The hum of the grav dampeners was gone.
He hadn't even noticed it disappear only realized it after drifting into the wall and bouncing off with an empty grunt.
The silence that followed wasn't jarring anymore. It was… intimate. Familiar.
He let himself float for a moment in the main corridor, arms out, body still.
Time had become syrup. Thick. Slow. Every second a droplet sliding across his skin.
Somewhere between sleep and routine, EVA spoke.
EVA: Primary power core is nearing minimal threshold. Life support prioritization active.
"Status?" Atlas asked, rubbing the sleep from his face.
EVA: Structural integrity remains within acceptable bounds.
Atmospheric containment steady.
Reactor condition critical.
Of course.
The heart of the ship was dying.
He made his way to the engineering deck, hand over hand. The reactor room loomed like a cathedral of metal and forgotten noise.
The lights here flickered with a pulse he couldn't ignore. It was as if the ship were breathing its last, wheezing through rusted lungs..
Atlas drifted toward the maintenance console. He stared down at the diagnostic layout. Everything was red.
Heat levels, fuel rods, cooling system. A labyrinth of fault lines blinking their final warnings.
One by one.
One final alarm.
He exhaled.
"This was never designed to last a year," he muttered.
EVA: Correct. Estimated operational duration: 89 days. Current operational time: 158 days.
Atlas smiled faintly.
"You really kept her going."
EVA: You did, Atlas.
Log 46 – THE LAST ENGINE
I've come to think of this ship like a body.
The hull is the bones. The lights are the eyes.
EVA is the nervous system. And the core… is the heart.
Today I try to restart that heart. Not to escape,
But to give her a better death.
He removed the panel shielding the reactor chamber.
It groaned like something ancient.
Inside, coolant tubes hissed with vapor and cracked ice.
Half the fuel rods were burnt out. The fusion channels were misaligned. The auxiliary cells? Dead.
But there was still one hope.
The compression shunt. A sealed coil meant to stabilize fusion flow in case of overload.
Untouched. Untested.
And buried beneath scorched circuitry.
He rolled up his sleeves.
He wasn't trying to survive anymore. He just wanted the lights to stay on just a little longer.
Long enough for EVA to finish broadcasting the logs. Long enough for the Legacy Pod to charge its emergency ejection booster.
Long enough… to matter.
It took six hours.
Six hours of crawling inside a suffocating vent.
Six hours of rewiring plasma lines, recalibrating thermometric arrays, manually rotating failed magnetic locks with a wrench the size of his arm.
His hands blistered. His eyes stung. He bled from his left forearm when a latch snapped open unexpectedly.
But he didn't stop.
Not when his body shook. Not when EVA warned of a cardiac strain.
Only when the final circuit lit green… did he let himself fall back.
The silence again.
This time, it didn't feel empty.
It felt earned.
He stared at the ceiling. At the faded lights.
Then reached for the control panel beside him.
A switch.
Unassuming. Small. Old-fashioned.
Manual override.
Atlas looked at it like a priest before a relic.
And with a breath like a prayer, he flipped it.
The ship trembled.
Just a whisper at first.
Then a deep thrum, like the buried heart of a slumbering beast.
The lights surged dimly, but fully.
Gravity returned with a gentle tug.
And EVA… sang.
EVA: Primary core stabilized. Emergency reserves rebalanced. Legacy Pod booster now at 47% charge. Estimated full charge in 19 hours.
Atlas blinked.
Then laughed.
A tired, raw, utterly human sound.
Log 47 – THE SWITCH
We won't live forever. But we can leave something behind. Today, I bought us a little more time. Not for escape.
For memory.
He crawled back to the main chamber and sat beneath the viewport.
Stars moved again.
Slowly, as they always had. But brighter. Like they'd come a little closer to say goodbye.
Atlas closed his eyes and whispered,
"You're still beautiful."