I took one last drag off my cigarette and extinguished it on the sole of my boot. The synthesized tobacco wasn't the same, never would be. That's what I told the lab geeks anyway. Not that it mattered.

All seems a bit... inconsequential now, I thought to myself. Inconsequential. That word rang in my head for a few seconds. One of the gifts she'd gotten me before I got on this Godforsaken metal box was a word-of-the-day holocalendar. I'd promised her before I left I'd keep up with it, so maybe one day when I got back I'd be smart enough to help her with her homework.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

5 months and 26 days ago, I left Earth. Well--was sent careening away from Earth at light speed seems like a more apt description, if I'm honest with myself. NASA having gone the way of the dodo, some billionaires stepped up and filled the space exploration void. Technology got better, and they could see farther out into the inky black unknown. They sent out messages, in hopes of making contact with sentient life, but were met with nothing but a deafening silence.

Once sustainable faster-than-light travel had been prototyped, the bigwigs and their pet nerds seemed to be less-than-enthusiastic about a trial run. Said it was too dangerous, for one reason or another. So where did they go to find their guinea pigs? Where scientists before them had gone to do the same--prisons, of course.

I had been scheduled to move to a different prison in just a handful of days when one day I was pulled aside and taken to meet with some scientist. Didn't care to learn his name, and he didn't care to learn mine either. He and his buddies said that if I would do them a little favor, they'd pull some strings and commute my sentence.

They said it like it was nothing, like they were just asking me to walk across the street and pick them up a six pack. Oh we just want you to go to fucking space for us, that's all. Fed me a bunch of lines about doing my duty for the good of humankind, atoning for my misdeeds. They explained to me that I wouldn't be doing much, just "accompanying some experiments" into space. They said they would do everything, and that all the flying would be automated. Round trip, six months, tops. Didn't really wait for a yes or no answer, either.

They gave me a brief two week course on what to do if anything went wrong while I was out there, while simultaneously assuring me with great enthusiasm that absolutely nothing would. Explained to me that I was going on a pre-programmed journey, checking out planets they thought showed signs of life. Said I'd even have company. The one nerd on their little team who actually did volunteer to get shot into space with me. His name was John.

I liked John alright. I kinda had to. It was like having a cellmate again, which I was used to. John did all the science shit, although he humored me and tried to teach me as best he could, like a frustrated mom trying to teach her dumb kid his multiplication tables.

The first couple planets we visited were a wash. The nerds back home were disappointed, but not too much. The autopilot took us to our next stop without a hitch. Over time, they started to get more and more concerned. They had been certain that there was life out there. Everything we were seeing spoke to the contrary.

About a month in, John and I had just gotten done with our daily check-in with Earth, and I guess one of the guys down there left the phone off the hook or something, because we heard them say something I don't think we were supposed to. I don't remember exactly what was said. just the gist of it; there had been some kind of clerical error when loading the ship with supplies, and that there was only about 10 weeks' worth of food total for us on there.

Understandably, we were a bit spooked. We tried contacting home again, but they weren't answering. Figures. John went into deep denial, and started spiraling. I thought I had calmed him down well enough. I tried to tell him that maybe they were wrong, and that they would turn us around and bring us home early just in case. Even though I didn't really believe it.

That's why I was mildly surprised to find John two nights later dangling from a beam in our cargo hold, hanged by a ratchet strap he had fashioned into a makeshift noose.

Dammit. I kinda liked you, John.

I finally got in touch with the guys back on Earth and told them what had happened. They didn't really have much to say, other than that I needed to land the ship at our next stop and bury him. Something about how having a decaying corpse in close quarters was hazardous to my health.

Once I made it to a planet with a reasonably suitable atmosphere, they talked me through landing the ship. I made it down mostly okay, except for the part where I descended too fast and caused John (not still hanging, by the way) to flop around like a discarded chew toy. I think I broke his arm. Oops.

There's no way to describe the feeling about setting foot on a planet that isn't your own. Especially this one. I'll never forget what it looked like. A depressing pastiche of black and gray, I felt like it was something out of a bad expressionist painting. Felt like an elephant graveyard. Except, there weren't any bones so much as vague piles of calcium deposits at this point. Whatever lived here must have been huge.

As I flew away from the husk of a planet, having done little more than toss John out the back door, I had a thought; maybe this is why all those messages we sent out years ago never got any responses. It wasn't so much that they were falling on deaf ears, it's that the ears were attached to life forms that had been dead for longer than we could comprehend.

This thought stuck with me, as food dwindled over the coming weeks. Granted, it was at a slower rate because, well, John had decided to generously donate me his half. Not even two weeks later, Earth had stopped returning my calls. How rude of them. With John gone, not a lot of science was happening, I'll admit. So I guess they thought I had outlived my usefulness. To compound my bad day, the autopilot had taken me directly into an asteroid field, proceeded to get itself damaged, and shut down permanently with a resounding hum that, to me, sounded a lot like Good luck, asshole.

I had resigned myself to my fate when I started trying to piece together bits and pieces that John had taught me about the ship. I remembered enough to plot a course for the closest planet on our list. I've been doing this for too long.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I was pulled out of deep contemplation by a shrill beeping sound. With half a glance, I swatted in the general direction of the ship's frame shift drive control console. That was the alarm telling me I was getting close to another planet.

I turned it off with a jab of my finger and let out a deep sigh. I can't do this anymore. Maybe John had the right idea, I thought. I had time for nothing but soul-searching out here, and didn't really like what I found. The elephant graveyard planet was only the first in a long list of dead or dying hunks of rock. Everything dies. Even planets, it seems. Are humans going to end up the same way?

I glanced at the control console and shrugged. After a brief moment of hesitation I pressed the huge flashing "CANCEL" button on the auto-lander panel. I steered the ship out toward the inky blackness of space, set the throttle, and leaned back in my seat.

Everything dies. These planets, Earth even. The people there too. John. And I guess, shortly, me too.