Samuel woke several minutes later to an alarm siren. He didn’t know where he was for many seconds. When his memory finally came flooding back Samuel felt like he had been unconscious for moments or years. Samuel stood up; his vision was blurry.

He was standing in the same room, but it was different. It was harder to breathe. The air must be draining, setting off this alarm. I must escape, Samuel thought. He couldn’t see anything clearly. He looked down at his feet, trying to make out a grey shape with red lines through it.

Nirn was lying there in a puddle of his own blood. Samuel felt the world pitch again, and fell to his knees.

“Nirn!” He shook his son, who moaned. “Nirn! We must get out of here! Nirn!” Samuel’s shouts seemed to echo and die quickly, but Nirn lifted his head toward his father. He tried to shake his head, but the movement was almost imperceptible.

“I am.... or nearly... can’t explain.” Samuel couldn’t see clearly enough to tell what was going on: his son obviously had a terrible wound in his stomach, but Samuel couldn’t do anything. He tried to put his arms around Nirn, who groaned. “Don’t move me: I only have... few moments. The machines are... air... they will run out of ener--” Nirn coughed, and red splashed out. Nirn was speaking so softly that Samuel could barely hear him.

Samuels’s tears fell unnoticed on his son’s shirt. He desperately wanted to see, but he couldn’t get his eyes to focus right. It was like a film hung over them.

“Get out... I gave you some 'machines... get out...” Nirn was gasping, but obviously couldn’t breathe. His words were whispers, quickly loosing strength. “No air... the air... you only have a few moments...”

Suddenly Samuel understood. The air was draining: in a desperate attempt to save his life, Nirn had moved some of the nano-machines over to his father, because the nano-machines could carry air temporarily and give Samuel a better chance at survival. He looked down but couldn’t see clearly: his lungs, his hands, perhaps his entire body had a thin layer of machines working to pull oxygen from anywhere and give it to his blood. The air pressure had dropped, making it impossible for Samuel or Nirn to absorb air with their lungs, but the nano-machines were aiding them. In a few moments, there would be so little air pressure that even the nano-machines wouldn’t be able to feed oxygen into his blood. A few moments more, and the vacuum would start to pull him apart. He would die with his son in a few moments, if he didn’t move.

He didn’t want to move.

Nirn seemed to sense this. “Dad,” he said suddenly, strength infusing his words for precious seconds, working past the blood and the lack of air: “Go. I don’t want my achievement... to die here ... with me. I love you... go.” Nirn coughed again, a rattling noise whispering around the blood. He didn’t stop coughing for several moments. The finality of his last hissing breath was like the finality of a leaf falling from a tree that was completely bare, save for that one leaf: it was soft and fleeting, a desperate loneliness hanging around it, as unnoticed and inevitable as that leaf’s tumble to the ground. Samuel knew that his son had just died in his arms.

Suddenly Samuel couldn’t breathe. Without the node in Nirn’s brain directing them, the nano-machines were no longer forcing air past the barrier of pressure into Samuels’s blood. For a moment, his son's death overruled the lack of air: he felt as though he were missing a more precious substance and that the air was only secondary, but his son's last wish rang through his mind and he stood. Once Samuel decided to try and escape the terror of asphyxiation joined his son’s final words and together these two things pushed him to find a way out. He could not distinguish anything with his broken vision. He fell forward: he did not know where he was going, but only that he must try to move. Nothing mattered as long as he tried to move before he died. He pushed against the pain of his body, the loss of his son making him indifferent to fear and suffering: he pushed against the lack of air with a deadened determination. He fell again, and stood, noting grimly that each time it became more difficult. Something was glowing before him. He took a faltering step: the brightness grew, shimmering, drawing him toward it.

He staggered toward this light. A few steps and he felt his consciouness ebbing again, this time in finality. He fell one last time, thinking that he was about to join Nirn in whatever dark place he had gone. The light enveloped him.


Suddenly he could breathe: the light had not dimmed, but the air had thickened. He gasped: he was blinded by an overpowering light, but he knew he was not dead. He felt wetness beneath him. He tried to stand again, but suddenly hands latched onto his arms and pulled him up. He was dragged and he heard someone shouting orders.

The world was becoming more focused, but not much more. Samuel was being dragged through a thick brown substance that he had never seen on the colony. It was mud: the bright light he had seen reflected oily off of it.

A grey sky yawned open, with a ball of fiery energy marking it, thirty degrees up, drawing Samuel’s gaze. He didn’t know what was happening: he didn’t know how there was a star, or a sky, or others speaking the terrible grunting words of the stranger who had killed his son. He didn’t know why he still couldn’t see very well.

He was thrown into a cage, wooden rods an inch and a half thick alternating into a grid as impassable as a steel wall. He didn‘t rise when he fell: he rolled on to his back, his eyes up to the infinity of the sky through the bars of his enclosure. His thoughts were sparse and spread like gas filling an infinite vacuum.

He might as well have been dead.