Flash Fiction: Light Years (100/100)

... together.




The end has been reached!

Just to recap, Light Years is a work of flash fiction, relayed one word per week over the previous two years. It is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever recounted (as far as I know); in real-time its one hundred words would have taken exactly 10,000 years to appear. The first word of the specially-accelerated transmission was published on September 13th, 2009. Our unfortunate space-traveller reached the half-way point of his or her journey on the 22nd of August 2010. The final word was sent today, 7th August 2011.


The traveller's words have now been pieced together into one continuous story. Here it is :
 

One thousand light-years from home. Six centuries of time. The cold of vacuum. No hope. Earth? No word. The starship malfunctioning. I’m alone with the universe. New suns blink by, there, gone. I leave behind countless unknown novae, nebulae, neutron stars.

One week’s consciousness every year. Check the ship, correct navigation. What damaged the machinery? Instead it’s one second a hundred years. One frame glimpsed per century. One word into the abyss before the oblivion of stasis. The welcome oblivion.

Eighty seconds of life, eight thousand years. My life-span is that of stars. Immortality. The galaxy and I age together.

Message ends ...