Fade To Black

Tara Mason a week before her 40th birthday

Yehezkel Raz - Charon

The warning klaxon was the last sound she heard, cut short not by silence, but by the theft of air itself.

One moment, Tara was bleary-eyed, wrench in hand, staring at the exposed wiring of the arrivals airlock, her mind fogged by a stubborn refusal to sleep. The next, the universe turned inside out. The pressure seal failed—or maybe she had failed it—and the atmosphere vented with the force of a bomb, taking her with it.

Back on Nova Cygni, moving this fast would tear the skin from your face with the bitter cold wind. Here, only terrifying, silent acceleration. The station was receding at a sickening velocity, shrinking against the backdrop of the uncaring stars. How disorientating—a sensory conflict that made even her cybernetic stomach churn—the visual cues screamed speed, but her body felt suspended in a void.

Survival instinct kicked in before her mind could process the horror. Her mechanical hand clawed at the chest of her jumpsuit, fingers fumbling until they found the sensors—a scream into the void, a last-ditch plea for rescue.

She thrashed in the vacuum, grabbing the heavy tool belt strapped to her waist, unbuckling and hurling it away from the station, hoping the equal and opposite force would arrest her drift. She emptied her pockets, throwing a multitool, a heavy coil of wire—anything with mass. They floated away, spinning lazily, mocking her. It wasn’t enough. The station kept shrinking.

The cold hit her then. It wasn’t a chill; it was an absolute absence of heat that seemed to snap her bones.

And she felt it all.

The irony was sharp enough to cut through the hypoxia beginning to cloud her brain. LITH had installed that implant in her neck just days ago—a neural bridge designed to heighten her sense of touch, to bring her cybernetics in line with human sensitivity. Now, that gift was a curse. Every inch of her skin screamed as the vacuum boiled the moisture from her pores and the cosmic chill bit into her nerves. She was feeling every agonizing second of her own death with high-fidelity clarity.

“You need to stop chasing this dream, Tara,” Giles had said, his voice echoing in her memory. The mess of a man, half-flesh and half-scrap, had looked at her with pity. “It’s a living nightmare.”

“You are not ready,” LITH had warned, her synthetic voice laden with that developing concern that terrified and comforted Tara in equal measure.

They were wrong. God, they were both so wrong. If she were a machine right now—if she had the full-body prosthesis she had coveted, the steel shell she daydreamed about—she would be fine. She would just be drifting, annoyed, waiting for a retrieval tug. It wasn’t the machine that was the nightmare, it was this numb cage of flesh that required oxygen and warmth and sleep.

Anger flared in her chest, hot and useless. She was here because she was tired. She was dying because she was too stubborn to close her eyes, too arrogant to admit she was breaking down. She had walked into an airlock without a suit because her brain was misfiring from exhaustion. A mistake a technical assistant wouldn’t make. A mistake that cost everything.

Her vision began to blur at the edges, the stars streaking into lines of light.

Somewhere back on that shrinking point of light, in the ironically warm, pressurized safety of the Epistemics department, her friends were probably musing. Tara could almost see them—the kitsune waving her PDA, the rodentia sipping tea, discussing the metaphysics of the soul or the joys of women. They were laughing, perhaps. They didn’t know that she was currently freezing to death in the silent dark. They would check their comms later, wonder where she was, maybe be annoyed she didn’t say goodbye.

The thought didn’t bring comfort. It brought a crushing wave of sorrow.

Her mind drifted, untethered like her body. She thought of the first real anchor she’d had on this station. Gone for a month now. Was this where he went? Just a silent slip into the nothingness?

Then the older ghosts came. Her parents, reduced to red mist and memory twenty years ago. Her brother, and the reason half her limbs were metal. And the agent. The Sol Alliance spook she had saved, the woman she had allowed herself to picture a future with—a home, a family. A life she never had.

And then, a new face, overlaying the old. Tara’s heart ached with a sharp guilt. She had spent the last few weeks in a flurry of emotion, struggling to separate the two in her mind. Her innocence mirrored the agent’s so perfectly it felt like a haunting. Now, she realized with a final pang of regret, she would never get the chance to untangle them. She would never get to apologize for loving a memory through a living soul.

Her lungs burned, empty and collapsing. The cold was no longer painful; it was a numbing embrace. The panic was fading.

No one will miss me, the darkness whispered to her. It was a lie, a final cruelty of her dying brain, but it felt true in the silence. LITH would find another project. The station would hire another Chief Engineer. The girl would find someone who saw her for who she was, not who she reminded them of. The universe would grind on, indifferent to the speck of biological matter cooling rapidly in its orbit.

This is how the story ends, she realized. There is no grand speech. There is no last-minute hand grabbing your wrist. There is just the cold, the silence, and the heavy eyelids of eternity.

Tara Mason closed her eyes. And she let the world fade to black.