Commander Lisa Rice finally left her sleep station after seven days of silence to declare planet Earth dead, as if by procedure, at 8:25 p.m. UTC. Nine days earlier, it had stopped spinning.

Seven days after that, the last recorded radio wave contained the opening notes of ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears. Then silence.

EVA Specialist Robert Silverstein was hovering by the toothbrush with a careful look of consideration on his face. He was deciding whether or not to brush his teeth.

Crew Medical Officer Dimitri Fedrova had killed himself without making a fuss about it. That was eight days ago. Now he lay packed into his sleep station like old luggage, slowly revolving.

The Hecaterides Machine had become an obsession for Robotics Officer Cecilia Carlos, Chief Systems Engineer Lìn Yànzhōu, and Logistics Operations Manager Clay Davis.

Its struts sprawled around the central drill bit like the legs of an iron spider as they worked at its bolts and couplings. Something always seemed to go wrong, and Lìn never seemed particularly surprised.

The mission was meant to mark a small but significant step in humanity’s effort to colonise Mars. The drill had been designed to extract basaltic rock from the planet’s surface, material that would later be fashioned into heavy bricks for base construction.

But once aboard the ISS, the Hecaterides never worked.

Science Operations Officer Ivan Raskoshin, the youngest-ever crew member on the ISS at the age of twenty-three, floated back and forth beside the radio, monitoring its darkened surface.

The crew convened in the Cupola.

Cecilia, Lìn and Clay had not ceased their work. With every pneumatic grind and sigh, Lisa’s hands balled tighter.

‘Stop it,’ she said at last. ‘Just stop it.’

The machinery fell silent.

‘Ten days till the deadline,’ Clay muttered. ‘It needs to be operational. These things matter, Lisa. This is important.’

Cecilia stifled a snigger.

‘What’s important is, uh, food,’ Robert droned, ‘and I think Lisa has a plan, so… If you’d like to listen to your Commander.’

‘My boss isn’t your boss,’ Clay said quietly.

Clay was only here for the Hecaterides. It had been his invention, made possible through the privatised investments of various dreamers. There was a lot of money on the line, and failure wasn’t an option.

‘Your boss is why we’re in this situation, Davis,’ Lisa snapped, making assumptions. ‘Anyway, all our bosses are dead now.’ She sighed. ‘I want a live inventory of all food, potable water, rehydratable meals, electrolyte drinks and emergency packs. Strict first-expire, first-out rotation. Prioritise thermostabilised, freeze-dried, irradiated, dehydrated and intermediate-moisture foods.’

‘So I die eating sweet potato?’ Lìn asked dispiritedly. ‘It is not to my liking. It is not even a potato.’

‘We’ll rotate meals,’ Lisa said.

‘No one’s going to die,’ Clay cut in. ‘Not unless you’re like Dimitri. It’s a simple communications error. They’ll be online in a few days.’

They ignored him, as had become routine.

Lìn tossed a pen at the back of Ivan’s head. It spun to a slow stop before it reached him.

‘Unless Mr Conspiracy gets talking with some green friends.’ Lìn grinned.

Ivan said nothing.

Cecilia looked down at the Earth between her boots. The ISS was still orbiting in its stable rhythm.

‘For us, it looks like it’s still spinning,’ she said with a smile. ‘Almost like nothing’s changed. I was asked… We all were… If you could see anything, all of time, all of space… And I said this, the end of the Earth. Quieter than I expected. Still. An opportunity.’

She was the only one smiling.

‘It’s wrong, Jim. I am Vulcan. You are human.’

‘But, Mister Spock, not all of you is Vulcan.’

Three nights later, in the crew station, they staged a play based on Lisa’s spirited childhood fan fiction. Clay was Kirk. Lìn was Spock.

‘It’s racist,’ Lìn said.

‘You’ve just got to kiss him,’ Cecilia said, chewing a mouthful of sweet potato.

‘You cast me as Spock because I am other,’ Lìn protested. ‘And don’t say the eyebrows weren’t a factor.’

A chant began somewhere near the galley wall, slow at first, accompanied by a loose clap that passed from one body to the next.

‘Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him.’

Robert made kissy-kissy noises.

‘You can’t make us do this,’ Clay said, dropping the Kirk act. ‘This is a complete abuse of power, Lisa. Where’s the structure here?’

‘I don’t think you can talk about an abuse of power,’ Lisa sniped.

‘It’s just a bit of fun, homo,’ Cecilia laughed.

‘It’s a — it’s a humiliation ritual,’ Clay spluttered. ‘Why are we even doing any of this? We’ve missed the deadline, we’ve heard nothing for days, and you’re all acting like everything’s funny.’

Silence fell again.

‘I think we’ve all been granted an extension,’ Cecilia muttered.

Across the module, the radio blinked at the edge of Ivan’s vision. For the first time in days, he pushed himself over to the console, put on both headphones, and gave the equipment his full attention.

‘Anything?’ Lìn asked.

Ivan listened a moment longer, then ripped the headphones off.

‘Just static.’

Clay snorted.

‘Why would they make contact with us?’ he said.

Then he pushed himself away from the wall and drifted down the length of the station.

Lisa and Robert floated together in the dim light of their sleep station. Lisa rolled up Robert’s sleeve to reveal a humble tattoo. The word ‘Wow!’ in poorly applied black ink. She knew what it was, but she asked anyway.

‘I got it as a teenager,’ Robert said sheepishly. ‘I was drunk.’

‘I can tell,’ Lisa said, not unkindly.

‘Jerry Ehman, at the Big Ear in Ohio. Gets a signal: 6EQUJH. Thinks it’s a message from space, circles it, writes “Wow!”’ Robert smiled. ‘As human as they come,’ he paused. ‘We spent all of those years looking to the stars, waiting for the tiniest piece of data. Now here we are, looking back home.’

Lisa smiled.

‘Show me,’ Robert said softly.

‘You’ve seen it before.’

‘Tell me again.’

Lisa brushed her hair from her neck to reveal a small tattoo of a smiling fish.

‘Martin did it for me,’ she said. ‘You should’ve seen the girls’ faces.’

‘Why a fish?’ Robert asked tenderly.

Lisa fixed him with a look.

‘We thought it was beautiful.’

And they kissed.

The crew ate together in the galley. The sound of chewing filled the small, stale space. Lìn squeezed sweet potato up a crinkly packet.

‘Can no one swap with me?’ Lìn asked.

Stocks were low, and everyone knew why. Lisa took the blame for her count being off.

The night before, Ivan had heard packaging. Just the dry, private crackle of foil being opened somewhere in the dark.

‘Hello?’ he had called.

The sound had stopped.

A moment later, Clay’s voice had come back, perfectly calm.

‘Go to sleep, Ivan.’

Everyone knew.

‘Clay, switch with Lìn,’ Robert ordered.

Before Clay could reply, Lìn had snatched the shrimp packet from his hand and switched it with sweet potato. It was the third day in a row it had happened.

Lìn took a bite of the shrimp.

‘You know what I’d kill for?’ he said. ‘A hot dog. Onions. Fān qié jiàng — what do you call it, again?’

‘Ketchup,’ Robert said. ‘I’d just take ketchup right now.’

Ivan wasn’t listening. He’d been replaying the same blurt of static on a loop for five days.

‘You gonna join us, Ivan?’ Lisa asked.

‘Mister Conspiracy has a theory,’ Lìn said. ‘We’ve always believed static was background radiation from the Big Bang, but this is different. This isn’t the static I heard back on Earth in the 90s. This one repeats. It loops. And every time it does, there’s a break in the sound.’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Clay said.

‘It requires an imagination, Clay,’ Robert said.

‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.’ Lìn spread his arms. ‘It’s a nice story.’

‘What do you think it’s saying, Ivan?’ Cecilia asked.

Ivan kept the headphones on, silent.

‘It’s not saying anything,’ Clay said. ‘It’s just static.’

‘It says whatever we want it to say,’ Ivan muttered.

Cecilia smiled. ‘Maybe it’s a song.’

‘Oh great, aliens making chart-toppers.’ Clay rolled his eyes.

Ivan finally threw his headphones off, stared down at Clay, and sang lowly in Russian.

The day will come, when with the flock of birds
I’ll also float in a blue-grey haze.
Singing from beneath the sky as a bird
All you, who I left behind on the Earth.

Clay kicked off from the wall and floated away. Cecilia clapped.

For two days after Ivan sang, the missing food became the only thing anyone talked about. Packets were counted, recounted, logged, accused of having been mislogged, then counted again. Nobody admitted anything. Nobody slept properly. Clay stopped eating with them, then stopped answering when Lisa called his name.

On the third morning, they found Node Three blocked from floor to ceiling with cargo bags, tool kits and strapped-down storage units.

Clay floated behind the makeshift barricade.

The cargo bags rattled. Lisa’s eye glared from between the stacked storage units.

‘How long are we gonna keep this up, Clay?’ she asked.

‘You don’t have a toilet in there, big poopy-man,’ Lìn called.

A brown-streaked wad of tissue paper floated past Clay’s face. Clay rattled a food packet in response, taunting them back.

‘What happens when you get too big for your suit, fatso?’ Cecilia called.

Clay stuck a piece of food in his mouth and chewed aggressively.

‘As long as I ain’t gotta put up with you assholes, I’ll get as fat as I like.’

‘Americans.’ Lìn scoffed.

Robert scowled.

Lisa rattled the barricade again.

‘It would take us all of five minutes to take this down,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Please, just stop this.’

‘Fuck you.’

Lisa looked from Robert to Ivan, then to Lìn.

‘Okay. No one goes in swinging,’ she said. ‘We take the food back. That’s it.’

Robert nodded. Ivan said nothing. Lìn was already smiling, as if this were still somehow a joke.

The barricade came away in seconds.

Lìn drifted through first, wearing a big, stupid smile.

‘Neighbours again,’ he said.

Then Clay brought a spanner down on the side of Lìn’s head.

The fluids in his skull leapt up in a weightless dance. Red globs wheeled in the air. Ivan recoiled, horror-struck, as Robert launched himself across the module, twisting aside from the bright flash of the spanner, and drove his fist into Clay’s jaw.

One of Clay’s molars drifted past the window.

It could have been a star.

Clay was restrained in a sleeping pod, under guard. They took it in shifts. Across the module, Dimitri Fedrova’s corpse made its slow rotations in the straps. Lìn’s body had joined him there, tethered beside him, the memory of his last smile still half-present on his face.

Cecilia floated in the Cupola, staring down at Earth. Her tears drifted toward the window in shining beads. Ivan joined her.

‘Ivan?’

He’d left his station at long last.

‘Given up hope?’

‘Have you?’

Cecilia looked back to the Earth.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said. ‘Just as beautiful as the first time I saw it.’ She pointed through the glass, towards Las Vegas. ‘Brightest place on Earth, that was. Now it’s totally dim.’

‘I never got to see it,’ Ivan said.

‘Oh, it was awful. Shouting and sweating and gambling and drinking…’ She trailed off. ‘Maybe dimness is for the best.’

Ivan drifted towards Cecilia and put his lips towards hers. When she drew away, she slapped him.

His cheek was red.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Didn’t hurt.’

‘I’m gay,’ Cecilia said.

‘I know.’

‘Martin!’ Lisa keened. ‘Oh, Martin.’

Martin was a memory; it was Robert on top of her. Or maybe beneath her, perhaps beside her — none of it really mattered up here.

Robert didn’t mind. It was nice to see her happy.

Clay drifted over their sleep station, ignoring the moaning. He had everything worked out, down to the smallest detail. Two days ago it would have been impossible; everyone was still too cautious around him. Today he drifted past them like a ghost. He preferred being the phantom on the station; it was better than being the target. At least this way he could haunt them.

In the end, there was no fixing Hecaterides. It didn’t need to be fixed.

On Mars, Hecaterides would have had to fight the planet. Here, if he could anchor it properly, which was all he was trained to do, it would go through the outer airlock like a knife through foil. And that was exactly what he was going to do.

He’d pictured it over and over again. He would drift into the airlock, leaving the inner door open behind him, fasten Hecaterides’ clamps to the outer door, and put the drill to work. The structural integrity of the station would fail, throwing him into the unforgiving vacuum of space, but everyone else, too.

They had never understood his vision. They were children playing at astronauts, with no grasp of progress or what progress was for. But all children had to stop playing eventually.

Playtime had to end.

It took three tries before the clamps locked onto the outer airlock door.

Then the alarms began to scream.

Cecilia was the first to arrive, pulling herself along the handholds outside the airlock window. Clay did not look away from his work. He tightened the last clamp to the outer door, checked the angle of the drill head, and prepared to bring the motor online.

Cecilia slammed the control panel. The inner hatch ground shut behind him.

Clay looked up. She had trapped him inside the airlock.

For a moment, Cecilia stared at him through the small round window. Then Clay smiled and began releasing the clamps.

Without hesitation, he shifted Hecaterides around, bracing his feet against the inner door as he dragged the machine into position. The drill head swung slowly towards the hatch between them.

All he had to do was make one small hole; after that, opening the outer door would do the work.

As he worked, he stared at Cecilia through the glass. He imagined her face swelling, her eyes bulging, her mouth opening in the sudden, silent panic. The thought made him laugh.

Maybe she’d finally start taking things seriously.

Lisa and Robert arrived next, half-dressed and breathless, followed by Ivan, grey-faced and bleary from sleep.

‘Open the door, Clay,’ Lisa said.

Cecilia did not look at her. ‘I sealed him in. We open the outer hatch and vent the airlock.’

Lisa turned on her. ‘Are you insane?’

‘Oh, I’m the crazy one?’

Clay let out a distempered gale of laughter.

‘Clay,’ Lisa said, pressing herself close to the window. ‘We haven’t always seen eye to eye. But this is too far. You don’t want to die.’

Clay kept tightening the clamps to the inner door.

‘We’re all that’s left,’ Lisa said. ‘Don’t make this the last thing humanity does. Please.’

The words sounded strange coming from her. As if she had learned compassion from a manual.

Clay locked the final clamp into place.

The drill was aimed at the inner hatch. But he had to say his piece first.

‘The last thing humanity does? Earth stopped spinning at 9:03 a.m. We didn’t notice until 9:30. Do you know why? Because you were too busy teasing me. That’s the last thing humanity ever did. And look at us now. Still going. Humanity, my ass. You’re all just immature, selfish little—’

He fell quiet.

Cecilia removed her hand from the jettison button.

A hoarse, wet rale tore from Clay’s open mouth.

His chest hitched once. His belly swelled with trapped and gurgling gas. Spit foamed across his tongue and boiled white. His eyes went slack and sightless. His gloved fingers fattened grotesquely around the outer handle.

He tried to breathe again. Nothing came.

His skin darkened into blue. When the airlock opened behind him, his hands slipped free one by one, and Clay drifted backward into the stars, bloated, blind and silently boiling.

He floated towards the half-shadowed crescent of Mars. Maybe one day, he would make it.

The outer door slid closed again.

Hecaterides held firm to the inner door.

Cecilia shrugged. ‘Guess it works.’

‘It’s wrong, Jim. I am Vulcan. You are human.’

‘But, Mister Spock, not all of you is Vulcan.’

There was no funeral for Clay. That night, they put on the Star Trek play again. Cecilia was Kirk and Ivan was Spock.

This time they kissed, to raucous applause.

Robert held Lisa’s hand tight.

‘Everyone,’ he said. ‘Me and Lisa have something to say. We’re getting married.’

They didn’t clap.

Everybody knew what that meant.

The two small syringes filled slowly with the clear cleaning fluid. Lisa and Robert floated side by side in the cool light of her sleeping station.

‘I, Robert Silverstein, take you, Lisa Rice, to be my lawfully wedded wife.’

‘For better or for worse.’

They laughed softly.

‘No one to officiate,’ Robert said.

Lisa’s eyes went to the window.

‘The whole world’s watching.’

She handed Robert one of the syringes.

‘I’m excited about Rio next week,’ Lisa said, positioning the needle over her arm. ‘I hope the girls like you.’

‘I hope you like our new place,’ Robert said, doing the same. ‘I can’t wait for you to move in.’

‘Where did you say it was, again? Somewhere by the sea?’

‘The dog needs somewhere to run, doesn’t he?’

‘He?’ Lisa asked, raising an eyebrow.

‘I need another man around the house.’ Robert paused. ‘Maybe we could have a little man of our own.’

Lisa pushed the end of the syringe down. The fluid crept into her bloodstream.

‘I think he’d like the dog,’ she said.

Robert did the same.

‘I think we all would,’ he said. ‘Our little family.’

They lay down together and smiled. Lisa imagined an Irish terrier leaving paw prints in wet sand. And they were, in the end, really quite happy. Then the tide came in.

Ivan found them an hour later.

He didn’t tell Cecilia, who had vanished to the far end of the station. As he worked, he played the static aloud.

In the seventies, the Golden Record had carried two crude drawings: a man and a woman. Ivan thought it might be best, this time, to provide more anatomical specificity.

By the time he had finished, Robert and Lisa’s organs and veins were spread across the skeleton of the Hecaterides machine like an exhibit in a science museum. And they were beautiful.

He could no longer tell where they ended and the machine began.

He eased his work into the airlock, sealed the inner door, and opened the outer one.

Lisa, Robert, and Hecaterides drifted away until they were only a metallic glimmer in the dark.

At the edge of his vision, another shape moved to meet humanity’s last couple. A porthole of light opened in its vast underbelly and accepted the gift. Then it spun away, bound for regions unknown.

He knew it was a trick of the eye.

But it was a nice story.

Ivan pressed his lips to the radio microphone, hit record, and spoke over the static. He had known the words since he was a boy, staring up at the stars through his bedroom window.

‘We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us, and it is with humility and hope that we take this step. To teach if we are called upon, and to learn if we are so fortunate.’

Then he shut the radio off, and the static died.

Cecilia floated alone in the Cupola, looking down at Earth.

The last clatters and clanks from Ivan had ceased half an hour ago. Now there was only the pneumatic hum of the ship, the grind and wheeze of the engines.

She looked down at the careless scatter of continents, the slow revolution of clouds. Hidden behind it all, the sun crowned the Earth in light, as it could not bear to shine alone.

Mother Earth deserved this peace. Still, in the back of Cecilia’s mind, there remained a hope, and a true one, that children might one day play upon her again.

Then another thought answered from somewhere darker, somewhere altogether more primal: why break the silence? Do we not all deserve to wake, and then to rest?

And that was what Cecilia would do now. She would rest.

But first, she would sing.

There’s sun, there’s rain
In your path
But you don’t mind, it doesn’t hurt
You still think… that’s better than nothing
Everything you can be…
Or nothing.
Tudo o que você podia ser.