For some reason, loneliness always came at night. Mark was relieved more than anything; despite all that happened, despite everything he’d done or helped to do, the loneliness always came at night. It was a constant that Mark needed, even if it was a depressing one.

As he walked through soulless concrete tunnels and narrow steel hallways, his mind turned first to drink, then to home as it usually did. Mark never gave himself the luxury of burying his regret and isolation in a foggy haze; that coupled with a (former) job that had no tolerance for alcohol, meant that he couldn’t physically stomach the stuff. Plus, the local brew tasted like rocket fuel.

His thoughts drifted homeward as he arrived at his usual spot, a comm center located near the top of the facility. From there, the security monitors on the wall gave him a good view of the place, from the power generators that kept the whole facility running to the thousands of storage rooms. How long he’d been here he didn’t know, but he expected to die long before he visited all of them. Not that the rooms contained anything particularly interesting; it was just something to do besides stare at the contents.

They were like statues, he realized. No, not statues. Monuments. Monuments to him and his mission. He felt a perverse sense of pride about it, knowing that he alone had helped create them. Their grotesqueness was an issue he’d already made peace with.

That still didn’t solve the loneliness, which had begun to settle over his vision like a blanket, suffocating out everything else. It was like a bad head cold; all he could think about was how miserable it made you and how much you hoped it would go away soon.

He glanced around the communications center one more time. The steel-covered, utilitarian room contained little apart from the monitors and the consoles that powered them; there were a few tables, but no chairs. The only thing worse than crippling isolation was crippling isolation combined with boredom.

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“I want to go home,” he whispered to himself, finally admitting what he’d long thought of. Any inhibitions against it had died out years ago. So, Mark began to do what he did best.

Getting home himself was out of the question; he’d never be able to build a ship, let alone one that could take him home in a cryo tube. So, he had to settle for the next best thing. After a few minutes of pacing around the comm center, he nodded and ran down to one of the storage rooms. The components were common enough, Mark told himself as he jogged down one of the cement corridors that snaked through the entire complex. The only issue was amplitude.

Soon enough, he reached the storage room in question. It was unlocked of course, and contained all the communications equipment he needed. After he had a box full of random parts and a set of tools, he ran to one of what he called the ‘monument rooms’. Brushing past the rows and rows of statuelike figures, he stopped at a computer monitor near the corner of the room.

“Here we go,” Mark muttered to himself as he looked over the computer one last time. A voice of caution echoed somewhere in the back of his mind, but at this point he just didn’t care.

“Might as well,” he said. Then he got to work.

It took a few days to get everything assembled, but Mark was a desperate man with far too much time on his hands. It seemed like moments later when he was done, staring at a computer that didn’t look much different from when he’d started. However, looks could deceive.

Mark tapped a small microphone on the desk, then began speaking.

“Attention attention,” he croaked, trying to keep his voice smooth and even. “This is an SOS transmission. I am stranded at the following coordinates and require pickup. I repeat, this is an SOS transmission. I am stranded, please send help.” Then he clicked off the microphone and started to transmit the message. With a little luck the transmission would make it back to Earth, where someone could understand it and send help. If not… well it didn’t matter much. He’d grown used to his quiet life.

Once the message was done transmitting, he sat back and yawned. Now all he needed to do was wait. And maybe grab a weapon, in case he caught some flak for it.