Epilogue
Coming up next...
ISS, Earth's obit - November 2022
Amelia sighed to herself as she checked over her worms, "and they wouldn't let me bring mice-" she mumbled to herself as she picked over their little boxes and the feed that looked like it was meant to breed a rose bush rather than a living creature. She tutted and waggled her toes in the antigravity mid-air float she was currently enjoying and then reached up to tip the food into a tube that fed through into the worm enclosures. Each one had a name taped to the glass, one for each of her three sisters; Nancy, Kate and Liz; and one for her brother Derek. Then she had a few spare so she added; Ryan after an ex-boyfriend, and then Mary after a girl she had a crush on back in college.
"Hello babies," she said sweetly then smiled before doing a backflip in order to see the Earth. It was a hobby of hers, hovering outside the window with her arms folded just to stare down at the planet. The day the radio had gone out was one lodged in her memory, her place on the International Space Station was a final measure to make sure that humanity didn't die out. She'd been sent up with a selected pilot as a last resort so that if the time came where no one was left on Earth she could somehow repopulate some other planet she figured out how to inhabit. They were a little hazy with the details. But for three years it'd been her existence, watching the Earth from her little window, checking on her worms and watching more and more lights flicker out each night.
When they passed over the US she would look down at Seattle and make a few prayers, she wasn't religious but at this point there didn't seem like much else of an option, and Mary had been a big pray-er back in college. The pilot had carried the virus up with him without noticing, which was kind of a set back, that was a day Amelia thought about giving up on her research, but then she put on a space suit and jettisoned his body from the airlock. She spent fourteen days inside that suit to make sure she didn't catch it. She never did.
She was a research biologist and medic but she wasn't a pilot, she wasn't trained to come back to Earth by herself, though now it was looking like her only option. Plus space ice cream really sucked. So she found her fortune teller in a draw and began to pick options. The first time it told her to go back to Earth, the second told her she was going to die, and then another for luck said she should watch tv because there was no way she was going to survive this. The worms agreed. That's when she decided space kinda sucked and that her food was running out, she was down to her last three protein packets - pretty soon she was going to be living of dried milk and toothpaste.