THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

EPILOGUE - Salvation

Saturn's Moon - Titan

2.5 Years Later

9/23/2082

Jake Soloman woke up in his private quarters like he had every other morning for the last thirty years. Some of that time he had spent in cryo sleep in his escape pod after fleeing Arcturus. But his mind lumped it all together for simplicity's sake. With a sigh, he rolled out of his cot, placed his feet on the gray plates of the habitat's floor and yawned. In the adjoining lavatory, he urinated, flushed the stainless-steel toilet, and inspected his scraggly beard in the mirror. Strands of walnut hair jutted in various directions on top of his head. A moderate crop of foliage covered his bare chest.

Down a flight of stairs, in the hab's spotless white kitchen, he poured a cup of steaming black coffee, took a sip, and pressed the cereal selection on the food generator screen. He waited while the machine hydrated the freeze-dried packet—hissing and vibrating—and dispensed the bran flakes in a bowl. A spout added the artificial milk.

Jake snagged a spoon from a drawer and lumbered over to the bar, sat on a stool, and ate. On the far wall, a window displayed a shimmering lake set against the backdrop of a mountain blanketed with evergreen spruce trees, and above the summit, a deep blue sky.

"Lexa," he said.

"Good morning, Jake," the feminine voice of the computer mainframe replied from a speaker in the ceiling. "How may I assist you?"

"Let me see the sunrise."

"As you wish."

The image on the wall screen pixelated and then reassembled into the view provided by the exterior cameras. A smog-like haze miles up in the atmosphere left the landscape in a perpetual state of twilight. The sun, distant and weak, looked like a bulb shining through copper tinted glass. A burnt orange ocean sloshed slow-motion waves upon a dingy brown shoreline.

Jake snarled his nose. Took a final swig from his cup.

He led a common existence with several unique problems.

One, he lived on Titan. Two, because of a top-secret project back on Earth, he was immortal. Three, his immortality had a side effect, which he kept under control by swallowing a clear blue pill once a month. And finally, he was alone. Desperately alone.

Jake left the bowl and cup on the counter and padded down another flight of stairs to the utility floor of the habitat. The bottom level housed life support and mechanical equipment, a maintenance zone, a lab, flight packs, thermal suits, and the main airlock.

Living on Titan presented certain challenges. For instance, when a new morning dawned every eight—twenty-four-hour—days, Jake would don a thermally insulated suit and sit in his favorite beach chair overlooking the ocean of methane. The oily reservoir was actually the size of one of the Great Lakes back on Earth, his chair fashioned from a block of water ice carved by hammer and chisel.

Jake had a lot of time on his hands.

During the one hundred-and ninety-two-hour night, Saturn and her rings dominated half the skyline. But because of the dense atmosphere, even that magnificent view resembled a vague outline for much of the Titan year. Mostly, Jake preferred to stay indoors at night. Not because of the extreme cold—it was always frigid on Titan—but because if he wandered away and got lost, the battery powering his suit would die, he might never find his way back, and he would freeze, becoming another hardened object littering the barren surface. He might even die, if that were possible for him. The temperature plummeted to around two hundred and ninety degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Here, methane and ethane, normally present in gas form on Earth, flowed as streams, rivers, and seas. Water was hard as rock, like boulders on the ground. And a nasty carbon-based grime the color of mud fell from the sky like dirty snow and collected on everything.

Jake wandered over to the suit rack, slid his arms into the thick metallic garment, and pulled it over his head. Next, he pulled on the pants and snapped the lock seal, connecting the top and bottom halves together. The helmet came next, followed by the gloves. With the joints inserted and snugged into place, he stepped to the airlock, which equalized temperature and oxygen levels, not pressure.

He took a longing, empty-eyed look around the interior and entered the hatch.

Being immortal on Titan stole Jake's only hope of escape.

If he didn't do anything stupid, he would never die. But he was still human. He needed oxygen. Warmth. Food. Water. All the essential necessities. He had all that in the habitat, in the thermal suits, and from the natural resources available on Titan. Yes, there were things to eat on the moon. In addition, the hab's life support system and power supply drew its fuel from the abundant methane on the surface and the water ocean under the mile thick crust of ice.

Jake could live forever on Titan if it were not for the side effect that came with his immortality. He became a test subject for the sake of his wife. Because of her unique genetic makeup, he found himself assigned to the space station Arcturus, orbiting Jupiter. Then all hell broke loose on the rotating wheel, and instead of taking his escape pod to Earth like everyone else, Jake's pod mysteriously went to the outpost on Titan. Why? Maybe it was because the same monster that rampaged the station lived inside of him? Maybe someone wanted to get rid of him? He didn't know for sure.

The clear blue pill was no bigger than the nail on his pinky finger, but critical for one very important reason. But concerning those pills. He had taken the last one before going to bed last night. By Jake's calculations, he had thirty-one days of sanity left. Thirty-one days before the monster left its cage for good.

Jake closed the hatchway and exited the habitat through the exterior door. On Titan, air pressure was comparable to Earth, only slightly higher, like being under thirty feet of water. So, all a person needed was oxygen to breathe and clothing to protect from the cold—capable of freezing him rock solid in one second flat.

Fortunately, no one was around for Jake to hurt if he changed into a monster. Yet he didn't want to go out in such an inhumane way. He wanted to choose. He wanted his own terms.

Jake strolled across the icky carbon snow and plopped into his favorite chair one more time. He reached up to the seal around his neck. Fingered the lock, ready to say goodbye. For sanity's sake, he tapped the display on his wrist and opened the radio line in case anyone was listening.

"This is Jake Soloman signing out," he said. "About to remove my helmet and take my last breath." He sighed with great resignation. "Let it be Titan air that takes my life because I have nothing else to live for."

He concluded he would always be alone on this gloomy, frozen wasteland of a moon, even if he didn't have a monster clawing its way to the surface.

"Jake, it's Sarah!" a voice rang out over his comm system, shattering his concentration and making him jolt upright. He glared up at the sky as a landing pod blazed through the Titan clouds and scoured a trail over the ocean in front of him. "Don't do it, Jake! I've come to save you."

"Sarah?" Jake stumbled across the nasty beach, closer to the orange ocean shoreline.

"Yes, it's me. I'm coming to get you."

He felt a strange sense of glee as the pod disappeared beyond the edge of his alien horizon. "It's about time someone came to rescue me."

He tried to raise this Sarah several more times on the radio but received no reply. As the seconds ticked by, he realized he had thirty-one days to find that pod and find out who in the world of Titan this woman was, this woman named Sarah. He felt like he should know her, but thirty mindless years of solitary living, and running low on those little blue pills, spreading them out over the last year to give him more time, to stave off the transformation process, had taken its toll on his mind. However, he still clung to some clarity of thought, some fortitude, especially when this shred of hope presented itself.

So, with that determination, he set off across the barren landscape in search of this brave woman. This woman named Sarah.

THE END