The Outlier

I remember a time when the Earth existed, a big blue marble in the darkness of space, but that was a long time ago. It almost seemed like a dream now, the sound of birds, the feel of grass beneath your feet, the sound of the wind racing past your ear in a whoosh, the view from a mountain, the grandeur of a valley.

But that was so very long ago, before I and few others escaped the dying Earth on this space ship, this ark of sorts called: The Outlier. I was young man then, and not unwilling to even contemplate the notion of dying with my planet, nor did any of my compatriots on this voyage to nowhere.

Why do I call it that? For, in truth, we had not achieved close to interstellar capacity for any ship, and with no planets in our solar

system suitable for inhabiting, we left on this ship that we knew would be our home till the day we died.

In the years of our slow travel, there have been many changes. We started out with a company and crew of over forty individuals, that number has since dwindled, in the years it took us to pass the Rings of Saturn, and the outlying planets of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto. And now that we are about to pass thru the boundary of our known solar system... It was then my train of thought was derailed by a familiar voice.

"Good 'morrow, Rank Commander." said the young girl named Astra, born on the trip, as she floated up to me. Good 'morrow had replaced the more customary phrases like good morning, good afternoon, or good evening aboard ship long ago, as there were no solar based time variations to make illusion to here.

"Good 'morrow, Astra, and you know my rank aboard the Outlier no longer has any meaning, so you can call me Jordan."

"Is Jordan your first or last name, Rank Commander?"

"My first."

"Then it would be disrespectful for a someone of my age to call you that. What is your last name?"

"Zastupnevich."

The girl cleared her throat as she was wont to do when flustered.

"Well..." she began haltingly. "Part of respect is adhering to your preferences, Rank Com... Jordan."

She was always so proper, yet so very sweet natured. Though having lived her entire eleven years in zero gravity has taken it's toll on her body. Her bones were so weak that she had broken her arms and legs several times. And had endured the breaking up and passing of several kidney stones due to the extra calcium in her blood not needed for her skeletal structure without the pull of gravity telling her body to send more calcium to her bones.

With her father having died on an EVA when she was just a toddler, and her mother passing away a short time after that, she was really the ward of the Outlier herself, as all of us had a hand in raising this precocious young thing among others born on the ship. I had always thought that our automatic shared responsibility towards those children, orphaned and not, brought new dimension to the old phrase: It takes a village.

"What are you thinking, Jordan?"

"I'm thinking how cheated you are."

"Cheated?"

"To never have known life on Earth."

"I've seen videos in the archives. It did seem majestic. But nowhere near as vast as this." she said, looking out a porthole at the blackness of space, and the pin prick lights of the stars.

"But to never feel the sun on your face after the morning clouds part? To never smell the freshness of the air after a rainstorm? To never see a rainbow streak the sky once the rain subsides? I had over twenty-five years on Earth and never appreciated a damn one of those things. But now I'd give anything to see just one of them again."

"Don't feel sad for me. You can't miss what you've never known. Just like my parents. Everyone on the Outlier has talked to me about what good, what brave, people they were. A part of me feels like I did know them, but I never truly missed them. I had all of you. Dr. Moniz, Miss Sherry, Remy and you Ra... Jordan. You all did more than love me... You took care of me."

"I know you miss Remy most of all."

"He was my only contemporary aboard the Outlier. We played together all our lives, until..." her voice trailed off.

"You're not still blaming yourself for that, are you?"

"I'm the one that pushed him."

"You were playing. You never meant for him to hit the wall, and especially at that velocity."

"I can still hear the sound of his neck cracking. Dr. Moniz did what he could, but..."

"And now Moniz is gone too."

"I guess my next broken bone might be my last one. I mostly miss how Remy used to talk about how sure he was that we'd find a habitable planet, find some way to land on it, and colonize it. His... Certainty... His positivity... Would always give me hope."

"Hope is an interesting concept. Always frail, but ultimately very hard to kill."

"Remy never even considered that we'd long ago used energy from the retro rockets to divert to life support to keep us breathing and warm in the vacuum of space."

"But you knew."

"I'd overheard enough conversations between you, the Doctor, and Commander Garrin to know that the Outlier was our only home. The only one we'd ever have. But Remy turned a deaf ear to all that. Always focused on the impossible. Now that we're the last two, at least we can be honest about our situation."

"Honesty in the face of oblivion? Hardly a recipe for a non-depressing existence."

"I'm not depressed. We have now. Today. Maybe ever tomorrow. That's enough for me."

"But, should it be?"

She simply turned to smile at me with teeth that never quite grew out right due to the lack of gravity, but still seemed adorable to me.

"I'm heading to meal prep," she started. "You want something?"

"No, I'm fine, thanks."

Then she pushed off from the chair I was strapped in, to at least feel as though I was truly sitting, and disappeared into an adjacent corridor.

It was to be the last conversation we were to have. The condemned shall eat a hearty meal, and I allowed her this last one, though I was fairly certain it wasn't to be all that hearty.

You see one of the reasons Commander Garren tried an ill-advised EVA two months before, why Dr. Moniz committed suicide a few weeks ago, was that the food and water supply we had on board was dwindling. To almost nothing now.

We'd taken great pains to insure that Astra wasn't aware of that situational truth. I guess we couldn't expect our stores to last forever. They'd already gone for more than twenty-five years.

The food and water had bought us time, but not the new life that Remy was so fond of imagining. There would be no new life. Soon for Astra, a painless death that Dr. Moniz had seen fit to leave me for her in the form of a loaded syringe. Because of the way Dr. Moniz felt about her, I was certain she'd never feel an iota of pain as she died.

He'd left one for me too but I had already decided that, once alone, I'd enjoy what little time the remnants of the food and water would give me, then I'll simply shut off all life support... And wait. Maybe as I would lose consciousness I'd see the Earth I so well remembered in my mind's eye. The Earth that is gone, as I soon will be.