The Capsule is a white tube of sterile plastic and humming fans. It is exactly four meters wide and twelve meters long. For me and Elias, it is the entire universe.

We are the last two. The others died in the Great Sifting, or they simply ceased to be when the life-support in the other sectors failed. Now, there is only the hum of the air recycler and the rhythmic drip of the water condenser.

We don't talk about the destination anymore. Epsilon-Prime is a mathematical abstraction, a coordinate in a computer that hasn't been rebooted in fifty years. We don't talk about the 'New World' because the word 'world' implies a horizon, and we have no horizons.

"Do you think the stars are still there?" Elias asked today. He was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling panels.

"The sensors say yes," I replied.

"The sensors are lying. Everything in this tube is lying. The air is a lie, the light is a lie, even our hunger is just a scheduled chemical release."

He turned to look at me. His eyes were sunken, the color of old ash. We have been in this tube for twenty years. We are the same age, though we have aged in different ways. He has become a creature of anger; I have become a creature of silence.

"Why do we keep going?" he asked.

"Because the momentum is already there," I said. "Stopping would require more energy than we have. We are just a bullet fired a long time ago, waiting to hit something."

He laughed, a dry, hacking sound. "A bullet. I like that. We're just a piece of lead flying through the dark."

We spent the afternoon in silence. It is a heavy silence, a physical thing that fills the space between us. But it is not a lonely silence. In the absence of everything else—no cities, no forests, no other people—the presence of another human being becomes an absolute.

Elias's breathing is the only clock I have. The way he shifts his weight, the way he sighs in his sleep—these are the landmarks of my existence.

"I'm glad it's you," he whispered, just before the lights dimmed for the sleep cycle.

"Me too," I said.

We don't know if we will ever arrive. We don't know if there is anything left to arrive at. But as I lay there in the dark, listening to the steady beat of his heart, I realized that the destination was a distraction. The journey wasn't about the star at the end; it was about the two of us, here, in the silence, refusing to be alone.

*** OTMES-V2-CODE: [V-12]-[T9-10]-[theta:270,M4:8.0,R:0.4]