“Why didn't you have time? It happened only in the last few days in there, which gave you plenty of time to pull us all out, surely?” Danny asked confused.
Auton hesitated in replying. It was clear to Danny that he was holding something back.
“Due to the original malfunctions, I had to slow the simulation down to conserve energy, let you run your virtual lives much slower than real time. I eventually had to run my processor at a much slower rate to conserve energy too, meaning my processing speed was reduced by more than your simulation was running” Auton said almost regretfully, “I eventually realised that the hard drive sections were beyond repair, and that we were losing the team. I had to speed my processing power up again to get to the point to extract you all, but by then it was only you and Brandon left. Unfortunately, I was too late for Brandon”
Danny didn't still understand this. Why did he have to conserve power? There were solar panels built on to the craft that would have collected more than enough energy for anything that was happening on board.
“But the solar panels-” Danny shouted angrily.
“Damaged” Auton replied, “Almost instantly. When we got into the outer atmosphere, the radiation from the blast was more intense there than I expected, and it damaged not only some of the electronics and drives, but also the solar panels and the modules to convert the energy. That meant we have had less than ten percent of expected energy levels. That eventually reduced to one percent due to usage and accumulated damage from the sun's rays that was short-circuiting crucial systems”.
Danny was stunned back to silence. He expected nothing like this when he lent this craft his consciousness. He expected to come out of the simulation and awaken back in a body, not still floating in space with a compromised ship. It suddenly dawned on him that if his world had been slowed down, he had no idea what year it now was.
“If I am remembering right, we lived just over seven years in the virtual world?” he said.
“Correct”
“So, if it was seven there, how many has it actually been?”
“It's been 7.5 billion years” Auton said slowly.
At first it didn't sink in and Danny thought he had misheard it. Then the realisation slowly came over him, like a wave of nausea, seven-point-five-billion. As a mathematician, his first thought was the enormous lapse of time based on the average length of a species. No known species would live for that long, it would die out or evolve into something else, to then eventually die out anyway in that space of time. It was a horrific moment, one that the word dread could not satisfactorily describe, even if you stretched each letter out to span an entire solar system of its own. He was the only human left. There would be no others. He didn't have to ask Auton, he knew. He was the last human, and yet he didn't look human, his body was shed billions of years before, so was he still human? What defined him as human? Was it his physical appearance or the accumulation of his experiences? Perhaps it was how his mind worked compared to other life forms? Perhaps he was no longer human at all. He couldn't think straight, turmoil arising with each thought, an impossible number of questions floating up to the surface of his mind. His mind quickly turned back to the nuclear detonations across the planet, the primitive tribal instincts of a now long dead species. Did they all die back then? Or did they linger on to repeat their devastation elsewhere?
“Do you know if mankind ever recovered after we left?” He asked Auton. It was just one of many questions he wanted an answer to, and it was as good as any other to start with.
“I scanned the surface for years and never saw another sign of any significant intelligent species. For the first thousand years I saw nothing, no sign of growth, but eventually I could see large patches of green beginning to emerge across the continents. The plants returned slowly. There may have been some life that survived and evolved, but nothing on the scale you came from”
That left Danny deep in thought. Auton saw no cities blossoming at either day or night, no-one else to continue holding the torch of human existence. Everyone he had ever known was gone, long gone, the universe sweeping the bodies up and recycling them. How many untold species had undergone a similar fate over millennia, he wondered? To gain intelligence, to build and prosper, only to fall into the trap of territorial urges, casting common sense aside. He wanted to have one more glimpse at his home, even though it would be unrecognisable, just one more glance would satisfy his curiosity. He turned his view to the outside of the craft, scanning the surrounding heavens for likely culprits.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“It's no longer there Danny” Auton replied, “It's been gone for over five hundred years”.
The world Danny had known, grown from and called home, was gone. It was another revelation he found hard to swallow. They were supposed to land back there when the radiation had died down and it was no longer a threat to life, but this didn't happen. Had the radiation been so severe it was impossible to do that?
“Why couldn't we go back down?” was the next question Danny had.
AUTON'S STORY
All the team were safely on-board except for Sheryl, and her instructions were clear. It thought it felt a strange feeling for abandoning Sheryl, but it was her wishes and it had to respect that. It wasn't sure what this feeling was, another emotion perhaps?
With no time to concern itself with that, it pressed the launch sequence controls, and the craft ascended into the air. The initial ascent was bumpier than Auton was expecting, but it quickly got it under
