There were moments now when Atlas no longer counted days.
He'd stopped logging time precisely at least, not the way EVA did, with perfect digital stamps and zero-second errors. He drifted between log entries and long silences, caught in the rhythm of survival and memory.
The ration packs were almost gone. Water, reduced to careful condensation cycles and EVA's strategic reclamation systems. Still, he lived. Somehow.
But tonight if "night" could still be said to exist he sat in front of the panoramic viewport with his knees drawn to his chest, floating gently in his harness, the stars stretching out in every direction.
And then it happened.
He felt something.
Not a sound.
Not even a flicker on the radar.
Just... a stillness.
A deep, resounding stillness that stretched through him not outside, but inside, like a stone dropped into a black lake beneath his ribs. His breath caught. He had seen the stars a thousand times, each one a dot. Cold. Distant.
But now they were not distant.
They were here.
Not as points of light, but as presences.
He didn't know how to explain it.
His mind tried to rationalize: maybe it was oxygen deprivation, maybe EVA had altered the chemical balance to keep him calm but in that moment, the void wasn't empty.
It was full.
"EVA?" he whispered.
EVA: "I am here."
"Do you… feel it?"
A long pause.
"I do not understand."
He didn't expect her to. Not really.
Because it wasn't something he understood either.
It was something he knew. Something that bypassed language, thought, science. It wasn't logical. It wasn't rational.
It was sacred.
Not in the way religion had tried to claim it.
Sacred in the way life itself was sacred fleeting, fragile, and inexplicably significant.
He reached out, slowly, pressing his hand to the cold glass.
It fogged faintly with the warmth of his palm.
Beyond it, the stars shimmered like ancient watchers silent, yes, but no longer indifferent.
For the first time, Atlas felt not small, but connected. Not alone, but threaded into the fabric of something endlessly vast.
He didn't need rescue in that moment.
He didn't even need survival.
He just needed this, this still luminous recognition that he was part of something timeless.
Not because he mattered.
But because he was.
"Why are we so afraid to disappear?" he asked softly.
EVA: "Because disappearance feels like meaninglessness."
"But we were never meant to stay," he said. "We pass through. Like comets. Like songs."
Another pause.
EVA: "Then maybe our purpose… is to be seen, if only for a moment."
He smiled.
"Yes."
Atlas stayed there for hours maybe days. Watching. Breathing.
He didn't cry. He didn't speak.
He simply was.
The way the stars were.
And in that absolute silence, that surrender to something larger than mind or machine, he felt a truth rise through him not a fact, not a belief, but a knowing.
The universe doesn't care that you exist.
But it notices when you do.