Colony of One

[RoninFrog]

My name is Dunrick Kerman.  If anyone should find this file, I just want you to know that I tried. 

At this point, I've given up any hope of rescue.  It's been eight years since I've received any form of transmission from the KSC.  It's only a matter of time before something happens.  My fuel cells could go out.  The algae tanks could freeze over.  I could miss a rung on a ladder.  I could spend the next hundred thousand years living in this base as Laythe's orbit slowly decays until Jool's radiation belts melt the poles and I drown in the ocean.  It's no longer a matter of how long I'll be here until rescue comes.  It's a matter of how long I'll be here until I die.

I am the only one on this planet.  It is only me, the uncaring cold, and the faceless green light of Jool.  I haven't received any communication from another person for nearly three thousand five hundred days.  I can feel my mind changing, slowly numbing to the loneliness, becoming a scheduled machine.  My only solace is this writing, hoping that maybe in milennia to come by pure chance someone will land here and find this hard drive buried in the permafrost and the wreckage of my eroded base.  That maybe someone will know I existed.

I've come to accept that no one will take me back to Kerbin, back home.  I can't accept that mission control has forgotten me.  My mission was successful.  The ISRU is working.  I am ready to refuel spaceplanes.  But no spaceplanes come to be refueled.  I've been given no further instructions from mission control.  They haven't even checked to see that I am still alive.  My antenna isn't powerful enough to reach Kerbin, but KSC should be able to reach me with theirs.  Are they punishing me for something I've done?  There have been seven transfer windows since the base was established.  They've spent years and millions to establish this base.  Even if they throw me away, could they really throw all that away?

I have an entire planet to myself, but the only thoughts in this whole world are my own.  Some days I pretend I've died.  Some of those days pretend stretches into belief.  I'm trapped in an eternal twilit purgatory.  I drink the same thick algae soup every day and check the same air filtration and drilling systems, watched the same unsetting green sphere in the southern sky.  There is nothing I wouldn't give to see a real sunrise.  To hear music, to see someone smile.  I try to smile at myself in the silver reflections of the air ducts, but I've almost forgotten how.  My facial muscles have atrophied.

Why am I even writing this?  No one's going to find it.  It would be fantasy to think that someone would find this hard drive intact if at all.  It would be fantasy to imagine writing this isn't a waste of time.  The icy Laythe atmosphere will find it first.  No one will ever know about me; for all purposes I am already dead.  My time is already wasted.  The fantasy world is the only world I can live in, the only world with hope.  There is no hope in the real one anymore.