On the surface of the anemic satellite, amidst the craterous scars left by the celestial daggers of far off worlds, sat the gift of another, closer sphere. A fragment of the world whose blue and green gaze had been locked on the face of its grey follower for eons. This remnant had not arrived with the calamitous fanfare of the moon’s other galactic wayfarers, the soft curves and hard angles of its structure rising up from the surface its only defining features, contrasted with the immense gouges in the lunar flesh left by its far-flung predecessors.
The sharp, alien geometries of the visitor, meticulously crafted from the metallic bones of the gentle giant 238,000 miles away had begun to dissolve into the flat, soft desert of its surroundings. The creeping tendrils of dust encroaching on the traveler’s reflective surface, ever so slowly being consumed by the apathetic barrens of its host. At its summit, a rectangle which once bore the only color on the world now displayed only the ashen standard of its claim.
The scene within the solid skin of the station matched the stagnation of the surrounding void. The only motion disturbing the perfect stillness originating from a single once-gleaming construct, endlessly carrying out the will of a consciousness that had long before ceased to be, and blind to the inanimate skeletons of its kind that ringed it. Its own life ending and resuming in cycles with the fading and return of the light.
This ghastly tranquility was mirrored in a half dozen rooms throughout the station. In one, a channel through which clear liquid once flowed freely was now choked with lifeless silt. The thin, verdant limbs of a small garden that had once stretched and reached up towards the distant cradle of its genesis now stood a crystalline blue corpse of its former self.
Past countless motionless devices that had at some point whirred and glowed with their own form of life, beyond the tables and monitors that still held now meaningless discoveries that had once seemed worth untold sacrifice, sat a group of consumptive figures. With their preserved forms and serene expressions, they could have been confused for dozers, pleasantly dreaming.
Within this burial mound, so saturated with cadaverous images, one could be forgiven for failing to notice one small detail. Past all the frozen horror, tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of the site’s heart, one door stood sealed.