one hundred and twenty days of silence

Captain’s Log – Stardate, December 3rd, 2043.

As a little boy, I dreamed of writing something like that and having it actually mean something. A child of parents born in the sci-fi seventies, I was indoctrinated by the Stars—Trek and Wars—and taught to imagine that our world was so much more than Planet Earth. That our rock was one of an infinite number of cosmic collections of matter drifting endlessly through space. That much is true. I was also taught to imagine those collections of matter were inhabited by a variety of aliens. That might not be so true. But as a boy, I certainly believed so. And as a man? Well, I’m hopeful.

I remember a time, no, better to call it an era, where I was no older than ten, unburdened by responsibilities and not yet showered with worries by the world. Every evening, after rushing to finish homework, boring family conversations, and dinner-time veggies (I hated broccoli the most), I’d hurry into the backyard, glue myself to my telescope, and sit there till I fell asleep and my mother had to carry me in. Those evenings were where dreams were born. Where, unbeknownst to me, I charted the path for what would become my entire life. That telescope…it was the foundation for my tomorrow.

But I do not write this to reminisce. Rather, the opposite. I write this because what I experienced, the ideal path of hopes and dreams burgeoning into a fruitful future, is a relic of the past. Once, the whole of mankind awoke each morning to push something ahead—society, themselves, sometimes just survival. But now? Now, mankind is dead and the fact is this: there is no tomorrow.

We squandered our chance at it. No, we took it for granted. We, those who had already grown old, with bones that cracked when we stood and memories a little slower than we would like, didn’t think about anyone but ourselves. We abused our fortunate situation, pilfering and polluting the one home we were certain of. And then, as if the slow death of tomorrow wasn’t enough, we blew it into nuclear ash. What’s left? Smoldering ruins. Corpses. Nothing.

Atomic bombs, we called them. I say “called” because there probably aren’t any left and there certainly won’t be any new ones made. They were engineered to end a certain war, and they did, and they weren’t necessary then, and they aren’t necessary now—they could reduce the population of a city to zero as easily as I could smack a fly dead, and that was always the problem with us humans. We were always looking for ways to kill each other more efficiently and never viewed each other as anything more than flies.

I wasn’t on Earth when annihilation happened. That’s the only reason I’m alive. Throughout the Dying Age—our planet’s rapid degradation due to mankind’s reluctance to give a shit about anything but the current moment—I worked as a researcher for NASA, studying the universe. When things got too bad, my objective changed. Instead of trying to unpack the mysteries of the stars, I began calling out to them, spitting distress signals into the vast void of space, praying some foreign lifeform would unscramble them and come save us. Or, as one of my colleagues said: “At least put us out of our fucking misery.”

When that didn’t produce any results, I pitched the idea that would, unbeknownst to me, save my life. Stood before the president of the United States, I proposed a new type of shuttle, one that would travel to space with the sole purpose of emitting distress signals. The key difference? This one would be manned. I would sit in it and devote my life to putting out fresh messages every single day, manipulating radio waves as I attempted to throw mankind’s cry for help out to galaxies far and wide. It was approved and Journeyer, named after Voyager, was built. The mission outlined to me was simple:

CONFIDENTIAL

JOURNEYER will be sent into orbit on December 3rd, 2038, piloted and manned by two individuals of the President’s choosing. The pilots will, by any means necessary, attempt to contact alien life. They will devote their lives to the cause of mankind and report their findings, or lack thereof, to the White House each evening. JOURNEYER will remain in orbit for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days a year. It will touch down every December 3rd to resupply, repair, and be reassessed.

You read that right—I’ve been doing this for exactly three years now. My childhood dream was to watch the stars, but instead my life’s work has become watching Planet Earth, and I’ve watched it spin around over thousand times, and a few months ago, fresh after waking up, I watched as it was set ablaze.

When the bombs erupted, I heard nothing. It was like I was watching a movie with the sound off. I saw the puffs of smoke, the splashes of burnt-orange flames, and watched the land bloom into death. Lush patches of Earth had the color blinked out of them; ash permeated the air, clotting up my view of the boiling oceans. I screamed into my radio, begging to hear a voice, any voice, familiar or not, friend or foe. Nothing came back, not even the buzzing hum of a misdirected signal.

Silence. That was all that there was. Silence.

Every morning since, I’ve phoned Earth. I turned dials, flicked knobs, and spoke for hours, same as when I called to the aliens, now begging for my own kind to respond.

One hundred and twenty days of silence.

One hundred and twenty days of slogging out of bed, brewing coffee, making breakfast, trying not to pay too much attention to the dwindling cans in the cupboard, and calling out into two different nothings: the Earth and the universe.

But now, as I approach the end of my rations, with no way to resupply, I have to accept reality. Tomorrow has changed.

Tomorrow is now memorabilia, artifacts, and trinkets. Tomorrow is a Fender Stratocaster, a pile of Sabastian Bach sheet music, an Elvis Presley vinyl, a Jimi Hendrix eight-track, a Boston cassette, a Nirvana CD, and an MP3 of Radiohead’s OK Computer. Tomorrow is The Godfather, golden age Marvel comics, and a stack of Playboys. Tomorrow is millions of pictures and words, articles and moments, compressed into tiny folders, meant to paint a clear picture of millions of years of mankind in less than a hundred gigabytes. Tomorrow is a pack of Marlboros and a bottle of Southern Comfort.

Tomorrow is not myself, nor is it…

“Da-da!”

…the little girl playing in front of me.

My daughter.

I watch as she bashes the front-ends of two choo-choo trains together, blissfully unaware that the world she has been born into, the world I brought her into, is dying. She has only spent two days of her life on Earth—the first being when she was born, the second being last year, when we touched back down. The other one-thousand-and-ninety-five have been spent here, trapped in the shuttle, orbiting, listening to me, and some time ago her mother, chatter on. But now that it is just us here…

Well, she doesn’t have much to do, and I don’t either. The only difference is I know what it means to have something to do, she doesn’t, and she shouldn’t. She is little, just a smidge over two, able to speak but not string together her words in an intelligent way, spewing out spit-spackled “blahs” and “bleghs.” She is content with this, because this is all she knows, all she will ever know, and that breaks my heart.

The greatest moment of my life was her birth, but it is also my biggest regret. I did something beautiful, the most sacred act a human can do—I brought a child into being, I created a life. And now, it is going to end, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and it isn’t fair. She deserves so much more than to suffer because of the mistakes the greedy made, and yet here she is, unaware that tonight, we will eat our last dinner, and tomorrow…

Her favorite meal is SPAM. She likes it pan-fried in soy-sauce. I call it musubi, she calls it “muhmuh” and bounces in her seat whenever she hears the pan sizzling. She detests veggies, same as I did, especially broccoli, and maybe one day her tastebuds would have turned around entirely, same as mine. Maybe she would have gone a step further, gone vegan, or she might have just gotten more carnivorous, chomping through steaks like potato chips. When I cook, I put on old records, and jazz gets her swinging her head back and forth, especially Miles Davis. Maybe, when she grew out of diapers, she would have begged me for a trumpet of her own so she could be just like him. Maybe she would have been. Maybe she just would have joined the marching band. Maybe she would have been happy.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

What is certain is that we’re out of food and time and that, tonight, when we go to sleep, we won’t ever wake up. At midnight, this ship finally runs out of oxygen, and both her and I will perish, and as I lift her into my lap and give her a big hug, I’ll try not to think about that, because I don’t want to cry at all tonight, I want the last experience of her life to be a pleasant one, because there is only tonight, there is no tomorrow.

Tomorrow, this ship will become undocked from the Earth’s orbit and begin to slowly drift through space, a relic of a society long-since past. Whoever finds us, they’ll know of the humans. The wars we fought. The civilizations we created. The technologies we invented, the art we fashioned, the diseases we cured.

The lives we lived…

…and the life my daughter will never get to live.

THE END