"The last day. Supposedly." He smiled nervously. "I've wrapped up the last things I wanted to take care of... you know when I decided to take those recordings up in space? Yeah..." He rolled his tongue over his teeth.

"I gave myself the chance to decide what I'm going to do when, if, this succeeds. If time would unfreeze and I'd get back and everyone knew... almost a hundred and sixty years of recordings gives a lot of information about someone. Would I want the world to know everything I said, everything I felt? There are no secrets on those tapes", he said softly, "and... some things are just meant to be heard or thought by only yourself and by no one else... I know that there's never a coming back to how it used to be, but I'd like to think that I'm still me, you know? I've done everything by myself for years and years of time, and then I'd go back to Earth and just be... overloaded with whatever is thrown at me. After all this... you know, back when I was a kid, I'm sure I mentioned it before, that I wanted to be an astronaut? Just the idea of going into space gave me the chills, but also... millions of people watching you, following you closely, seeing you as a role model, almost a hero going into space. And now... I just want to go home. No awards, no media, no... praise. Just going home." He stared next to him, a single USB-drive laying on top of a box on the table.

"In this box I've kept every single recording since Day 1. If this succeeds and I live... then I'll get to decide what to do with it. If I don't... it won't matter anymore, will it? If I succeed but don't make it... I have this thing with me", as he picked up the USB-drive, "it's a message to Sarah. I recorded it this morning... I told her how I felt, how I feel about her, that her being who she is made me keep my head up in harder times... I've told her how I've spent two full lives alone, waiting, wondering, working... hoping. That I hoped to return one day, to the life we used to have, to the love we had together. After all this time," he coughed, a heavy lump stuck in his throat, "I can't imagine it to be ever like that again. And I think I've realized I don't want it to be that way anymore either." He looked away from the camera.

"If I get back, I'll need time. Real time. Actual time spent in actual solitude. I've never had a chance to catch up, make up my mind. What will I do as a man that advanced so far, alone, a hundred an eighty-year-old mind filled with... so much, in a barely thirty-year-old body. I don't know how long it will take...", he said, as he looked back into the camera. "But I do know that I will get back to Sarah. I will return. Even if I need all the time in the world." He smiled, his eyes sad. "I've transmitted that file to her cell phone, e-mail and our computer, so that when time continues and either of those situations occur... she deserves to know."

After a short moment of silence, he continued. "Everything that was still on Earth... data, theories, research, you name it... I've distributed it to each government in the world as accurately as I could. The inevitability of politics forces me to recognize that the knowledge I've built up could have major consequences if used as a power tool. I don't want my legacy to consist of that." He sighed.

"The reality is that humanity probably won't change. If I succeed and life goes on and they find out exactly what happened, they will weep, they will laugh and they will celebrate. But in years the memory and fear of extinction will fade and old patterns will rise back to the surface. The irrelevance of some artificial importances, the struggle for power, money, greed... When I was younger I asked my grandfather what he meant when he said none of that mattered. "Power, money, what for?", he'd asked, and I had looked at him, my eyes wide. "You can buy things, or do things", I'd answered. He told me that if I was older, I'd understand what he meant. He was right, you know? Happiness, joy, pleasure, love... cliché, sure, but really the fundamentals of our existence. My outlook has changed and things that used to be important are now trivial and trivial things matter the most. "Wisdom comes with age." I used to hate that phrase. Old people didn't always know better. They didn't, in fact. But now, as I'm old, considering everything at least, it's the experience old people inevitably have. They can look back and think, what really mattered?" He paused. "I've had more than twice the length of a normal person to think about those questions. I can't help but conclude that even if it won't work, or even if it won't last, I'll try to make people, everywhere, realize what matters, really matters. I can give them that opportunity." He stared at the lens for a few seconds, ordering his thoughts.

"I could keep going on about whats and ifs, but after a while there's not much else to be said. There will be things I haven't realized, things I couldn't have understood the consequences of, but I think I tried my best. And as long as I don't stop all this", he said, while gesturing around him, "there's really not much of a point saying this all." He walked away from the desk he was leaning on.

"The explosives are on their way and are scheduled to arrive in three hours. The WHM is ready to go. C-7 and C-8 are running tests, calculations, whatever they can do to influence this process positively."

He walked to his chair and sat down. "The WHM is going to need more power to suck up the planet as a whole than if it was blasted to smaller pieces of particles before it was sucked into the hole. The batteries had a little bit of power left in the original calculations... I'll use that to compensate. It's going to be a close call. There's nothing more I can do to change that right now, so we'll have to keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. Right now I'll have to guide the ship to a distance where I can intervene whenever possible, if necessary, but still be safe if something unexpected happens, as far as that's actually possible. I'll lift myself in my suit in the meanwhile." He tapped a few buttons and set course to a hundred miles further away from the planet.

"The holes on the planet have still been spitting out material", he started after a short silence fell. "The heaps have been analyzed by the robots and their estimate was... almost unimaginable. Millions of black grains, billions of lighter ones... whole parts of the observable universes have collapsed. Who knows how much of the actual universe we've lost? And how much more we're about to lose?" He shook his head lightly.

The ship traveled through space as it reached its destination fifteenminutes later. The WHM would need two hours to reach the required amount ofpower to form the wormhole. The rockets were scheduled to arrive mere secondslater. As Chris followed the countdown on the screen for the WHM to initiateits process, his heart started throbbing in his chest. As the countdown reachedzero and the process engaged automatically, Chris sat in his chair. He staredat the monitor, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The importance of the upcominghours weighed on him, and all he could, as he had all those years, was tensehis muscles, carry the burden and go on.