The Vigil (2 page)

“Yes.”

A woman’s voice, breathless and tense. “Unidentified space station, this is Sergeant Yvette Burgess of the U.S. Army 66th Cavalry. I am the sole occupant of an underground shelter at coordinates 22° 00’ 48” S, 68° 33’ 08” W, and have been unable to make contact with anyone else. Please respond. I repeat, please respond. If you receive this signal, if you can hear me up there, please. I need… I need assistance. Are there other survivors out there? Please, please respond.”

His mind raced. He didn’t know what to do. “Send message, send message now.”

“What kind of message?” the computer replied.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I guess like the one I received.”

“Affirmative. Would you like to complete one of the previously started messages?”

He paused. “What?”

“I have recorded three prior attempts to reply to the distress signal. First attempted message…”

“Sergeant Burgess,” said his voice, “this is the space station. I’m so confused. I wish I could explain my situation, but I can barely understand it myself. Was there a global disaster of some kind? I’m scared and I can’t remember…” A beat of silence. “Hold on, I’m getting a warning of some kind. I, I don’t understand what’s happening. Planetary shadow? What is—”

“End of first attempted message,” the computer said. “Second attempted message…”

Again his voice, more urgent this time, “Sergeant Burgess, this is the space station. You are not alone. I have so much to ask you, so much I need to know. I’ll do everything in my power to help you, but there may not be much I can do. This is so hard to explain. Maybe it would be easier if we spoke over a live, two-way channel? Is that possible?” A gasp. “There’s that warning, oh my God. Cancel. Cancel. Cancel!”
 

“End of second attempted message. Third attempted—”

“Stop,” he said. “Stop playback.” He tried to think clearly but couldn’t.

“Warning,” the computer said suddenly, “now entering planetary shadow. Solar power loss in 30 seconds.”

“Solar what?”

“Resetting memory and program sequence for next solar cycle.”

“Resetting memory? No, no, no, no, wait.”

“Negative.”

“Override. Override!”

“Negative. Override of psychological integrity protocol requires verbal confirmation from a living human. Ten seconds to reset.”

“Sergeant Burgess is a living person,” he pleaded. “She’s alive down there, didn’t you hear her?”

“Negative. Pre-recorded message is insufficient to establish existence of currently living human.”

His mind jumped to something he had said in one of his previous attempted replies. “Open a live communication channel with the signal source, do it now!”

“Affirmative,” the computer replied, but its voice drooped, the words slowing to a lethargic crawl. “Initiating two… way… comm…”

The computer went quiet. With one last wink of light, the sun disappeared behind the thin, blue crescent of the planet’s atmosphere. His sight dimmed to black and a numb silence enveloped him. As the last of his senses sank into the abyss, he clung in the darkness to his remaining thoughts, desperate to protect a memory, any memory, from oblivion. But his will to remember was as illusory as the memories themselves, and like wind grasping at wind, he twisted away into nothing.

☽

Sergeant Burgess watched through the viewfinder as the space station slipped below the eastern horizon. To the west, the sunset drowned in its bath of poisoned sky.

She hadn’t brought her orbital charts with her, but endless hours of studying the figures had seared them into her mind. She counted the months until the station’s next pass. Thanks to her training, she could track its movements with mathematical precision, down to the day and the hour. How much longer she could survive on her remaining supplies was a far harder question.

The desert faded to charcoal gray in the deepening dusk. She climbed out of the truck and began her weary trek back to the bunker. The sun would come up again. It always did. And for as long as she could, until she no longer had the strength to climb that ladder to the light, so would she.

MORE BY CHRIS W. MARTINEZ

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