GROUND ZERO : SPACE

It’s hard to believe that just beyond the six inches of reinforced, supertested glass that there is nothing. Well, not actually nothing, but space itself. Space is obviously something, but not very much. It’s dark, and has no colour. No atmosphere. No resistance. So nothing, I suppose.

It’s like electricity. And loneliness. It exists. It cannot be seen. Or touched. or felt. Or seen. Or heard. And no man should be afraid of what they cannot touch or feel. But I fear loneliness. I fear space. And here, I have both. And time. All the time in the world.

Of course, there are objects. Stars, supernovas, black holes - though you can’t see those with a naked eye - sometimes even other ships. When we get further and further out they tend to have become more frequent, checking out the stranger in their neighbourhood. Some of the designs we see are quite beautiful – organic, flowing, flourocesent shapes cutting through space. Others are black, dark, almost invisible against the black curtain of light. Since we have no defensive capability to speak of, almost all of them are benign to us.

There is a belief that alien life is by its very nature, passive and not at all hostile. So far, this is generally true, but there is an arrogance in the assumption that technology equates with civilisation and tranquility. Mankind was the walking, talking proof of the failure of that theory.

We’ve been out here for years. Self-contained. Self-reliant. And self-diagnosed. We’ve all got cabin fever. Going slowly mad, clinging to a culture that no longer exists, a Wagon Train to the stars, a handful of us searching for a habitable planet we can land upon and start anew.

It wasn’t always like this. Even three years ago we were a brave new experiment, a microcosm of society, orbiting Terra. People of all races (but not of any religion, something to do with trying to avoid an Interstellar Jihad) circling the planet in an attempt to prove that mankind could co-exist, to try and prove to the squabbling, proud idiots below that tolerance was still possible.

And we failed, like the rest of the world.

I crave sunlight. I miss her hands. Even when it was at my fingertips, I never wanted it to rain. And now there’s little I want more than to enjoy a hailstorm, or snow, bad weather, wet grass, anything.

Even the dawn would make a welcome change from what we have at the moment. Thankfully we managed to engineer some programming in so that it gets lighter in here during what we call daylight hours. And darker at night. But things are somewhat less interesting than they seem, to be honest. There is quite literally nothing to do anymore. The further away we get, the less hope there is for any of us.

We can’t go home anymore. There is no such place. One day we ceased contact with what was below. We kept pinging and pinging, but there was never any answer. No channels of communications were open. Everything just. Stopped.

It was as if Earth had suddenly become a ghost. At the time it happened, or more correctly, at the time things ceased to happen, we were operating a skeleton night time staff. Inside the depths of the ship, maybe 20 or 30 of us lived, just housekeeping. Making sure that nothing failed. Cannibalising whatever was left of the spare parts. We didn’t even notice it at first. The background static of transmission just ceased. In the same way as when I was on earth and the fridge stopped humming in the middle of the night, the background chatter ceased. Things fell apart, and nobody noticed.

I miss kissing. I miss love. I miss music. I miss getting drunk. I miss my friends.

Over a period of time, an hour, maybe two, the gravity of the situation started to dawn. One of us had the forethought to view the permanent link between Home and Ground Control. In the Big Room, situated in the World Capital of Metropolis, formerly Berlin, normally you can see something. The Graveyard Shift of the 30 or staff , yawning bleary eyed through the night, brewing coffee and necking ProPlus to try and stay awake.

In the first few months of Home’s orbit we used to talk to them. After that time, we just kind of lapsed into silence. Like a marriage where the love had gone, there was nothing left to talk about. We spent whole evenings mute, silent, unable to talk. The weather never changed much here anyway.

We’d gone through the whole gamut of discussions. Even intergalactic chess. We used velcro pieces to keep the pieces on the board when the gravity effect was broken. It took a while, after which our muscles had begun to waste away, before we managed to fix it. At that moment our head of engineering was simultaneously the most (and least) popular person on the ship. Sleeping crew members fell sharply to the ground and it became very difficult, after two months of weightless life, to pick up even simple objects.

In the meantime, on earth, nobody was to be seen in the Big Room. Radio transmissions and TV transmissions were garbled. We managed not even to notice that they picked up static and everything just carried on as normal.

Except there were no people. For some reason all the people were gone. Despite the fact that Home managed to monitor and record every transmission made by mankind, and still maintained a permanent laser link with the Earth (even now as we drift away from the dead rock, searching for somewhere new to park), we were still in the dark. It took a long time before things became clear.

The first inkling I - or any of us had - was when I was sifting through the news transmissions of the day in question. I began to notice strange things. Transmissions kind of ceased at around about 5.30am GMT (or about 12.30pm US time). After that live bulletins stopped, or were at best sporadic. The centres of communications - London, Metropolis, New York, - all kind of faded out.

The only way I realised what it was was by looking carefully at the stream from The Big Room. At around 5.13am the building shook. like an earthquake. I noticed a couple of the engineers fall over. The rest slumped in their chairs, shaking violently from the unexpected event.

And that was how the world ended