FEATURED STORY
RECENT STORIES
STORIES BY TOPIC
NEWS
TRANSPORTER
Take me to a...
SEARCH
Enter any portion of the author name or story title:
For more options, try our:
SUBSCRIBE
Sign up for free daily sci-fi!
your email will be kept private
TIDBITS
Get a copy of Not Just Rockets and Robots: Daily Science Fiction Year One. 260 adventures into new worlds, fantastical and science fictional. Rocket Dragons Ignite: the anthology for year two, is also available!
SUBMIT
Publish your stories or art on Daily Science Fiction:
If you've already submitted a story, you may check its:
DAILY SCI-FI
Not just rockets & robots...
"Science Fiction" means—to us—everything found in the science fiction section of a bookstore, or at a science fiction convention, or amongst the winners of the Hugo awards given by the World Science Fiction Society. This includes the genres of science fiction (or sci-fi), fantasy, slipstream, alternative history, and even stories with lighter speculative elements. We hope you enjoy the broad range that SF has to offer.






art by Richard Gagnon

Last

Rich Larson is a 20-year-old student living in Edmonton, Alberta. His cyberpunk novel Devolution was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His shorter work has since appeared in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review, Daily Science Fiction, Isotropic Fiction, Scifia and many others. He has stories forthcoming in the anthologies Here Be Monsters and Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction. His self-published sci-fi can be found at Amazon.com/author/richlarson.

He waited until Eta Carinae was in the viewport, roiling on its stellar winds. It was blinding.
"Four hundred times the size of the old sun," he said. "Which, of course, fit upwards of a million Earths."
She champed at the plastic in her mouth.
"And at peak population, Earth had, what, eleven billion people?"
She turned away. The skin of her neck was burned and blistered, like his, from the slow approach.
"And now there's only two of us," he said, craning to see the bodies drifting above them, each with a cauterized hole in the forehead. "Just the two of us with the whole universe in front of us."
Her head dropped to her chest. Then, slowly, she pushed towards the viewport.
"So now you want to see it, do you?" He smiled. "Think of all that room in there. Think of the vastness. If you could love me with the size of one Earth inside Eta Carinae, that would be enough. I'm not a greedy man, you know."
She maneuvered her bound hands to the airlock control.
"We're so important now, you and I." His eyes were rapt on the star. "The last two."
She pushed.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
Become a Member!

We hope you're enjoying Last by Rich Larson.

Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.

Daily Science Fiction is not accepting memberships or donations at this time.

Rate This Story
Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):

Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.

5.0 Rocket Dragons Average
Share This Story
Join Mailing list
Please join our mailing list and receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept 100% private):