The Last Postman of the Void

The title was official: Interstellar Communications Officer, Grade 4. Everyone else called him the Postman. His name was Kaelen, and his ship, the Distant Echo, was the smallest and oldest vessel in the Fleet. While admirals commanded dreadnoughts and scientists studied nebulae, Kaelen’s duty was simpler, and infinitely heavier.

He delivered the mail.

Not data-packets or military dispatches. Those were shot through laser-tight beams across the void. No, Kaelen carried the physical things. The items that held weight, and scent, and soul. The last tangible pieces of a world saying goodbye.

Humanity had spread to the stars, but not every outpost had thrived. Some colonies failed. Some were scoured by plague. Others simply… lost the will to go on. When a world was slated for evacuation or, in the grimmest cases, final quarantine, the order was given. And Kaelen was sent.

His ship was a reliquary of lost futures. In its secure hold lay a locket containing a strand of hair from a child on Cygnus-7, destined for her grandmother on Terra. A data-slate with the wedding vows recorded by a geologist on a dying lava-world, meant for his partner waiting on a pristine orbital station. A single, genetically preserved seed from the last tree of Veridia, addressed to the Galactic Seed Vault.

His current delivery was the hardest yet. The colony on Aetheria had been a shining example of human success, until a psycho-active pathogen had turned their dreams into waking nightmares. The only cure was a complete neural wipe, erasing all memory and personality. They were being evacuated, but who they were was being left behind.

Kaelen’s parcel was a collective memory-core. The Aetherians had spent their last lucid days pouring their essences into it—their first kisses, their favorite songs, the view from their bedroom windows. They had addressed it to themselves, care of "The Future."

The Distant Echo broke orbit around Aetheria, a world now silent, its cities full of empty-eyed survivors who no longer knew their own names. Kaelen set a course for the one place in the galaxy that could hold such a sorrowful package: the Archive of Lost Causes, a hollowed-out asteroid that served as a museum for dead dreams and ghosted worlds.

The journey was long. The silence in the ship was a physical presence. He could feel the ghostly whispers from the memory-core in his hold, the echoes of a million lives now gone. He was a ferryman on the river Styx, carrying not the dead, but the memories they could no longer hold.

He never opened the parcels. The privacy of final words was sacred. But he felt their weight. The weight of a love that would never be felt again. The weight of a secret never told. The weight of a hope that had flickered and died.

Many saw his job as a morbid, hopeless task. A courier of regret. But Kaelen saw it differently. As long as he flew, as long as the Distant Echo traveled between the stars, these stories were not lost. They were in transit. They were proof that even in their final moments, these people thought of someone else. They reached out. They sought connection across the impossible gulf of time and space.

He was not just delivering mail. He was delivering proof that they existed. That they loved, they hoped, they feared. He was the guarantee that the universe, for all its cold, uncaring vastness, had at least one witness.

The Distant Echo slipped into the docking bay of the Archive. Robots unloaded the memory-core, placing it gently in a vault next to the last poem of Xylos and the battle standards of the Martian Secession. Another package delivered. Another story saved from the absolute silence.

Kaelen returned to his cockpit. A new manifest was already blinking on his screen. A single, handwritten letter from a dying explorer on a fringe world, addressed to a rival he hadn't seen in forty years.

He powered up the engines. The void stretched out before him, infinite and dark. But he was the Postman. And he had a letter to deliver.