Eloa had broken the rules. He wasn’t to have woken so soon. The Slumber Chamber had been developed to operate within certain standards that closely aligned with his physiology. Sleeping for about a thousand years was the ideal. Two hundred years or so one way or the other was acceptable. In emergencies, of course, the ship would wake him no matter how much time had passed. But this was no emergency. He had deliberately scheduled an Awakening just four years into his Slumber.
Pulling a stunt like this just four years ago would have been enough to have cost him the opportunity to be on this ship. Now, though, nobody ranked higher than him. Nobody alive, anyway. Nobody awake. Even so, he realized he was being a bit childish to want to see it with his own eyes. The ship would record everything, and he could review it at his next scheduled Awakening. That’s what the others would do.
But there was something irresistible about it. When he had gone to Sleep, his ship, and two others just like it, were just beginning to pull away from his home planet, each taking a different course. Unlike the others, his ship actually headed inward toward the sun. To get the most speed, his ship was scheduled to sling-shot around the innermost planet, wrap around the sun, and then rendezvous one final time with Earth, stealing a tiny amount of energy from it as it catapulted him out into the far reaches of space.
And so, as his ship was about to arrive at its closest approach to Earth, he had broken the rules. He stood beside the viewport, looking one last time at his home. The instruments aboard his ship were collecting all kinds of data, data which he would later pore over with his shipmates. But for now, he was fixed in place looking at the awful destruction that had taken place.
He lifted his hand in a somber salute, the final Earthling saying goodbye to a planet that was no more fit for life.