The water recycler hissed softly behind him, its sound becoming a sort of mechanical lullaby.
Atlas sat in the dim-lit galley, knees to his chest, head against the wall. EVA hadn't spoken in over twelve hours.
Neither had he.
He didn't need to.
Words were losing their edge. Their urgency. Even meaning.
What remained now were thoughts deep, wordless streams under the skin, grinding down his certainty like rivers over stone.
But eventually… he whispered.
"Why did we do it?"
The words were spoken not to EVA, not even to himself.
But to the emptiness.
To the long black spine of the universe.
To the slow-burning embers of everything he once believed in.
He pulled the old mission data up on the cracked screen, scrolling past supply manifests, encrypted war orders, and official logs from central command. They all read the same:
"Class-A Logistics Mission."
"Essential Civilian Delivery."
"Non-Combat Transport Clearance."
Lies.
He knew what the supplies were for. Atlas had carried them before. The meds, the armor plating, the chemical amphetamines wrapped in sterile labels. He'd seen where they ended up on the front lines, in the hands of conscripted children and synthetic soldiers who bled the same.
He remembered the war camps. The way soldiers didn't scream when their limbs came off they just twitched, like dolls being unsewn.
He remembered Lia's last deployment. How she never returned. Not even a body. Just a flag, folded and delivered by someone who didn't know her name.
"For her service," they'd said.
Her service.
Atlas let out a thin, bitter laugh.
Then silence again.
Log 42:
"We thought we were preserving civilization. Keeping humanity alive.
But now, all I see is how easily we called destruction 'order' and called survival 'duty'."
He walked to the observation deck. A wide, curved window overlooked nothing but stars, cold, still, infinite.
His reflection hovered there too, barely visible.
Hair grown out, face gaunt, eyes shadowed.
He didn't recognize himself.
"Do you think it was worth it?" he asked EVA, his voice soft.
Her answer took longer than usual.
EVA: Define 'worth.'
He stared at her interface, then at the void.
"Never mind."
He sat down again, crossed-legged on the cold metal floor. Not out of comfort. Just because standing no longer made sense.
"Maybe we fight," he said, more to the dark than anything, "because we're scared that if we stop, there's nothing left to be proud of."
Another silence. Then…
EVA: Perhaps we fight because we were never taught how to heal.
That made him blink.
He stared into the dark.
And for a moment, he felt like weeping but couldn't. The tears wouldn't come anymore.
Like his body knew that sorrow had already been spent.
All that remained was truth.
And the truth was this.
There was no enemy anymore. No command. No planet worth dying for. Just one man floating alone in a coffin of steel, trying to remember why humanity thought this was noble.
Log 43:
"The war will end. Not with victory. Not with surrender. It will end because there will be no one left to fight."
Atlas closed the terminal.
He didn't speak again for the rest of the night.
And EVA didn't ask him to.
They both just listened.
To the silence.
To the weight of a truth too late to change.