The Last Signal from Station Virgo
“We keep talking, hoping for reply, but the silence in the stars has begun to feel like an answer.”
I am not sure how long I have been sitting here, broadcasting messages into the infinite. Days blur aboard Virgo Station, and time outside runs loose—sometimes the sun seems to blink by in minutes, sometimes nothing stirs for a week. My name, when I remember to speak it, is Mira. But the logs list me as Technician Three, and sometimes, I answer to that instead.
The station’s main window stretches before me like the silver mouth of a labyrinth, opening onto blackness scattered with patient, unblinking stars. Each day, I send the same inquiry down the dark: “Central, this is Virgo. Requesting update. Is there anyone left?” No response for fifty-three transmissions.
One day—I don’t think it’s a day, but when the station clock ticks twelve, it feels right—the intercom hisses. “Status report, Virgo.” A voice I don’t recognize, rough and slow, like sunlight filtered through dust.
I press the receiver, voice trembling. “Technician Three, standing by. Awaiting instruction.”
“You’re alone?” The question is soft, almost intimate.
“Yes.” I have not seen another in thirteen cycles, since Protocol Breach Alpha closed the lower decks and I found myself on the command bridge with rations and static for company. “I repeat my query. Is there anyone—”
“We’re all here,” the voice says. “Keep talking.”
I do. Each day the signals from Earth—if that’s where they were from—grow weaker, scrambled with bursts of hallucination. The logbook, which I keep tucked into my pocket, records everything in shaky script. There is an order to my scribbles: transmission times, equipment checks, my own voice questions written and rewritten.
But time is not straight on Virgo. The same blue-green planet passes the window three times in a row, each arc slightly different—the city lights hovering faint or absent, continents edged in fires or whole. I smell something familiar, baking bread, though there is only emergency paste issued here. Sometimes, my own messages are waiting for me before I speak them—a page torn free from the logbook stuffed against the receiver. “Is there anyone left?” in my handwriting, before I have sent it.
One day, as I wait for reprieve from the silence, an amber moth flutters at the window. This is impossible; in the vacuum outside, nothing should live or dare the cold. But it dances before me, wings tapping the glass, and in the hush, I imagine I hear it whispering back each word I say. I begin to talk to it. “Hello,” I say. “Do you know where I am?”
The moth lands on the logbook. The clock blinks twelve again.
“Are you sending the messages?” I ask, only half-ridiculous.
The speakers crackle. The unknown voice laughs, soft but distorted. “We all send messages. Some get through, some become echoes.” The moth draws lazy circles over my page, inscribing a symbol I don’t recognize—a spiral, endlessly folding in on itself.
Sleep is uneasy. When I close my eyes, my dreams spool out in reverse. I see my first day on the station, laughter with the others—now missing, lost to the breach. Sometimes, in the dreams, I am not alone; we all sit around the console, trading stories about the world below and the signals that come from afar. Sometimes, I recall a face close to mine, lips brushing my temple, a name catching on the air, but when I wake, I remember only emptiness.
The moth remains. It glows dimly, an ember left behind in a world of cold machinery. Some days it is big enough to shadow the entire window; others, a golden speck on my finger. When I voice my fears, it seems to listen—never judging, always returning.
The transmissions become stranger. Some arrive from past days—my own voice, young and hopeful, asking about tomorrow. Others are layered with children’s laughter, or low, overlapping singing. The unknown voice persists. Sometimes, it calls itself Mira.
I struggle, searching the logbook for sense. How many days since the breach? How many transmissions sent? What is the right question to ask? I recall a warning from the training manual: “Extended isolation may produce hallucinations, memory loss, and perceptual warps. Log your findings for post-mission recovery.” I start to write every thought: the dreams, the moth’s appearances, the sound of the stranger’s words.
One evening—if it is evening—the moth lands on my wrist. I feel its weight as real as the pulse beneath my skin. “I want to go home,” I whisper.
“Home is where we listen, not just speak,” the voice says. This time, I know it is my own. The strange clock ticks backward, each second chanting return, return, return.
I close my eyes, willing the memories to hold. The laughter, the warmth of another’s hand in mine—someone who called me more than Technician Three. A name, maybe: Julian? Or was it myself, calling for help?
The moth beats its wings, and suddenly, I remember: The breach was no disaster. It was a signal, one sent from within—not to receive help, but to force memory to surface, to bring me back.
I rise, logbook clutched in hand, and speak into the silence, no longer requesting, but answering. “This is Mira. I am not alone. I never was.”
The moth bursts into gold dust, swirling through the air and outlining shapes—faces from the past, fragments of lives remembered. The unfamiliar voice, so long a specter, is simply my echo, my fear of being forgotten, resolved now into the realization that connection does not end, even at the far edge of the void.
The intercom falls silent. But I keep the logbook close, and each time the sun blinks past the window, I write a new message—not for Central, or rescue, or explanation, but for myself.
“I remember. And as long as I do, nothing is lost.”
The station hums on, time folding and unfolding, carrying the last signal—hope—onto whatever new world waits beyond the stars.
###END###
