Spacewalk

“Do you think they felt this?” Amoré asked. She had a grin plastered on her face. An annoying face, Jack quickly thought. He blinked to himself and felt guilty. 

Jack mustered a smiling response, “They must have, right?” 

“Maybe. I hope so.”

She could have been referencing a million things, Jack did not know, but he knew better than to drag this moment out.

Amoré was actually questioning ancient sailors. She always loved how ancient people, like truly ancient—before FTL travel—must have looked beyond their shores with a hint of fear and hope. 

Jack found it odd how Amoré obsessed over ancient humans. Their little experiences and such were of little interest to him, but he understood that to Amoré, these details of humanity were as important as humanity’s survival itself.

Amoré turned around and stared back at the expanse. Like a blanket full of tiny holes, illuminated by the big light above a child’s bed. The classic blanket tent; a staple of every healthy child’s life. She experienced none of this, but she knew of a million examples throughout millennia. 

She looked at that star-specked, endless night. 

She looked down at her enclosed legs and body, then back up at Jack in the window. Thick, sealed glass windows obstructed her physicality. 

“Are you ready?” Jack’s crisp comm voice cracked into her headset. 

“No, but when does that matter?”

Jack gave an amused laugh as they looked at one another through the glass. 

He quieted quickly.

“Come back. Alright? For me?”

Amoré gave a glorious smile. Big and bright, her toothy grin warmed the interstellar ship. 

She slowly turned back around towards the void, and the single, cosmic deformity in front of her. 

A single tear fled from her face, quickly making its way down her chin, neck, then chest, making for a tickling sensation.

Jack piqued back,

“I am not joking. Come back.”

A silent moment passed. A moment of understanding.

“Please. Somehow, in some way, we’ll be together again.” Jack pleaded, perhaps not even to her, but to some divine power. 

Without any motion, Amoré replied, still looking away,  “Of course.”

She knew she would not be back. She was sent on a—possible—suicide mission. The last attempt from humanity, a crumbling dozen humans, to save their dying race.

Jack glanced down at the interface and twisted and turned the necessary functions.

The screen blared, “Are you sure? Is this what you want? Are you ready?” And all Jack could think, as tears seared his face, was, “No. No! No!” 

But he pressed on. It was his duty; his mission. A pitiful one, yet necessary. Amoré would be the one walking into something truly new. And this galaxy rarely has anything truly new happen. But he was just the guy who let her go, how could he live with that?

It was a brutal realization; if Amoré was successful, then he would probably never exist, and all this sadness would be for nothing, but also; all his love would be for nothing.

He physically shook his head to that thought. Tears floated around his floating place. Little spheres of liquid, drifting smoothly around the sterile deck.

He screamed inwardly to himself. “NO! THE LOVE REMAINS! IN HER!! IN THE PEOPLE OF OUR PEOPLE!!!” 

Amoré’s suit unhooked and unclamped and unlatched from the ship. She quickly was pulled towards the rift. An ancient humanity’s attempt to never run out of time. To borrow from the past and future. It was unstable, but the last remnants of her species believed it could send her back. They speculated that only a limited amount of mass could enter the rift without it fully… well… they do not really know. 

They don't really know; truly. She may just vaporize. The rift could explode with the energy of a supernova. Or, she could travel back. Travel hundreds of thousands of years to a distant humanity. She had on her watch. This simple device should tell her exactly when she was, and she needed to get back to -329,000(SGTU) (Standard Galactic Time Unit). They were using the moment she jumped into the rift as the base starting unit for time. -329,000 is around the time humanity barely reached outside their solar system. A schism’d people; locked on their home-world. Her task was simple: to push ancient humanity onto a better course. To strive for peace and prosperity amongst the stars. 

When Amoré was born, humanity had basically been wiped out for thousands of years. They were ruthlessly slaughtered, though not without reason. Worlds collapsed in on themselves, killing trillions.

She was raised to fully comprehend and embrace humanity. To show them the correct path. To make gardeners out of conquerors. Ever since she was born, Amoré was trained in every human art, skill, and accrued knowledge. She did classical training in tandem with her brain expansion tasks. She had thousands and thousands of years of history lodged in her expanded mind. She knew everything. In a way, she was all of humanity. Everything worth sharing and keeping, placed into one person.

She was bred to learn and love. She was the end result from thousands of years of specific genetic alteration and research. She was literally the perfect human. She bore a complete resemblance to a normal human, someone born on Earth (while it still existed). 

The pull of the rift grew stronger and stronger. 

As she floated away from her love, the cosmic deformity grew in her vision. Time became wonky; and she became loopy. She saw the past and present. At first she was terrified, but as she saw the faces of trillions of humans throughout hundreds of thousands of years, she grew resolved. Instead of gripping her, the rift greeted her, though it hummed with a rhythm of sadness. Amoré was curious about this, but before she could process it more, she entered the rift. 

—

Humanity built the rift a hundred thousand years ago. It was a celestial object in its own right; lighting up this solar system, with a sprouting, geometrically changing figure of white strings. The rift’s lines leaked ethereal, glowing, white light into the expanse. Humanity built this, almost magical, construction to abuse time. In theory, they could enter the rift and take resources from the past and future. It was written that the rift would understand the travelers needs and send them where they needed to be. It was confusing. It was paradoxical. It was the creation of a race hellbent on their own destruction, it seemed. 

Humanity’s wipeout was a long time coming. Unlike what you may assume, the rest of the universe’s inhabitants were quite chipper and kind.

They were used to other sentient species always advocating for peace and prosperity.

Perhaps it was a dozen bad apples…. multiplied a million times over, or maybe an innate flaw with humanity, but we are conquerors. And boy did we conquer. Quickly after we got to the stars, we started pillaging. After a few hundred thousand years of being enslaved and abused, humanity’s sentient peers banded together to rid the universe of its greatest pest; and no, that is not entropy.

—

Amoré appeared beyond time. She floated in the absence of stuff. She was in the void of the void, between existence itself. Her mind toyed with her. “Have days passed?”She asked herself. Suddenly, she had to ask, “have years passed??”

—

Jack watched as Amoré disappeared into the rift. He clenched his teeth, waiting for himself to stop existing. He always assumed that when his reality blinked out of existence  that it would hurt. He realized how silly that was at that moment.

He floated still. Staring ahead, waiting for the end.

There was no escape plan for himself. He never told Amoré, of course, but the shuttle they took was a one way trip. Ya know, the rest of humanity was kind of betting all-in on this gamble. Also unknown to Amoré was the fact that her and Jack were the very last of the humans. The couple dozen humans alive a decade ago had fallen to infighting soon after Amoré and Jack left on their mission. Traveling across the galaxy to an ancient human technological monolith took a long time, especially without FTL travel (lots of cryo-sleep was involved). You may be a bit confused on how the last remnants of our once great civilization died to infighting. Well it is actually quite simple! They were human! Imagine the pressure of revitalizing and saving your—basically—extinct race. Now imagine that pressure building on every generation of humans for thousands of years, as resources and numbers dwindled.

So he floated there. Realizing that Amoré was gone; probably vaporized, his training kicked in. He shut the ship off to emergency power and began to write all he knew about humanity, but most importantly Amoré; the perfect human.

As he typed away, he cried and swallowed pride as he frustratedly understood how little he knew about humans. He was made in a fucking lab, god fucking damn it. He cried because he knew Amoré could write this. She could write for years about this; about people. She and Him had only met a couple other humans, but Amoré would talk about humanity with the love of a caring mother… he thinks. They would sit in their shared room as Amoré, between lessons, would ramble about Shakespeare plays, or 24th century planet-wide concerts. She always said they were the same thing in essence. He never understood that, but that was okay!! Because she understood!! And she could explain!! But now she couldn’t. And neither could he, so what the fuck was this all for.

He typed for days… and days. Time meant little to him. After a couple weeks and liquid recycle treatments, he finally died. 

His writings were long and often rambling, but he wrote with passion and a steady hand. He ended up writing only a small portion about the rest of humanity. He never met them; he never knew them. But he knew Amoré. So he wrote about her. Everything was about her, simple because she was everything to him. His final act was uploading the writing on every communication avenue he knew. He sent her story across the stars. He sent her a story across time…

—

In that place beyond time, she felt a presence enveloping her. Maybe it had always been there, but she slowly became more and more aware of it. It was like a mother’s embrace, she thinks.

It spoke with a deep, resounding tone,

“Do not worry, descendant of the creators, you have left the only home you have known, but the place you wish to go is not where you need to be. I am sorry I cannot do any more. I am merely the lever which moves the planet, I have no control of the hands of fate that pull me. Safe travels, creator.”

—

Amoré’s eyes snapped open in front of the rift. Her mind was all loose. She had just experienced something completely unique, I assure you. 

She twisted her forearm with vigor. Her watch said 329,000(SGTU). 

“YES!! YES!!! FUCK YEAH!!! Wait.”

She gave a quizzical pause. Not negative? Where was she? Why was she still at the rift? 

Amoré’s skin crawled as she understood. She traveled forward in time.

“…fuck”

Suddenly, a ship nearby, with designs completely unknown to her, turned lights at her. It had spindly arms, so she assumed it was a ship meant to experiment and prod at the rift. 

She felt her body grow light, somehow in zero-gs, and glow a soft blue.

She appeared in an alien spaceship, surrounded by a dozen aliens(?).

She had no words. She was heartbroken already, and confused as fuck already.

The people around her were human.

“What the fuck…” Amoré thought. She had much more to say, but she immediately passed out.