Skirting the low hills around me, concrete-colored clouds move fast overhead, pushed by a hard cold wind on this lonely desolation of Ross 128 b. During the Outjump to the Ross 128 system, I was Genmoded to seamlessly adapt physically to this place.
I’m still cold.
With my back to the wind, I stand in the midst of the startcraft’s twisted and broken wreckage that’s scattered over a kilometer-wide slice of the planet’s broad treeless Plateau XI. The gray rock of the plateau is cut by deep canyons that reveal nothing but a void, yet reveal everything. In the distance, the acrid smoke of a volcanic blows kilometers high, punching a hole in the concrete-colored sheath of clouds.
The air smells of death.
I’m in this forsaken cold place due to an anomaly: this planet and the Ross 128 b star system is, in fact, way past the Shankar Limit: that place where the A.I. Sentients fear to tread. I’m the token waterbag human, albeit with certain enhancements, they’ve sent out to this inhospitable wasteland to investigate where and, more importantly, what they cannot.
To find a lost starcraft. To find any survivors.
I’m not here by accident, though. I came here to find her.
She is a member of the crew. Was, assuming the worst.
I almost feel her shade walking silently among the bio-metal debris.
Feel her watching me with those dark eyes as she did long ago on that weekend at her father’s cabin in the foothills of Olympus Mons when, in the cool of the Martian summer night, we’d roasted synthetic marshmallows over a holographic fire, and, later, I tasted the sweet sticky of her lips, and she was warm and smelled of the ubiquitous red Martian dust that was everywhere, and so, later, we went on together as lovers do…and found Nirvana.
Nothing survived this crash. I found the wreckage within hours of arrival.
I spend the next four day-periods reconstructing the wreck for the record. An informal temporary shelter offers me a break from the continuous cold wind.
She comes to me at night. Her ghost, her shade. I don’t even know if she’s here.
She says, “Why have you come?”
“To find you. You’re lost.”
In the din of a setting sun, she turns from me and looks to the wreckage. “No, not lost. Not now.”
“I have only a few days left here.”
She looks over her shoulder to me. “Then you must go.”
The wind howls past me.
She disappears. Forever.
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