Static Void

Day One
My name is Endymion Katapodis, and yes it’s Greek. Well, I guess you probably don’t know what Greek even means. You probably don’t know what any of this means. I don’t even know if you’ll have a written language. Could you even make it here if you didn’t, though?
I’m getting distracted. None of that matters. What matters is that when you talk about me don’t call me Endymion. It’s too long, gets caught in the mouth. Just call me Endy, like my mom always did. You are probably wondering why you should care about me if you can understand this at all. Well, let me put it simply.
I’m the last human.
In case you didn’t find all of us, floating out there beyond our solar system, adrift in the endless void sea of space, let me fill you in on just what a human is. If you can read this, we were sort of like you. We were bipedal communal sentient organic life if you want to be scientific.
We were flawed, but what life isn’t? We fought and yelled. We killed each other by the thousands in mass wars over resources we didn’t control and were terrible to one another based on insignificant differences that all seem so damn small now. It’s better now that we can’t anymore.
But we also cared for and loved one another. We knew how to laugh, how to create beauty out of our troubles. How to connect with one another and create bonds that are more powerful than any physical connection could muster. That is what I think all of us former humans, as I undoubtedly am by now, will miss.
Maybe I should explain what’s happening. I already told you that I’m Endy, but I am a network structuralist with expertise in complex blockchain networks via quantum computing. I’m sure none of that makes any sense, hell, I hardly understand a lot of it most days. But I bring it up because that is why I’m the last human.
Twenty years ago the United Peoples Coalition passed a unanimous vote for human transcendence. The motivation was simple. After this planet’s climate change crisis was averted just over a hundred years ago, humanity’s existential dread pointed its hideous eyes towards the inevitable supernova of the star we rely on.
Miraculously, the petty squabbles that plagued our kind so dogmatically faded away as we as a species began to look towards the future. It was only twenty years ago, in our time at least, that the solution was decided on.
The best solution humanity could think of to avoid the physical dangers of our world? To stop being physical at all. A technology was developed to translate the electrical signals and neurological connections of our brains into raw data packets, neatly organized and contained to remain indistinguishable from our living consciousness. The process was dubbed soul translation by an opposition group, but the name was adopted by its inventors and eventually stuck better than any official title.
We developed a plan to take all of the packets and combine them in a large, secure harddrive and connect them through universal neutral coding to allow them to interact. The hard drive would then be rocketed out into space, drifting towards the planet we labeled Kepler 186f. Only 490 million light-years away, it would give humanity the best chance to be found by some other intelligent life that could effectively download our consciousnesses and hopefully protect us, effectively guaranteeing our immortality as a new digital species.
My role in all this? Well, the soul translations were organized to get the elderly and sick translated first as they had the least chance of surviving a later assignment date. More than ten thousand translation facilities were constructed all across the planet, with each one feeding their data into a central hub located here in the California metropolis.
I was recently out of college at the time and got a job at that central hub. I’ve spent the last twenty years performing translations and ensuring the structure of the capsule, what we labeled the harddrive, remained intact. I was designated as the last to translate, so here I am, sitting just ten minutes after translating my last companion, a nice young man named Matt who hated the taste of baked beans.
So, as the last human, I’ve decided to delay my translation for seven days, which will be documented here with this being my first. From here I will travel and try to encapsulate humanity somehow to leave this behind as our final will and testament. I don’t know where I will go just yet, but I’m going to think about it before I go to sleep tonight.
If you are reading this then you must be here on Earth. I am going to have an AI bot I whipped up over the last week translate my journal into every known human language and logical variation that it can devise as I write, giving you the best chance at being able to comprehend what I am saying.
So, well, here’s to the last week of humanity. I suppose I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Day Two
I am starting this day recording while still in my SaniPod this morning because I finally decided what I am to do with the next six days before me. I am going to get as comprehensive of a tour of humanity as one can. I will travel across all of California to hit the highlights.
Luckily, the city of California stretches from the new Pacific coast all the way in the Sacramento district to the edge of the grand canyon. so there is plenty to see without leaving the city. But first, I suppose I need a car.

#

Well, it was easier to get one than I expected. Almost everything being left behind is still operating, lucky for me. The solar powers everything runs on are made to only require maintenance every hundred years or so, so maybe everything is still up and running while you are here reading this even.
Anyways, what matters is that I was able to ride the mag-tram to a local car dealership. It had been quite a few months since I rode it before today, with everyone I know having translated and everything. It was weird how empty it was. I never realized how loud the damn things are without the constant chatter drowning the creaks and rattles out.
It was fun though. I'm not sure why but I felt compelled to do something I never had before on the ride. I scribbled my name on the back of the seat in front of me next to about two dozen others. I guess it just felt necessary to commemorate my last mag-tram ride in some way. I don't know.
Sorry, I'm rambling. What matters is that I did get my hands on a car. At first, I went for the most expensive line they had, but the encryption on the assignment chips was just too complicated. For me at least.
I was able to get the assignment chip for a luxury SUV to work, though. As someone who could never afford a car, I'll admit that it is really exciting. Independent gyroscopic control of all four wheel spheres, mini-fridge with motorized drink delivery, the newest road rules AI, and a five gig download/three gig upload connection to the national network cloud.
All I had to do was plug the assignment chip into my wrist phone and run a kernelled troubleshooting reboot as an administrator. Then it just let me assign it to myself for a test drive. You would think the security on this type of thing would be a bit better.
I am dictating all of this down as I ride in my new car to a market to pick up supplies for my last days. It is unbelievable how fast the AI can drive when the only other traffic left on the roads are delivery drones and rideshare cars endlessly circling blocks waiting for riders that will never summon them.

#

So, I ended up feeling like camping. I've never done it before but something seemed just extremely human about it in a way. Obviously, I couldn't make it out of the city tonight to camp in the real wilderness, but I managed to find some grass here in the metropolis.
It is fake grass, what we called astroturf, that is in the center of an enormous stadium. I planted my tent right at the center of the field, away from the sand and paint that lines the outer edges of the field.
The roof of the stadium is an immense array of screens that project an image of the night sky to mimic the open-air stadiums we used to build before the rain turned acidic. It displays a beautiful large moon surrounded by bright stars with colored vapor splotches of distant galaxies and can react to the real weather it shields from with raindrops, lightning, the whole nine yards.
I have always heard that you can tell it is an imitation, that the real sky is much more beautiful. Personally, I have no idea. I've never left California. Sure, I've traveled up to Mount Rainier and over to the canyon, but I've never left the city limits and within the city, the night sky is nothing more than a dull sheet of muted gray. Light pollution caused it, they say.
However, the food I got today is what has me excited. Part of my contract to stay behind and assist with the translations was being completely cared for like I was back in college. A small apartment with amenities and premium streaming packages, a stringent schedule that had to be followed, and all capped off with a full meal plan. If you could count them as meals.
The food rationed to me made my assigned uniform look appetizing. It was like eating chalk ground into sludge with a blender and then seasoned with more chalk, ground up this time.
What I’ve got from the vendor stall, however, is all of the best food that money can buy. I spent the rest of my money on it. Literally all of it; I won’t be able to take it with me once I translate anyways.
So I’m going to break this down for you because if there’s one thing we humans knew how to do, it was eat. I got some pumpkin-flavored potato chips, vacuum-sealed baklava, gyro salted almonds, blood oranges, California rolls, a couple of lunch meat sandwiches, approximately five pounds of candy, triple chocolate cookies, pastries, and a gallon each of sweetened iced tea, milk, Corporeal Fizz, and water.
I’m sure that none of those words mean anything to you if any of this does. What is important is how this food makes us humans feel. I don’t know if you eat, mysterious reader, but you must have some form of sustenance, something that keeps you alive and moving. Maybe it’s light, heat, energy, some sort of weird kinetic physical energy transfer, I don’t know. What matters is thinking about how it makes you feel.
That is food for humans. Food can be life and everything that comes with it, both physical and metaphysical. Sure it makes the body feel whole, but what really matters is what it carries with it. It can bring one’s mother back and place her spirit in the chair directly across from them with all of her warming glow and that crooked smile. It lifts and ties the spirits of friends together as they celebrate a new development.
Even just smelling this baklava now teleports me back to my childhood bedroom. Huddled beneath the sheets with a small plate of baklava clenched between my tense hands. My mother running her fingers through my hair while reading from a book detailing Hercules and his labors. Happiness and comfort. The warmth. All from a vacuum-sealed package of honey-soaked pastry.

Day Three
I did not sleep well last night. After I finished writing and set my wrist phone to sleep mode, I started thinking about my mom. I couldn’t help but ponder on whether or not she was enjoying life post-translation. Or if there even was much of a life for her post-translation.
After all, the soul translation was just a theory when we started translating folks, and although the lead scientists behind it claimed that the human consciousness would translate entirely, they had been unable to open up a line of communication with anyone after translating to confirm.
This led to wild speculation from both sides of the aisle, desperate to provide an answer that would support their case either for or against soul translation. Some merely said that there was plenty of evidence that the consciousness was completely conserved, which was completely untrue. The other most popular arguments were that either too much of consciousness was lost, or rather our actual souls were lost, in the transfer, rendering those who transferred to nothing more than nonsensical binary.
The explanation from the supporting side was even more terrifying to me. Their movement unified behind the theory that after people translated they simply outgrew us. The new perspective they had ascended to was simply beyond us. We were too small and insignificant for them to even bother with our pleas for confirmation of their safety.
Thinking of all of this, pondering on all of this was what kept me up so late, and when I finally did fall asleep a terrible acid thunderstorm started that shook me awake. The downpour was torrential and battered against the roof of the arena that it sounded like shattering glass falling around me. The claps of thunder and lightning made the electronics of the arena flicker in and out.
So I laid there for hours, waiting for sleep to grab me that would never come, but it gave me an idea for what to do today. Right now, I’m on my way to my parent’s old home, where I grew up, where all of my best memories took place.

#

Well, I'm sitting here on my old childhood bed in my parents' old house over in the Baltimore Town district. It's a couple of hours before noon, with the acidic rain tapping on the metallic storm shields that cover the window panes around me. It still smells how I remembered it, just a bit dustier.
It all is making me feel, I don't know. Poetic nostalgia?
Regardless of what I should call it, it feels weird being here now. The outside looks so different. My parents were in the first wave of translation due to their age, leaving the house to be overrun with vines and foliage like the earth is hasty to move on from us humans.
But the inside is the same. The coffee table in front of the couch that I hit my head on when I was four. The armchair that Dad would always fall asleep on, one hand still on the remote, and a cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the carpet.
I still remember when my first girlfriend broke up with me when I was seventeen. Cassie Wolchak was her name. I had liked her for years, and we had only been dating for a few months but I was sure that I was in love. I talked to her all day every day. Messaging her on my first wrist phone, calling her before bed. We were never truly apart.
But then she told me that she wanted to break up and that us spending so much time talking to one another was one of the main reasons. I thought I could die.
The pain made me restless. I wasn't able to focus on anything. Not movies, books, building my first private integrated server at the time. I was on the brink of sobbing at any given minute. It lasted for almost an entire month and undoubtedly would have lasted longer if it wasn't for my dad.
The advice he gave me has gotten me through every hardship I have faced since. He simply told me to stop fighting myself. To feel the emotions my body was telling me to and let them work themselves out. That they would not last forever because nothing does. That it would feel terrible, but that terribleness would shape me and make the good that followed that much sweeter.
It was that day that my dad taught me what it was to be human.
My mom, on the other hand, taught lessons in a less grounded way. Her mind was planted firmly in the past and the clouds. She was proud of our Greek heritage and took every opportunity to indoctrinate me. She would always tell me the myths and stories and all about the heroes and villains within them.
She taught me about the power of stories, and their intrinsic relationship to humanity. Through the stories I learned to let my imagination run, to wonder, and let that be enough. And she taught me to view the stories as a product of the people and showed me how they are emblematic of the cultures, beliefs, and fears of the time.

#

I wouldn't normally admit this, but I'm never going to meet you if you are reading this, so I will just say that I broke down into tears and could no longer be in that house. The memories were simply too much.
I know that my parents are there, just translated to the hard drive, but I can't escape the feeling that they are gone forever. Maybe they all are.
Either way, I'm now standing outside of my other old family home, this one being the home I shared with my wife when we were still married. We got divorced nearly ten years ago now, so I suppose we have been separated longer than we were ever together which is strange to think about.
The outside of the house is almost exactly how I remembered it, so at least she has been taking good care of it. I will probably have to break a window to get in, but why shouldn't I? There's no one around to care.
She must have sold the house a few years ago. I'm hurt that she didn't even bother to tell me. That our son didn't even bother to tell me.
I feel like an alien here. It's like a dream. Everything feels familiar, there is an atmosphere that I know where I am, but in reality, everything is strange and detached from me.
So, here I am, floating passively through, visiting the memory this family left behind when they translated. Dirty cleats thrown carelessly on the wooden floor. A sweatshirt draped over the back of a reclining chair. A pet's food bowl is only half empty.
Where did the pet go since they cannot be translated?
An unmade bed. A stack of money drives, doubtlessly withdrawn to burn through now pointless savings. An XLED family photo hangs crooked on the wall.

#

Well, in continuing with my embarrassment for today, I am closing this day's entry from a hospital bed. Something compelled me to adjust and fix that crooked photograph, but I was foolish enough to try and do it while still dictating to my wrist phone.
Needless to say, I knocked the frame off the wall, causing it to shatter and slicing open my arm in the process. I rushed to the hospital, had an auto-nurse stitch me up, and now I'm lounging on a hospital bed snacking on a tin of shrimp chips.
I think I'm going to sleep here tonight and figure out a plan for tomorrow in the morning.
I will admit, however, that this journey has me feeling like Bellerophon. He was a hero of ancient Greece, famed for traveling with the winged horse Pegasus and slaying terrifying monsters like the Chimera.
I think my new car is my Pegasus, and this seven-day journey is my Chimera. What the different pieces that make up the amalgam are I'm not sure yet. But I will slay my challenges along the way. Maybe each piece is an aspect of humanity I aim to capture? I quite like that interpretation.
My worry comes at the end of Bellerophon's story. I feel such pride in identifying with such a brave and noble man, yet like many Greek myths, his story ended in tragedy. In Bellerophon's case, I remember two interpretations.
Both began with Bellerophon riding Pegasus towards the heavens of Mount Olympus to join the gods. But he was thrown from Pegasus' back and fell to the earth. It is here that the endings diverge.
The simpler has him die upon impact with the surface of the earth, still a grim outcome in its own right. The second sees him surviving, left to wander the earth aimlessly as a broken man with nothing left.
If my story is to be that of Bellerophon either interpretation is a tragic one to be walking towards. But what scares me, even more, is the possibility that it is not simply myself who is Bellerophon, but all of humanity.

Day Four
I suspect that my entry for today will be quite brief, as I intend to spend much of it watching films. I spent this morning riding over to a movie theater near the hospital I stayed in last night. The front doors were left unlocked, so I did not have to break my way in.
However, the door to the upper floor, where the server was, happened to be locked. I just grabbed a chair from the lobby and forced my way in, though. Once I was in, forcing my way through the encryption to the central drive proved easier than expected. I was able to access all of the files and rip them to my wrist phone.
I had to download a sketchy third-party decoder to translate the files to something my wrist phone could make any sense of, but I figured there couldn’t be any harm in it. Even if it stole all of my bio-data or my financials, who could capitalize anymore anyways?
This is probably a bit late, but I should let you in on what my thought process is here I suppose. You see, the theater had millions of movie files on its network, and I grabbed the highlights. I’ve aggregated a collection of a handful of the best movies, and the best art, that humanity has ever, will ever, produce. So now, I’m going to sit in a comfortable chair with a pile of food haphazardly dropped around me, and simply enjoy the fruits of my species.

#

It is night, many hours later as I now write the rest of today’s entry. I have traveled, dear alien, oh how I have traveled. Films have been integral to humanity ever since they were first invented nearly three hundred years ago. They changed everything.
Sure, photographs had helped connect us through the wall of time years before, but films brought it to life and made it real. It was a way that we could tell stories, pass on lessons, and communicate.
So, I spent all of today watching the timeless classics. I will not go into detail here, because I am no critic, and I doubt whoever is reading this has seen any of them. If you are curious, however, I have included the files to the ones I watched, as well as some I simply could not make time for, in the same places I intend to leave this document.
I guess you already knew that though since you must have seen them when you found this.
Anyways, watching these films made me dwell on stories as a whole and their importance to us humans, and maybe even your culture as well.
Even going back to the start of our species, stories have been an integral part of our communities. From paintings on cave walls to the advanced fully immersive experiences we have now, or even those Greek myths my mother always told me, stories have always been there.
And is it any surprise? Perhaps they strike such a chord with us because of just how important empathy is to our experience. Stories allow us to imagine ourselves in different situations and allow us to be guided through emotions or thought processes by the artists. They help us confirm that our fellow humans have experienced the same things we have and help us communicate with one another about them recognizably and universally.
Which got me thinking, what stories are there to tell after soul translation? I would be lying if I said this train of thought does not terrify me.
Are emotions even possible in that place? Can you even call a communal cloud network that merely houses your consciousnesses a place?
Regardless, in humanity's hard drive I simply see no way for stories. In such a place there will be no conflict as there is nothing to conflict over. There are no possessions, no tribulations, and no physical needs. Many pro-translation groups thus defined it as paradise, but I must admit, I am not so sure.
Of course, a relaxing life free of conflict or trial may sound relaxing snd peaceful, but without it in your life, I simply cannot imagine what would even fill one’s day, much less eternity. What an empty existence it must be to have no preferences, nothing to eat or shop for, no reason to work, and no end in sight to bestow any urgency.
The absence of pain or misery does sound great when isolated, but I do not think what is left is content happiness. I can only imagine that the lack of contrast, the sheer monotony of it all, would leave one with nothing but a maddening null of emotions. A complete lack of anything at all.
I'm probably just spouting nonsense at this point, I apologize. I had a drink or two with the last movie I watched, and I think it has loosened my lips a bit too much.
Anyways, I am not sure what I will be doing tomorrow, but that is a discovery for the Endy of tomorrow.

Day Five
As I woke up today it dawned on me just how lonely I am. Humans were never meant to be so isolated. We depend on one another whether we admit it or not.
My parents, my friends, even my ex-wife, and son have all been gone for just over three years now. I was left behind, left to finish the rest of humanity's translations without seeing any familiar faces.
I have forgotten most of them, and I will never see them again because they simply do not exist anymore. I guess there also will not be any new people, will there? With no bodies, there will be no new humans. All of humanity for the rest of time is on that drive, driven by their selfish greed for immortality to have it end with them.
But what kind of eternity can it be? With nothing to occupy their time, what can the translated souls even do other than think and talk, but talk about what? Everyone is in the same unchanging void, so what could there possibly be to talk about?
Anyways, I am writing this at the end of my fifth day, as my car races through the streets of California City towards my destination for tomorrow. I am planning on sleeping in the car since it will have to go through the night to get there in time.
I know I have failed to write throughout the day like I usually do, but there was not much to write. The first three-quarters of my day was spent moping about the movie theater feeling down. The last quarter was spent at a park, the last natural park in California City.
The park is plainly known as Oak Park because it houses the last natural oak tree in the world. I had never seen it, and it was only a two-hour drive away with the lack of traffic, so I drove out there to see it. It was, to be honest, a tad underwhelming. It turns out the synthetic replicas are rather accurate. Accurate to the point of indistinguishability for the layman.
Feeling the bark under my hand and smelling the leaves in the air felt natural to me. Not like the tree was natural, because of course, it was, but it felt natural for me to be there with it I guess.
But that was it. It just felt commonplace rather than anything special. If I had not already known the tree was special I would not have paid any extra attention at all.

Day Six
I arrived early this morning at a small secluded spot at the center of the last square of desert left in the states. A small plot that is a mere four miles by six miles and makes up half of the remaining undeveloped land in the country.
As I write this it is just about dusk. I spent the day lounging in my car, reading through a children's book of Greek myths that I swiped from my parent's house. It was great revisiting all of the classics, and I could not help but feel a connection with the plight of the famous Odysseus.
A wanderer, he spent decades trying to find his way back home after fighting in a war that he should have had no involvement in. He was only there for his friends, his family, and his duty toward the city-states of Greece.
So too do I wander the ocean remnants of the Earth, trying to find a way home, a way back to my family. But I'm not sure where my home is at this point. Or whether or not my family is still there to be returned to.

#

Night has fallen and I cannot stop crying. Seeing the sky above, exactly what I came all this way for, untainted by light pollution is just too much.
As darkness fell the night sky came to life with a brilliant gradient from a deep navy blue to a rich royal purple. It was peppered with innumerable stars, small flecks of brilliant light that shone proudly countless miles away.
Jupiter claimed one corner of the galaxy as its own. Its orange and brown stripes were beautiful and radiant with a confident sternness. I could have sworn that its orange eye was staring back at me too.
Staring up at Jupiter my eyes began to water, but they erupted in tears when they made their way to the swirling nebula that dominated the scene. Like a cloud of green and orange, it warped and twisted within itself in an ethereal knot. It was unfathomably large, bigger than I could ever know or try to know. Yet, there it was for me. Caught in the stillness of space, perfectly preserved and unmolested.
It all was too much. I sobbed and sobbed, laying on the hood of my car with my hands making a crude pillow for my head. Never have I felt so small or so grounded. The imposing cosmic indifference sends shivers coursing through me, but yet it carries with it a release of mounting pressures.
My insignificance, the sheer absurdity of the notion that humanity claims a level of importance in an existence of such scale and power, is freeing. I feel as though I can do anything now, as what I do need to satisfy only me alone. What difference could it possibly make to Jupiter? Or to Mars? Or to the nebula before me? Or to Kepler 186f for that matter?
And what narcissism we as a species display, claiming that we can transcend our place in the universe at the behest of the belief that we are somehow special or different. That anything out there in the cosmos would care about us or would even have reason to take the slightest interest in our petty machinations. To try and make a claim to a spot up there, among it all, seems absurd to me now.
But there is no way that I can stop it now. I could elect to not go, but what sort of life is even possible here on Earth alone anymore? And that would do nothing to stop the rest of humanity, my people, being reduced to nothing more than binary text floating aimlessly through space.
Imagining it now fills me with dread. That small drive, cased in alloys and housing a solar power cell along with the drive meandering through a nebulous null with no way to detect or see what is occurring around them. A single comet, a stray piece of debris from a failed shuttle, and all of what is left of humanity would be lost for good.
How little we all understand what we have agreed and aspired to. Jumping blindly with only faith as a reassurance that soul translating was a good idea, that we would even be preserved, to begin with. And there is no way back now. The decision is made, the lives have been led, and the future is as determined as it can be.
That small, fragile drive will spend eternity floating through space with humanity's consciousnesses on it. Or, if the soul translation did not work, it will float empty and barren. And I and the rest of what was once humanity may never know.
And say that the drive is discovered by some other intelligent life that is waiting out there just beyond our celestial sight, what then? The chances that they would have any interest or motivation in us at all is slim to none. The best-case scenario is that they simply protect the drive to prolong our empty interminable existence within.
The worst-case scenario is that they bring about the extinction we initiated with hardly a lift of a finger.
What most of the people who translated are hoping for, I think, is that whoever finds them will somehow know the next step. They will be able to extract them from the drive and give them some new form of being, a key to a new life off in the distant galaxy. Many of them have taken to calling Kepler 186f New Eden.
But how can millions of years with your consciousness suspended in a digital stasis not change someone? I can nearly guarantee that even now after only three years anyone I know that translated-if it worked at all-has been so morphed by the experience that I would not even recognize them or consider them a friend.
And so I lay here, sobbing the last tears of Earth, the shadow of what comes next looming over me like the executioner's ax.

Day Seven
I was not planning on entering anything for today's entry, to be honest. I feel so overwhelmed by all of this that doing so seemed impossible.
But, here I am now sitting next to the translation station with it set to perform the procedure. All I have to do is plug myself into the system. The rocket for the drive has been scheduled to launch in three and a half hours, I set it when I left in case there was an accident or I was not able to do it manually for some reason.
A translation takes just under three hours to complete, meaning I have thirty minutes to make up my mind. Starting any later would risk an incomplete transfer, and I don't even want to start considering the possible repercussions of something like that.
I do not think I can bear a life here on Earth alone. The loneliness has already begun wearing me down. I can feel myself losing my grip on the world before, even surrounded by its artifacts. The thought of never speaking to anyone again, never seeing my son's face, or hearing his laugh again is worse than death.
But an eternal life trapped in a floating void may be no better. There is no guarantee that the translated souls can even communicate with one another, or if they even care to. And what good is life then? I don't think I can bother to live a life that is a plateau of nothingness. I fail to see the point.
I am tired. I think I may just be tired of life. I have translated so many souls, seen their eyes go dark, and disposed of the bodies as if they held no meaning. I have been worn thin, and I simply don't know if there is anything left for me. Here on Earth or out in the cosmos or on whatever is next in that hard drive.
Well, I have rambled too long. Two hours and fifty minutes to launch. My hesitation made my choice for me, but I think that somewhere in me I knew that it was my choice all along. I was just too afraid to embrace it. I wanted to hope that there was still hope.
But there is a serenity in nihilism. In knowing that there is a definitive end.
If somebody is reading this, I hope that things fare better for your people. I hope that this self-inflicted destruction that has led to the death of mine is not a universal oddity that afflicts all advanced peoples. Maybe this journal and what you find on Earth can provide an example of deterrence, but, on the other hand, maybe it will do nothing. I suppose there is nothing that I can do about that now, and that feels great.
I do not know what I will do now, but what I do know is that if someone is reading this I am no longer around. I wish you only the best.