 The following tale is titled Stars by DJ Cactus. You can find it at www.scp-wiki.wiki.com forward slash surprise-happy-birthday-9. It's part of the Gears Day story collection. It called the star Agatha for as long as it could be called a star. It appeared as if overnight shining bright in the northern skies. Brilliant. Even against its peers. I remember when we first saw it on the hill outside of the town with Bethany and Richard laying low in the grass and watching this new herald burning brightly in the heavens above us. What little we knew. What little we could have known. In those dying moments of summer when it was just you, me, Agatha, and the infinite dark above. Who could have felt the cold winds of fall fast approaching? What would you believe if I told you how it ended? Would you know how close I am to you? Even now? Then came the report slowly at first, convincing only those who wanted to believe the worst and then a wave that swallowed even the thermoskeptics, not a star, a meteor, a primordial inferno set loose by the chaos of creation to scream across the cosmos until it met its statistically inevitable end. They gave it another name then, the 2022k-14 meteor, but we still called her Agatha. It helped, early on, to give an identity to this catastrophe. It helped some people to meet it with dignity. What I would have done, they would say, were not for Agatha coming to town. Others begged. Some fell prostrate, worshipped her as a god, as an impending force of judgment. They called out to her in fear, in desperation, in sanity, but their pleas echoed off of unhearing ears and Agatha continued forward, compelled by fate to complete her grim work. And it was in those dark hours when all the lights were going out in our shriveling civilization that the greatest minds of our generation discovered the last way out. I was called to duty, as I had been when I was young, and all those years of research that had long since been decried as wasted suddenly found new purpose. The journals I'd saved, the tables, the calculations, the endless arithmetic, all were giving a new life in the dying light of mankind. Agatha, it was determined, was far too large and far too fast for all the weapons of war that humanity had spent so much time perfecting to make any noticeable difference in her trajectory. She could not be destroyed, not with any arsenal built by human hands, but perhaps she could be averted. There's distance between us, my darling, but it is less every day. I want to see you. I want to be near you again. And still, the numbers never really came together. We toiled for weeks on end in the darkest laboratories on the planet for an answer that would never manifest. While the world burned above us and while the last remaining threads holding our human decency together frayed at the ends, we found nothing but frustration at the bottom of our efforts. There simply was not enough time. Any attempt now to divert Agatha's trajectory would not make a meaningful difference. It would have needed to take an action hundreds of years prior, with 60 million miles of buffer. It was a colleague of mine, Desmond Elliott, who made the great discovery. I remember meeting him at an event some years prior, some dull gathering of astrophysicists with more hair on their chins than on their heads. And I remember the knowing smile you gave me when I rolled my eyes at his conjectures. That if space could be manipulated, then so can time. You don't need to push a hole through space time to get to where you're going, just wrap it around itself. The Elliott Thurman retrocausality engine is what they would call his miracle. A device that directed Tachyon's backwards through time to bend its flow sideways and then push against itself with a stable hand on the ship's automated rudder, all you had to do was ease its sideways into the slipstream and you would drop from one loop to the other. Simple. And they didn't mention how many pilots they put into the testing rigs, but none of us really wanted to know. Agatha had consumed us just as it has consumed the sky, and the pilots didn't return. All the better. They would be spared the worst of what was coming. It couldn't be done with just rudder control and allerion. The onboard computer could tell you when the slipstream was formed, but the moment of dropout could not be handled by a machine. The computers were too efficient, too willing to ease into the transition, and they were pulled apart. All of them. And history became filled with dark streaks of flaming debris that were once machine and pilot. A team was assembled, pilots, engineers, physicists. In simulation we could make the transition once every four or five attempts, but we only needed one. The first team to leave did so aboard a vessel called One Last Chance. The objective was really simple. Find Agatha across the vastness of space and then nudge her sideways. The required variance was only millimeters. Extrapolated over enough time and distance, Agatha would pass a hundred million miles from Earth. If our doom could be averted, the moment she was out of range, the project would cease to exist, and the future no such disaster would have ever inspired our efforts. We just had to find the right time. The right place. How long has it been? How many lifetimes have passed since I held you in my arms? One last chance left our planet like a conquering hero, to the cheers and adulation of a desperately hopeful populace. Their course laid in, a team of seasoned veterans at the helm on a one-way trip into infinity ahead of them. You were with me when we watched them rise into the sky, a sky now dominated by Agatha's grim specter and disappear into the night. I remember you squeezing my hand, flashing another smile but softer this time. A smile weathered by grief and tempered in anticipation. Once she was free of our solar system, one last chance turned towards the universe, set light to Elliot's engine and vanished into history. We wouldn't know how long it would take, though theory suppose we would know immediately or rather we wouldn't know, but days turned to weeks and Agatha grew nearer and our Messiah never emerged. It wasn't until a month after that we determined what had happened. One last chance had left the slipstream, 100 years prior and then been immediately obliterated. We're foolish. Even a century prior Agatha had been going too fast. They arrived when they were set to arrive and they were atomized seconds later. We'd started picking up on their distress signal, flung free from the ship during the collision in the late 70s, a signal we didn't know the origin of or what it could possibly mean, but the central computer recognized it now. Today, like all of us, we're just a little too late. Another vessel was built, another team was assembled, we were so close, it's just the math was off. We had to go back further in time, push the engine harder than we had before. The next attempt failed to cross the slipstream and nervous pilot pushed their crap too slowly and was scattered across a millennium. Another attempt was destroyed before they even left the solar system. The engine inverted and they were flung into a dark, cold future. Time after time, we ran and re-ran our calculations, loaded women and men into increasingly sophisticated vessels, pushed them over the edge and one by one, they were late or too far away or annihilated. For a year, we sent vessels into space, praying that this one would be the one. Each time, it ended in disaster. Did you pray for me when you realized I was gone? Anyway, one day, there was nobody left. Mankind had been reduced to quiet, miserable pockets of whimpering animals hiding under grounds. There were no arks to carry us away, no shields under which we could hide. Every scientist, every architect, every possible combination of team available that could pilot our vessel had been exhausted. A day came when I walked into the hangar of our most recent iteration and I was alone. There were no engineers, no scholars, there was me and there was finality. One more ship, needing only a single operator with an engine that could run for a million years or more. By flooding the interior finality with the same tachyons, its pilot could stay as they were, static and unaging for as long as it would take. He begged me to stay. He begged me to go with you underground. Maybe it'll miss us, you said. Maybe it'll only graze us. I wish I could have maintained your optimism, but I couldn't understand. I might never understand. But I know how it ended. I plotted Agathis trajectory myself a thousand times. Without exception, she would descend from the sky and, in an instant, set the atmosphere alight. She would punch a hole 20 miles deep in the earth and the ejected molten rock would blanket the planet. It would burn us all. We were the ones who had gone underground. The continents would buckle, the seas would thrash and break the shore. Mountains would slide into the chasms of shattered earth and we would all die. Screaming. Agatha had waited a billion years for this moment and she would not be denied. I left you in the morning before you woke. There were no nights anymore. There was just the sun and Agatha. But her room was dark and you didn't see me go. I loaded the few things I wanted to remind me of you. I took her truck to the launch center. There was no one at the gate to welcome me. No one in the lobby to greet me. No one to perform a pre-flight check. No one to wish me well. No anxious and eager crowds cheering my departure. The facility was dark. I was alone, saved for finality. I made the necessary preparations. Had a fine meal. And then I laid in my course. This time we would not be too late. Did you wake up in time to see? This finality rose on a pillar of fire into the light of the morning. There were no scenic views on my ship. She had none of the artistry of her sisters. None of the curved glass and polished steel of one last chance. Long since having been replaced by bulkheads and more sensors. But I had kept a small porthole just to the right of where my head would rest, from which I could look out into the cosmos. And as finality climbed, I caught my last glimpse of you from the site, with the world stretching further and further away from me. I thought of you, laying in our bed, expecting me to be there when you awoke. I wondered if you would feel betrayed like I had abandoned you. I wondered if you'd think I was trying to flee if I was leaving you behind. If only you knew. The space for my body within finality was no bigger than a coffin. There was room enough for the slipstream controls, and enough for me to turn sideways if necessary. I was at, I wouldn't age. I would need food or drink. The onboard systems would maintain my life so long as it was required. All I had to do was push the ship over the slipstream, and then wait. My path out of the solar system took three weeks. On the 23rd day I passed by Agatha. Our paths crossed as I was waking, in the dim light of that far edge of our celestial neighborhood I spotted her. Silently following the path set for her. As I watched her pass, I couldn't help but feel a sense of grim familiarity. We were the same, she and I. Both of us set in motion by forces that existed long before we had. Both of us powerless now to escape our destinies. I wondered about her as she pulled out a view. Was she the living thing? Did she dream? Was Agatha afraid of her death as well? Did she have anyone she loved, waiting for her back home? I turned away from the sun, into the dark cold of open space. I'd never been religious, despite my mother's insistence, but in that moment I closed my eyes and I asked for something. I didn't ask for salvation, didn't ask for an end to the pain. This path I walk now was not one that could be avoided, but I did pray for courage, not just for the moment I was in, but for all the moments to come. The engine behind me roared and time and space sang together as we inverted, twisted, and danced. For a moment, we were all at once. Every vessel that had come before me altogether in a single line as they began dropping from the slipstream or were destroyed by it, I looked to my right. Was there a ship that would follow me? Was there anything for us after my mission? For a moment as my hand trembled in the darkness I felt yours in mine. Were you here with me, guiding my actions? The world grew dark as finality crossed the slipstream she tumbled out into nothingness, ejected into a place that was very different than my own. When I came to my senses I surveyed the heavens. I saw no stars, no planets. Nothing whose light had reached me wherever I was. And for a moment I felt panic. What if I was late like all the others before me? I'd come out on the wrong end. If I'd been ejected into the heat death of the universe, Elliot's miracle would end here. But the computer came online reassuringly reminding me that it was not the distant future that we had landed in, but a far more distant past. Out of my tiny porthole I saw it now, streaks of luminous gas, a cosmic miasma, and behind them points of light. We were just in a dense nebula, far away from Earth, with nothing but space and time between me and my home. And despair gripped me. Was I too far away? Had finality come out too far? Would I have enough time to get back? I thought of you in our bed and locked my jaw in determination. I'd have to make up for lost time, but I could get there. I could make this happen. The computer laid in a course for Agatha's projected trajectory, and finality's extra light engines flung us through space. I was alone. For eons. From my coffin in space I saw wonders, my dear. If only you could have seen them too. The birth of stars, of worlds, dreams, nightmares like you could never believe. For years, then decades, then centuries, until any measure of time devised by man was insufficient. How far can the human mind stretch? How long can it persist in the face of endless, inexorable time? I'd close my eyes to dream and lifetimes would pass. I sang once, a song my father used to sing to me before bed, and the song lasted a thousand years. The change of finality happened so gradually. It took me 700 years to notice. The flight computer warned me about trajectory variants and had to compensate. Then I scanned my vessel to find the disturbance. I discovered, to my dismay, that the ship had nearly quintupled in size. Gas in particular from the young universe attracted by the pull of the extra light engines had begun to accumulate across the hull. The scanners were unimpeded, but it would not be long before the extra lights were damaged by the thrust of ionized metal forming around finality. I could only watch in horror as my tiny window to the world became cloudy and then dim and then dark. After another 4,000 years, I was in total blackness. But the extra lights continued on as long as they could. I came to the grim realization that I'd run out of propulsion before I found Agatha if I could even find it in time. I had hoped to rely on extra lights to give me time to find it, but without them, I was just a missile. But there was another way. My scanners did not know where Agatha was, but the computer knew where she would be. While I still had command over finality, I made a course correction to .100 years in the past from where I had come and brought the engines to maximum power. One last chance had not been able to disrupt Agatha's arc, but finality could. I made the calculations myself. We had significant mass now, only increases we hurtled through space. Any angle of attack would be sufficient, so long as we made contact with enough speed. Finality screamed to the sky, extra lights blazing like the sun until the dust and debris caked over the nacelles, and then were suffocated. I dreamed of you in those days. Often, I would slip back into sleep and be in your arms again, laying in our bed, talking about your work or your studies, or what we wanted to watch on TV. Where had the time gone? We talked about starting a family, about getting a dog. You wanted me to move to Vancouver, but I wanted to stay close to our parents. It just felt like we had nothing but time. We couldn't spend it fast enough. While I slept in my cocoon, I thought of you. What we would do together if I was able to save us. What would our lives take us? Carolyn. You told me if it's a girl, Carolyn. And if it's a boy, George. After your father. Sometimes I would dream about the world I left. You died. I mean, I'm sure of that. Agatha struck the earth. She would have turned into a cloud of hot vapor. And the worst of them I see you laying there. As you were when I left you. And the wall of fire engulfed our home. I wonder if you felt any pain in that moment. Or if it was over before you realized that it even happened. Did you curse me? Did you cry out? Did you think of me at all? Did anyone think of me at all? Is there anything left to think about? The stars. We're all just stars. Don't fear my darling. I'm getting close now. I have been in the dark for so long, but I have not given up. My body has changed, but my mind is resolute. I will not abandon my mission, not now. So dark in here. Scanners tell me that finality is tumbling through space. I wonder how large it has gotten. I wonder if it'll be large enough to disrupt Agatha's course. I run the numbers again. Must be. And something strikes the hull, but I barely feel it. Nothing can stop me now. Nothing will stop me from reaching her. I'm so close. I could feel it. Scanners have not found Agatha yet, but I know she's out there. I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna save us. And then, when I've completed my task, I will return to you. And we can be together again. I'm coming home. Would you believe me? If I told you how it ended. I'll see you all again on Tuesday.