Ways Out

“Do you think this is it?”

The metal strains and groans, as the morph within begins to wither and melt, the slick, oily tendrils of meat slipping off the pristine steel like reluctant hands losing their grip on the edge of a cliff. Peeling and pooling back within corrupt cores, uncountable morph-hearts beating their last. The sirens blare and spinning amber lights glare off the window the two of you peer through.

“I don’t think so. It can’t be. It never has been, for thousands and thousands of years. Someone always figures out a way out, right?”

Long, thready wires of flesh, bone and steel span the entire distance between the Boiling Core and its planets. The morph adheres like glue to the outside of a long-since complete Dyson sphere, sapping from it tremendous energy. It binds a star, a set of planets, asteroids and almost every single piece of space-junk in this system like creeping cobwebs.

It’s hard not to feel like you’re staring at the end.

“Yeah, ‘till they don’t,” you say. “A lot of people never found a way out. We think there’s always a way out, ‘cause we spend our entire lives building that for each other. The sum of all of history is building ways out for people. But this…”

The interior is clean of the morph, now. The lights flicker as the engine-heart begins to decay.

“Maybe, finally, there’s just something bigger than all of us.”

“Yeah,” your partner starts, though her tone quickly shifts. “But—we can’t resign ourselves to that, can we? What good’s that do us? Better to live short, hopeful lives than short, hopeless ones.”

A heavy buzz sets into the room for a moment, and all the lights cut, as the ship’s systems finally die off, leaving it a hollow coffin of plain steel. The morph is simply gone, having receded to where it belongs. Wherever that is.

“Guess you’re right,” you sigh. You heft your rifle off your shoulder, and click on your flashlight.

“C’mon. Let’s go clean up and try to get her back up and running.”

“Yeah.”