Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Fiction Group 3 | Page 135

It’s failing now. The Canglong is old and has been mended too many times, not enough resources to
visit another planet without burning up. And my heart, too, has been broken and mended too many times.
One day I’ll have to replace it too.
But now I know, even as I bare my chest on the surgery table, maybe for the last time.
I’m not the last of the human race, am I?
I’m the first.
Because if there’s one thing that we humans haven’t failed at, it’s hope.
Hope for knowledge. Hope for wealth. Hope of the here-be-dragons and undiscovered territory.
Hope that, far beyond the horizon, whether it rests on uncharted seas or uncharted stars, we’ll find a kindred
spirit.
That’s why we keep our ports open and our telescopes trained to the sky, isn’t it? That’s why Zheng
He embarked on those journeys and Bi An took up the torch. Hope.
And if there’s one thing I know for absolute certainty, it’s that it’s not the electrodes that govern my
titanium limbs, nor the artificial crevasse left by my beating heart, that determines whether I’m human. It’s
not my skin or warped anatomical structure or breathing tank that converts any trace of water to oxygen.
And these aliens, with their gas-cloud bodies and nebulous eyes and fierce, ardent hope? They’re
human too.
I’ll broadcast the Canglong ’s log.
With the her technology, I can do it.
She’ll transmit them outwards, with her four slender antennae, as momentum catapults her through
light years of space I’ll never hope to see.
And maybe, just maybe, when even the Canglong is nothing more than a twisted hunk of metal and a
handful of floating ashes, a voice will crackle over the static of a radio receiver pointed to the sky of a blue-
green planet not so different from our own. It’ll be transmuted and fractured and borderline unintelligible
and following it, a white line lapsing into darkness like a lighthouse’s rays, will be rows and rows of
numbers.
And it won’t be easy, but they’ll manage, grasping for the whispered nuance written fervently into the
lines of zeros and ones.
They’ll manage, and a message will appear. The Canglong’s surgical cabinet holds two prosthetics, it’ll
read. A metal femur and a metal heart.
*
*
*
So, let me tell you a story.
Not about me or a long-forgotten solar system, not about the Milky Way or even the tiny, failed
species that is the human being, prideful and naïve and setting fire to a planet in their thirst for the stars.
No.
It’s about you.
Because there’s so much light you still can’t see.