You’d think we would have some hope now that we’ve reached Olympia. It’s been our goal to reach this port for decades of space travel, and it took sacrifice and patience for our entire crew.

But we arrived to a ghost town. Every citizen of this town is dead.

It’s radiation poisoning; the port is too close to the sun, and the sun has shifted to a red dwarf. There’s nothing we can do. We’ll die too; we can’t escape. We’re poisoned already and couldn’t get off this planet without any fuel.

So we sit with each other in the restaurants and empty homes. We chat while we have the energy to. Some of us hold hands and hug each other, while others seek solitude and quiet.

There’s plenty of food, but none of us have any appetite. Anything we eat tastes like ashes. We’ve lost our hair; our skin is gray. Our eyes begin to cloud with cataracts.

We question what brought us here in our moments of lucidity. There were ideas of exploration and conquest. There were muscular ideals of pushing forth to limits, to the apogee of human potential.

We flew too close to the sun, ultimately. One by one we begin to bleed from our mouths, from our anuses, and we become too weak to carry on even our minimum routines. We lay on the ground in a circle and murmur to one another.

No carrion animals or insects harass us as we rot. They’re all dead as well. We simply respire, waiting for death.

I hear their breathing stop, one by one, and there’s only me. I close and open my eyes, all that’s left for me, waiting and praying for death.

Strong hands pick me up, in the crumpling plastic of radiation suits. I pass from consciousness and awake in a hospital. I’ve been extubated, and when I can understand words I’m told I’ve been given a bone marrow transplant. Thousands of people on the planet, hundreds of members of my crew are dead. They have arrived in time to rescue me, only me.