Gravity of the Forgotten

Gravity of the Forgotten

Day 347.

The station creaks.

It’s not supposed to. The engineers back on Earth—or whatever’s left of Earth—would tell you that pressure-sealed bulkheads don’t creak. But when you’ve been alone for almost a year, orbiting the corpse of a forgotten colony star, everything begins to sound like voices.

Especially the silences.

Commander Rion Vale, last living soul aboard Station Icarus, floated gently past the observation bay. The gravity generator had long since flickered out, and what little power remained was being rationed to life support, communications, and memory logs.

The problem was, memory hurt more than the silence.

---

Day 1.

They had arrived with laughter.

Icarus was a frontier outpost, set to monitor the terraforming progress on Kepler-7c, once hoped to be the next Earth. Vale and his team—eight in total—were chosen for their brilliance, adaptability, and psychological resilience.

What they weren’t prepared for was abandonment.

Earth had gone silent six months into the mission. No transmissions. No support. Then, one by one, the systems started to fail.

Then the people did too.

Radiation leaks, panic, suicide.

And finally… just Rion.

---

Now, he drifted. Not just through space, but through time, through memory. Anchored only by the routine: check air filters, monitor solar shields, speak to the recorder.

He recorded everything. Not for Earth. Not for rescue. But for her.

Elyra.

His wife had kissed him at the launchpad, a starlight pendant around her neck, promising to wait. Promising to name their child after him if he didn’t come back. He didn’t even know if she’d survived whatever disaster had silenced the Earth.

But he still talked to her.

---

Day 198.

"Hey El… remember that time in Argentina, by the salt flats? When we slept under a million stars? You said they made you feel small. I said they made me feel infinite. Funny how now I feel neither. Just... weightless."

---

Sometimes, he’d imagine her voice in the crackle of the oxygen recyclers. Other times, he imagined her outside the station—standing barefoot on a glowing ring of atmosphere, hand pressed to the glass, mouthing words he couldn’t hear.

But most days, he floated in the dark, letting the stars blur into streaks as the station slowly spun through dead orbit.

The worst part wasn’t being alone.

It was remembering what it was to not be.

---

One morning—or what passed for morning when there was no sunrise—Rion discovered the AI core had reactivated a dormant process.

“SCAN: Memory Sync Archive – Fragment Found.”

A heartbeat he hadn’t felt in months thudded against his chest.

> FRAGMENT: 2.3 MB

SOURCE: External transmission

IDENTITY: Unknown

DATE: +318 days

He replayed it.

Static at first. Then a garbled voice. Female. Distant.

“…if anyone…Kepler…still listening…gravity…”

The rest dissolved in distortion.

He looped it again.

And again.

And then cried.

Not because he understood it.

But because for the first time in nearly a year, he wasn’t sure he was completely forgotten.

---

Over the next two weeks, he rerouted what power remained to boost the signal range and triangulate the source. The process was painfully slow. His fingers trembled from protein deficiency. His mind faltered with sleeplessness. The station groaned with every adjustment.

But still—he tried.

He whispered into the dark. "Gravity of the forgotten, pull me back to something real."

---

Day 365.

He didn’t find the signal again. But he found something else.

In the deepest storage vault of the station's memory logs, a hidden message.

Text only. Simple.

> “For Rion. I knew you'd check the logs. I knew you'd stay.”

– Elyra

She had uploaded it just before he left Earth orbit. A message hidden behind security walls he’d never thought to look past until desperation gave him reason.

> “If I’m gone, promise me you’ll keep looking up. Keep remembering. Because even gravity forgets what it’s holding until it falls.”

---

Rion sat in the dark that night. Floating, weightless, but heavier than he had ever felt.

He wasn’t dead.

Not yet.

And even if Earth was gone, even if Elyra was nothing more than a whisper in a dying machine, her memory had gravity.

It held him together when nothing else did.

---

Day 367.

Rion powered up the beacon.

Not for rescue.

But to be remembered.

To remind the stars that someone still floated here.

Watching. Listening.

Waiting for the gravity of the forgotten to pull him home