Cruel lottery.
Sublime sunrises.
Outliving contexts.
The blast looked both prettier and uglier than the mushroom clouds Nara had seen in old documentaries about nuclear bombs. In those documentaries, the mushroom clouds appeared narrow, tall, and clearly shaped. As powerful and destructive as those terrestrial bombs were, they were still site-specific. Their blasts interacted with a small region of the atmosphere. That was how they could stay narrow, tall, and clearly shaped; they weren’t meant to destroy the whole planet; they were things that were targeted toward the enemy and only the enemy, far away. Not us.
But that thing right there, on Earth right now? Yeah, that thing was intended to destroy everything known to planet-bound humanity. Or maybe it was intended to blow up the planet itself out of existence. And even though it didn’t fully succeed, it did a pretty decent job.
With wide eyes, Nara observed the planet that continued its existence, but would never be the same after this. She watched a vast, rising dome of ash and vapor spread outward instead of forming one tidy stem. Multiple huge convective columns merged into an enormous, uneven canopy of brilliant plasma white, surrounded by expanding rings of amber and deep crimson. A giant, malevolent, planet-scale sunrise consuming itself—that was what killed the Japanese archipelago, everything east of Beijing including the Bohai Gulf’s entire rim, and the peninsula of the two Koreas, which, both together and separately, used to call itself/themselves the Land of Morning Calm. One of those Koreas was Nara’s home country, which contained her home city, which contained her home home.
Yet, what crossed her mind at that moment wasn’t a sense of pure despair. If she were the type of person to be quick to mourn, she wouldn’t be here on Space Station Seven, otherwise known as Triple-S. She wouldn’t be the sole witness to this scene either, still so interested in the world, as if anything good was ever going to come out of it. Thus, she concluded with calm finality:
This sunrise was prettier than the usual variety of documented destruction because from this distance, it moved with the languid grace of something geological—a new mountain range being born in seconds, sublime. At the same time, it was uglier because nothing about it was contained or finished. It sprawled and metastasized. It was an open wound that would take hours to stop spreading. Because of this openness, it was at least honest, in a way, but it still resembled her own cancer cells too much. The explosion multiplied, each convection current spawning new ones, the whole system feeding on itself in grotesque proliferation.
Fascinating, how opposites can coexist.
Nara removed her forehead from the reinforced glass that formed one of the many observation panels, so numerous because tourists loved that. She looked around the space station. Nothing was shaking. Neither had her eardrums been harmed through unbearable noise.
Nara didn’t know much about physics or naval engineering, but she knew that sound couldn’t travel through space. Even a continent-scale blast didn’t physically jolt an object in orbit. And she doubted that the debris from an Earth-surface-level event could reach orbital altitude. Even if it could, if it had, the station’s automatic collision-avoidance feature would have fired thrusters. She would’ve felt that. She hadn’t. So.
But what she did feel was that her eyes hurt. Despite the fact that the explosion had been long-anticipated, when it did happen, it felt sudden nonetheless. The initial flash had been too bright. She blinked. Her eyes were watering a little, but not enough for tears to fall.
Rubbing her eyes, she took the main corridor through the residential ring, her movements no different than they’d been on Earth. When she first arrived at Triple-S three months ago, this sameness between Earth-life and space-life had slightly disappointed her. But as things had turned out, if the case had been any different, she might have died from stress first, before dying from cancer. Because, Earth versus space living hadn’t been the only aspect of her life in flux.
The continental coalitions had been escalating their provocations for many months before Nara arrived at the station. She almost hadn’t made it here; twice, her launch was scrubbed due to debris fields from destroyed satellites. But the philanthropist billionaire sponsoring her trip (it had initially been intended as a trip, not a permanent residence on Triple-S), he fought to keep her launch on schedule.
Terminal Cancer Patient Fulfills Dying Wish Thanks to ReGen Cosmetic Technologies—Fair Age Reversal for Everyone!
Each word of that headline, capitalized. That was the press coverage that the billionaire wanted. He thought, with such an exciting level of good vibes, he could compete with the war footage.
In a different era, people would’ve called him greedy and disgusting for caring so much about money, when war coverage was so much more important. There would’ve been religious leaders and conservative lawmakers criticizing him for mocking God and whatnot, for attempting to semi-immortalize humans. But in this era, they called him cute and idealistic. The dude actually thought that anyone still worried about cellular age markers, as if it was a joy to live semi-eternally on a planet where, pretty soon, there weren’t gonna be any continents left to live on.
She wondered if he was still alive, the CEO of ReGen Cosmetic Technologies. He’d seemed like a nice guy. They’d shaken hands and had their pictures taken and all that, three months ago, when she was launched from Earth. Now, he might have disintegrated so thoroughly that calling it “death” felt offensive; he’d been unmade at the molecular level; sublimated into something more fundamental than he’d ever been while alive—pure energy, pure light.
See? Opposites coexist. In his destruction, he’d been made both something insignificantly nothing and grandiosely everything.
Or maybe he had not died. He might have been somewhere else, not East Asia. That was a possibility too.
Nara felt a bit apologetic for so easily jumping to the conclusion that he must have died. But when you had cancer at only thirty-something and you were surrounded by irony after irony, perhaps that line of thought was only natural.
She couldn’t even exactly describe why she’d been so stressed about the war getting worse and worse on Earth once she arrived at the station. It wasn’t as if she had decades ahead of her. It wasn’t as if she had a million friends and family who could suffer. Not that she was happy to imagine non-family and non-friends suffer, but surely you understand her point. The whole reason she had wanted to come to Triple-S was that she had semi-hoped that the space life might expedite her death.
The word “semi” was doing a lot of work here.
Why she still got out of bed at all to look out the observation panels that were bound to reveal sublime sunrises, was beyond her.
But that was her. The type to be on Triple-S, semi-wishing for a speedy end. Still interested in the world, as if anything good was ever gonna come out of it. The one with uncontrollably spreading, obnoxious cancer cells.
Funny that she was the last survivor on Triple-S. None of those who were already dead had been diagnosed as terminally ill, the way that she had been diagnosed. Yet here she was, more of a permanent resident on the station than anybody else.
She kept walking down Corridor 6B. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness, her pristine sneakers light and smooth. The station’s rotation gave her a normal weight, just like on Earth. Everything felt ordinary—the slight give of the rubberized flooring, the handrails at hip height, and the uniform panels of off-white walls. It could have been any hospital hallway on Earth.
Only the faint curve of the floor, barely noticeable in this proximity, reminded her that she was in orbit. That, and the fact that the air smelled stale. The recyclers were working, but without fresh filters, a metallic tang had crept in. Soon, other systems would begin their slow failure. Seals would degrade. Sensors would drift out of calibration. Backup generators would give up one by one. Space Station Seven would die the way she was dying: from the inside, quietly, each small malfunction cascading into the next.
Oh sure, right now, it looked more or less fine, the way she looked fine. Just a thirty-something woman, supposedly nowhere near the “worry about death” age bracket. Clean hair, clear skin, a body that hasn’t yet betrayed its corruption visibly. But the fate of deterioration was already written into both of them. They were terminally ill, and exactly at the same time, the ironic last survivors…
She stopped in front of a door. Without knocking, she went in.
“Lucas, you won the bet.”
She flopped down near the head of his bed, ending up lying across it at a perpendicular angle, her feet still on the floor. A strand of her hair fell across her face. She still had all her hair. It was still thick, still dark, thanks to the targeted nano therapy that had attempted to attack her tumors very carefully, unlike the give-no-fucks-about-collateral-damage approach of old chemo. Yay for technological advancements. They don’t solve everything and sometimes enable continent-destroying bombs, but they sure do try to be helpful.
Oh, and the CEO of that medtech company was probably friends with the CEO of ReGen. Yay for both of them.
She brushed her hair back.
“The bombing started, and it’s massive,” she told Lucas. “But I wish you had bet on a timing where if you win, you’d be here to see it.”
Lucas said nothing. Of course he didn’t. Nara didn’t look at him. So long as she didn’t look at him, she could pretend that he was still capable of listening to her. He’d died less than a day ago. Just like she and Triple-S, he hadn’t visually deteriorated much—yet. It also helped that her nose had stopped working properly after the first round of meds—a side effect she initially resented, then found useful when the station’s recyclers started struggling. Just because she was about to die didn’t mean she wanted to suffer in every possible way prior to her doom.
Anyway, so long as she didn’t look at him, she could pretend this was just another conversation—even though it was about him winning a bet where he said he’d die first before the bombing began.
Nara tried to focus on the fact that, at least, Lucas hadn’t been lonely in the foreknowledge of his own death. Somehow, she had left Earth and brought herself to this station where no one was terminally ill but everyone was bound to die. Just after she arrived, their fate had become evident.
Food wasn’t the problem; the station had hydroponic gardens and algae tanks. Even the recyclers without fresh filters, the station’s degrading seals, its uncalibrated sensors, and the backup generators that liked to give up weren’t the most urgent problems.
The worst problem was radiation shielding degradation. The electromagnetic field generators that deflected solar particle storms required replacement coils that could only be manufactured on Earth. Those were going to fail, everyone realized, three months ago. And they did fail.
High-energy particles flooded through the station. Most people’s healthy cells couldn’t cope. Early symptoms included nausea, fatigue, and weakened immune system. Later symptoms: infections, organ failure, all that fun stuff.
The first ones who died were cremated and processed properly, as protocol demanded. But when those who could safely operate the cremators died, that was when the deceased started being jettisoned into space.
A lot of the survivors reacted to that idea with horror. There were initially around a thousand people on Triple-S, in total—technical people as well as tourists, journalists, and researchers. They hadn’t come here for some Battle Royale where the station became the arena and radiation was the shrinking circle. So, to space people into the nothing? That was too cruel!
But it couldn’t be helped. Decomposition in a closed life support system wasn’t just disturbing, it was lethal. Someone with a science background pointed this out using words like methane, putrescine, and cadaverine, which sounded alarming enough even for those without a science background. So, off they went, the bodies.
But then those who were brave enough to jettison dead humans into space started dying. That was when the survivors among the survivors started putting the deceased in freezers. The debate about which option was more morbid—jettisoning or freezing—could potentially have been endless and pointless, but the remaining survivors quickly gave up on that, mostly because many of them died within the subsequent few days.
Then, when the freezers ran out of space, the corpses were simply kept in sealed rooms.
And Lucas, the second-to-last survivor, died yesterday.
Nara was the last human breathing in a space tomb.
Her gaze drifted toward him despite herself. She’d covered him in a blanket up to his chest, but she could still see the outline of who he’d been: a competitive swimmer. Long torso, wide shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, muscles that were smooth rather than bulky. He had come up here after a shoulder injury, hoping the reduced gravitational stress might help it heal in ways Earth-based treatments couldn’t. Well. The gravitational stress might have indeed been reduced, but the other types of stress had killed him. Jump from the frying pan into the fire. Escape the tiger only to meet the wolf. Ha!
He would’ve laughed about this too. Nara was certain. He had found her whole ReGen sponsorship situation hilarious.
“They’re a regenerative medicine company,” he’d said, grinning, “and they sent up someone whose cells won’t stop regenerating. I think saying ‘cosmic joke’ isn’t cliche in this situation.”
Nara smiled. Some people would think that talking to the dead was morbid, especially if the body was in its early decomposition stages right next to you. But what was actually morbid was to look away from someone just because they were close to death. She remembered how people on Earth had treated her after her diagnosis. So young, they’d said, implying that she carried some invisible curse. Bad karma. Bad genes. Bad choices. She’d broken the unspoken rule of invincible youth. A contaminated being. Contagious. That’s what they saw when they looked at her, and yet, all those hushed, careful tones. So fake. Such a lie.
She wasn’t going to do that to Lucas.
Then her stomach growled.
She sat up. It was absurd, but she was ravenous. Her stomach was so loud, it would’ve been embarrassing, if Lucas had been alive. Clearly, her body hadn’t gotten the memo about the apocalypse. Well, it had never been great at receiving memos of any kind. Cells ignoring the social contract, doing whatever they want—that was her specialty, wasn’t it?
She pushed herself up from the bed, shaking her head at herself. Hunger in a mausoleum! Lucas would’ve liked this.
Would’ve, but couldn’t anymore. So, alone, she brought herself to the hydroponic garden that still smelled like life. Between the rows of lettuce, under the purple-white grow lights, she pulled a fist-sized tomato off its vine.
She bit into it. Juice ran down her chin. She didn’t bother wiping it away. The tomato felt warm from the lights and tasted aggressively alive. This was nice. Lucas would’ve liked this. The history professor from the University of Vienna, who died seven weeks ago and was jettisoned into space, would’ve liked this. Mr. Benson, the janitor who died three weeks ago, who still lived in a freezer would’ve liked this…
A chime interrupted her fourth bite. She froze. The sound had come from the wall-mounted communication panel near the irrigation controls. The screen was glowing blue, which meant an incoming call… from Earth.
She frowned. She’d thought that all the communication satellites had been destroyed.
The chime sounded again.
Nara swallowed the rest of her tomato and walked over to the panel. She pressed “Accept.”
The screen resolved into a face she recognized.
“Nara!” the man said.
It was the CEO of ReGen Cosmetic Technologies.
“Andrei.”
She hadn’t known they were on a first-name basis, but this was doomsday, and she could roll with it.
“Thank God, you’re alive,” Andrei the CEO said.
“So are you. Er, are you on Earth?”
“I am, I am. Luckily, not in East Asia.”
“Evidently.”
He laughed nervously. He looked terrible, which was unusual. For a man in his sixties, he always looked polished and excited in all the promotional materials. But today wasn’t promotion day, clearly. His collared shirt wasn’t covered in blood or anything like that, but it had that distinctive quality of clothing that had been worn for too long. It looked sweat-soaked. His hair looked greasy. Behind him, she could see a wall of concrete. No sign of any sunlight. Him being a billionaire and all, it was possible that he was in his private bunker. Also possible: him having a communication satellite, undisclosed to the masses.
He said, “So, about the station, are you… is anyone else…”
“It’s just me now.”
His face did something complicated. Relief, horror, the instinct to laugh it off, make it all go away.
“I just wanted to…” he started.
Nara waited.
“I…”
She waited some more.
“I am sorry about what happened with your home country. I wanted to check on you.”
Silence.
“Oh,” Nara said.
She’d expected him to elaborate much more, and quickly too. Because, it would be a lie if she said she’d never been influenced by the stereotypical imagery of one-dimensional greedy medtech CEOs. She’d expected some speech about brand resilience in crisis. Or some rehearsed pivot to damage control. Or a monologue about what her journey represented for the future of longevity research, even as the world ended.
But what he said next was simply this:
“I am sorry.”
Nara said, “It’s not your fault they nuked East Asia.”
“No, but I sent you up there. You were supposed to have this experience, come back down, and…”
“I always considered it a possibility that I might never go home alive.”
“Oh.”
Now it was Andrei’s turn to wait for an elaboration. Maybe he’d been influenced by the stereotypical imagery of cancer patients wanting to prolong their lives at all costs.
“I don’t resent you, Andrei,” Nara said eventually.
Something like amusement flickered on his face.
“I don’t resent you either for implying that I’d expect you to resent me,” he said.
They smiled. They might have met as the sponsor and sponsee of a marketing campaign, the dying woman as billboard, billionaire buying good PR with her suffering. But now, barely an hour after the first continental detonation, here they were, two people who had outlasted their own context.
“How are you feeling?” Andrei asked. “Physically, I mean.”
“I’m fine,” Nara said. “Tired, but fine. Better than I expected, actually.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. I thought the radiation would’ve gotten me by now, or the cancer would’ve accelerated, or… I don’t know. Something.”
He nodded. “Is the medical bay still functional?”
“Probably. I haven’t checked in a while.”
“Oh, Nara.”
Andrei made a face that was almost paternal, like she’d forgotten to eat vegetables. Nara laughed. He shook his head. He collected himself, removing the paternal exasperation. The man knew the boundaries of his role in her story, what their brief professional arrangement allowed and did not allow. He was a decent person.
“I wish you’d take good care of yourself,” he said. “We’re working on getting you out of there. I’m personally going to figure it out, somehow. You can stay with me, until, you know, until…”
He was much too decent to say “until the war is over.” It might never be over. If it was going to be over, that might mean that everything else, too, was going to be over.
Nara said, “That’s kind of you. But please don’t waste resources on me.”
“Waste! How—“
“Honestly, Andrei, it’s okay. I was already dying before I got here. Focus on the people who weren’t.”
Andrei opened his mouth—
The screen went white. Not flickered—white. Pure, absolute white. At the same time, light flooded through the observation windows in the garden. The sublime sunrise, again. Some other continent had vanished just now.
Quickly, Nara glanced at the screen once more. It was black. Dead.
Tears came to her eyes. Was Andrei dead?
The garden was silent except for her own breathing. He might have been vaporized, and here she was, breathing. Tears fell down her face. This was entirely different from people slowly dying, from herself slowly dying.
She’d been talking to this man only seconds ago! This fool of an idealist who thought mid-war was a good time to launch a marketing campaign for goddamn age reversal! Equality for everyone! The right to last longer in a dying world!
She wept the way the explosion had spread—uncontained, without structure, just spreading and spreading. Sprawling and metastasizing. What a grotesque productivity!
He might be alive though.
She forced herself to look up and breathe. Outside, the aftereffects of the sunrise were subsiding.
Remember you jumped to his death earlier, but he was alive? It could be like that, again.
A few more times, her sobs continued to split: one to two, two to four.
But she pressed her palms against her eyes.
Stop. You can talk to corpses and ruminate about your own inevitable doom, but don’t kill someone who might still be alive.
She left the garden. Andrei had thought he was giving her a dying wish. She didn’t intend to give him his dying wish, but even with him alive and well, she could still give him a wish. No adjective attached. Just a wish.
So, the medical bay. She was going to take good care of herself.
The medical bay was a narrow room. Two diagnostic beds dominated the center. The smell of disinfectant hung in the air. The counter still had stains of substances that Nara didn’t know the name of, stains from when they’d tried to treat the first radiation cases. But mostly, the bay was white and clean. People had fought hard to save other people here. Then they’d cleaned up, because sometimes, hygiene was all you had left. It was a small gesture of I couldn’t save them and myself, but I won’t make it worse for you.
Nara prepped the blood draw. She’d done this dozens of times on her own: tourniquet, alcohol swab, needle. Then she put the sample in the chemistry analyzer. While the machine did its job of analysis, she performed the next part of her job of stepping into the diagnostic scanner, positioning herself according to the floor markings.
Image my major organs! Track tumor progressions! Tell me how aggressively my cells are misbehaving, even though we all know, there’s not going to be any new news.
The scanner finished first, going silent after three minutes of humming. Nara remained in position, waiting for the beep that meant results were ready. Finally, it beeped completion.
She stepped out, pulled up the imaging, ready to confirm what she already knew…
No, this wasn’t what she knew. She frowned at the screen, zooming in.
Another beep came, this time, from the chemistry analyzer. She rushed toward it. A smaller screen attached there declared:
Tumor marker levels: stable.
Cell proliferation index: minimal.
Nara breathed shallowly. This didn’t make any sense. No new metastases? No new divisions? No new killing through spreading?
Radiation.
The thought came slowly. Radiation for cancer treatment—that idea itself was nothing new. The goal was to damage the DNA of tumor cells, her doctor on Earth had told her once upon a time. That way, the cells’ ability to multiply could be limited.
But radiation in outer space? What she’d been exposed to, along with everyone else on Triple-S, hadn’t been precisely targeted radiation therapy. That was why everyone else was dead. Constant and chronic radiation coming from all directions. Cosmic rays, solar particles, high-energy protons, whatever. Combine that with the microgravity environment. Also, the fact that, unlike the others, Nara had received experimental radiation treatments before, which might have led to some kind of hitherto unknown cellular adaptation.
Could it be that the combination of all these factors had changed how her cells led their existence?
No one had studied long-term cancer progression in space, because why would they, and how could they? Most terminal patients didn’t go to space and most researchers didn’t want to stay in an unshielded environment, understandably. Nara was probably the first person ever to experience what three months of cosmic radiation did in microgravity. She was an experiment with a sample size of one. Useless as data, but utterly conclusive for the only subject who needed a conclusion.
A conclusion, in the form of a pause button.
Terminal Cancer Patient Fulfills Dying Wish Thanks to ReGen Cosmetic Technologies—Fair Age Reversal for Everyone!
Yes. Yes, Andrei. Well, I don’t think this counts as age reversal, exactly, but what I mean is: yes, you may capitalize each and every word making up that headline. You deserve it. Whatever is happening here, it’s definitely capitalization material. Totally.
Nara wandered out of the medical bay. That room didn’t have observation panels, but out here…
She gazed down at the Earth. While she was keeping herself busy, the Atlantic coast had vanished. From Miami to Boston, gone. The plasma dome was collapsing now, slow and poisonous. And there!
A fresh sunrise erupted over Europe. Terribly elegant. The canopy expanding, expanding, expanding. So bright.
Nara blinked. Her eyes watered, but she kept them open. She pressed her forehead against the glass. That right there wasn’t going to be the last planet-scale sunrise. More were going to come, consuming themselves.
And now that her cells were on pause, she had enough time to see all of them go, both pretty and ugly. Then she was going to tell Lucas all about that earthly experiment down there, which had no control group at all, before he, too, went away while she faced her own unexpected continuation.
For how long? Until the station died, or until Andrei got her out of here—if he was alive—or until her cells decided to resume their uncontrollable proliferation once more. Who knows? That was a possibility.
But until then, she would pause, along with her cells. As the winner of a cruel lottery, where the things that had killed everyone else happened to keep her alive for now, she would watch, watch, watch.