The Goodbye

“And take upon's the mystery of things,

As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,

 In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,

 That ebb and flow by the moon.”

– William Shakespeare, King Lear

O - 10.65 Hours

The earth beneath her was warm and damp and moving. Sweat glued her hands to her gloves. The metal edge of her helmet dug into her neck. Above her, only a silver-green sliver of moon glowed, pinned between the black sky and the black earth. If there were stars, she couldn’t make them out – and somewhere, people were screaming.

It took more strength than she expected to push herself upright. The longer she spent off the surface, the harder it was to adjust to Earth’s gravity when her feet touched down. Now she felt as if her pack was filled with bricks instead of oxygen, and her limbs and head pulsed with the same sharp bursts of pain.

She couldn’t remember landing. She couldn’t remember the end of her mission, or whether they had made it through the last of their scheduled tasks. She could remember, though, that she was meant to land five miles from land, in the Pacific Ocean. Wherever she was, it was not an ocean. 

Her arm itched. Absently, Daphne reached over to scratch it, but instead of her arm, her glove made contact with something else – something that squirmed. She pushed it from her in a panic. 

It was a white worm the length of her forearm, with teeth like needles. As she slept, it had bitten a hole through the arm of her spacesuit and into her skin, and blood lazily trickled down into her glove. When she kicked at it, the worm wriggled into the earth and disappeared.

Staring down at the place where it had been, Daphne reached up and pressed the side button on her helmet. The words Hello, Daphne flickered to life, and then a menu. Her location, which had relied on a connection to the ISS’s network, was blank, but her oxygen and vitals and radio were all active. According to a blinking light on the glass of her visor, it was TIME. Another light alerted her to the tear in the arm of her spacesuit, as if she couldn’t feel warm air on the bare skin of her arm. 

Daphne held down a button on the back of her wrist. “Fortune Base, this is Sanchez. I’m speaking to you from… Well, I’d guess that you know better than I do. What’s going on? Do you read me?”

The radio sputtered and went silent. Daphne tried again. “Fortune. Sanchez. Come on, guys, I’m a bit lost out here. You won’t believe what was attached to me when I woke up. Over.”

Nothing.

Daphne inspected her arm. At least it didn’t seem infected, but tingles of lost circulation raced up and down her fingers. As best she could with her clumsy left hand, she tucked the torn fabric back around the wound and sealed it with drying earth. 

Daphne flaked the last of the mud off of the glass of her helmet with the tips of her gloved fingers. Far off, the silver-green moon squirmed against the sky, the only light that she could see. It wasn’t much, but it was something – a destination. 

She began towards it, her boots sinking into the mud. Her calves burned with the effort of pulling her legs from the squelching earth, and her radio unfurled a long red string of silence. And somewhere, people continued to scream. 

O - 10.02 Hours

The further Daphne walked, the less familiar her environment seemed. Every so often, the Earth rose and fell beneath her, as if the universe was compressing and expanding – a turning of the galactic tide. Hours of strong winds came and went as the weather turned hot and then hotter and then hot again, but they were interspersed by periods of calm so absolute that Daphne felt she was walking towards a photograph. 

The field was not as empty as it had first seemed. In fact, it was scattered with debris, though most of it had been entirely submerged in mud. Daphne turned to avoid strips of sharp metal, plastic bottles, a chair. It was two fifteen in the morning – according to the number on her monitor - when Daphne found the ping-pong racket, buried up to its handle in the dirt. 

The wooden bottom of its handle almost tripped her. At first, she thought it was a fallen stick, though there were no trees in the endless field around her. When she picked it up, however, she saw the initials: “J. B.,” roughly etched into the handle with a kitchen knife. 

Jared’s paddle. He had played a game with her on the ISS. Daphne’s camera floated in the corner of the room. There was no need for nets, only a weightless plastic ball that darted through the canned rec room air in all directions as they pushed off walls to pass it back and forth. Their game made into an advertisement for sneakers, and probably a million people watched back on Earth. 

Now his racket was in her hands. The wood was stained dark with mud, mud that looked red in the light of her headlamp. She didn’t know why she wanted to keep it, but the thought of dropping it scared her. Long strands of congealing mud connected her glove to the racket as she tucked it into the loop at her hip. 

O - 9.31 Hours

Not long into her journey, Daphne realized that she was walking towards the wall at the end of the world. As she walked towards the moon, the moon became closer to her, growing larger and larger in the sky. The sky itself, which she had conceived as an infinite expanse of blackness, was the same mud-dark color as the Earth. The heavens were mud – the dark and dripping borders to a vast cavity through which Daphne stumbled. 

Miles later, she stood below the moon, and the moon writhed above her. It clung to the wall of the world with six sharp legs. It emitted a light so powerful that Daphne could not make out its shape completely, but it was not a sphere, not a celestial body at all – or perhaps it was the purest form of a celestial body, the living body of an insect that pierced through the darkness like a star. Its mouth was unmoving, sunk deep into the endless wall of mud. The rest of its body writhed, mindlessly hitting the wall and curling through the air; though in ecstasy or agony, Daphne could not tell. Darts of light swam under its skin, darting through the hollow of its abdomen. 

Occasionally a dart of light broke from the insect’s stomach and scuttered off into the darkness, fading as it went. As it left, others returned. Gape-mouthed worms squirmed up the wall of mud, dragging with them pieces of Earth debris. Maggots carrying a keyboard, a violin cracked down the center, a piece of clothing clotted so thickly with dark liquid that Daphne couldn’t tell what kind of clothing it used to be – one by one, they all disappeared beneath the abdomen of the giant insect and disappeared. 

If Daphne had been standing a meter to either side, she wouldn’t have seen it – and then she would never have known. But one of the larvae passed by the very edge of the small area lit by the glow of the living moon, moving more slowly than the others, dragging behind it a heavier load, and Daphne’s eye fell on its burden.

White fabric stained red as clay. The insignia on the side of the ankle. Torn around the calf – above the top of the boot.

As soon as she realized, Daphne was on top of the worm, kicking it hard. It released Jared’s leg with a squeal like a dying pig. 

As the worm flinched back, the insect above them rattled to life. Its mouth pulled from the wall with an audible sound of suction, and it turned to look at Daphne. Its glowing face was splattered with darkness.

If the insect had eyes, Daphne couldn’t make them out. Still, when its blank face turned towards her, she knew with absolute certainty that it was staring straight back at her. Examining her. It was the unseen eye – the hawk, the wolf, the virus. It was every predatory animal. Daphne was every prey. 

She stood her ground, more out of terror than bravery. Her eyelids refused to close, and she stared up at the creature while its young wriggled at the edge of her vision and the endless dark pulsed around her. Her vision blurred and hot tears ran down her cheeks and dripped from her chin.

She was going to die here. She could feel blood pulsing beneath the thin rice-paper skin of her neck. She could hear blood as it pumped past her ears and fed her brain. She was aware, as she had never been before, of the fragility of her own body. She knew, she knew, she knew – her blood whispered by her ears – she only knew she didn't want to die. 

The insect turned with a sound like a bat being dragged over a metal grate. With unnerving speed, it scuttled endlessly up into the darkness until it was only a shrinking point of light above her. It was a mite the size of a house, and then it was a sun, a moon, a star. 

Daphne squeezed her burning eyes shut and sank to her knees in the mud. 

O - 9.15 Hours

She couldn’t dig a grave for Jared’s leg. Sinking her hands into the swamp floor was like sinking her hands into waterlogged leather, and though Daphne tore at its surface until the undersides of her fingernails stung with splinters, it wouldn’t give. So she pulled shards of metal from her friend’s skin the best she could, tied the ragged end of his spacesuit over the stump of his calf, and piled watery earth over what was left of him until the white plastic of his boot was invisible under a mound of dark red mud. On top of the mound, Daphne tried to stand Jared’s ping-pong paddle like a flag, feeling both hopelessly absurd and as if this was the most important task she could possibly be doing – but no matter what she tried, it flopped over onto the ground, so she finally decided there was nothing to do but leave it as it was.

Twenty or thirty feet above her, where the insect’s mouth had latched itself to the wall, there was a hole in the sky like a dark wound. Mud wept from it and trickled down the wall. Watching it, Daphne remembered how one of the insect’s worms had latched itself to her while she slept – how its mouth had left a hole, a dark wound in the skin of her arm. 

A thought floated from the bottom of her mind, nauseating and half-formed. 

Daphne took up the largest of the metal shards, almost the length of her forearm, and held its point over the leather-thick earth of the swamp. In one swift gesture, she plunged it deep into the ground until her hands met the surface below her.

The world shuddered and rumbled with the sound of a distant, drawn-out cry, deeper than the sound of a current at the bottom of the sea. Daphne shielded her face against a sudden wind and pulled the shard out of the ground. 

Out of the tear in the earth bubbled a dark liquid, unmistakable: blood. 

Another sudden wind, blowing itself in the opposite direction. The earth rose and the wall closed in, as if the universe was squeezing all of the air out of itself. 

Lungs. She was inside the lungs of a gigantic beast.

O - 4.03 Hours 

It took Daphne five hours and half of her remaining oxygen to stumble from the creature’s lungs to the ridge at the top of its stomach. Its body was surprisingly easy to navigate – she walked into each inhaled rush of cold wind until she found an opening barely tall enough to crawl into, dark as a crack in the wall of an underground cave. She waded through capillaries, towards veins where she swam through blue-black blood, and into the pulsing rivers of arteries. She was following the screams.

At the top of the creature’s stomach, there was a ridge of flesh where she stood, looking down. Thirty feet below her, maybe more, she could see the very tops of skyscrapers with walls that sloped down into the distant darkness. Parasites glittered across the creature’s stomach lining like city lights. 

Somewhere below her, fires were burning. Through the bitter scent of digestion, Daphne could smell the smoke. 

It had swallowed an entire city. More than that, Daphne guessed, though she couldn’t be sure. In every direction, the segment of the earth that Daphne saw within the creature’s stomach crumbled into mist. The darkness seemed to go on forever.

A lone seagull alighted from the top of an office building, flitting in and out of shadows. It circled the bubbling cavern of the creature’s stomach and landed where it began. 

Daphne knew these buildings, she realized. She had to imagine them with glass, reflecting the glare of the sun – not skeletons of concrete and steel, but blue-black offices that skimmed the sky. Beyond the line of skyscrapers, Daphne thought she could just make out a vast wasteland, empty sand that once held water. Her laugh was bitter, the color of rust. It was Chicago, crumbled, half-dead.

Daphne had been here once, with her mother. She was nine, and her mother was on her way to one of her conferences in New York. They were in such a hurry that they didn’t even stay the night – but for an afternoon, they lay on the dock with their bare feet in the water, watching the storm crawl in. Seagulls rose from the lake and swooped in and out of her vision. It was warm, and comfortable, and brief.

Daphne lay on her back with her feet over the ledge of the end of the world, watching birds rise from office buildings with half-burnt feathers. 

When the oxygen alert on her helmet started flashing yellow, Daphne stood and climbed out of the creature’s stomach without looking back. She clambered through the maze of cartilage toward the creature's throat. She was going to die – it was only a matter of time. But if she had to go, she was not going to go alone. 

O - 3.21 hours 

Daphne knew that the beast deserved death. She believed it absolutely. Not because what it did was unjust – no more than a hawk acts unjustly when it hunts a mouse – but because she was alive, and if she was alive, there must be a reason. The shard of steel, the momentary frost of revenge – these were reasons. She would see it die. Then she would slip from the land of the living like water down a rock face.

Daphne followed the hall of the creature’s throat up from the cavern of its stomach until she found a place where the walls pulsed with the beast’s heartbeat. From here she could see endless, distant rows of teeth like mountain ranges, opening and closing around the emptiness of the universe. The creature’s dark mouth was infested with glowing mites like tiny stars. Lit by its parasites, the inside of the alien was the dull orange of the inside of Daphne's eyelids – but the darkness outside was absolute. 

On one side of the creature’s throat, long slits stretched from Daphne’s feet to far above her head. Around them, the creature’s skin fluttered in and out as it breathed. Gills, Daphne thought. The vacuum of space leaked through them and bled into the open cavern of the creature’s body. Through the gills, between the stars, the sky fell into a blank, unseeing nothing. 

In the distance, tucked between two stars, Daphne could see the Earth.

Half of the planet was gone, the rest decimated. As Daphne watched, pieces of Earth larger than the moon broke off and tumbled through space, fracturing into smaller and smaller pieces until they floated in a cloud of dust. Daphne could see marks where the creature’s teeth had scraped against stones, white streaks across the blood-red mantle rock. In her head, since nobody else could, Daphne made a list of the missing. Half of Europe, half of Africa; she could see most of Latin America, but none of the East Coast, where she had lived since her family moved to the United States. Her high school, her university, the NASA training program. Her mother, her brothers. 

Daphne pulled the glove from her right hand. It was hot and damp with sweat, but it was only skin again, human skin. The helmet seemed to magnify all sound inside of her and erase all sound outside of her. Daphne could hear the trembling of her own heartbeat. One, two - one, two - one, two. I don't want to die, it seemed to say. The words repeated, quiet, the sound of a drum resounding over a great distance: I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die.

She placed her bare right hand against the artery's damp, rice-paper skin. The alien's flesh was hot as a dog's mouth. With her left hand, she held the shard of metal that she had pulled from Jared’s leg. Her arm was a coiled spring. The shard’s jagged edge tore into her palm, and her red blood mixed with the dried blood of the beast – through them both, she could see the blue ISS logo inscribed on the metal. 

Beneath her hand, its living artery pulsed. One, two - one, two - one, two. The vibrations of a distant drum passing through the earth. 

Above her head, the stars rattled and clicked and scurried and sucked blood from the veins of Daphne’s murderer. Outside, the stars peered at her with distant, eyeless faces. The Earth crumbled. The world ended, and it kept ending.

The creature’s slow heartbeat jumped against her hand. I don't want to die – but she was almost there. She was standing at a door and knocking, and Death was letting her in, and he was saying hello, Daphne, you're late – the party's already started. 

Everything in Daphne's head was suddenly very quiet and very still. 

Her hand opened and the steel fell. There was no sound as it hit the muscle of the creature's neck and skidded, uselessly, down the long column of its throat. 

Was there some kind of mold, she wondered dully, for all life in the universe? Why was it so easy for her to understand this creature, to recognize its teeth, its lungs, the locations of its veins? Why was it born with a beating heart? Maybe, Daphne thought, every kind of life that ever tripped into the universe was fundamentally the same. A blood-sucked parasite, a fractal of murderers and victims.  Sharp-toothed, eating, eaten.

O - 0.59 hours 

What would you do if you were the last human being on Earth? It was the kind of question kids asked from top bunks when they stayed up late at sleepaway camps, homesick and fidgety. If you could send one single message into space, one message to encapsulate the totality of human achievement, what would you send?

On the Golden Record, the phonograph record sent into space on the Voyager to act as the universe’s introduction to human life, NASA sent greetings recorded in fifty-five different human languages. In high school, hopelessly in love with the universe, Daphne learned them all by heart. She could recite them, imagining that out in space somewhere, someone was listening – someone who would appreciate the quaint niceness of human language. Reciting them in the dark of her childhood bedroom was as close as Daphne would ever come to prayer.

Even now, she still remembered parts of the greetings, scattered through her memory like shimmering shards of glass. “Hello from the children of planet Earth,” she said in English, and the words swirled at the bottom of her helmet and dissipated into empty space like milk into water. In Akkadian: "May all be very well."

In her head, though she didn’t dare speak it aloud, Daphne was reciting the Amoy greeting: “Have you eaten?” The Earth was the size of a grape. Daphne could squeeze it between her fingers, swallow it down. 

A minute ago, her oxygen alert had started glaring red in the corner of her vision. The wound on her arm itched incessantly, her feet were too hot and her head too cold, and she could still see and breathe and hear, and her chest was crumbling, and everyone she knew was probably dead, and her life was ending. 

Daphne watched her planet shrink into the sky until her eyes could no longer grasp it. (Humankind’s first Indonesian hello to the universe: "good night ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.") Her bare hands on the pulse of a dying creature larger than her entire planet, Daphne lay on her back, stared into everything, and waited for everything to end. Goodbye and see you next time.

Musician’s Note

I intended this score to be as much about sound as it is pure composition. For a story like this where the world quite literally is as much a character as anything else, creating a soundtrack worthy of that was one of my main goals. In terms of the sound design, I opted for a number of synths in conjunction with a few samples mixed with traditional orchestration. To me, science fiction stems from combining familiar settings, characters, or values with something new and so I choose to use this mix between traditional methods of composition like an orchestra and electronic ones to reflect that. The critical sound I used throughout was actually once a relatively high piano note - I noticed that if you slow such a sample down to be extremely slow, it creates a huge, cavernous sound which I really fell in love with and ultimately, chose to make the cornerstone of the piece, both creating atmosphere and signifying the entrance and departure of various other instruments throughout.

ANTONIS CHRISTOU