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“I’m glad you could come, Nachshon. I couldn’t sleep at all.”

Nachshon Aminadav smiled. “Neither could I.” He was lying in bed with his fellow cadet and fiancée, Mirya Leyv. Tomorrow both of them would enter a pod for the first time. Their class, which had numbered in the thousands, had dwindled to a few hundred. The others had dropped out, whether from failing one of the grueling mental tests, or simply from stress.

“Once we graduate, we’ll fly together.”
“I’d love that.”
“And I love you.”


Next morning…

Nachshon ran his fingers over the podship. It was quite large – the size of an interplanetary shuttle. The actual pod itself was much smaller, but what good was ejecting from a doomed ship if you had no way to get somewhere? The pod was in fact a functional spaceship, equipped with thrusters, basic sensors, camera drones, minimal shields, even a warp drive.
As he had been ordered, he disrobed before entering the pod, leaving on only a simple torso suit that allowed his body to connect with the life-support systems. He reached out with his bare foot to touch the fluid. It was only lukewarm, but given the cold environment of the space station, it felt warm to Nachshon.

He slipped into the pod, allowing the various tubes and interface systems to connect to his body. For a moment, his senses went dark – then, he could once more see, only now he was seeing the pod from the vantage point of a camera drone outside.

“Welcome,” said Aura, the shipboard AI system.

Nachshon got out of his pod. He had completed all the tests, and his graduation was imminent. Tomorrow, he would be a pod pilot. He and Mirya would venture to the stars together.

He ran across the docking bay to Mirya’s ship, hoping to congratulate her as she exited her pod. But what he saw instead was his worst nightmare – an unconscious Mirya being lifted from her pod.

“MIRYA! NO!” he shouted, as he pushed aside technicians to get to his fiancée. The medic looked at him with a resigned expression.
“It’s mind-lock. She’s gone.”
“No, it can’t be, she’s –” the rest was lost in a flood of tears and gibberish.
“I’m sorry for your loss. Rest assured, she will be taken care of. The Pirkotan Institute is a fine one.”
“May I accompany her?”
“Of course.”

Nachshon spent the next hour at Mirya’s side. He tried to say something, but no words came out. He had just suffered a terrible loss – that of his true love.
Someone knocked on the door. It was the medic.

“In preparing for Mirya Leyv’s transfer to the Pirkotan Institute, we discovered that she had a living will. She wishes to be euthanized, rather than placed in care. She specifically requested that you do it.”
Nachshon stood up. He knew, of course. He had signed a similar living will.

“I will do it.”
“She also stipulated that while her family would receive most of her personal possessions, there is one that she wished you to have.”

The medic handed Nachshon a sheathed blade fifty centimeters long. Nachshon drew it. It was the Leyv family's ancestral blade, normally handed down to the eldest child as he or she became a warrior.

Nachshon swallowed the next wave of tears, and spoke.

“Ever since we met, we’ve been together. We were planning to get married after graduation.”
“What we both wanted was to spend the rest of our lives together. She felt that she would rather live on in my memories than spend the rest of her life in mind-lock. I felt the same.”
“She’s giving me this blade because now, I’m both of us. I’m going to live for both of us. And ironically, as I am a capsuleer, she will live in my memories forever.”

After staring for a few moments, the medic handed Nachshon a syringe.

“Would you prefer to be alone?”
“Yes.”

The medic left. Nachshon bent over Mirya. He kissed her one last time. As he did, he injected a lethal dose of morphine.

“Goodbye, Mirya.”