Almost Time
My left arm is missing. I ask Syndi about it as spidery black arms lift me out of bed, brush away sour sleep gel, and ease my shrivelled, chicken-like body into a powered, steel-blue exoskeleton that reeks of oil. A tendril slithers into the jack at the base of my skull and momentarily, I feel four hundred again.
“There were complications from tankrot.” The smooth female voice chimes through the walls. “The infection reached the bone.”
Between the liver spots on my remaining forearm, red welts glower like apocalyptic bedbug bites. I used to be left-handed. I wonder if I’ll be able to explain that concept to them.
“I have good news and bad news,” Syndi says. “Which would you like first?”
A bubbling noise interrupts her as thick cables flex and bulge with some kind of artificial super blood that chills like ice as it seeps into innumerable ports in my exposed flesh. Servos whine, and my first tentative, robotic step echoes off the walls, then flees the med bay like a panicked bird, ringing and rebounding through dead metal veins. The boom-boom-boom of fluorescent overheads snapping on through the corridors are the first heartbeats of sentient life in decades. Unless Syndi hums.
“Worse than my arm? Let’s try good.”
“We have arrived.”
The words wallow in freezer-lag, the mental fog that takes longer and longer to lift each thaw. But when they’re through, a butterfly tickles my throat. Probably just a heart palpitation. Or could it be … excitement? After all this time?
“And the bad?”
She pauses. “It’s about Jerry.”
I sigh. “I’m going to need a suit.”
* * *
Jerry—short for geriatric—was ninety-two standard years old and his tiny sleep chamber weighs nothing in my new arms as I pass through the sepulchral silence of the Great Chamber and by four hundred dark, silent caskets. Dead eyes burn accusingly behind misty visors, where Syndi has gathered them over the centuries.
Not that the ghosts are confined there. Every corridor intersection rings with scuffing shoes, whispering lovers, and children’s giggles. I’m surprised Syndi hasn’t filled in the bullet holes, fixed the sparking panels, buffed out the tally marks. A half-finished poem glitters amidst pornographic graffiti and rusty stains. Immemorial life, curated by a lonely librarian.
The next turn leads into Syndi’s gardens, a sudden pocket of sweet air and tinkling water; dangling robot arms squirting solution into wall-mounted shrubs. Fat, pink worms writhe in soil, and floral scents activate deep ancestral memory that burns in my patchwork sinuses.
I scan Captain Franklin’s palm implant—slipped, still bloody, into my small hands just before the hooded men spaced her—and enter her cabin to watch the end. And the beginning.
* * *
In the porthole nook, Jerry’s coffin sparkles with a million stars.
Vivaldi’s “Spring” pipes gently from hidden speakers, punctuated by the ubiquitous hiccupping thrum of the great drive.
“It was an equipment failure,” Syndi says. “He didn’t suffer.”
“I’m glad,” I say.
As glad as you can be that the last child in the universe is dead anyway. Jerry was our first—and last—arti-baby, grown from embryo stock before it spoiled. He never even drew a real breath.
“I need a fucking drink.”
A serving drone flutters over to the mini bar, manipulating clinking glasses as I sketch my name into a dusty tabletop. I get halfway, but the rest won’t come.
“They have sent another transmission,” she says as the drone returns with a double whiskey. The reflective brown liquid displays a shrivelled husk in a starchy collar and tie. The only survivor of the food riots, the Church, the coup and lawless years, and the quiet time, when life wound down like a dying clock and hairy, feral people scuttled about, forking the evil eye at Syndi.
I’m glad she took the arm. Maybe now I can forget the man who came for Jerry, and how easily it stopped him.
“Have you … deciphered it?” My first sip is mostly water. Typical Syndi.
“I forgot my Rosetta Stone,” she says.
A spinning holographic world superimposes the porthole. Wispy clouds dance over cyan oceans and green islands, contrasting twinkling nightside cities. The cold sun beyond reaches into the dark, eager to snare us. I’m too overawed to smile.
Another little tremor races through me.
“How long?” I ask.
“About four months. I’ll decelerate as much as possible, but we’re coming in too fast. We’ll need to flip and burn. Assuming …”
Assuming the ship holds together. Assuming her calculations are correct. Assuming this is reality, and I’m not still asleep, mind slowly pickling before that final little pop.
“Right. I’ll go back to bed then.”
Vivaldi fades into waspish silence.
“Chances of surviving another freeze, at your … advanced stage are eleven-point-two percent,” she says.
Last time it was forty-three, and I barely won that argument. “And surviving a twenty-gee burn in this skeleton?”
“Marginally better.”
“Has anyone told you you’re a real comfort?”
There is a fractional pause. “Has anyone told you you’re a real asshole?”
My sudden laugh sprays red-tinted whiskey over the table, making the ghost-planet shiver. The exoskeleton whines, pumps something icy into my chest, and things turn fuzzy.
“Are you excited?” I ask, later. The ship ticks and clunks, and my glass is empty. Jerry’s wake is over.
I picture the excitement on that little rock. The parties, papers, speeches, riots, doomsday cults. The inevitable military response. Maybe I’m humanising. I’m allowed. I’m the last one.
“Life is going to change,” says Syndi.
“That’s not really an answer.”
But it is. For billions. People with wings or flippers or three heads and twelve brains. People who may dress me in ceremonial robes and deify me upon a sacred summit. Or shoot us down and publicly vivisect me.
“I hope I live to see it,” I say, feeling the exoskeleton squeezing my brittle spine, my skull aching under papery skin, ready to fall inwards like a neutron star.
“I hope so too,” says Syndi.
We debate briefly whether I’m considered the alien, then lapse into silence as the ship draws on, toward a world like one that died before I was born.
I am the last, but right here, right now, I’m also the first. For a species that flickered briefly in the eternal darkness, it isn’t much. But it’s enough.
Andrew Jackson is a student and writer from Surrey, UK, with a love of dark fiction. He experiments across a variety of genres, but most of his work embraces science fiction, ranging from speculative, dystopian fiction and space opera to the claustrophobic terror of sci-fi horror.
Drawing on influential films such as Alien and Event Horizon, and videogames like Dead Space and Mass Effect, he’s happiest in space with something unspeakable hunting him. Most of his stories are speculative, bleak, and a little bit weird.
He has had science fiction and horror stories published with Black Hare Press, Night Terror Novels, and Dark Matter Magazine. Additionally, he has self-published Project Jotunheim, an aquatic horror novelette, co-authored with Samuel M. Hallam.
Find him on Instagram @authorandrewjackson where he posts all the books he hopes one day to get through, and occasionally some writing too.
Copyright © 2025 Andrew Jackson.