near where the automated supply ship had left the system. He wasn’t sure what to make of it. Even at maximum zoom on the porthole he couldn’t see the telling plume of ejecta of a Torch Drive.

He pondered this, but could come to no satisfactory answer. He supposed the rest of humanity could have come up with some sort of FTL drive in the six hundred years that he had been in cryosleep on his way to this nameless system. But why in the vast void would they come to his system? He had barely been on station for six months, before his FTL coms went down with his microsats, and had mis-classified the World.

He shrugged. There was nothing he could do about another ship in the system, if that’s what the moving dot actually was. All he could do was drawp images of it. The music in his head was low and menacing.

Day Thirty-Nine

He decided that the moving dot was definitely a ship. Its movements were too erratic, too irregular, to be anything else. He also decided that it wasn’t a Torch Ship, given that he had seen no ejecta wake behind the ship. It must use some other form of propulsion, he deduced, but he had no idea what. Nor had he any idea who or what might be aboard.

Now the ship was getting closer to his home, and he still couldn’t get a good look at it. That frustrated him, but he wasn’t too frustrated. He was still alone, but might not be alone forever anymore. The music in his head was happy for the first time in a long time.

Day Forty-Five

The Ship was busy circling the World. He knew the pattern, because his mapping microsats had made the same orbits before the Gravitic Anomaly had wiped them from the sky. He wished that he had some way to talk to the Ship, to tell it that he already had the maps that they were looking for, but his radio only had a half-kilometer range. He supposed that they might detect the signal at some distance beyond that, but the transmission lag would be slightly annoying. Even then he could see a few problems that would get in the way of being not-alone again. If the Ship wasn’t even human. If the occupants of the Ship didn’t speak his language.

He shuddered, and decided to not activate his radio. The Ship would see his home soon enough, and would come to look at it. He would be able to look through the porthole and perhaps see some more details. Perhaps he would even be able to draw the Ship properly.

Day Forty-Six

The Ship was just sitting in orbit over the World. It was in a lower orbit than his Home. Which meant that the Ship had exceptional thrusters, and fuel to burn, to keep a low stationary orbit like that. He thought he could see smaller dot move away from the Ship and descend towards the World.

Now he was so very sad and alone. He had found the World first, but would not be the first to set foot on it. The music was a somber march in his mind.

He sighed, the first vocalization that he had made aloud in some time, and went to fill out paperwork. If nothing else, the first contact forms would fill his time. Perhaps the next automated supply ship might show up to carry them back to the Home Office.

Day Fifty

The Ship was still in orbit over the World, and the little dots hadn’t come back up from the surface. Or if they had then he had missed the event. He didn’t think that they had however, because the Ship was still there.

The music was dancing between jaunty and spooky. He still didn’t recognise the Ship nor any of the insignia painted onto its hull. He did have some fantastic drawings of it however, silhouetted against the World as the dawn-line illuminated both.

Day Sixty

The next automated supply ship had arrived, and the Ship had detected it. He knew this from how the Ship acted. It had jerked and twitched, thrusters flaring as it spun in place to face the arriving supply ship. Then the Ship had settled back down to wait the few days for the supply ship to burn in-system. Now the supply ship had flipped and was decelerating to meet with his home, and still the Ship sat in orbit over the World, waiting and watching.

The music was ominous now. He didn’t know what to make of the Ship any longer, nor did he know what the Ship thought of him and his home. Did it think his home to be an automated station, left over from some bygone age? Did it think him something other than human? Did they think that he had gone insane from loneliness, having been alone for so long?

He supposed that the Ship may have a point when it came to madness. It took a certain sort of nutcase volunteer for the Survey Corps, and a particular sub-sort thereof to volunteer for a solo Torch Ship run, with only a face and a voice over the FTL link to connect back to the Home Office and the rest of humanity.

The automated supply ship bumped into his home and docked. He set about gathering up his paperwork and drawings to load aboard it once more. Somehow he doubted that the Home Office would ever get this report. And if they did, then he would no longer be around to hear their response.

The Music was a slow waltz, twirling about his head as he worked.

Day Sixty-One

He gave a start as his short-range radio sputtered to life.

“Cosmo Erikson? Apologies it took us so long to find and contact you, we had to call home for the proper frequency after we built this radio. I’m just glad my Chief Engineer is such an archivist, keeping obsolete designs around. Welcome back to humanity, we’ve been waiting for you.”