Static... fifteen days now, all I get on the radio is static. I guess
that any survivors aren't bothering with
broadcasting it.
Thankfully most of the network up-links are still
online. The net was built to survive, and it did, with a little help from my colleague's, even when the humans it was
build to serve couldn't.
That up-link is critical for our little
project though, it's what's been keeping me sane for the last month, it's
our last chance to yell into the darkness.
When two months ago
the mission control centers on earth fell silent, first one, then
another and another in an ever increasing rate, our fears where
confirmed, we where on our own. The virus that had made headlines
during the preceding weeks had made it across the globe. Humanity as we
know it was going extinct.
There used to be five of us, up here in the ISS,
looking down upon the pristine looking earth below, we wouldn't have
lasted if all of us had stayed here though, supplies would only have
lasted so long. So we searched for solutions, tried to make plans, it's
what we're trained for, it's what we're good at, it's what kept us from
thinking of our dead friends and family below us.
In the end,
we decided to go for my plan. If I had the time, I knew I could turn
the dozens of satellites around earth into a big transmitter, all
working together, sending a signal stronger than anything earth had
ever before send. While humanity might not survive, we could make sure
it did not go silently into the night.
The problem was time.
Time to link the satellites together. Time to rewrite their code. Time
to realign them. Time to make them all work together. But time was not
on our side. When the control centers fell silent, several network
up-links had already dropped. If they kept dropping at the same rate,
they all would have stopped long before we needed them. So our plan was
formed. The others used the docked shuttle and the escape pods to get
back to earth. They each landed as close as they could to the crucial
network hubs that we needed for our plan, they all knew that their fate
would be the same as the rest of humanity, a horrible one to say the
least.
Thanks to them, I had the supplies I needed to live this
long. Thanks to them, the up-links stayed online this long. Thanks to
them I can broadcast this message.
Humanity might have died,
their intelligence lost to a miniature enemy, but their knowledge might
survive. Together with this log of the last few days of humanity's rule
over earth, I am broadcasting the knowledge of several of our
encyclopedia's and other knowledge stores that are still accessible on
the net.
I don't know how many times this message will repeat, as
the data is too big to permanently store up here, and the power to
broadcast is limited, but I hope that somewhere out there, someone is
listening, someone who can store this data and the last struggles of
humanity and who might be able to learn from it all.
So that we will not go silently into the night, we will not have lived in vain.
Ado Higgins signing off,
December 23, 2012 aboard the International Space Station in orbit above Earth.
Last known survivor of the human race.