Time stopped making sense. Hours or maybe days bled together on the bridge. Darryl didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He just sat in the command chair, watching the dead world turn below. The sobs had dried up, leaving behind a hollowed-out ache that was somehow worse. He was an engineer, a man who solved problems. But there was no solution here. There was only a choice. A terrible, impossible choice.
“Sentinel,” he finally croaked, his voice rough from disuse. “Give me the numbers.”
“The numbers, Darryl?”
“Resources. Life support. How long does this ship last with just me awake?”
“With one occupant, the ship’s consumables—water, recycled air, and nutrient paste—are sustainable for approximately one hundred and twelve years,” Sentinel replied instantly. “Power is indefinite, thanks to the solar arrays.”
A lifetime. He could live out his entire natural life here, alone, watching a dead planet. The thought was nauseating.
“And if… if I wake everyone up?”
There was a fractional pause. “The ship was designed to support ten thousand active personnel for a maximum of ninety days during the pre-landing orientation phase. After that, without resupply from Earth, critical systems would begin to fail. Water reclamation would be the first to go. Then food synthesis. Air scrubbers would be last. Chaos would likely shorten that timeline considerably.”
Ninety days. Three months for ten thousand people to face the end of everything.
The first, most human thought was to wake them. It felt honest. People deserved to know their own fate. They weren’t cattle. They were souls. They had a right to face the end on their own terms.
He pictured it. He’d start with Dawn. He’d hold her hand as her pod hissed open. He’d help her sit up. And then he’d have to find the words. “Honey, Stacey’s gone. She had two kids. They’re gone too. Everyone is gone. The whole world is dead, and we have about three months to live.” The cruelty of it stole his breath. Dawn was a psychologist. She spent her life helping people through pain. Waking her up would be to plunge her into a pain so absolute, so final, that there would be no recovery. It would be a living hell.
And what about the others? He imagined the mess hall, packed with ten thousand terrified people. He’d stand at a podium, their faces turned to him, a sea of hope and confusion. Then he’d tell them the truth. The shock would turn to panic. The panic to anger. The ship had food, water, supplies. Not enough for forever, but enough for now. And that “now” would become a war. People would kill for an extra week of life for their child. They’d murder for a bottle of water.
There was a priest on board, a Father Michael. A good man. He’d probably try to offer comfort, to lead prayers, to hear confessions. But how could faith stand up against the stark, brown proof hanging in the viewport? It would be a bandage on a severed artery. Giving people the choice to face their own end sounded noble. But the reality would be ugly. It wouldn’t be prayers and tearful goodbyes. It would be violence, starvation, and madness. It wasn’t giving them a choice. It was just giving them a front-row seat to the horror.
So, what about the other way? He could just… stop. Go back to his pod. Lay down next to Dawn and let Sentinel put him back to sleep. Let the silence return. It was so tempting. To just turn off the knowledge, to undo this waking nightmare. He could drift away, back into the dreamless black. It was the coward’s way out, and right now, he felt like a coward.
“Sentinel, could you put me back into stasis?”
“Yes, Darryl. The process is reversible.”
He would just be delaying the problem. The ship wasn’t immortal. It was a machine, and machines break. An asteroid fragment, a solar flare, a simple mechanical failure in a few decades or a century. And then they would all die anyway. Silently, in the cold, without ever knowing why. He was the caretaker. His job was to care for the ship, and for the people on it. Going back to sleep wasn’t care. It was neglect.
A flash of anger, hot and sharp, cut through the grief. He could just end it. All of it. Fire the main thrusters and set a course straight for the sun. A final, defiant act. A funeral pyre for the human race. He imagined the ship glowing, melting, vaporizing. A quick, clean end for everyone at once. No suffering. No choices. Just oblivion. But the thought felt wrong. It was rage. It was a child throwing a tantrum, smashing a toy because it was broken. He was an engineer. He didn’t smash broken things. He tried to fix them. And if they couldn’t be fixed…
The last option settled in his mind. It had been there all along, lurking in the dark. The one he didn’t want to look at.
He could just let them sleep. Forever.
“Sentinel,” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “The cryo-pods. The termination protocol. Is it… painless?”
“The process is designed to be gentle, Darryl. The pod’s internal temperature is slowly lowered to a point where biological functions cease. There is no shock to the system. From the occupant’s perspective, they would simply continue sleeping.”
One by one. The computer would do it. One every minute. Ten thousand minutes. Almost seven days. For a week, his home would become a tomb, one soul at a time. It was murder. Mass murder on a scale that had no name. He would be the greatest killer in human history, and its very last man.
But was it murder? Or was it mercy?
Was he an engineer, a father, or just a man pretending to be God?
He was a religious man, in his own quiet way. He and Dawn had gone to church most Sundays. He believed in God, in a soul, in a final judgment. And now he was faced with this. Did he have the right to do this? To decide the fate of ten thousand souls? It was the ultimate sin, the one they warned you about: playing God. To stand in judgment and declare that life, for these people, was over.
For a moment, a desperate thought surfaced. He could wake someone. Just one person. Dawn? No, he couldn’t do that to her. Father Michael? Maybe. An engineer, someone practical? He could share the burden, get another opinion. They could make the decision together. But the thought died as quickly as it came. Waking someone else wouldn’t lessen his guilt. It would just create another damned soul. He would be dragging someone into his own personal hell, forcing them to look at the dead Earth, to watch Stacey’s videos, to feel this same crushing weight. It wasn’t fair. It was a cruelty he couldn’t bring himself to commit. This was his burden. His alone.
He thought of it another way. He wasn’t a god. He was a caretaker. A shepherd. And his flock was sleeping peacefully, dreaming of a beautiful pasture they would never reach. Was it kinder to let them keep dreaming, or to wake them up and show them the wolves and the cliff edge?
He pulled up the video of Stacey again. Not the last, desperate one, but the one before. The one where he saw his grandchildren. Tammy and little Brian, huddled under a blanket. He watched their small faces, their innocent eyes. They never had a choice. They were born into the end of the world. The people on this ship… he could give them a choice. But it was a choice between a nightmare and a quiet dark. Was that really a choice at all?
He closed the video. He looked out at the dead Earth, hanging in the void like a dirty secret. He was the only one who knew. The burden of that knowledge was a physical thing, crushing him into the command chair. He had the power of a god, and the soul of a broken father. The options were clear. None of them were good. And he had to choose.