The following is a 2022 short story named Sprocket's Scrap. While the world this story takes place in has now changed to be nearly unrecognisable, I still stand by the messages and storytelling in this work.
Content warnings: Mental illness, suicide, death.
It had been four years since Lutèce Nehalem had tried to kill herself.
That had been tragic, if it weren't just a statement of fact. It wasn't uncommon, either. In the moment, suicide always made perfect sense. Some suicide attempts were impulsive acts, but some were planned and took a lot of deliberation. The textbooks had always made a clear delineation between the two, and the latter was a lot harder to treat. The goal of therapy was always to improve the patient's life, brighten their outlook and motivate them to improve themselves. Those who had attempted to end their life and failed were usually less receptive to these methods, but the principle was still the same. Despite everything, life was still worth living. Even if it wasn't, that hardly mattered. If one looked hard enough, one found. Suicide was not permissible under any of the schools that authored the psychology textbooks. It was the one thing they agreed on: Suicide was a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
In a way, death was an equaliser. The circumstances of one's death hardly mattered in the moment. At the end, everyone would die. Was it not the most basic freedom to take control of this universal constant for one's self? No being should be made to suffer unnecessarily, after all.
Wherever Glenn had landed, it was a desolate and hopeless wasteland. In the distance, two moons gently flew under the horizon and disappeared. Namaka and Hi'iaka, if the maps were accurate. They had no reason not to be. He was confident he had the right place. Piles of scrap metal and discarded starships dotted the landscape, accruing around the three metal towers that provided an atmospheric tent. He wasn't planning on leaving his ship.
Glenn went to the counselling office and made sure everything was still in its right place. The traditional Orci mask was still on the wood-clad wall, the books were all in order, the two seats were placed where they belonged. That pleased Glenn.
He took one of the tapes from his music collection and slid it into the player by the bookshelf, and turned it up to a comfortable level. One would still be able to have a conversation over the gentle swinging of the piano.
Steps were coming from the airlock below. Glenn straightened out his jacket, readjusted his glasses and stepped down the staircase. Below, in the airlock staging room, his patient waited for him to lead him up.
"Welcome, Ms. Nehalem. Please, come upstairs."
She followed him. She was nervous, maybe even a little worried, maybe even anxious. Glenn had seen it many times before. As he stepped over to the table where his tea set was placed, Lutèce looked around the room, studying the ceremonial mask and the diploma on the wall. Glenn poured boiling hot water over the little pile of powder in each of the ceramic mugs. The tea smelled excellent. He took the tablet and placed it on the wooden cube between the two identical reclining chairs.
"Please," he said. "Take a seat."
She took a seat. He had learned not to let appearances sway his thoughts, but that didn't mean he wasn't observant. Like she had told him in her message, she was a child. Fourteen years old, according to the letter. She didn't mention the metal, though. The right side of her face was completely void of any skin, instead having a round piece of metal - most likely titanium - welded to her head. Instead of a right eye, there was the black mirror of an oscilloscope display, and above it, an array of sensors. A singular green dot was displayed on the screen that masqueraded as an eye.
Her left arm was also metal, as were her legs. The parts were a little oversized for her adolescent frame. She didn't seem to mind. Her legs still dangled in the recycled air above the ground. The chair was too big for her.
"I assume this is your first session of this type?" Glenn opened his ledger and readied his pencil. He took pride in the fact that he used real paper and pencil for his session notes and didn't distract his patients with the pale glow of a tablet computer.
"Yes" his patient answered. "I was told you can help me."
Her voice sounded normal. Maybe a bit low for her age, but other than that, perfectly normal.
"Well, I certainly hope so." He handed her the cup of tea. She took it with her mechanical hand. "Tell me. What's on your mind?"
"I don't want to live."
"Why come to me, then?"
"I... want to live. I mean, I want to want."
Glenn scribbled a note on his ledger.
"Why don't you tell me a little about that?"
His patient sighed and leaned back in the chair, her feet now almost touching the upholstery.
"How would you feel if you were the last of your kind?" He didn't answer. "I don't know. I don't know how I'm supposed to feel."
She looked out of the porthole, off world, at the sun.
"I'm not supposed to exist."
"In all my years of counselling, I've never met someone who wasn't supposed to exist" Glenn answered. Inferiority, lack of self-confidence.
"I mean that literally. I'm not supposed to live."
"You've made it this far."
A pause.
"Maybe I should start at the beginning," she said and leaned back. "Do you remember when the Martian archive was discovered?"
Glenn did. An ancient piece of technology, perfectly preserved. Designed to be read from, the datasore known as the Martian archive was the legacy of whatever civilisation came before his. It contained historical records, personal accounts, an impressively thorough copy of their computer network. The language used in the archive data was easy enough to decipher, and had been chosen to be the universal language of the galaxy, since it belonged to no one.
"When humans went extinct," she began. Humans were the dominant species of the system that both Mars and Earth had been a part of. "It was Earth that came first. They were an impressive species. So many civilisations on one planet, and it wasn't even populated half way.
"They relied on fuels. Minerals they pulled from the ground, crude oil that powered their machinery for decades, centuries even. The parts of Earth the fuels came from were ravaged, destroyed even. And the parts that remained didn't fair much better either. Producing oil and burning oil both brought the planet to its knees. Eventually, the atmosphere dissolved and everyone burned to death.
"Mars was there, of course. Home to the richest of the rich, those that could afford their own spaceships, those that could afford sending supplies the twenty light minutes up there. But when Earth suffocated, Mars had its days numbered. But humanity wasn't going to go down without a fight.
"Their plan was to assemble everything they had - their history, their encyclopaedias, their research, their art, their culture - and make a copy of it. Put everything on a computer, leave that computer somewhere it would be accessible but protected. If there was someone out there, they'd recover it."
She made a vague gesture with her organic hand. "They did, of course. You know the rest."
"I have a feeling there's more to this story."
"There is" She took a sip from her tea. "Among the recovered data, there was a sequence of organic information. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen mostly. Genetic code. At first, everyone thought it was Talosian, since it looked more or less exactly the same, but it wasn't. It was human DNA.
"A team at the Talosian Institute for Archaeology took it upon them to try and resequence the gene, splice it into something from which to make a human. This was illegal, of course. Not to mention unethical. But they did it anyways.
"Tula Nehalem was the project leader. She did most of the work on the project, and she was the one who eventually would carry me to term. She's... my mother, I suppose. Just not biologically. When the ethics commission pulled the plug on the project, she refused to terminate, and when I was born, she did everything to keep me alive. She did all my body work, too." Lutèce tapped her oscilloscope eye. Her metal finger made a clinking noise as it his the glass. "Without her, I'd already be dead."
"I assume something happened to her."
"She got caught. Far as I'm aware, she's in some Talosian prison. I got away, and somewhere within my implants there was enough information to make me an engineer. Enough knowledge to pay for a one-way trip home. I ended up here. Set up shop, sometimes some pirate comes through and I fix their ship. In return, they give me food and medicine."
"I'm sorry about your mother." Glenn said.
"She's not my mother." She looked out of the window again. "My mother died two hundred years ago."
"How do you feel about this? It's quite a life you've lived."
"I feel sick." she answered. "Not just physically, too. I don't want to live. I'm supposed to be dead, I'm supposed to have been dead for centuries."
"But you're not." Glenn said. He'd have to approach the topic at some point. "You're alive, and I for one think that's a testament to you and your species. How many beings can say that they've come back from extinction?" Lutèce cracked a faint smile.
"I guess, if you put it like that."
"I understand how your life may seem cruel. How it is cruel. But you're special. Why would you throw that away?"
Another pause. Lutèce needed a moment to think. No, not think, that's not what it looked like. Prepare for what she was about to say.
"I'm dying."
Lutèce Nehalem pulled her shirt a bit down, revealing a metal rectangle embedded in her skin just under the clavicle. Glenn had seen this before, on some other patients. A chemotherapy intake port.
"My condolences" Glenn said. She just nodded.
"Fourteen different types. Turns out two-hundred year old DNA really doesn't like being sequenced into a Talosian egg cell."
"Prognosis?"
"Negative." She covered the port again and drank from the tea. "I've not seen a doctor in a while, but I've been sticking to the regiment. The drugs I get from the pirates, and implanting the port wasn't that difficult." Glenn noted down that she did it all herself. At fourteen years, she held a tremendous amount of independence, even disregarding the fact that she was her own oncologist.
The question hung in the room like the thick smell of something gone rotten.
"Maybe a month. Maybe a week. At this point, who knows."
"Is this why you tried to take your life four years prior?"
"Partially" she answered. "I mean, it was the cancer. Yes. But it was also the idea of being the last of your species. The crushing loneliness of having an entire solar system to myself. Not finding any joy in the world. The metal digging into my skin the more I grow. It just didn't seem worth it."
"But you don't feel this way now?"
She nodded. "Oh, I do. I don't want to live. I want to die, leave this behind and let humanity finally rest."
"Yet you feel like you shouldn't throw your life away."
"You see the problem."
Glenn closed his ledger.
"I'd like to be honest with you." He leaned back in his chair and took a sip of the tea. She looked up to him, expecting something she'd heard a hundred times before from random people online, the pirates that came to her to get their ships fixed, her pharmacist.
"Go ahead"
"I don't think suicide prevention would help you." Something changed in his patient. If he had to infer from the limited time he'd already spent with her, he'd say that this was the first time anyone had ever said that to her.
"Is that your expert medical opinion?" she retorted and put the cup of tea down. One track of the record stopped and the next one played, bridging the awkward gap in conversation.
"I don't think you're suicidal," he elaborated. "I think what you're looking for is more akin to euthanasia." She scoffed.
"I don't need euthanasia. I can just wait a few weeks." Deflection. She'd considered this before, that much was evident.
"Ms. Nehalem, I think you're misunderstanding," he began, leaning forward a little bit. "You're in a unique position, one that puts you under a lot of stress. It most likely depresses you, and the lack of social interaction all the way out here on the rim of a dead system is also getting to you. You're faced with your own mortality and, by extension, that of your species."
"So far, so obvious. What's your point?"
"I'd like to help you, but I don't know what you need from me. Would you like to be happier? Would you like a fulfilling rest of your life? Would you like to die right here, right now, and get it over with?"
The room went deathly silent. Even the music from the tape player seemed to quiet down.
"Do you care?"
"Of course I do. Just because you're paying me doesn't make my desire to help you any less genuine."
Lutèce processed that.
"Do you mind if I ask you some questions for a change?"
Dr. Glenn nodded. "Be my guest."
"How many patients do you have?"
"Around fifty."
"Do you have a family?"
"Yes, I have a wife and two children."
"Adults, I assume?"
He nodded.
"See, that's your legacy. When you eventually die, that's what you'll leave behind. Your children, your wife, and all the patients you've helped over the years." It dawned on Glenn. "What do I have? One-hundred-and-fifty tons of scrap metal, a dainty sublight rocketship that'll barely last for a trip down the well and back, and fourteen cancers."
"If you're afraid that you won't leave a mark on this world, rest assured that you already have."
"Maybe on you. Maybe on the ethics committee at the Talosian Institute. Maybe on the pirates that drop by to have me fix their reactor twice a week. Maybe on the pharmacist who sells me poison under the counter so I can cling on to this miserable existence a little longer."
"Isn't that enough? You'll be remembered."
"No, it's not" she said. "When historians look back on the galaxy, on the solar system, on Earth, they'll just see that humans existed, they had a good run for some twelve-thousand years, and then their own idiocy killed them. And maybe, if the records are ever declassified, they'll include a footnote about how one xenobio graduate tried to revive them and got too attached to the little frankenstein she let grow inside her, which, surprise surprise, died a few years later anyways without any notable achievements."
"Frankenstein?"
"Human story about a doctor who tries to create life and winds up with a monster." Glenn considered that.
"You conceptualise yourself as a monster?" She shrugged.
"I mean, I kind of am one. I'm a human born from a Talosian, and my body is actively rebelling against my existence." She pointed to the oscilloscope embedded in her skull. "And let's not forget all this."
"Was the moster violent? Evil?"
"No, it was just trying to live. The people of the town shunned it, and it ran off to live in the woods" she explained, realising how well the metaphor actually fit.
"So how does the story end?"
"The monster swears to make Frankenstein's life miserable if he doesn't make another monster that can be his companion. He agrees, but when he fails and the monster kills his partner, he runs away and eventually dies at sea."
"Do you think you resent your mother?"
"Tula's not my mother," Lutèce replied. "And yes, I do. She made me. I didn't ask to be born, and even when I was, I was nothing but an experiment to her."
"Didn't you say she got attached to you?" Glenn asked and jotted down a note on his book.
"Well, in the way you get attached to your favourite screwdriver." She crossed her arms. "Not like you would a daughter. She tried her best, but she was never a mother to me."
"If you acknowledge that she tried, how can you still discredit her for that?" Lutèce sighed.
"Look, if you want a child, or alternatively, have a science experiment grow in your womb for nine months, you gotta come to terms that it's going to take up a lot of time and money, not to mention love and attention. If you're not ready for that, or rather, if you can't guarantee that you can commit to that, you shouldn't have children. Normal or monster."
"And she couldn't."
Lutèce shook her head. "Nope, not really."
Another short pause, only punctuated by jazz.
"How does the story end?"
Lutèce had dreaded that question.
"When the monster sees Frankenstein dead, it mourns and realises that everything it did only made it more miserable than even its creator." She took a deep breath. "It vows to end its own life and disappears into the snow."
"How do you feel about that? If you were the monster, what would you have done?"
"Well, I wouldn't have killed around five people," she deflected. "But I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it. Disappearing, I mean. Just leaving everything behind and dying alone. If I'm not leaving my mark on the world, I might as well die with some peace and quiet."
"So it's either dying on your own terms or going out with a bang so loud the whole universe will remember it."
She put her mug back on the little table between them.
"What does happiness mean to you?" Glenn challenged her. "How does it feel?"
"I've never been happy. Not for long, anyways. I try to distract myself with fleeting joy, like a new video game, or a book, but it doesn't last."
"Well, like you said, that's joy. I'm talking about happiness. Eudaimonia."
"I don't think that's something I've experienced."
"Humour me, if you will," Glenn proposed and took out one of the books from the shelf by his seat. "The works of Plato. A human philosopher."
"How does someone who's been dead for two hundred years help me now?"
"More around two thousand and six hundred." Glenn paged through the book, looking for a specific passage. "He argues that happiness can only arise once one has engaged with the six dimensions of what it means to be happy. Self-discovery, improving your best potentials, a sense of purpose, effort, hard work and finding joy in the things that help you express yourself."
"So?"
"Let's work through them. Self-discovery is first. Who are you, Lutèce Nehalem?"
When she recounted her life's experiences, Glenn had to put in effort not to lose himself to much in the harrowing tales of abandonment and trust issues. Lutèce was not well. She never had been.
"I didn't even have a name. Tula never gave me one. She called me Fourteen, I was the fourteenth attempt she made at cloning from digital DNA. I had worked. Well, at least I didn't instantly liquify. I guess that counts as a success.
"I chose Lutèce by myself. Human society was ordered around districts of the planet they called countries, and in those countries there were cities, not unlike the cities we have on planets now. Urban centres. One of them was Paris, and as far as I can tell it was a bustling but somehow still humble metropolis. It never forgot where it came from, and I liked that. A different civilisation had called it Lutèce. I like to think it fits well. Sticking to your roots, and all. The people that come here to have their ships fixed call me Sprocket. I don't mind it, at least they respect me for who I am. They don't know I'm human, of course."
Maybe that was something to work on.
"What brought you to Haumea?"
"The sun" she answered. "Earth. I wanted to be here. I still do, I belong here."
"Yes, but why Haumea? Why not Earth?"
"Haumea is out far enough that it's still easily reachable with an FTL drive. And I do need my customers to survive."
Glenn didn't say anything. There was something Lutèce wanted to say, but hadn't.
"...and Earth is dead."
Her remaining eye glazed over slightly, and a small tear formed.
"I'm sorry."
"It's hilarious." She tried to hold back her tears, laughing nervously. "I spend all my life looking for the place I belong, and when I find it, it's dead. No life, none. Extinct. Just a desolate wasteland."
Glenn handed her a box of tissues. She took one.
"That was four years ago." It concided with her suicide attempt.
"I assume the events were connected."
Lutèce nodded.
"You don't know how it felt. I had come so far. I barely had supplies, and I was flying for weeks. And then I finally was there, I touched down, and... there was silence. Absolute deafening silence."
"Were you expecting something else?"
"It was so quiet I could hear the blood rushing through my body. There was absolutely nothing. No grass, no trees, no birds... everything was empty. Just rocks. Grey rocks. The sky had burned and left nothing behind."
Glenn poured another tea.
"I rocketed back up the well, to this place. Set up my little makeshift home, the atmospheric tent. But something like that... it doesn't leave you. Earth was dead. I had to be dead too."
"So you tried to take your own life."
"A few days later, I walked out of the tent." She swallowed. Her voice was quivering. "I was outside, and I turned off my suit core. I'd suffocate in around ten minutes. I waited. Everything went dark. I don't know how long I was out, but my implant had detected that I was about to die and shot me full of adrenaline, and also activated my suit again. I didn't die, and I haven't tried since."
"Why do you think you haven't?" Lutèce hadn't thought about that before.
"Well... if it didn't work the first time, I suppose it wasn't meant to be in the first place." She smiled faintly. "The universe telling me 'hey, here's another thing you suck at.'"
"What did you feel when you fell unconscious?"
"Relief" she said and looked out of the window at the rocky desert, to the spot where the air fluttered at the edge of the tent. "And then I felt like bawling my eyes out when I came to." She shook her head. "Eye, I mean. Just the one."
"Yet you wouldn't try again."
"The universe denied me closure." She looked around nervously. "And that's that."
"So you just went on?"
"What else was there to do? I set up my makeshift home and started digging through the piles for anything salvageable."
"The scrap was here before?"
"Haumea was a dumping ground. Still is. Mostly used by porters and pirates that can't be bothered to jettison their unrecyclables into the sun. That's metal, complex machinery, reactor parts and depleted fuel. There's mounds like this all over the planet."
"And you made a job out of using this garbage to fix up pirate ships?"
"Yeah. By accident, too. Pirate ship landed here once and couldn't get off again, busted launch thrusters. Fixed it, word got around. Next day someone with broken retro rockets smashed into my little rock. Fixed that too. And that sort of became a regular thing. They knew I didn't keep records, didn't take money. I eventually shared a list of things I needed to survive with them. Food, water, a recycler, hygiene products and, of course, cancer meds."
Glenn looked outside at the little habitat Lutèce had built herself. It had been improved with various things from the scrap heap, and the emergency habitat tent it was made out of had been added to with many smaller rooms made out of welded scrap metal. There were a few windows too, and one of them was a room made of the circular observatory of what Glenn assumed to be a former Navarean research vessel. He could see her bed under it, next to it the chemotherapy machine.
"Is doing this something that fulfills you?" he asked and went to the second point on his list of the prerequisites for happiness.
"Maybe not fulfil. But I do get some satisfaction out of it. It's a puzzle, and I like puzzles. And I'm slowly getting better at it, too. I can swap a reactor in record time on a smaller ship." She pointed to the other ship on the runway. A sublight dinghy, directional thrusters and reminiscent of ancient lunar landers. "I built that from scratch."
"Very impressive. Does it fly?"
"It flies, all right. Landing, that I'll have to work on." she joked. For a moment, all her fears and depressive notions were gone. Wanting to keep her happy for even just a moment, Glenn engaged.
"What made you build a sublight ship?"
"Well... I always liked the idea of exploring. There's so much of the galaxy that's barely mapped, and most of that is star systems with many planets, like this one. Earth, of course. All the ruins there are a lot of fun to explore, especially what used to be big cities. Same applies to Mars, that's usually in better condition. Then there's old abandoned Lagrange stations, like the one by the asteroid belt. I recovered some pretty cool trinkets from there." She sighed, and the smile vanished from her face. "But it's all dead now. It's also depressing if you stay for too long."
"What do you think is your purpose in life?" he asked. Number three.
"To die and end humanity's chapter in history" she replied, as if she'd thought about this many times before. "I'm serious. Maybe they have some unfinished business I have to take care of before, but I must die. Eventually."
"Unfinished business?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. I'm just saying if my entire species had to die, I certainly wouldn't have time to tie up all the loose ends." The wording was curious to Glenn. Her entire species had to die. She saw herself at a remove. A delusion of grandeur, perhaps?
"Do you think you're going to uncover the secrets of why humans had to die out?"
"Well, no. It was capitalism. Unchecked ecological exploitation." Surprising amount of knowledge for a fourteen-year-old. Then again, it was her species. If anyone would know, it was her. "Maybe there's someone still out there. Maybe some humans made it. Maybe I'm not the last one." She quickly discarded the thought. "I mean, you're right. That's silly."
"So apart from dying, what, to you, is the meaning of life?"
"Making sure your species lives on? But, well, I can't do that."
"Some argue that life is what you make of it. That living well and being content is the meaning of life, and there's no greater good than your own contentment." She crossed her arms.
"Well, that's no good to me" she muttered. "That all you got? Procreation, a life well lived, what else is there?"
"Well, the industry argues that there's a lot of money to be made. That how successful you are, fiscally, determines how much your life was worth in the end."
"That's not helpful either. I have fifty credits somewhere on a chip I found in a scrap heap."
"What about nihilism?"
"The idea that nothing has any meaning and life is just a path to death? Well, I can see it."
"It's a powerful philosophy, if not a particularly sunny one."
"You're actually considering it? I thought you were supposed to get me better."
"Nihilism doesn't have to be hopeless. For instance, optimistic nihilism argues that there is no inherent meaning to the universe, no reason for life to exist, and nothing exists with purpose. But that just means that we get to create our own purpose. Our own goals and ambitions become the meaning of life, in essence."
"I like that idea, but it seems flawed," she answered. Glenn was intrigued.
"How so?"
"It's a justification after the fact. It's not a real philosophy. If you don't have ambitions in the first place, this won't give you any."
Glenn considered that for a moment.
"That may be true, but I don't believe that you don't have any ambitions. You mentioned you like exploration. Doesn't that make you happy?"
"Happy", she scoffed and rolled her eyes. "With me? No such thing."
"Don't be so quick to dismiss. Maybe you just haven't found the thing that makes you happy."
"If that's the case, I won't find it in a few weeks."
"Well, experimentation begins at home. Why not just try something new? Crochet, perhaps. Or baking."
"Engineering is fun. I mean, fixing starships. And building my own."
"And exploration, too."
"Yeah, although I wish there was more than rocks and ruins."
"Most of the things should be well preserved, no?"
"Yeah, sure. Personal effects, books too, sometimes. Some of what I assume to have been shops still have stock sometimes."
"Ever found anything interesting?"
"Most of the time the batteries are shot. They still thought Lithium Ion cells were very impressive. After two hundred years, they're mostly dead. And besides, the really impressive stuff you find in outer space." She adjusted her seating position. "Humans had this weird obsession of either keeping their trash on world or shoot it out into the void. Not into the sun, just into space. I found a car in orbit around Saturn once. A nice one too." Again, she distracted herself. They both noticed at the same time. "Figures that I'd love rifling through literal garbage."
"Isn't that always the case though?" he asked. "Whenever I pass a giant pile of trash, I always have to thoughts, in no particular order. The first one is 'oh wow, that's disgusting!' and the other one is 'I bet there's some good stuff in there'."
"Is there ever?"
He nodded over to the sublight ship parked between two scrap heaps. "That one works fine." She chuckled.
"Yeah, guess you're right."
"Do you think you're doing your best? Are you putting in as much effort into the things you love?" Number four on the prerequisites for happiness.
"I'd say so. Fixing starships is serious business. You can't really cut any corners or you'll pay for it with your life. Or someone else's life." She looked at her ship. "That being said, I wouldn't trust this with atmospheric flight in any case. I can barely land it, let alone fly it through air for longer than liftoff."
"I'd like to talk to you about your customers. The pirates whose ships you repair."
"Not much to talk there. They show up, I fix it, they usually leave money or order a porter to deliver some supplies for me."
"Did they ever threaten you or abuse you in any way?"
"What? No." she answered, probably questioning his methods. "No, they may be pirates, but they're not savages. No, they get their ships fixed, they pay me in one way or another."
He looked to the clock on the wall. The session would be over soon. His notepad was almost completely filled with notes about Lutèce, and they all coalesced in one conclusion. He wouldn't be able to help her, at least not to any meaningful degree. He didn't even have to run through the last two points. He closed the book with Plato's wisdoms and looked her in the eye.
"I think I've heard enough."
"For what, a diagnosis?" She perked up.
"No, that one I could have given you before. You're depressed as a result of your terminal illness. But you know that, and that's not why you're here." She nodded. "You're here because you want help. You don't want to feel like this any more, even though on the surface you appear as though you couldn't care less."
Again, she nodded.
"Generally, I would advise any patient with depression to adopt a self-care regimen. A balanced diet, exercise, social interaction. Antidepressants too, and in very severe cases, psychosurgery. In the months to come, you'd usually be better."
"But not me?"
"Like you said, you don't have much time left." Her heart sunk as he said that. "It's not going to make a meaningful difference."
"So what do you suggest, then?" she answered. The lump in her throat became bigger, and she felt tears forming on her organic eye. She of course couldn't see, but the pale green dot on her oscilloscope probably jumped all over the screen. It tended to do that when she was emotional.
"Live like you want to live. If there's anything you've always wanted to do, do it now."
"That's it? That's not very comforting."
"I know. But it's all I can do for you."
The tape ended. There was absolute silence, something Lutèce was only too familiar with. The fifty minutes were almost up.
"You're a fucking fraud." Lutèce stood up and reached in her pocket, producing a credit chip and throwing it on the floor. "Take my money and get the fuck off my planet."
"I understand why you're upset, but there's no need to lash out-"
"As if you care. As if any of you fucking care. This is a job for you, nothing more, and because I'm gonna be a tumour-ridden corpse soon you don't put in any effort."
"Just because I'm getting paid for my work doesn't mean I don't have a genuine interest in getting my patients better. This is more than just a job to me."
"Is it? Are you interested at all in the truth of how I'm feeling?"
"I'm only interested in the truth."
"And yet you charge for an hour that's only fifty minutes long." She got out of the chair, turned to the stairs and went down to the airlock. The fucking audacity of this hack to tell her that there was nothing she could do anymore. That she was doomed to a joyless existence.
The door opened and she hopped out of the ship onto the cold grey surface of the planet she'd called her own. Hands in her pockets, she went back to her tent-house. A few minutes later, the ship of her therapist ignited and lifted off, rocketing into the star-dotted void.
And just like that, she was alone again.
An hour later, Lutèce still steeped in her anger. Her hand hurt from clenching her fist. She had punched her pillow, over and over again, with both her organic and mechanical hands. Over and over and over. She imagined it being Tula's face. Eventually, she had to pay for dooming Lutèce to this shitshow of a life. A life so bad even a renowned psychotherapist couldn't help her. Tried to play god, and all it got her was a prison sentence and a terminally ill daughter. Fuck you, Tula, she said to herself over and over again. Fuck you, she shouted. I never asked to be born.
There was a ping from her radio setup over on the table. Someone was hailing her.
She snapped out of her fit of rage and crying. When she released her fist, she realised how hard she'd been clenching it. Marks from her fingernails were a deep red in her palm.
The radio chimed again.
"Who is this?" she answered the phone, trying to overplay that she'd been crying.
"Sprocket. You got time to look at my thruster? Been acting up all week."
"Lyle?" One of her regulars.
"That's the name"
She sighed. "Bring her in."
She wiped away her tears, turned off the radio and wheeled her garage cart outside. It was always a brisk twelve degrees under the atmosphere. Not too cold, but she usually wore a jumper. Her ship was standing on the otherside of her improvised runway. Tanks were full last time she checked. She hooked up her machines to the cart, put on her welding cap. Broken thrusters usually also meant a little body work. Her arc welder worked fine.
The PU None Of Your Business, a pirate ship disguised as a galactic delivery ship, entered the atmospheric tent. Lutèce could see the problem while it was burning to a stop already. The port side thrusters didn't run, most likely a pinched water line. The ship touched down on the already burned part of the planet, and Lyle jumped down from the airlock. Gravity was low enough that he didn't hurt himself.
"Thanks for helping me. Left thruster-"
"Port thruster."
"Whatever. Can you fix it?"
"Easy."
"Good. Ay, I don't have any supplies right now. That okay?"
"Not ideal. Talk to Alix and pay for the next shipment, then."
"Come on, Lucy. We're buds-"
"My name's not Lucy," she said and flipped down her welding hood. "And you'll pay Alix next time you see them if you wanna leave here with a working thruster."
"Jeez Louise," Lyle answered but then nodded. "Fine." Lyle was a bumbling idiot, but at least he was easy to intimidate.
"Good. This won't take long." She pushed her tiny body off the ground and magnetised her boots to the side of the ship, then walked up the hull to the damaged part. Within a few minutes, she had patched the water line to it and fixed the hole in the hull. Probably a tiny asteroid ripping through, nothing she hadn't seen before. She welded a piece of titanium over the hole. It was heavier now, but it would hold. Then, she disengaged her magnetic soles and hopped back to the ground.
"That was it?" Lyle said as she flipped up her hood and put away the welder. "I coulda done that!"
"But you didn't, so you better get me my cancer meds and snacks."
"Yeah, yeah." There was an awkward pause as she put away her equipment and wheeled the garage cart inside again. "Ay, you doin' good?"
"Why?"
"You're cryin'."
Lutèce quickly wiped away a tear that she didn't even realise was there. "I'm fine. Arc welder."
"If there's something on your mind, you can talk to me." She laughed.
"I doubt that."
"Try me." Lyle said and sat down on the ground, patting the spot next to him. Lutèce just rolled her eyes, but then sat down.
"I guess I'm just scared of dying" she sighed.
"Oh, you get used to it."
"No, you don't understand. I have maybe a few weeks left to live. Even with meds."
"Lemme tell you something, kid."
He lay down on the rocky ground and looked up at the stars. Lutèce followed suit. The stars didn't move at all. Occasionally, one of Haumea's moons moved across the black sky.
"You don't gotta be scared. First thing I learned in this world is that it can be over, just like that" he snapped his fingers on the last word, for emphasis. "And that's fine. In the end, you can't do anything about that. I mean, you can try to hang with the right people and keep your ship in check so that it doesn't happen that soon, but even if it does, not that big a deal."
"I just don't wanna be forgotten."
"Why? Doesn't matter to you."
"Huh?"
"You're dead. What does it matter if you're remembered? Doesn't make any difference to you. People worry so much about what to do to make their life memorable and worth rememberin' they forget to live. Nothing lasts forever, and your life doesn't for sure."
"That's... weirdly comforting."
"Eh, don't think too much. Falls apart when ya do that."
"So you're not scared of dying?"
"If my time comes, it comes."
The night sky was beautiful. She could see the eye of the galaxy, with the four arms of the milky way coalescing around the black hole. The endless blanket of stars stretched to infinity, and presumably far beyond - and it was quiet, as quiet as it always was. But this time, Lutèce didn't mind.
They lay there, quietly, for the better part of half an hour. For the first time in a long while, Lutèce had thought of truly nothing. All the rage she felt towards Dr. Glenn, all the hatred she kept inside about Tula, it was silent for once. The pain from all her illnesses was also silent, as if to grant her a moment of respite.
"Well, I gotta go. I'll talk to Alix about your payment. Stay gold, kid." Lyle got up, and so did Lutèce. He saluted goodbye, got back into his ship and rocketed away from the planet. Lutèce was alone again.
The modified emergency tent she had called her home for almost four years now was clean and tidy. She'd spent some time getting it all set up. Her clothes were all clean and neatly folded in the dresser, her bed was made, the kitchen was spotless and the bathroom was shining.
It was a good day to never come back.
She placed a hand-written note on her desk. She'd never read it again, but someone else might.
The door she left unlocked, keys in the lock. Atmospheric generators were on, too. The solar panels and backup batteries would keep them going for a while.
She walked down the surface of her little scrap planet and climbed into her ship from the bottom. She sealed up the hatch, put on her spacesuit and sat down in the cockpit. The engine roared to life, and she pulled up the controls for lift-off.
Lutèce took a quick look at the map, not that she needed to. She knew where she was going. She set the ship's autopilot to the third planet and engaged, taking care to map the trajectory in a way not to fly into the sun. Aligning flight vector, it replied with text on a screen.
She leaned back in her seat as the ship burned some more fuel. Accellerating towards destination. It stayed that way for two hours. She had leaned back and tried to get some sleep, but couldn't. She was too anxious.
Firing retrorockets. Burning even more fuel in front of the ship, it slowed down to not slam into the surface of the planet. She could see the blue marble now, with the five continents and the adorably tiny moon.
Autopilot complete: Earth.
She switched to her long-range scanners. It was a long shot, of course, but she was crazy not to send at least one pulse out. Scan for life signs, she ordered the computer. A pulse of light wandered across the digital simulacrum of the planet she was supposed to call her home.
One positive result came back.
Over on the northern hemisphere, in an area her old maps marked as Cascadia, there was a single life sign. A tree, a pinus longaeva, by a river delta.
She ran another scan, and it returned the same result. There was life on earth, even if it was just one tree. Good enough for her, she thought. She flipped up the landing camera and prepared to touch down on the planet, playing carefully with the bottom-firing rockets to not crash into the surface. After a few tense moments, her ship had landed.
She was on Earth again.
Luteèce knew she wasn't going to return. She turned off all the lights, the beacon, then the reactor itself and left the key in the ignition. The hatch at the bottom of the ship was manual, so she flipped it open and climbed out onto the dirt surface of her home planet. A few steps forward, and she came face with the last tree. It was a lot taller than she expected. A few of the green needles were scattered across the ground. The river nearby was flowing, and even though the water wasn't clean, the sounds of a babbling brook comforted her a lot.
It was a good place to die.
Lutèce Nehalem sat down on the ground and leaned against the bark of the last tree on earth. She put her hands on the glass of her helmet, twisted it off and put it to the side. The air from the outside was thin, but it smelled of pine needles.
A few deep breaths was all it took to fill her with the peace and tranquility she had been looking for all her life. She wouldn't be remembered. The human race would have most certainly died with her, at some tree, at some place in Cascadia. That would be her legacy, and no one would know.
But somehow, she didn't mind dying at home.
Her vision went blurry, presumably from all the toxic compounds in the air slowly suffocating her. It didn't hurt. Lutèce didn't fight it and just breathed in deeper and deeper, in and out. Around her, everything went dark as her consciousness slipped away from her more and more.
On the 10th of July, 2289, Lutèce Nehalem died peacefully.
Darest thou now O soul,
Walk out with me toward the unknown region,
Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not O soul,
Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,
All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.
Till when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.
Then we burst forth, we float,
In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,
Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O soul.*
Walt Whitman