Adam reached the ocean on Saturday.

Actually, it could've been Sunday, or Tuesday, or any other day of the week, because Saturdays were Fridays were Thursdays were Saturdays. Every day of Adam's sixteen years of life could've been a Monday, and it wouldn't have mattered.

What mattered was Adam found the ocean.

Or rather, a very special route to the ocean.

He pulled the Rover to a stop a rough fifty meters from the water. The ocean in front was an expanse of liquid iron, whispering over the crimson, rocky shore everytime it washed over. Thin grey mist rose from the ocean into the smoky sky that was starting to show the ghosts of stars. Proxima Centauri shone from the horizon, a dim red globe. Auroras danced across the sky like immense snakes of fire. A massive wall of glacial ice rose behind him, like the rims of an enormous bowl. One which Adam stood in. Tidal wind, going from the side of perpetual Night to the side of perpetual Day, thrashed and howled around the Rover, rocking it ever slightly. If he stood out in the wind, he'd freeze. If he breathed in it, he'd suffocate.

Adam turned the lever. The Rover shook with a slight explosion. N⁸ Charge one just got planted. He drove the Rover a few meters back as soon as he did, just for safety. A little smoking hole a feet in diameter lay where the Rover was moments ago.

He checked his watch. Seven pm. Now to backtrack home.

But before he could, he spotted something in the ocean. About five hundred yards away and half covered by mist, something bobbed up and down in the water.

Adam pulled down out his telescope and peered through the lense.

It was a Sea Base, or whatever was left of one. Several interconnected white cylinders floated together in a chain. The waved splashed over them, making them roll again and again.

Adam put the telescope down and looked at the Position System.

In the LCD display, he was a tiny black dot, fifty large square's length away from a large cluster of darkness.

Seven hundred miles from Day Side EM.

He looked again to the box floating in the ocean.

What're you doing there?

These parts were of the ebb. The tides here should be carrying whatever debris in towards the ocean. That included the odd floating degraded human habitats.

Regardless of the cause, it was a former human base. By the way it floated, it should be intact. Adam's oxygen mask, fully loaded, could provide oxygen for an hour and a half, if he's calm. This wasn't safe, but chances were, it was worth the risk.

He drove the Rover to the edge of the water, fifty meters from where he planted the charge. Shutting it down, Adam wore his oxygen mask, transparent to not obstruct his vision, and swung the backpack sized plasma cutter in his back. Thinking obliquity, he put the detonator in the satchel he carried to his front. He opened the door and air pressure released with a little hiss. The rover shuddered like a titanium mammoth, as if feeling the chill outside. The wind slammed on Adam's side as he swung himself out.

Adam stepped on the ladder and climbed down it's cold length. Outside was a good two degrees below zero and the metal would've given him frost-bites on his palm of not for his gloves. He let go of it from five feet above. Both feet landed together; the sand was wet, red and cold as it engulfed his feet a few inches.

Walking on it was like walking on putty. It stuck to Adam's boots with a flop flop sound and dragged his feet down. But it was fine. The wind, a howling alien monster from the freezing nights, tried to sweep him off his feet. That was fine too.

Adam went infront of the Rover and pulled out the Yank cord. He had forgotten to wear his belt when he left, so he hooked the head to the collar of his suit.

Twenty paces in, the water was to his ankle. It rose up and went down, the pieces of opaque white glass crystals under the surface shimmering and warping. Cooled by the Night air, the water threatened to freeze Adam.

When the water was to his knees, the ground vanished.

Adam was disoriented for a second, like any would be with their footing suddenly gone. Then he slapped both his arms down on the water to balance himself. The current was already bringing him closer to the base. The weight of the chord on his neck was a barely tangible pressure.

He reached out to hold the large cylinder. It was about three meters wide and six or seven in length, it's right side attached to another, which was half submerged. His palm slipped on its surface for a few seconds before it stopped spinning. The logo of StellerWv came up.

When Adam was born, there had been hundreds of these, all inhabited and busy, floating under the currents like large, metal seaweeds.

Then there were dozens.

Then there were couples.

And now, there was only Adam.

At least on the planet.

Stabilizing the cylinder with his weight, he pulled out the plasma torch from it's compartment on the battery.

He turned the switch, and a sizzling, small ball of blue fire materialized at the tip of the torch.

He touched the light to the cylinder's body, and sparks shot out of the point of contact. The obtrusive sound of metal melting and sizzling stomped on the ambience of the beach, and it's phantom echoed back from the walls of ice far away.

Of course, cutting a hole into the cylinder with a plasma cutter would take hours in the least, but that wasn't what Adam planned to do.

When he was about an inch into the metal of the cylinder, he took the plasma torch back in compartment and looked at the shape he made.

It wasn't round.

It looked like his pancakes.

Well, forgive him for forgetting to learn fine arts while simultaneously surviving and trying to make something that qualified as Megastructure.

He put the torch back in the compartment and, from his satchel, pulled out a circular object the size of a thumb. An N⁸ mini-charge. Being pressed into the center of the shape, it stayed put. He uncapped it and brought out the fuse, letting it droop like a string.

Adam pulled his plasma torch back out again, fired it up and held the spark to the end of the string.

The fuse was lit.

Quick but too slow for adrenaline, he put the plasma torch in the compartment and pulled the zip that shut it airtight. Hands to his chest, he curled up into a ball and sunk.

The water was cold enough to burn, even through the suit. The world above was bleary and tangled; The world below an abyss of dark blue. The ocean was muffled inside itself. Adam could hear his mask working to convert his carbon emissions back to oxygen. A electric whine and a metal tick tick tick. It smelled like burning copper.

There was a muffled whoomp and the sound of metal clinking. The charge had detonated.

Adam lifted his head to come to the top, but banged it on something solid instead.

Looking up, he saw the white body of the cylinder.

Ah.

The current had moved him.

He swam a few exhausting feet against the current, and came up on the shore side of the cylinder.

Where the shape was, was now only a hole. Dark, because it faced away from light. It was just wide enough for Adam.

Holding on to the edge of the hole, Adam hoisted himself up and into the cylinder, the water already slipping off his Neopolymer suit.

The right side was what had originally been made to be the floor. The control panel was that way. A cadaver was strapped to a chair, yellow and blue, the chair laying sideways. Something slimy covered the ground. Adam couldn't smell. It would've been nostalgic. The chamber rolled a little again and Adam balanced by putting his hands on the wall.

There was something small under his left hand. He picked it up. It was small chip, covered in goo. He wiped the goo with his thumb.

It was an optical memory drive, unharmed and well-jacketed in Graphene. He looked around. There were more strewn about. On the wall. Stuck in the control panel. Dipped in the slime. There was half a box of the stuff, in the goo right infront of the cadaver.

"Oh ho," a little exclamation escaped Adam. It seemed his cadaver buddy left him a final gift before their last sleep.

The risk was worth it. Even if the memory chips are empty.

Adam crouched down to collect all the chips. The cylinder bobbed left and right and up and down, making him balance himself every once in a while. He took the chips and put them in his satchel. Everything from used up cans of food, to old burnt out Lightcubes, to the parts of a hydrolytic generator were strewn about. None usable. Water splashed and sloshed around the cylinder. The cord reminded him of land.

It was after he cleaned and emptied the chips in the box into his satchel, that he noticed that Cadaver was holding something in their armpit.

Adam somehow got his hands around the object — it was box shaped and the size of a basketball — and yanked, but the cadaver wouldn't let go. It had died with it, and went through rigor mortis with it. Adam yanked harder. No use. He was slipping on the curved floor. Putting his feet against the wall for leverage, he pulled again.

The cadaver's arm ripped off.

Oh well.

He used the heel of his palm to wipe the slime of his trophy, and it took him exactly three seconds to recognize it.

Adam swallowed his tongue.

It was a Signal Receiver.

Last five day's anxiety came rushing in a panic. He fumbled and almost dropped it. Setting it down with careful, jittery fingers, he pulled out the plasma torch out of his back. He unscrewed the lead and bared the wires.

For this to work, the receiver needs a voltage converter in it.

The sockets to the receiver was underneath. He separated the wires with gloved hands and put them in the sockets.

A green light, somewhere inside the box's semi transparent body, lit up. A deep static came out of its speakers.

Adam let out a relieved breath. It was working .

He touched the top of the box and ran his fingers over the stained surface. Sure enough, when he reached the center, a small green circle lit up. He tapped it to switch from AM to FM. The circle turned blue. Adam touched the edge of the circle and slowly rotated it. The pitch of the static changed as he shifted through the frequencies.

About a quarter way through, the static dropped. And Adam's heart dropped with it. A mechanised female voice spoke through the speaker.

"-auras log: one seven four nine three.

Abstract log:

Ship condition: Critical.

X-124 Ionic Propulsion system: Offline

Artificial Photosynthetic unit: Online

Radio communication module: ERROR 709, Reciever offline.

Centipetral Gravity: Ten point Five eight.

Habitat conservation: Twelve percent.

Gene bank: seventy nine percent conserved.

Temperature in habitat: twenty seven degrees Celsius.

Air humidity: fifty six percent.

Human population:-"

Adam held his breath.

"One."

"HAHAHAHA!" Adam leaned back and laughed out loud.

They're still alive!

That son of a gun in space lived another day!

The mechanised voice droned on about other things for a while before saying, "Playing Last Transmitted message:"

Then, the voice changed. The pitch became lower, like a girl or a young boy, "I'm here."

Adam smiled.

They were there. There they were.

The first he had Received the signal had been three years ago. The night the only other person alive with him died.

Joseph. A twenty year old walking bundle of self esteem issues. It wasn't anything flashy. Joseph wandered into a magnetic blind zone, and his Oxygen mask shorted. He tried to send a signal to Adam. He did. But Adam was too far away.

Adam remembered sitting by Joseph, who was still a bundle but lacked both walking and self esteem issues. And he took off his mask. And just sat. And just waited.

There hadn't been sadness. Or anger. Or dread.

There was only.... Obsolescence.

Then, when Adam was beginning to feel sleepy, Joseph's comm module had come on.

Adam had listened drowsily as it droned on about the ships condition, it's online and offline parts, until it came to the recording.

"I'm here."

And they were there.

And then there was sadness. And then there was anger. And then there was dread.

Because then, there was purpose.

Could it be a fluke? An anomaly? A heat sensor acting weird? A programing anomaly refusing to let a value be zero?

Maybe.

But for Adam, it was very real.

The Receiver went into static, then the voice began droning again. "Tauras log one seven four..."

Adam pulled the plug out of the Receiver and picked up the lead from the ground, intending to screw it back on.

That's when he ran out of cord.

Adam's collar bit into his trachea and he fell back. The lead of the plasma torch fell from his grasp. The cord sunk into a crevice of the irregular hole and his occiput slammed against the wall. And then he was pinned there.

Stars flooded his vision. His lung was too shallow and the air too hot. His tongue lolled out of his mouth.

The lead of the torch laid a few feet out of reach. Adam tried to reach for it. His fingers grazed the metal surface, yet he couldn't grab it. All the air in the world was finishing up. He coughed but choked on that cough. His brain pounded against his skull.

Then he saw the cadaver's arm.

He grabbed the detached limb. The hand was Clenched into a fist, and the elbow was bent, so it couldn't grab. Adam grabbed the end of the arm, hooked it behind the lead and pulled. The lead came only a couple inches closer to him, but that all he needed. He grabbed it.

It took an excruciatingly long time to screw in the lead to the cable. Turned on and turned up, Adam reaches back and touched the plasma torch to the cord.

Nothing happened.

The heat seared Adam's hand even through the gloves. Blue light cast shadows on the cylinder's interior.

But the cord stayed put. It was heating up now. Adam felt the blistering heat on his neck. But it it didn't budge the slightest. The world was beginning to mottle and darken.

He tasted blood; he smelled it. A string of saliva made its way down his chin. His lungs were replaced by pits of tar.

Then the cord snapped.

He was thrown forward as the cylinder spun all of a sudden. He fell on his right shoulder and bounced. There was a thump, and it was all black.

-------

Adam woke up to getting strangled by the cadaver.

He pushed it away from him. It had probably fallen on him when the cylinder tumbled. His mask was covered in cadaver goo. He wiped it off.

There was a splitting headache when Adam tried to stand, so he crouched down low, and looked out the window.

Open ocean. The coast was a barely visible red line in the distance. How far was he out? If Adam were to guess, it'd be a dozen miles.

The cylinder bobbed on the water again. Adam checked his watch. Eight seven pm. The cylinder was probably moving the whole time Adam was in it; the cord was a lot longer than two hundred meters. But it wasn't moving when Adam spotted it. That could only mean one thing; that the cylinder dislodged when Adam blew the hole in it.

If so, Adam had been knocked out for almost twenty minutes, and he'd been floating for forty or so.

Did he have a concussion?

No way to know yet.

The wave made the cylinder rock again. It was the deep sea. The current was strong here. There was no way Adam could swim through these waters.

Adam slumped down on the ground.

If it took him fifteen kilometers off coast in forty minutes, that makes the current speed twenty two and a half kilometers per hour. That'd leave him thirty two hours before the Constant Dayside EMP from Proxima Centauri became strong enough to toast the oxygen mask.

So, even if he restarts the cylinder's power system to connect it to his oxygen mask, he had one day and eight hours left to live.

All of which he wanted to spend sleeping.

But Adam didn't sleep. He was one of those people who could never sleep when they wanted to.

So instead, he drew. With his finger on the stain that seemed to be everywhere. He drew the only he'd been drawing for the last four years.

A big square. The primary thrusters. To get the whole thing off the ground. Methane engines.

A big, long triangle a length above the square. The tertiary thrusters. That's a rich word for it, though. It was basically a big bag of Nukes.

A curved line went under the triangle's base. The hemispherical shield. To catch the explosion. A circle to the triangle's tip; residence.

And that would be a crude drawing of what everyone Adam knew had been trying to build for as long as he knew them. A rocket. To get off a dream turned nightmare. A rocket back home that's being steadily built in the heart of a disemboweled mountain. Using twelve thousand half gigaton bombs to reach earth in twenty years.

They had almost finished. When Joseph died, all that was left to do was lower the upper parts on the lower ones. The ship had been made so it took no more than a single person to operate.

Then Adam drew a square between the triangle and the base square.

It was his modification. His design.

An X124 ion thruster. To go to Tauras. To go to the one person alive there and tell them, "I'm here too."

And now Adam was dying in a ditch.

Admitted, a ditch the size of an ocean, but still a ditch.

He put his palm on the edge of the hole and looked out. The water was a dark blue under now clear orange sky. There were a few clouds here and there. Big, menacing clouds gathered far into the horizon. The chilly wind from the Nightside blew on the ocean, making the waves that pushed him further and further.

Adam chuckled, and picked up a lightcube. It was ironic. The place he thought to be safe is pushing him towards death. That too for the exact reason it is safe.

The lightcube lit up.

That was surprise. The fact that the lightcube still had functional battery left made Adam feel... Envious. Adam had taken an oath, to save the person who once saved him, and he couldn't fulfill. The lightcube had taken an oath to enlighten, and it still fulfilled it.

And that made him envious.

Still lit, he took the lightcube and lowered it to the water, before letting go.

The cube sank a meter. Then two meters. Then three. Then five. Ten. Adam watched it with a morbid of satisfaction.

Then, at almost fifteen meters or so, the lightcube moved back.

Adam blinked.

What just happened?

It was absolutely possible that the lightcube only appeared to move back, because Adam and the cylinder was moving forward. But it was worth another shot.

Adam looked around for another cube that'd light. He found one; it wouldn't light up for a second, but then it did.

He held the cube above the water and marked an imaginary point ten meters from there.

If the current is going at twenty two kilometers per hour, it'd take one and a half seconds for the cube to be behind them. If it's less, then Adam is up to something.

Adam let go of the cube.

Around thirteen meters down, the cube moved backwards, stopping it's acceleration at three and about a quarter seconds.

Then it crossed the ten meters distance four and a half second from starting the count.

There was a back current. The gravitational back current. A slower, bulkier movement than the surface waves caused by the wind, but definitely there.

But could it get Adam to shore?

If the calculations are correct, the current moved only five or so kilometers per hour. That'd take over three hours to get to the shore.

It was eight eleven pm, now. Adam had nineteen minutes of oxygen left.

Adam needed another power source, apart from the cylinder.

He looked at the plasma torch.

This should not be tried at home.

Scratch that. It should not be tried at home, playground, or anywhere where your life isn't in danger.

Adam took a deep breath, and took off his mask.

Calmly, he took off the battery case by the side of the mask and removed the rechargable cell. It went to his satchel. Then he unscrewed the plasma torch's lead, and put the two thick wires on the two points of the battery. A low, electric whine let him know the mask was working.

Now to find something to keep it there with.

Adam reached behind him. There was almost a meter of strap dangling from his neck. Now loose, the hook unhooked easily. The strap was soon wrapped around the two electrodes, keeping them in place.

Adam put the mask on his face and took another deep breath. The air was hot, but he didn't smell smoke, or anything else weird.

Then he pulled the mask away again, pulled out an N⁸ charge and rubbed it over the knot, using the waxy, hydrophobic material to render it waterproof. Again, he wore the mask and took in a breath of fire.

He peered out the hole again.

There was another problem. He had the used the battery exactly three times. As a plasma torch twice and to power a receiver once. The power that went into the receiver was negligible. But if he had used the plasma torch for twenty minutes total, it would power an oxygen mask for about four hours.

It would take three hours for him to get to shore. An hour was not enough to find his Rover if he really gets lost.

He needs some way to navigate.

He looked left and right, and then opened his front satchel.

The detonator.

An explosion of two hundred kilograms of N⁸ throwing red sand in the sky should be visible from pretty far.

How many ways could this go wrong?

The battery on his back could short circuit in the water.

He could crash onto a submerged rock.

He could've parked the Rover too close to the charge, essentially blowing it up and dooming himself when he pressed the detonator.

How many ways could this go right?

One.

But he could believe in that one scenario. He has been for three years. It didn't matter how many ways it could go wrong. It didn't matter how many ways it could be false. He couldn't die here. He had somewhere to go. Someone to meet. He had three words to say.

Adam looked at the sky. At the vast expanse of space, intimidating and liberating, and, defying all logic, he saw the Tauras, floating lonely and broken. Because it had a soul in it, lonely and broken.

"Thank you," Adam whispered in a coarse voice, "For being there."

And then, he closed his eyes and dove for the depths.