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Space trash. That’s what Kyungsoo is.

To his right, he floats past another junkyard... big green tubes and shiny pieces of scrap metal, doomed to exist forever.

And he can’t help but wonder, as he drifts aimlessly along, what life was like before; before the sun exploded and sent all the million artificial parts of year 2095 Earth wheeling into space; before a small group of resourceful men and women pirated a spaceship from NASA and escaped just days before it happened.

He wonders.

He is very lucky indeed that his parents were aboard that ship, and luckier still to be born during the time when mutations from the strange environment arose with the new babies: all children conceived after the escape from the dying planet were able to breathe normally, without the help of any air tubes or globes.

He’s not lucky in that he and the other children had to watch as the older generation, without the benefits of mutation, eventually asphyxiated to death when the spaceship wiring finally broke down, taking down the oxygen filter unit with it. They could only watch, helpless, as the invisible gas they didn’t need killed their parents in a matter of minutes.

The band of children had eventually broken apart, scattering out in every direction to take his or or chances with the lonely, eternal universe. Sometimes, when stardust particles are illuminated by bright green nebulas, it’s a breathtaking universe, but more often than not it’s cold and cruel and forbidding.

Kyungsoo’s still alive, but he’s pretty sure it’s in name only.

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