The day I turned ninety-eight, I booked a journey in one of those fancy Afterlife ships to leave Earth and life for good.

Fifteen days later, I was in a hangar decked out with orchids and a lilac fifteen-hundred-foot-long spaceship with drawings of lilies and smiling planets on its hull. This big coffin was called the Blissboat. Speakers blasted out Annen Polka, op. 117, by Johann Strauss. A pretty good strategy to muffle out the sobs that echoed throughout the hangar while families said their goodbyes to relatives.

I waved to my daughter, grandson, and two great-grandkids, trying not to shed a tear.

“Granny!” Emma called me as soon as I started to swivel the wheelchair toward the Blissboat. “Will you fight wars out there?”

“I’m pretty sure I will.” I smiled, wheeling closer to her, and raised a closed fist. She bumped it with hers. I didn’t want to touch her cheeks again. It would be an invitation to renounce the journey.

“Will you send the enemy’s teeth to us?” She pointed to the empty terrarium on my lap, labeled with Emma’s shaky handwriting. Great Granny Bethany’s Memories of Space.

I looked into the terrarium to hide the tears and said, “If they have teeth, I’ll grab them to replace mine.”

Emma chuckled.

“We love you, Mom,” Lena said. “Fill the terrarium for the kids. They’ll love it.”

My lips trembled. I looked back at them one last time.

“I will.” I grabbed my phone and took a picture of them, automatically sending the file to the Blissboat crew. I folded my phone into a cubicle and put it in Lena’s purse. I didn’t need it anymore.

Something whirred behind me. The floor vibrated. The plasmatic odor of the Blissboat’s fusion engine pervaded the air like a gas released to hasten my farewell.

“Go there, Gran,” said Lukas, pointing to the Blissboat. “They’re waiting for you.” He was a tough little ten-year-old brat, but he knew damn well what that flowery spaceship meant. Every citizen over ninety years old had the right to book a final journey in one of them free of charge.

“I remember when I was a kid like Lukas,” my grandson Joe said. He had been red-eyed and silent next to Lena. “You told me falling stars were just rocks bringing space stuff from far away.”

I nodded and the words caught in my throat. I cleared it and stuttered, “I tell you now this spaceship is just a steel box bringing Earth stuff to faraway places.”

“Mrs. Bethany Taylor, please step into the elevator,” said a woman’s voice over Johann Strauss.

“Hate to be the last one.” I smiled and shrugged, feigning toughness as the oldest member of that die-hard family. I wheeled myself toward the Blissboat’s elevator. It was time to meet the twenty-nine other residents.

A fast-diminishing Earth moved away on the Sightseeing deck’s view window. It wasn’t Johann Strauss who blasted his music this time, but Adele, low and soft enough not to mute the exclamations and remarks when the moon passed us by. It occupied the entirety of the window and the curving glass that stretched along part of the deck’s floor. Even the caretakers were focused on the satellite. I stopped the Prosecco halfway from my mouth and put it on my wheelchair’s table.

“We’re leaving everything behind, ain’t we?” said a man towering behind me, one of the caretakers.

I said nothing. I wanted that moment for myself, to take it all in.

“All we ever knew is right there.” The man pointed to the Earth.

I pivoted the wheelchair to face him, slowly, so as not to drop the Prosecco. He wasn’t a caretaker. He wasn’t wearing their lilac jumpsuits with an ID on the chest.

“Are you rehearsing some list of clichés?” I said, frowning.

The man laughed. Apart from the gray hair and beard spreading across his wrinkled brown face, he might as well have taken the wrong spaceship.

“Well, isn’t this the closest we have to living happily ever after?”

I rolled my eyes and took a sip of the Prosecco.

“Hi, it’s Jeanne again, your captain,” the voice echoed all around. “We’ll fly by Mars and spot the colonies there from a distance, but we won’t orbit it. After that, we will kickstart our FTL engines to jump. There is a lot of interesting stuff to see out there, far from here. Meanwhile, enjoy your stay in our gardens, the Board Games deck, or spend some time watching one of the 16,312 movies in our database.”

The man arched his brows. He carried a camera with him, but by the way he clumsily held it, it was clear he wasn’t at ease with it. “It seems we’ll—”

“Please, don’t say we have to watch movies where people die in the end.”

He laughed again. “I was going to say I didn’t leave my laptop behind to stream movies in outer space.”

“You have a point.” I tossed the remainder of my Prosecco. “I’m Bethany.”

“Pleased to meet you, Bethany. I’m Abdul.”

I smiled and shook my head.

A caretaker approached us, arms open, a smile widening on his face. “Excuse me. Your belongings have been set up in your rooms as requested.”

“Thank you,” Abdul and I said.

“Keep in mind we have caretakers to help with anything you need. Just two-tap your wristwatches.” I glanced at the object around my wrist. They’d said it was for communication and health monitoring.

As soon as the caretaker left to approach another group, Adele restarted her croons.

“I suppose I have to see my new room,” I said. “See you around, Mr. Cliché.”

“Won’t you stay to see the colonies on Mars?” He fumbled with the camera, glancing at it.

“I’ve seen enough on TV. I want the unknown, like planets swarming with aliens or … a meteor shower. I’d love that.”

I wheeled past him toward the corridors that led to the Rooms deck, asking myself why I didn’t want to see the red planet. Turned out I knew damn well why. Mars was Emma’s obsession. My great-granddaughter knew everything about its colonies, main personalities, and even the scientific names of Martian microbes. I hadn’t departed in a last journey to cry over my past before a planet gleaming on an oversized window.

The residents’ rooms were located in a place unlike everything I’ve been led to believe after a life of a granddaughter begging me to watch space TV shows with her. The Blissboat wasn’t a military craft, so it was designed in the most comfortable manner possible. The grid of corridors that left from the common areas of the ship led to circular spaces the caretakers called villas. In the one I’d chosen, trees rustled with the artificial wind in a copse-like arrangement. There were benches, wooden tables, marble columns, and at least a lake with a boat. A hologram floated above the trees like a sign hanging from a shop’s high ceiling. Welcome to the Blissboat! Around the circle, five timber doors with numbers on them were positioned with red brick roads crisscrossing each other.

“Hi, Bethany.” A voice came from my wristwatch. “Prior to lift-off, you’ve chosen the garden theme, so we’ve arranged one of the five rooms in here for you. Your number is 3. Please, keep in mind you may move to another villa any time you want.”

I directed the wheelchair to the road that left off the corridor where I was, frowning at the bricks, unsure if I was able to go all the way without getting the wheels stuck.

A brick glinted.

“Oh.” They were just images on a surface with enough friction for my wheelchair. They had thought of everything.

I wheeled myself toward number 3. The breeze blew on my face with an almost imperceptible whiff of magnolia.

The door opened as I neared it.

My “room” was composed of two floors, an elevator, a studio, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a wall-sized television, and digital windows with high-res waves slowly breaking on a beach, clouds flocking around a mountain peak, and the kind of silly stuff I wanted to leave behind. I shut them all off by touching the controls on a wall panel. The Blissboat crew might need a memory refreshment that we were all there to forget Earth and keep some healthy distance from our affections. We wanted space and all the peace it could muster.

With all windows switched off, soft yellow lights automatically turned on. It was then that my gaze locked on a table.

There it was, in picture frames spread across the table like puppies waiting for attention. What I wanted to see even less than fluffy clouds and dancing waves. Emma hugging a red ball she’d named Mars, Lukas’s pinkish newborn cheeks, Lena’s wedding, my wedding…. Friends, dogs, places. In the middle of it all, Emma’s empty terrarium, and on the wall above the table, the last picture I’d taken of my family right there in the Blissboat’s hangar. Some caretaker had already put in the effort to convert it into a digital frame.

Tears coursed down my cheeks. My hands quivered. For an instant, I wanted to break them all, yell at the crew, and ask for my money back. I closed my hands in a fist.

My wristwatch beeped. A voice cracked through my room’s speakers.

“Bethany, it’s Abdul.” My heart thudded. I turned away from the pictures. “It seems we all have each other’s contacts in our wristwatches. What about we meet for a coffee after Mars? They’re going to exhibit that old flick The Martian in the cafeteria.”

“No,” I said. “I need to rest.”

I tapped the wristwatch and hung up on him. Emma smiled back at me in the picture frames. She wasn’t the sole reason I didn’t stay to see Mars, was she?

My belly churned. I flinched. Abdul’s way of talking, his firm voice, the cologne he used…. Even the way he stood there right next to me, staring at the moon and spilling out clichés. Somehow, our brief exchange of courtesies made me feel like I still had a life ahead of me. So I didn’t want him around me. And yet….

I looked at the wristwatch.

Some people aboard the Blissboat were only waiting to walk out of Earth. Passings happened unannounced. I only learned about them because Abdul was always gossiping with caretakers, then “briefing me about the situation” in our coffee-plus-movies days. According to him, three people had passed away during the five days of the first hyperspace trip, five more when we flew by a gas giant, and another one during the second jump.

“That must be because hyperspace jumps are so depressing,” I said over a long macchiato. We were in one of the cafeterias available to residents, a cozy space with small dancer holograms on the tables. On ours, an Atilogwu Igbo dancer performed acrobatics in mid-air. We’d been meeting for weeks now, against all my thoughts about friendship aboard the Blissboat.

“Depressing?” Abdul crossed his arms. “I find it so peaceful. And this ship is really the prime of its type. No humming, no noises.”

“No humming?” I snorted. “The humming is everywhere. It’s low, I’ll give you that, but it’s all around.”

A ding sounded in the cafeteria. The Igbo dancer was replaced by the image of Captain Jeanne.

“Find a window!” she said, white teeth flashing in enjoyment. “We’re orbiting X Aquilae F, or as you might prefer to call it, Mollitiam. It’s a paradise with green lakes and flatlands. We’ll stay around Mollitiam for five days. You are free to spacewalk and observe the planet and all its beauty. We have custom suits for all residents authorized by doctors to perform a spacewalk.”

A caretaker walked in the cafeteria handing out vintage flyers with all kinds of curious data about Mollitiam.

“Better than Mars, ain’t it?” Abdul said, grinning, already fidgeting with his camera.

“Indeed.”

“I’m gonna shoot some videos for Bart,” Abdul said. His camera was of a professional type, flat and elegant, but with bulky protruding lenses. Abdul was always carrying it around, though he looked fairly selective with what he chose to photograph. Actually, I hadn’t seen him doing it yet.

“Bart?”

“My brother. I thought I’d told you about him, but I think we only gossip about our resident colleagues, don’t we?” He chortled.

“Is he…”

Abdul stood, gesturing to the cafeteria’s door. “Let’s try to be the first ones outta here, shall we?”

I nodded, not really thinking about spacewalking but of Abdul’s brother. He noticed my gaze and said, “Bart’s on Earth, of course. When we pass some of those hyperspace messaging satellites I’ll send him the videos.”

“Don’t you feel bad?”

Abdul shrugged and frowned. “About what?”

I stared at him in silence. The Igbo dancer restarted his somersaults. I shook my head and folded the Mollitiam flyer. “Let’s go.”

The Blissboat had a whole deck dedicated to spacewalking. And for those who couldn’t get in a suit or expose themselves to space, the ship had simulations, virtual reality environments, and the good old video games.

As soon as we arrived on the deck, Abdul started filming Mollitiam through the windows.

“They said you could film it outside,” I told him. “By the way, you’re finally using that thing.”

“All angles.” He said without taking his eye off the camera, his lips a taut and concentrated line. “Bart is a retired photographer. I have to do my best.”

I wheeled forward and snatched up the camera from his hand. I fumbled with it for a moment, and it fell on my lap. Abdul gawked at me. I blinked, surprised at what I’d just done.

“What about being first?” I stuttered.

His expression didn’t change for some seconds, then he nodded. “You’re right.”

For my first spacewalk, my mind was swirling with thoughts. Why did Abdul still care? Why did I care to the point of snapping his camera away from him? I was in there to spend the last days of my life, not to mull over the pointless acts of other residents.

Abdul tugged the cable that attached me to the Blissboat. I focused on him.

“You’re far.” Abdul’s voice cracked in our private channel.

I drew closer to him, floating, my body as light as ever, moving the cable aside. The glass on my helmet reflected the green lakes of Mollitiam, and for the first time I took notice of their wonderfulness.

“In your mind.” He tapped my helmet. “You’re far in there.”

“It’s just … this view.” I wasn’t lying now. Sparse clouds scattered above Mollitiam, moving atop plateaus and the greenest lakes I’d ever seen. Even the ground surrounding the waters had unsettled cyan hues as if they were painted by a child experimenting with colors, unsure if she wanted blue or green.

Other residents started to pop out from the Blissboat. I asked myself if some of them were also enduring these odd convolutions within themselves, the kind that used to be there when I was far younger and had heart and mind to spare.

After the spacewalk, I wheeled back to my room and tucked the Mollitiam flyer in the terrarium. It was the third item there, adding up to a caretaker’s ID card replica and a coffee mug with drawings of the Blissboat’s villas. The pictures the caretakers had set up for me were all face down now. The only one I didn’t dare to hide was the one hanging on the wall. It was kind of the last window to the lift-off day. A window I didn’t have the guts to close.

We spent twenty days around Mollitiam. Whenever we wanted, we could go for a walk out there. My main aims were to spacewalk every day and to try to grasp the different aspects of the planet. And I did so even after it became repetitive. Abdul always accompanied me, and even when I went alone to the Spacewalking deck, he seemed to be always there waiting for me, taking pictures for Bart, shooting videos, waving happily to the brother he wouldn’t ever see again.

During the nineteenth spacewalk, watching mostly clouds bathed in green, Abdul asked about my family for the first time. “Is that kid your grandson? Granddaughter?”

“Which kid?”

“I saw the terrarium on our first day. Great Granny’s Memories or something like that.” He pivoted to face me, careful enough not to block my view of Mollitiam.

“We’re not here to talk about our lives, are we?” I said, not wanting to gaze into his eyes. “They’re what we’re leaving behind.”

“We’re not leaving anything behind.”

“We’re never going back, Abdul.”

“But we’re not dead.”

On the twentieth and last day of spacewalking, Abdul wasn’t there. I sighed in relief and floated alone. Not only without Abdul but anyone else. Every other resident was already bored with the green planet. I had many places and times to cry, but right there floating about seemed just the right fit. So I did. My tears ran down my face, and I couldn’t even use my fingers to wipe them. I cried because I wanted to close that window back there in my room, to shut it for good.

But there was something else, too. Something I only realized when I tugged the cable to float back to the Blissboat. I didn’t want to be there, alone in the void. I wanted to grab a long macchiato, watch Wall-E with Abdul, and talk about how the humming of the Blissboat had become part of our lives.

“Are you all right, Bethany?” A caretaker asked through my private channel. “Need to come back?”

“All is fine.”

On my ninety-ninth birthday, we were only fifteen aboard the Blissboat. That morning, I woke up in the dark of my room with the faint lights of the villa glinting on the switched-off frame on the wall. Had I made the right choice booking a final journey in an Afterlife ship? I was healthy. I felt healthy. My customary checkups with the Blissboat doctors all indicated that I was going to reach the fabled 100.

“I have a surprise for you.” Abdul’s voice crackled in my room’s speakers on my birthday’s morning, and all doubts faded away. The Blissboat adjusted its lights and the aroma module of my room whiffed out toast and orange juice coming from the room’s foyer. My silent alarm clock. The crew always took the residents’ breakfast orders in the previous night, and mine was invariably the same.

I tapped my wristwatch.

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Come to the main gate of the ship, Betty.” My face sizzled as if I was a teenager who had just scored a first date. Betty. If he hadn’t used that nickname, I would just repeat that I didn’t like surprises.

“What are you planning?” I stuttered, darting a look at the Blissboat’s panel installed on top of my headboard. “We’ve landed. Is that right?”

It was right. Abdul had arranged with the Blissboat’s caretakers and technicians to land the ship on a mining asteroid. When I arrived at the main gate, seven of the residents and a bunch of caretakers were there, hats on their heads and eyes upon me, clapping and singing Happy Birthday. Abdul held a chocolate pie with more candles than I was capable of counting.

“Oh, God,” I said, putting my hands over my face. “That’s madness.”

“It’s ninety-nine, Betty. Of course, it’s madness.” Abdul got closer with the pie. “The hardest part of arranging all of this was getting the crew to find ninety-nine candles. Actually, eighty of them are matches.”

I laughed.

He placed the cake on my wheelchair’s table. “I swear to you I asked Jeanne if it was possible to see a meteor shower from up close. I know you’d like it. She explained it’s hard to detect the safe ones and the ship’s algorithms aren’t improved for floating nearby them yet. But maybe when you’re 100.”

I gawked at him in silence. Inside of me, some kind of force ripped me apart because I wasn’t there to start a new life with someone. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but staring into Abdul’s eyes it was clear to me that it was the way we were going.

After an hour of chitchat over chocolate pie, both of us plus some of the residents and caretakers descended into the asteroid. Going down in the elevator made me shiver, and for a brief moment I was excited, as if Emma and Lukas would be waiting for me outside, Johan Strauss bursting out his symphonies.

No. I wasn’t excited. That wasn’t it. I was afraid that my family would be there because I’ve been slowly leaving them behind as if I was letting my memories of them seep through the thinnest part of an hourglass—on purpose.

The elevator’s doors whirred open. Instead of my family, a bunch of people in yellow jumpsuits were waiting for us.

The part of the asteroid where we could actually go was a facility, set up there for the workers that programmed the drillers and excavators to mine the asteroid.

“It’s the farthest point human life has settled,” Abdul told me as he pushed me across the base. It had a glassed-in ceiling and walls that allowed us to see the rock. Dozens of drilling monoliths were scattered along the asteroid’s surface. “We can grab a stone for your terrarium, or…”

He stopped as a bunch of men in yellow jumpsuits passed us with suitcases and pads.

“Hey,” Abdul called them. “Do you mind taking a picture with us?”

“Of course not.”

And that was how I came back to the Blissboat with a smile on my face, a finger-sized rock from the furthest place humankind has ever been to, and a digital frame with a bunch of workers in yellow.

Abdul pushed me all the way to the villa. In the last few weeks, he had moved from his robot-themed villa to a room in the one where I lived. He said he got bored of all C-3POs and Cylons, but I had at least eighty years of experience reading men’s minds to know his actual reason for leaving.

“Do you wanna come in?” I asked, my palms sweating.

“I wouldn’t mind resting my legs for a while.”

The lights switched on as we entered. The first thing he noticed was what I thought he would.

“Face-down pictures?” he said. “Just as I thought about asking to see pictures of your grandkids…”

“Great-grandkids.” I’d not been so open about my past life with Abdul. Since the beginning, I had made it clear in our friendship that I intended to be a reticent person.

But it wasn’t fair to let him in the dark. I wheeled toward the table and switched on the picture on the wall.

“There they are.” I shifted my gaze away. “Turn up some of the others if you want.”

He walked and squinted at the wall frame.

“Never had kids myself,” he said, depositing our picture and the piece of rock from the asteroid into my terrarium. “In my room, you’ll only find my bro.”

“Have you been in contact lately?”

“Rarely,” he said, sighing. “Hyperspace messaging is tricky. It’s not always that I can send something. And it takes a while for the message to reach him anyway.” He turned and kneeled before me, hands on the armrests of my wheelchair. The sense of his hands touching my arms, even if barely, and the fragrance of his cologne set my belly ablaze. “Why don’t you talk with your family, Betty? Send text messages, at least.”

“It’s all about promises, Abdul. They think I’m gone for good. That’s what I told them and that’s why most people use the Afterlife ships. I’m old. I wouldn’t dare to revive myself for them just to break their hearts in a while.”

“I understand.” Abdul’s eyes were downcast.

He stood. I pulled his arm. We remained in silence. The ship hummed louder and louder, in tune with my heartbeat, a constant cacophony of all the wiring and processing around us.

“I have to go,” he said. “Quite a tour back there in the asteroid today.”

I pulled him again, stronger. He kneeled again.

As my mother used to say about first kisses, almost a century ago now, it was like the universe got its clockworks messed up and suddenly everything else started orbiting around you. You weren’t a person anymore, you were transformed into a star.

After that kiss, I started betraying everything I believed an afterlife journey should be. It seemed like I wasn’t on a path to my ending anymore, but to a new, breathtaking beginning. Abdul and I started meeting every other day. Then, every day. It seemed natural to type our movie lists together, adding those we wanted to watch and those we needed to watch. We took painting classes in the Sightseeing Deck—the ideal place for an activity like that, of course—and met at the ship’s twilight to chitchat about other residents. After a while, we made a silent agreement not to mention the passings anymore. In a sense, it was like being on Earth, where people died all around, all the time, unnoticed, and you just sat there, with the feeling it would never touch you.

But what filled our hearts was astro-watching and spacewalking. The Blissboat had lots of those moments scheduled in its official programming, the crew knowing pretty well it was one of the greatest perks of a an afterlife trip. Abdul photographed everything he could and saved files with thorough descriptions not only of what he saw, but of what was happening around him at the time. My partner Bethany is here with me today as we see the sun of Leo F 13 glowing in green. We’re eating printed noodles with vegetable sauce today, sipping a port wine. I knew he did that for Bart, but he never talked about it. I never asked. Afraid that he’d ask again about the reasons why I wouldn’t call my family, I avoided any conversation about our past selves. But Abdul never asked. Different from the vastness outside, we had our limits. And Abdul and I did learn them pretty well.

On my 100th birthday—I did reach the fabled hundred after all—I didn’t want parties or celebrations. I wheeled to the Sightseeing Deck and asked to be alone, without Abdul, without any of the other residents. I knew the captain couldn’t do it officially, but Jeanne managed it for me for a few hours. We were orbiting a volcanic rocky moon and the streaks of smoke leaving its surface made it seem like it possessed a hundred spiraling legs.

Joe, my grandson, always prepared the most sumptuous cakes on my birthdays. One year before my parting, he left a big box on my door and called me, saying the cake arrived first that year, and that he, Lena, and the kids would come later. I never suspected that Emma and Lukas were inside, wearing party hats and carrying the real cake. I laughed so hard that even the pain on my jaw was memorable.

“I left for you,” I told the moon outside, hoping the smoke would carry my whisper away, to Joe, Lena, Emma, and Lukas. “So you won’t need to deal with me, so I’m not a burden if I get too sick in my final days, so you won’t need to acknowledge a corpse in a morgue. So you can live in spite of me.”

My sight blurred as I realized it was the first time I had admitted to myself why I left and why I wanted to leave them behind. That night I dined with Abdul at the villa, feeling as if I’d removed some weight from my shoulders.

On my 101st birthday, we were on my bed, caressing each other in the best ways our bodies still permitted.

“There’s something you won’t tell me,” I said. Abdul pulled the sheet to cover his torso, and his eyes shifted from my gaze. “You’re not speaking too much. You’re slower.” We were all slower than before, even the music the caretakers chose for the Blissboat’s environment seemed lethargic. But since Abdul woke up that day, he’d avoided social meetings with the caretakers and the four other remaining residents. He’d even refused astro-watching an ice moon, which was not like him at all.

“It’s your birthday, milady. I won’t bother you with minor stuff.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m just tired, that’s all.” He sighed and turned his face to the wall. “I need some sleep.” I thought of pulling at him and demanding more explanation. We were far more than fellow passengers now. In three years, the Blissboat had married us. But as I had my pictures face down, I was sure he had his. Instead, I tapped the wristwatch and a caretaker came in to put me in the wheelchair since I wasn’t able to do it alone anymore.

As soon as the caretaker left, Abdul groaned from the bedroom. “I love you, Betty.”

“I love you, too, Mr. Cliché.”

I wheeled past the empty table and spotted the terrarium underneath it. I had stopped collecting stuff for Emma and Lukas. A tightening of repentance spread across my chest. Why don’t you talk with your family, Betty?

“You’re my family now, Abdul,” I told myself, staring at the empty wall.

“Said something, dear?” Abdul said from the bedroom.

“Nothing. It’s just that I love you.”

I had all my answers sorted out, all kinds of thoughts to ease the pain within me, but even then the absence of my family crushed me in ways I hadn’t foreseen. For the last few months, every day I woke up, I pictured Emma’s reaction watching me in a vid, perhaps showing her an asteroid rock. Or telling her that aliens didn’t have teeth. Sometimes, it was Lukas, all tough and serious, but the most respectful brat I’d ever known. Were they the same? They were in their preteens by now, and with relativity, they could be a year or two off my calculations. Would it break their hearts if I came back to them in videos, sparingly and distant, a loved one with a close expiry date?

“Sweetie,” I called Abdul. “You know what I was thinking?”

He did not answer.

“I never forgot what you said back there in our spacewalk in Mollitiam. You said we’re not dead. I’m thinking about contacting my family. What do you think?”

He didn’t listen. Just the hums of the Blissboat answered back.

“Dear?” I said a bit louder.

A caretaker barged through the room straight into our bedroom, ignoring me, fumbling with a medical kit on her hands.

I knew right away I had lost my Abdul.

Captain Jeanne was beside me on top of the Sightseeing deck’s glass floor. We silently watched a meteor shower rip through the atmosphere of a rocky planet. Meteoroids provoked billowing dust clouds on its surface. The Blissboat thrust from side to side, and according to Jeanne, it’d been smartly avoiding debris based on what she’d called a drunkwalking routine.

But now, having lived so much longer than I expected, the shower seemed bitter and unimpressive. Just another spectacle among the thousands provided by the universe.

“Bethany, you’ve been very sad and it’s perfectly understandable.” Jeanne patted my hand on the armrest. The ship was all mine and the captain herself attended most of my necessities now. We’ve been meeting a lot since Abdul’s cardiac arrest, twenty days before. “We have a handful of options, as you may know. We may return to Earth, keep visiting these outworld places, or we can offer you an injection. It’s not pain—”

“For a needle prick, I could’ve stayed on Earth.”

“I understand.” She forced herself to smile. She’d probably flown an Afterlife ship a few times before, and each time she’d probably had a last resident to deal with. “Let me know anything you need. Why won’t you reconsider talking with your family? We can set up the connections.”

That was a matter I’d left unresolved since Abdul’s parting. I wanted his opinion.  I couldn’t have it. I lifted my head from the rocks shooting around the Blissboat, most of them crashing on the planet, which was already a cloud of grey and crimson.

“I have started a new life here, Jeanne. With Abdul. And now—”

Jeanne’s wristwatch beeped.

A violent shake cracked through my body. All my hairs bristled and my bones creaked.

Jeanne was hurled toward the glass.

I was propelled from the wheelchair toward the ceiling. My head swirled, meteors slipping by, gleaming with trails of blue.

I didn’t fall. Instead, I floated. The artificial gravity had been deactivated.

Red lights went on across the Sightseeing deck. My wheelchair pivoted, its wheels facing me.

“Are you okay?” Jeanne asked, tapping her wristwatch. “Oh, God…”

“What happened?”

“We were hit.” She gaped at her watch. “The algorithms failed.”

Jeanne came for me, arms open to set me back on the ground before the gravity reactivated. She put me in a yellow square by the corner and touched some options in a terminal. The walls whirred. My wheelchair and Jeanne’s boots were pulled down and firmly attached to the floor. Her wristwatch beeped and glowed in red.

“I’m afraid I have bad news,” she said.

Jeanne needed a few minutes to gather the courage to tell me the extent of the damage. The hyperdrive had been impaired. It was gradually failing and the only chance the Blissboat had to return to Earth was to use a backup single-jump hyperdrive. It would drain all the ship’s fuel and exhaust its functionalities, but according to the captain, it had a fairly good chance of working. If it didn’t, we were going to be marooned until another ship came to the rescue, which could take months.

When artificial gravity was reestablished, Jeanne wheeled me to one of the cafeterias. Over a long macchiato, with the lights dimmed to half their power, Jeanne could barely hide the tears smudging her make-up.

“The algorithms were almost there.” She fidgeted with her wristwatch. Outside, the crew was striding from side to side, performing tasks to remediate the damage. “The odds were that of … I don’t know. A lightning strike on one’s head?”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” I said, feeling really bad for her. Taking me there to watch the meteor shower had been her personal decision. “I’m kind of a last burden now.” A night shift that doesn’t end for you and the crew, I thought but didn’t dare to say. “I should just—”

She squeezed my wrist. A severe look spread on her face and her jaws became taut. She straightened up and wiped a lone tear that beaded on the corner of her eye.

“We’ll figure things out. We can move you to another ship. I assure you—”

“Jeanne.” It was my turn to grasp her wrist. I put some pressure on it. She needed to see I was being decisive. “I want that injection.”

“But…” She frowned but didn’t find the words to continue.

“I can’t go back to my family. They don’t deserve someone who will only come back to die soon. They don’t deserve someone who abandoned them and accidentally built a life up here. I’m gone for good.” Those words came out hard, a rasping in my throat.

Jeanne just nodded and we exchanged looks for a while. For the first time since lift-off, Abdul was right. The ship was silent. The humming was gone.

“Will you deliver the terrarium to my grandkids?”

“You don’t even need to ask.”

But the humming restarted when I was on my way back to the villa, with the ship’s backup system firing on. First, it was just a clanking sound reverberating through the walls, trying to find its pace. But soon it became the constant song of working machinery, of life cruising through the ship’s circuits and systems. The same background noise of our movies, the unwavering whispers that had infiltrated our nights and our chitchat in the cafeteria. If Abdul were here, I was sure he would have noticed it this time. So loud. So alive.

The lights of the villa fluttered on and it all came back to life. The hologram above the trees shone with an old message: Welcome to the Blissboat! A breeze began to flow and ruffle the grass, and a very low Strauss, even lower than the humming, played on the piano. The ship wasn’t dead, after all.

“The backup hyperdrive is fully functional.” Jeanne’s voice was a bit affected by the speakers, talking to her whole crew, but I knew the message was for me. “The Blissboat will jump in six hours and enter the solar system in about thirty days. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

I took the time to visit Abdul’s quarters. I hadn’t been there often before. It became one of our silent agreements that we’d use my place to be together. When I admitted to myself I was leading a new life in the Blissboat, it was welcoming to have someone in my quarters, scaring away any doubts, memories, and repentances that could’ve been prowling around like space ghosts.

On a side table near the door, I saw Abdul and me with a lot of workers in yellow jumpsuits. The smiles on our faces seemed alien, completely dislocated in space-time. Next to the digital frame, Abdul had organized a terrarium of his own. I gasped at the sight, letting my fingers run across the glass as if the items in there belonged to another era, to a Bethany who’d lived two lives and lost both of them. He’d never told me he kept those things. The Mollitiam flyer; a paint-brush I’d given him and he’d soon found out was broken, making us laugh at the quality of some of the things the Blissboat’s printer dispensed; the only handwritten letter I’d given him: a three-line note that I’d told him I was writing to test if I still knew how to write instead of typing, but was actually seeing how much of what I felt for him I could express on paper—turned out not much. You’re the best. Want to keep you, Mister Cliché. Lots of other trinkets and ends of our days lay mixed in that terrarium.

Neatly tucked into a bookshelf, I found Abdul’s camera. It wasn’t properly packed in its case, as if it would soon be used again. I picked it and sat on his bed. Among the thousands of videos and pics Abdul had carefully taken of moons, planets, and asteroids, all with elaborate descriptions and trivia, there were other files: videos of Abdul to his brother. I opened the most recent one.

“My man, I’m not feeling so well lately. I hope I can send this message soon, as I think this might be our real goodbye.” Abdul laughed at the camera, wheezing a little. His eyes were teary, his lips pressed tight. “Didn’t even tell my Betty yet ‘cause tomorrow is her birthday.”

He went on remembering many moments of their lives, of their parents, and things they’d lived together, but every now and then he found reasons to talk about us. I scoured through the other camera files only to find out Abdul had recorded many dozens of goodbye messages throughout the last few years, but never sent any of them.

While I severed my life in the Blissboat from my life on Earth and was reconsidering if I should stitch back those ends, Abdul had never severed his and was trying to find the point where it would inevitably and painfully be torn. In the end, it didn’t matter for both of us because life wasn’t really a thread but a web.

A few hours later, I entered my room and placed Abdul’s terrarium—our terrarium—beside Emma’s terrarium, which was now under the table.

Days passed in hyperspace. I never asked Jeanne about the injection. She never mentioned it. In thirty-one days, Mars filled our view and it was the first time I saw it from up there. Its terraformed rivers streaked out from the colonies like veins through a red muscle. I took pictures with Abdul’s camera, and wrote thorough descriptions and ramblings on each of them. Today, I’m alone, staring at the rivers of Mars for the last time. Funny how you don’t know when you’ll last see most things in life. But some of them you do know.

I deleted all Abdul’s goodbye messages and left only the last one.

When the Blissboat landed, I knew I was going to miss its humming.

Jeanne wheeled me to Lena’s door. She wasn’t home, Jeanne had told me. Joe and the kids had moved somewhere else, but I didn’t dare to ask where, with whom, when…

“Is the terrarium complete?” Jeanne asked, carefully placing it on the porch’s steps.

I squinted to the piece of glass, a bit matte now, with some dents on the edges. Emma’s writing was still there, though the ink was blotted. “Mollitiam flyer, caretaker ID, coffee mug, asteroid rock, a bunch of pictures, my wristwatch…”

“And what’s that tiny pointy thing?”

“Fake alien’s tooth.”

Jeanne smiled and put a hand over mine. “When will you tell them you returned?”

I looked up. The sun appeared from behind a veil of clouds. Abdul would have a cliché about how I missed that setting. The smell of grass being cut by a neighbor, the shifting breeze, as inconstant as the robins chirping nearby. But at that stage of my life, more than all of those beautiful things, I was going to miss the humming.

“I have a delivery to make,” I told Jeanne.

“What is it?”

“A story.” I pulled out Abdul’s camera from my chair’s small locker. “I’m going to need you to set some digital frames for me, in the best quality possible. I think the person I’m going to meet is a bit systematic about good photography.”