Bones in the Ocean I'd taken the shuttle between shift changes. Without the watchful eye of docking management, it was easy to slip aboard and depart without much notice. I don't think they even spotted me before the HMP flash. My course was straight, planned months in advance. I would arrive soon, at that place I'd first entered the Microcosm so many years ago. I had taken to calling it "the Origin"; they called it "Entropic Convergence Point 02D". So technical. Always technical. My name for it never stuck. I held no delusion that I would somehow return to my home through it, but I had hoped that it would offer some closure, some way of paying my respects to that dying universe and its people trapped within it. Perhaps I would sit there until my crewmates found me, weeping for ghosts they couldn't ever know. Perhaps. Another thought crossed my mind, a shot across the bow. I discarded it. Things weren't so dire. This was my home, and I would only leave it when the time came. The next jump awaited, a flashing button on my armrest. I flipped the cover open. --- Beyond the Veil I wasn't expecting what I found. As I stared through the cockpit window, figures stood in the void, flickering like shadows in torchlight. I felt that ache again - like an echo in the very seat of my soul, the Entropic screaming in my heart. The shuttle's systems were likewise screaming, voltage fluctuations tripping breakers and disrupting monitor images. I knew these people. Their forms curled with their familiar handwriting, stories from beyond the veil. Even as they sped beyond my eyes, I understood them like the words of a song. Hope, despite the fear. Children born, elders passing on, generational lines weaving like whole cloth. They lived on even as the stars sputtered out and died. The end was their beginning. The Starless, the hopeful... My outstretched hand met theirs. A gentle grip, like a breeze, and so much knowledge. It coursed into my heart, electric. I glanced briefly to my mechanical arm, worried it would be damaged by the exchange, and though it trembled I knew it was fine; this transcended physicality, my Entropic form the vector, my Entropic heart the recipient. These memories were mine now, a gift across realities. I was so captured by the emotion of it all I failed to notice a notification on my glitching terminal. --- The End I was wrenched from the half-dream by a jerk. A malfunctioning thruster solenoid had become stuck open, and with the vessel's systems bugging out across the board, there was nothing to counter it. Faster, faster, yet faster I spun. I tried to command a roll with the stick but it wouldn't go through. I tried commanding anything with the stick, and nothing. Crushed back into my seat, it wasn't long before I couldn't even lift my arms from the rests despite every effort. The motors just weren't powerful enough. The blood now draining from my head, my senses faded, vision reddening. The scream of the master alarm and the groans of structural elements straining against the increasing rotation melted into smothered echoes. Familiar numbness permeated me like water soaking into cloth. I couldn't fight it, not now. In the moment, I decided I wouldn't. This was the way my story ended, I had thought, to die in a spacecraft accident in the middle of nowhere, like it should have ended so many years ago. They decided otherwise. --- I'm Still Here As everything faded into the great nothing, I felt them reach out one more time. A single finger touched my forehead, and from it came a great surge of power that filled my body, bursting from my Entropic heart into the furthest extent of my form. I reached up to the fuse panel, not just with my arm, but the arms of everyone I had ever known. Keep going, they chanted. Cut-in secondary thruster actuators. Keep going. Cut-out package forward-port pressuriser. Keep going. Switch to secondary fly-by-wire system. Keep going. Command counter-rotation with foot pedals. It will all be okay in the end. I would be released with another jerk as the vessel fired in retrograde, easing steadily out of its death spin. Displays ignited with clear images and readable alerts. The master alarm, once so loud in my renewed senses, quieted to a buzz. I hit the acknowledge button to mute it. Much better. I never liked the SD-08's warning tone. The banality of the thought encouraged a chuckle. Here I was, my life saved by friends from another reality, and I was grumbling about computers! I suppressed the urge to continue until I rectified the spin, but once I did, I practically doubled over in my harness, howling from the absurdity. Then the weight came, and my laughter turned to cathartic, open sobs. I had defied death twice now. The first time, I had lost everything; my friends, my body, my home. This time was different. This time, I had gained so much. So much love in every word I had been gifted, so much hope for the world I had left behind. Peeking through my fingers, I saw them again, all smiling. All ready to say goodbye. I was ready, too. Ready to be the best version of myself I could be, to live my life to the fullest, for them, for myself. They wanted nothing more than that.