YEAR 2370.
THE STARS DID NOT EXPLODE. THEY DID NOT VANISH. THEY SIMPLY FADED, ONE BY ONE.
Over time, stars began to dwindle, fading from their light leaving nothing but an inky void in their departure. The stars we see now are known as 'ghost lights'. They're already gone. This event was later named the Quiet Rapture, a sterile title for something that felt like divine abandonment. Planets blinked out. Suns went dark. Entire systems erased as though crossed off. Only those already sealed inside stations and drifting vessels survived, small pockets of humanity clinging to metal ribs in a universe thats began to go blind. It's little suprise the panic that followed; resources thinned, alliances curdled, humans began clinging to any forms of life to keep them alive. Eden had preached survival through unity. And somewhere between hunger and desperation, men like Simon learned how easily morality starves.
POST-MISSION
They did not expect him to come back breathing.
When the retrieval vessel latched onto the Iron Lung, the hull was warped inward like something had tried to pry into into it, punctured and damaged beyond any repair. The welds were cut in frantic bursts of sparks, raining down in shimmering specks. The hatch gave way, and peeled open with a scream of metal, and inside they found him half-submerged in congealed red, skin blistered and cracked from radiation and god knows what else, fingers still locked around the black box like it was the last solid thing in existence. He fought them at first, in his wild and disoriented state. He thought the lights were that same thing he saw beneath the surface, the same thing that almost killed him.
Medical personnel swarm him, cutting fabric from blistered skin, murmuring about radiation exposure and oxygen anomalies. In all honesty, he expects chains once again, he expects a cell. The tests lasted days, blurring into nothing but blood draws, full-body scans, radiation mapping that lit him up in ugly constellations. His skin peeled in places, blistered in others. They catalogued the fractures in his arms from where he had braced against the shaking hull, the bruising, the measured oxygen deprivation.
He drifted in and out over the days, mind still trapped between the red ocean and white ceiling panels. Sometimes he swore he felt pressure against his body, an inability to forget just how sickening it was to be down there. Sometimes he woke clawing at invisible growths that were no longer there. He did not speak about the monster in clear sentences, only fragments. Stutteres mumbles about teeth, movement, voices... God, the voices, they still haunted his dreams when he attempted to rest.
Now he sits upright in the medical bay, thinner but finally steady, with IV lines threaded into his arm. The blisters have began to scab, a sign the skin is healing. His hair has been neatly pulled back from his face by one of the nurses. He's deeply truamatised by his mission, and sometimes shows signs of dissociation, panic attacks, and the inability to handle physical touch. His mind and body had taken a toll, so It's no suprise he was statled at the metallic noises of airlocks shifting, head lifting all bleary-eyed toward the door as someone enters.
"Did I do it?" He mutters, voice a steady rumble thats teetering on being hoarse. "The... The box? Did... Is it over?"