He rubbed his hand against the stiff skin, swollen under his fingers. Turgid and scabbed. The price for flight, for one more chance at living...

Unlike them. They had no more chances now. He closed his eyes against the welling up, the swelling of sorrowful sinuses.

Can’t afford it. Survival was still an issue.

The time to mourn would come later. He wasn’t ready to give up on his own life yet.

It had happened so fast, even though he’d known, like so many others, that the warning had been there, shimmering in the air like heat haze. Their atmosphere had never been able to adapt to fluid electricity, but minor mistakes and accidental releases had been treated with negligible regard. Time and endurance and the chemical stability of the giant sphere on which they lived would certainly put things right. There was no need to pass a lifetime tense in worry and fear. “Szrizoverer mokyrtz taxschl zak.”

“Accept and move on.” It was the credo for a generation. Accept what exists without strife. Inevitability is rooted in existence. Move on, forward to the future.

But it was too late for many. The fluid electrical impulses had endangered more than muscle retraction - they had interfered at the synapse level, where thought and communication and reaction lingered. A series of small mistakes, during the establishment of greatness, at the peak of their technology, had thrust his people into terminal stupidity. No thought, no movement. Vegetative creatures with slack faces and blind eyes.

He buried his face in his hand and fought against the constriction in his throat. The last thing to go had been the sympathetic nervous system. No more autonomic control over breath or beating heart.

No more life. He remembered the fallen: his daughter, contorted and then, mercifully limp. And next, even more painfully, the only woman whose flesh had ever melded with his own - how the warmth had left her, changing her from living entity to waste. All that he loved would be eaten like so much detritus...

No. There was nothing left to consume the dead. No internal electrical impulses to drive life, even in the minute. They would lie as they’d died, in disordered dignity, all vanity lost. Drying, mummified husks beneath a sombre sun...

Was there any resilience to the soul where there was no spark to feed eternity? Despite his resolve, a crystalline drop fled his eye and muddied a small patch of dust-dry soil. Were all tomorrows lost? Even those of the death-after life?

A flicker of movement in his periphery stirred him to near frantic searching. Had there been another survivor, besides himself? Someone else, lost in horror the way he was?

She was standing, half in her own abandoned form. Her eyes were confused, terrified, flicking wildly in frenzied panic the way his own had been moments before. Finally, she focussed on him, and relief filled her face. Despite any electrical malpractice, they grounded each other; they always had. She reached for him, then gave the high-pitched trill with which she always summoned their wee one.

Their connection was different now, and he sensed this was the way it would be for their tomorrows. When his curly-haired daughter joined them, her laughter was a spark and a sizzle.

Not all their sparks of intellect, of being, had been lost. Despite the hot sun, he shivered with relief. He looked back, only once. There lay the slack-jawed husk which had once held both a strong stature and a well-formed opinion of its own self-worth.

Abandonment drew but a momentary qualm. It was too late to mull over could-have-beens. Their inevitability was now rooted in non-existence.

“Accept and move on.”

His steps drew forth a bright fleck of static that rivaled the sun.

Move on, forward to the future.