Chapter 13: A Reason To Live

Wayne sat at a small metal table in his room, staring blankly at a clear glass bottle.

It was cheap, strong liquor, a kind that tasted like gasoline and burned all the way down. Back on Earth, Wayne wouldn’t have used it to clean his tools. He used to be a senior engineer at a big corporation, making three hundred thousand dollars a year. He used to drink expensive scotch. He had a future.

Now, this cheap bottle was the most valuable thing he owned and It was probably the last alcohol in the universe.

“Drink it,” Zack voice came from across the table.

Wayne didn’t move. He looked at the photo in his hand. His wife. His daughter. Smiling under a blue sky that no longer existed.

For the last four days, the two roommates had been stuck in a loop. Drink, pass out, wake up, remember the horror, and drink again. They were trying to drown the grief, but the alcohol wasn’t working anymore. Instead of numbing him, it just made the pain sharper.

“What’s the point, Zack?” Wayne whispered, his voice rough. “I came here for the danger pay. I was going to buy them a house. Now… they’re ash. Why should I keep going?”

Zack didn’t answer. He just poured a glass and downed it in one gulp, coughing hard.

The mood in the living quarters wasn’t panic anymore. It was worse. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of fifty thousand people who had given up.

Bzzzt.

The monitor on the wall flickered to life. The static cleared, showing Captain Jason.

“Attention everyone.”

Jason’s voice wasn’t soft. It didn’t have the comforting tone of a politician offering thoughts and prayers. It was cold, hard, and metallic.

“I am Captain Jason, the commander of Moon Base One. I am telling you this because it is time you knew the truth.”

Wayne looked up slowly. The truth? What’s there left to know besides death?

“It is with regret that I tell you: we have received zero distress signals from Earth. Except for the Victory, no other ships escaped the atmosphere.”

The words were a final sentence. Down the hall, Wayne heard a faint cry through the thin walls.

“However,” Jason continued, his eyes darkening. “Our scientists have analyzed the data recorded right before the destruction. I want you to look at this.”

The screen changed. It showed a complex readout of energy and gravity.

[Telemetry Data – Event Zero]

[Earth Rotation Change: Increased](0.0031)

[Gravity Spike: Increased](0.000176)

[Energy Signature: Gamma-Ray Burst] (Massive)

Wayne’s eyes widened. He was an engineer. He understood numbers. And these numbers were impossible.

“Look at the data,” Jason’s voice rose, cutting through Wayne’s drunken haze. “Natural disasters don’t spin a planet faster. Asteroids don’t make gamma bursts this big. Humans don’t have weapons this strong. We don’t have tech that can control gravity.”

“This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t nature.”

“It was a targeted strike by a hostile alien civilization.”

The air left the room.

Wayne gasped. The bottle in his hand felt suddenly heavy.

Aliens?

The nervous whispers in the mess hall, the jokes about the black-budget funding, they were supposed to be just, just jokes. Paranoia to pass the time. But this? The blood drained from Wayne’s face. Actual contact. And a first strike?

The silence of the cosmos wasn’t peace; it was a breath held in terror. The universe wasn’t empty space. It was a Dark Forest, teeming with unseen eyes, and by revealing this creature, humanity hadn’t just stepped on a landmine, we had screamed into the darkness. The hunters hadn’t just found Earth. We had invited them in.

“They didn’t just kill us,” Jason growled. “They exterminated us. They saw us as a threat, or maybe just pests, and they burned our home.”

Wayne’s hand started shaking. His knuckles turned white around the bottle.

A minute ago, he had felt nothing but a hollow sadness. He wanted to die because there was no reason to live.

But now?

A fire shot up his spine. It wasn’t fear. It was hatred. Pure fury. They hadn’t just died in a tragedy. They had been murdered.

“We aren’t extinct,” Jason said. “Moon Base One still stands.”

A number flashed on the screen, big and bold.

[51,223]

“Fifty-one thousand, two hundred and twenty-three. That is the number of humans left in the universe. It includes you. It includes me. Every race, every nation, every background.”

​”From now on, borders do not exist. Flags do not matter. We are no longer defined by where we came from, but by who we are together. There is only Us.”.

Jason’s voice got loud.

“Every life is a resource now. Every pair of hands is a weapon. If you sit in your rooms and rot, you are doing exactly what the enemy wants. You are finishing their job for them.”

“Our goal is simple. We survive. Not for ourselves. We survive for revenge. We survive to build a force that can one day make them pay.”

“We are evacuating the surface,” Jason announced. A schematic appeared, showing a huge sphere under the crater. “We are moving into the Alien Ship. It will be our fortress.”

The silence in the room was absolute. The base, the funding, the secrecy, it all made sickening sense now. We had been walking on top of it for years.

Wayne looked at the massive sphere on the screen, his survival instinct screaming against it. We were running from the hunters in the dark, only to hide inside the very thing that proved they were real.

Zack stood up. He swayed a little, but his eyes were clear for the first time in days.

“Wayne,” Zack said. “Does a man need a reason to live?”

“I don’t have a wife,” Zack said, his voice cracking. “My parents died years ago. But I remember what my mom told me before she passed. She said, ’Zack, find a nice girl. Get married. Give me grandkids.’”

Zack choked back a sob, wiping his nose on his hand.

“I want to live. I want to find a wife. I want to have kids. I want to make my mom proud. I can’t let our family line end here.”

“I have to live,” Zack stammered, clenching his fists. “I haven’t even had a girlfriend yet…”

Wayne lowered his head. He looked at the photo of his wife and daughter one last time.

If he died here, drinking himself to death, their memory died with him. If he survived… if he built this base into something strong… he could carry them with him. He could make their deaths mean something.

“She would want me to live, too,” Wayne whispered.

He stood up. He looked at the bottle of liquor, the symbol of his despair, his retirement, his old life.

SMASH.

Wayne threw the bottle against the metal wall. Glass shattered, and the strong liquid splashed on the floor, evaporating quickly in the dry air.

He didn’t need to forget anymore. He needed to remember.

“Come on, Zack,” Wayne said, stepping over the broken glass toward the door. His engineer’s mind was already racing, thinking about the move to the ship.

“Let’s go. We have a world to build.”

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