Alarms blaring ceaselessly, he emerges from his bedchamber. He is exhausted, seeing as he has slept for barely three hours and is still half-conscious, but he has no choice.

“Gosh, it’s so late! Can’t this wait until morning?”

He rubs his face, attempting futilely to waken, and lumbers onto the bridge.

Once in the control room, a huge monitor dominates his field of view. On it, vibrant shades of red and orange compete for his attention – evidently, something is wrong. There is so much data flitting across the screen that his droopy-lidded eyes take too many precious seconds to convey crucial information to his brain.

Oh no. This cannot be happening.

The oxygen scrubbers aren’t working right; there is no time to waste if he wants to survive.

Snapped out of his partial slumber by the impending threat, he bolts down the hall to the maintenance room. He then crawls into the tunnel, crouching to fit. He’s sweating, but can’t figure out if it’s from exertion or panic.

Waddling through to the best of his ability, a new sound rings through the air. WHOOP WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP! The situation has escalated – the fertile eggs, contributed by those brave people who wanted to further the species, are stored in a freeze-room on the other side of the ship. They have lost containment.

If he fails to save them, they will not remain viable; humanity will be given no chance to rise.

For one fleeting moment, he is torn. Should he repair the scrubbers, or should he preserve the future of humanity?

The eggs. They’re the whole reason we came out here. Michael died saving them. He loved Michael, and he died for these precious cells.

There is no time for anger now. He swivels and makes his way back down the corridor, cursing his inability to focus on the urgent matters at hand.

Once free of the passage, he breaks into a sprint, his nightclothes flapping wildly behind him.

Ever since his childhood, running has brought him solace. He hopes it will do the same today.

As he rushes, images flash through his mind. Michael’s beautiful face, his graceful hands, the helpless look in his eyes as he plugged that gaping breach with his body. He stops. The pain hits him anew, as raw as it was the day his heart broke.

“Why? We could’ve sealed it off! You could’ve stayed with me!” Tears begin to wet his face.

He falls back against the wall-panel and collapses to the ground, refusing to heed the ear-splitting wails around him. He is sobbing now.

It is then, in that awful moment, that he remembers why he left Earth in the first place. Why he studied for years to be chosen. He wanted to save the world like the superheroes in those old rectangle-picture books.

Summoning every ounce of his emotional strength, he stands. He takes a laborious step. Then another. Soon enough, he is running. It is the least enjoyable moment of his life, barring, of course, Michael’s death.

After a few eternal minutes, he has reached the freeze room. Warnings blare from speakers, and his steps slow as he frantically tries to restore the egg-pods’ seals. One down, nine to go. Two down, eight to go. Six. Three. One. It is finished. They are safe; and his only priority now is to keep himself alive – without a living being to keep them secure and coax them to sentience, the eggs are useless. And Michael would have died for nothing.

Suddenly weary from the adrenaline leaving his veins, he sits. And then he remembers. The scrubbers still need cleaning; he still has much to do. “And to think I got out of bed for this!” He laughs for a moment at his own joke before he realizes that there is no one to laugh with him. It is a sobering thought, and so he turns back to the task at hand.

As he is tired and it is, in fact, the middle of the night (though time seems to cease having meaning when one is in space), he moves far more slowly than he did earlier. Once arrived, he guesses that reaching the maintenance room took about seventeen years.

As he settles in to panicked work for the second time that night, he is hit by a wave of intense dizziness and grips a nearby acceleration coil for support. What’s going on?

The most rational piece of his psyche speaks, primed to do so by years of training. “You’re dying. Not enough oxygen is getting to your brain.”

Then another facet deigns to pipe up, the fighter of his youth enraged by all the injustices of the world. “Not like this! Try harder!”

And finally, once all is still, a quiet demon whispers to him. “This is all your fault. You didn’t ever deserve his companionship. Give up now.”

The alarms are quieting. Why are they quieting?

Oops. Too late. He wasted time; that pitiful expression of sorrow in the corridor cost him greatly. His vision is darkening already, and the sirens haven’t really stopped. He just isn’t able to hear them.

It’s over now. “See you soon, Michael. I’ve missed you so much.”

He lay on the steel floor of the craft staring at the stars, awaiting his final destination. “How wonderful and how terrible is this life I have lived; it is unjust that I end this way.”

In a striking moment of near-death clarity, he realizes that we were insignificant. He was the last human. He was the one meant to save us, but he failed. No angels come down to aid him, nor our tiny race. Nobody cares that we lived. We meant nothing to the universe.

His lungs inflate one final time with the raggedness of a man far older than he, and his eyes placidly close.

And though no mourners could weep for it, a lonely spark died that day in a vast midnight ocean.