Be assured your fate will find you.

 

I have fought destiny my entire life. Created to be one thing when every ounce of my being wanted to be something else; a part of a family. But space travel was my destiny.

 

I always heard it said that in space, no one can hear you scream. I have since learned the validity of that statement.

 

Traveling to the great beyond has appealed to Earth’s inhabitants since before the oceans turned to deserts. To be one of those explorers was not a choice I would have made given the option.

 

Conceived in a test tube from the DNA of strangers who would forever remain unknown to each other, and to me, I was an orphan before I drew first breath. From an early age, I wondered why scientists would create life in a Petrie dish when the planet they called home had already neglected its main purpose: to sustain life rather than take it.

 

The answer to that question had died along with those who raised it. Their souls lost in the purgatory of the lifeless ground that was once brimming with energy.

 

I had never seen that life.

 

Earth was drawing its last breath; but my fate lay elsewhere.

 

Since Earth had forgotten its role in the universe decades before I was generated, many people had requested to travel on the first ship to seek life on other planets. But only a few destinies intertwined with mine.

 

I was originated to be a space traveler, along with others of my kind. Beings who were made to be expendable. Those set to explore the vast unknown, searching for the next home that could support our kind; at least until as long as it took for us to destroy it as we had Earth.

 

We went through as much training as experts thought necessary before setting out into the beyond. Each of us, only a quarter of a century old, wondering what we would find in the vast universe known only to us as space.

 

During our travels, many became ill. Some succumbed to Space Sickness and passed on without the glimpse of a new life.

Unfortunately, all who knew how to pilot our ship were among those who died before we landed. This forced us to come in hard on Theta Quad, a planet on the dark side of a moon thought to be uninhabited.

 

Even so, when our ship finally came to rest on the surface, we made our exit with the unexpected feelings of renewed energy and hope.

 

Months later, I have been on Theta Quad long enough to learn my way from one watering hole to the next, one food source to another. But I have learned so much more than that. I have learned that space doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, male or female, birthed or cloned. It doesn’t care if you love it or hate it. It doesn’t care if you are a mother, father, child or immigrant. I have learned the hard but true fact that the universe doesn’t exist to coddle people. Only itself.

 

We were a group of fifty when we began our journey to Theta Quad. One by one, the journey, and then the planet, separated us, taking our lives as effectively, and often painfully, as possible. Only twenty-one of the original fifty remained; doomed to exist where we were with no way back to Earth. Not that there was a reason to go back.

 

We had pulled the dead from the ship and left them on the ground to return to the dust. There was no reason for such things as a civilized burial here.

My fellow travelers were snatched away by alien monsters, or fell into the many craters that sprang up at your feet without warning.

 

Although the air was breathable and water and food could be found, the appeal to begin life anew was not to be discovered here.

 

I watched from a short distance as the last of my traveling companions took their final step, placing them in the throes of a fiery crater.

 

I realized in that moment that I had traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to become isolated once more. The only family I could have called my own had all been taken from me by destiny.

 

I screamed my despair into the void that was now my home, and mine alone. The vast emptiness did not care about my scream, but still, it echoed back a single word I had been forced to claim since birth:

 

Orphan.