by Don Hall

[[ALERT]]:::OXYGEN LEVELS AT 0.5%:::[[ALERT]]

Captain Jason Blue had been floating in space for nearly ten hours. He was going to asphyxiate in his suit in a matter of minutes.

For the first few hours, he had spent his mental energy going over and over any possibilities of escape from his inevitable end. Sometime between hour five and six, he gave up and just spun slowly, millions of miles from anything but the void of outer space and reflected on his life and how he got here.

Two years. How could I not see it? It was just the two of us, for Chrissakes. Was it the isolation that finally got to her? The remoteness of space travel? The weight of the mission?

As he slowly accepted his fate, he thought about the many moments of love and trust between them. The laughs at silly jokes. The goofy pet names. The kisses. The sex. The special champagne flutes, made of crystal, that each year they drank from and toasted their marriage and the mission. He wondered when their monthly check-in became a farce with he earnestly assessing their relationship and she lying about it.

[[ALERT]]:::OXYGEN LEVELS AT 0.4%:::[[ALERT]]

What difference does any of this make now? I'll be dead and floating forever, a corpse with a story no one will ever hear. She's gone. She took the spacecraft. I'll never understand why and that understanding wouldn't help me anyway.

At hour nine, he used the last bit of battery power to record a message. No one would ever find him out here but it felt like something he should do. He thought that maybe, in that Ridley Scott sort of way, that a hundred years from now his body would be found and someone might download the message, curious about what had happened to him.

[[ALERT]]:::OXYGEN LEVELS AT 0.3%:::[[ALERT]]

[[RECORDED MESSAGE]]:::00.08.12.56:::[[RECORDED MESSAGE]]

"This is Captain Jason Blue of the star craft Minotaur. I am currently in free float approximately eight million miles from Neptune. Nine hours ago, my co-captain... my wife... Captain Deanna Blue drugged me and placed me in a sealed suit and set me adrift. I will be deceased from lack of oxygen inside of an hour.

"Our mission was a ten-year journey to the surface of Io, a moon orbiting Jupiter, to establish the possibility of colonization by the human race.

"No one will hear this but circumstances being what they are, this message is a limited explanation of my situation and the specifics regarding the mission. I... guess I welcome death. I won't get answers. Perhaps you can."

[[ALERT]]:::OXYGEN LEVELS AT 0.0%:::[[ALERT]]

He took one last gulp of air, held his breath, and looked out and out and out into the darkness. He thought he found a tiny speck of light that might be Earth.

✶

TWENTY-TWO HOURS EARLIER

"Deanna? You in here?"

"I'm right here. What do you need?"

"Why are you in the navigation hub? Is there a problem?"

"Nope. No problem. I was just running some diagnostics."

Jason sensed something wasn't quite right. This feeling that Deanna was evading him, omitting some truth he couldn't put his finger on, had grown in the past week. He punched in a few keystrokes on the console.

"Weird. The last diagnostic done on navigation was the scheduled one last week."

"That is weird, isn't it?"

"So what are you doing in here?"

"I guess that's the real question, isn't it?" She smiled as if this conversation was completely normal. Silly, even.

He typed a few more keystrokes and pulled the screen up to the console.

"What the hell? You've change our course! Why would you—"

He was cut short as she plunged a hypodermic needle into his arm and he dropped like a statue.

✶

THREE WEEKS EARLIER

[[TRANSCRIPT]]:::MONTHLY CHECK IN—22:06:31 EXCERPT:::[[TRANSCRIPT]]

D. BLUE: ...so all systemic checks are green. What else?

J. BLUE: Well, how's married life?

D. BLUE: Why do you always get to ask that first? I always feel like I'm on the spot.

J. BLUE: {Laughter} OK. Fair. I'll go first. From my vantage, we seem to be pretty healthy. Yes, we've been in a craft for years with no other human contact but we're both fairly independent. I hope I've been respecting your need for alone time, you know, space.

D. BLUE: Yes. You're really good about that.

J. BLUE: Can I ask you a question?

D. BLUE: Sure.

J. BLUE: When I was updating the logs, I noticed whole blocks of time when you were not accounted for on the ship. I mean, yesterday, you were completely invisible to the ship's systems for nearly five hours.

D. BLUE: What's the question?

J. BLUE: It's... just a little strange. What were you doing?

D. BLUE: I was in the greenhouse, reading. Sometimes I just need to be around plants and be by myself. You know how much I read. So that's your answer.

J. BLUE: Is everything alright? Are we good or am I missing something?

D. BLUE: Why do you feel like things are not alright?

J. BLUE: I don't know. I'm probably just getting insecure. Your recorded logs are filled with a lot of talk about sex but it doesn't seem like we're on the same page with that. And you're just off so much. I feel like I miss you when we're the only two people here.

D. BLUE: So, married life is not going so well in your view?

J. BLUE: That's not what I'm saying, no.

D. BLUE: Are we finished?

✶

TWO YEARS EARLIER

[[VIDEO DESCRIPTION]]:::FEBRUARY 22, 2048—MINOTAUR GREENHOUSE:::[[VIDEO DESCRIPTION]]

Captain Deanna Blue enters the Greenhouse. She sits on the west edge, near the viewing screen and pulls a book from her jacket. She reads for fourteen minutes, thirty-two seconds when something diverts her attention.

A blue light phases through the viewing screen. An extraterrestrial figure emerges from the blue light. Capt. Blue starts to run but the figure communicates something that stops her. She turns and speaks to it. It comes closer. Capt. Blue begins to remove her uniform.

Once fully nude, Capt. Blue touches the extraterrestrial between its bipedal legs and drops to her knees.

{The image is obscured as the light from the figure instantly becomes brighter, obfuscating the video image. This lasts for eighteen minutes, forty seconds.}

As the light lowers from the figure, it appears that the extraterrestrial phases into Capt. Blue. She glows blue for a moment. The video shows the light subside with the last blue light emanating from her eyes.

[[END VIDEO DESCRIPTION]]

✶

FIVE YEARS EARLIER

[[NEWS ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE]]:::LAUNCH OF MINOTAUR MISSION:::[[NEWS ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE]]

"In the news today , it's finally here. The launching of the Minotaur star craft with its mission to travel ten years to a moon orbiting Jupiter. The purpose of the trip is for the two astronauts to assess the possibility of sustainable life on the planet as a possible means for colonization by humans.

Chosen from thousands of potential candidates are the Blues. NASA, in tandem with Space X, concluded a mission flight of this length had a better chance of success if the crew of two was married. Captains Jason and Deanna Blue passed a myriad of tests and have recently been seen visiting a few of Earth's premiere vacation spots in an anticipation of a decade in space.

[[END OF NEWS ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE]]