I know the statistics. How big the universe is, the probabilities and proximities and the promises of other beings out there among the stars, but I’ve been there. There’s nothing. Nothing but empty, uncaring void, lacing dead worlds and dead stars all together like a tapestry of lonely meaninglessness.

Humans have existed for the smallest sliver of a fraction of a moment in the existence of the universe, and we will be extinguished just as widely. And when we are at last gone forever into the quiet emptiness of death, there will be nothing left but the cold universe.

And nothing shall mark our passing because there is nothing to do so.

Dismiss me if you wish to. Take comfort in your escapist fantasies of aliens and visitors from other worlds, but there’s no proof I can give you beyond the testimony of one who has spent so very long staring into that black and empty infinity and knowing, truly knowing, what it means to be floating and forsaken in an empty universe.

I knew isolation experiments could be rough when I signed up. I’m not some naive fool who thought he’d endure a few quirky side effects for science. No, I’m an astronaut, so I do my research. When I was picked for the project, a long-term isolation study set in conditions of low Earth orbit, I read up on as many previous cases and similar experiments from the past 30 years, familiarizing myself with side effects and likely psychological hurdles.

It was daunting to say the least. I wasn’t keen to experience some of what the previous tests seemed to promise what happened to my mind, but I didn’t feel like I had much choice. I’d had my application to the International Space Station floating in limbo for so long that when a private consortium approached me telling me they’d recently launched Daedalus, a small manned satellite of their own, and needed qualified crew members, I jumped at the chance to go to space at last.

I should have realized that what they meant by “crew member” was “lab monkey”. But to be honest, even after I found this out it didn’t do a lot to dampen my enthusiasm for the project. I was going to space.

There were two other people technically on the crew. I say technically as I never spent any time with them beyond the trip up to the Daedalus. Their names were Yan Kilbride and Manuela Dominguez. I’m sure that they probably did a lot more looking after the station than I ever did, but as far as I was concerned I was the only one up there.

From the chatter I heard before the mission began, each of us had an experiment of our own to be concerned with. But they were also there as a backup in case something went horribly wrong with mine, since the observing scientist simply didn’t have the option of intervening themselves.

I remember the man in charge of my particular project, Conrad Lukas, made a face of rather overstated disgust when he told me I wouldn’t be up there entirely on my own. I got the distinct impression he was one of those people who feel that ethical restrictions do nothing but bind the hands of the true scientist and leave them at the mercy of their subjects’ limitations.

My section of the tiny space station was completely self-contained. There was food, sleeping arrangements, and zero-gravity exercise equipment, all for my personal use. The single entrance to the rest of the satellite was locked and sealed. It could be opened from either side but on my side it required a code. I did have access to the code in case of emergency, but I had way too much riding on the mission to even think about being responsible for its early termination.

I also had one large domed window. It allowed me a decent view of the Earth below, as well as plenty of chance to stare off into space, which I did quite a lot in those early days.

I was told the other astronauts would do their best to avoid that window while doing maintenance or repair work outside. Mission Control had also supplied me with a lot of books and films and other entertainment as, like Conrad had told me at the first briefing, the experiment was into isolation, not boredom. So when I locked that door for the first time, I was feeling in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, to be honest.

I knew I was being monitored. There was a little camera mounted on the wall that kept a beady eye on me. It wasn’t so invasive that I couldn’t get away from it when I wanted to, but for the most part I was happy enough to eat and read and exercise in front of the watchful lens.

Obviously those assessing my progress would never communicate with me directly and they might not even be watching a live feed, so if they had opinions on how I was undertaking my task, I never heard them. Even if my task was just sitting around in a room in space waiting for my mind to break.

I tried not to take too much comfort in the knowledge that there were people watching my every move, as I felt that to find that reassuring would go quite strongly against the spirit of the experiment. I had to really feel alone. That at least it didn’t take too long to set in. I can’t honestly see how strapping yourself in to sleep or drinking your juice with a space foil pack on the straw can have much effect on isolation, but I wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.

I believe some people would have been more disturbed than others by its location orbiting Earth, but it didn’t feel markedly different to me from any of the other isolation studies they conducted over the last few decades. If anything the silent, rolling green and blue of the Earth far below was another source of comfort, in the sure knowledge of the billions of other people making their way through life who had no idea what was right above their heads.

Both of these comforts lasted me almost six weeks. That was when I was aware I should start to experience some of the more distressing side effects.

I’d already passed through listlessness and a bout of insomnia. And I hadn’t been using my exercise machine properly for almost a fortnight, but I still didn’t expect the severity of the hallucinations when they began.

Twice I was woken up by the sound of the door opening, only to find it as tight as it had ever been. Throughout the daytime I would occasionally hear footsteps, which shouldn’t even have been possible in zero gravity. There was also a blackout for about 20 minutes at one point that may or may not have been real. Certainly we didn’t seem to lose power in any other systems except the lights.

So this was all reasonably distressing, but at least it had the advantage of not being unexpected. No, the first warning I got about how bad things were going to get was the spacesuit.

The clocks read it as 14:30 UTC and I was rewatching 28 Days Later, one of the better films that had been provided for my entertainment, when a movement in the window caught my eye. At first I thought it might have been some orbital debris moving past, but then I spotted it, still at the edge of the domed window.

It was a hand. The white bulky gloved hand of someone wearing an EVA suit. It started to float slowly across the window, followed by the rest of the arm, then the torso, ‘till almost the whole suit slowly floating across.

I was excited by the idea of seeing another human being at first, even if it was only brief or might compromise some of the work, but as the suit made its painstaking drift across the space outside, it rotated enough that I could see clearly through the suit’s visor.

There was nobody inside. The floating suit was completely empty.

And I started to suddenly get very scared.

At last it had passed right across and off into the night, the other side, and I stopped to try and calm myself in the face of what had been a deeply strange thing to watch. I managed to do so, but only until I looked again out of that window.

There were no more empty, floating clothes, but I noticed something that for some reason hadn’t dawned on me when watching the empty suit. It was, to put it quite simply, impossible, and I must have approached it from a hundred different angles trying to make sense of it.

The Earth was gone.

At first I assumed it must have been an orientation change, but that didn’t make any sense. The planet below had never been hidden from my position before and if we shifted that radically I would have felt it, I was sure.

But still the fact remained that where the Earth should have been, there was empty, dark space. I must have watched for hours waiting to see the sun. We were definitely still moving, and from what I could tell we still seemed to be moving in some sort of orbit, but without a planet below I have no idea why we kept the same pattern. Regardless, the sun should have been visible sooner or later.

After two days of waiting, I finally accepted the sun and the moon had gone as well.

It wasn’t completely empty out there. Far off in the distance I could still see stars twinkling. Probably long dead, but I knew that there was nothing they could do to save me.

At some point on the first day, I remembered the camera. I focused my attention on it and began to scream and shout for help, in the vain hope that someone might be watching a feed of it and be able to make contact. I cried and begged and pleaded with that camera for almost four hours before I was suddenly struck by a terrifying thought.

I floated over to it and gently took hold of the cables that were fed out from the back into the wall. I followed them along, looking for where they connected the power or broadcasting apparatus. What I found instead were a pair of neatly severed wires.

Transmitting nothing. Powering nothing. Connected to nothing.

The camera had never even been turned on, and had certainly not been transmitting anything to Earth. So what data had they been collecting?

I still have no idea the answer to that question, but I did feel like I gained some small sliver of control back after spending an all-too-brief hour smashing up the camera.

After that, it was time to break out the code and get the door to the rest of the satellite open. I had decided that even if this somehow was simply a really elaborate and convincing trick to examine reactions to certain stimulus in a test environment, it was still far beyond what I had signed up for. One way or another I decided I was getting out of this damned experiment.

I opened the small safe that contained the passcode document and easily broke the seal on its container. I was desperate to get out of that door as soon as possible and took a few moments to memorize it.

E109GHT8.

I can still remember it vividly as I entered that code over and over in an attempt to get that locked door to open. Each time I painstakingly entered it with as much precision as I still had within me, and each time the password field read out what I had apparently typed in:

“No one is coming”

and the door remained closed.

And that was it. I was trapped alone in a tiny room floating in space deserted empty space. I had plenty of food and water so starvation wasn’t a danger, but sometime in the first week the clock stopped working.

With no timepiece and nothing left outside of the sun or moon keeping any sort of time at all became utterly impossible. If I had to guess how long I spent in that strange exile, I would say somewhere between three and six months. But that is based solely on my eating and sleeping patterns, which were largely fueled by despair and that quiet aching terror of being utterly forsaken. I couldn’t even read my books or watch anything as characters seemed dead and lifeless, the emptiness of their artificial existence made plain to me.

The hallucinations stopped. I did not even get the comfort of company in my delusions, though at some point the line between dreaming and reality seemed to blur. I’d be sleeping, strapped into my bed in the middle of the void, or at the same time floating through ancient graveyards, or the open empty sea. They weren’t hallucinations, though they were dreams, even if the cold did seem to seep out of them and into the bones of me.

I spent so long trying to get that door open, but nothing worked. The mechanisms and electronics were not accessible from my side. When I finally stopped trying it was the final abandoning of my hope. That was also when I noticed something else that alarmed me in a very different way.

I did some calculations and realized that my food and water levels did not seem to be depleting. For all the time I had been there, in what I could now only think of as my imprisonment, it did not seem like there had been any significant change in my supplies. No one could be restocking me, because there was no one but me there. The food remained static, then did that mean I could remain trapped in this place for the rest of my life, assuming I even still aged?

I began to very seriously consider the idea that I had died, and this was Hell. Given that worry, the way I finally escaped it could be considered ironic. I starved myself to death. Well, not to death, I suppose, given I’m alive enough to talk to you, but close enough.

I don’t know how long I just floated there strapped into my lonely cocoon of a bed, refusing to eat or drink, waiting for the end. After everything else, I had no guarantee it was even possible for me to die but I had to try. When I finally faded from consciousness for what I hoped was the last time, it was the greatest relief I have ever felt.

I don’t know exactly when I realized I wasn’t dead. There were various moments I faded back into consciousness and I know that I felt the re-entry very hard. But it is difficult to pin down clear thoughts before the hospital.

No one’s really given me an official account of what happened, aside from that it became known I was in serious danger of death, and my colleagues on the Daedalus retrieved me, and managed to keep me alive until the next opportunity to send me back down.

I’m not pushing to know more, not really. I know what happened. And no rational cover story that they could feed me is going to change it.

I haven’t followed up with Conrad and as far as I’m aware he hasn’t made any attempt to contact me. I was paid in full though, which was a surprise.

I wanted to tell someone what really happened for almost a year before I found your Institute. There’s nothing really to be done about it, I wanted to get it off my chest.

So thank you for letting me get it down on paper.

My mother and I have always had our differences. To be honest, it’s only been in the last five years or so that we really began speaking again. She was always a strong-willed woman, never one to blunt her opinions, and throughout my childhood it gradually got worse. Nothing I ever did was quite good enough, and any hint of pride I might have taken in myself or my achievements was always undercut by some cutting little critique.

Even on those rare occasions that I succeeded at something highly enough to actually warrant her praise, it was always appended with doubt. I remember when I was fifteen I came first in an inter-school athletics competition. I was two seconds ahead in the hundred metre sprint, and all she could say was, “Make sure being the best runner doesn’t distract you from your exams”.

It didn’t really come to a head until I got engaged to Laurence, though. We’d been dating on and off through university, and I’d sat through enough awkward family dinners to know that my mother didn’t like him, but her disapproval was nothing new, so I ignored it. When he proposed to me after our graduation, I’d assumed she would simply tolerate it as she had every other one of my decisions.

I was wrong. When I told her, she got angry. Not the chill, disapproving anger I was used to from, but a genuine shouting rage. She accused me of throwing my life away, told me I’d regret it, and that Laurence was good-for-nothing scum who’d drag me down and stop me achieving anything. I answered her in kind, and the argument that we had that night was the last time I saw her for almost ten years. I’d try to convince myself that our differences were just that: we were simply two very different people. But sometimes I worry that the reason we could never get on was that we were far too much alike.

For instance, we were both far too stubborn for our own good. Maybe that’s why I stayed with Laurence through two affairs, as if accepting that I’d made a mistake would be letting her win. In the end I only left him when he was jailed for embezzlement, eight years into our marriage. Even then, I didn’t want to speak to her. Didn’t want to tell her she’d been right. It wasn’t until my father had his accident that I finally decided to try and make amends.

My father is a gentle man. To this day I couldn’t really tell you anything about his thoughts or opinions on anything, as they were invariably bulldozed by my mother. He was a benign, ineffectual presence, always in the shadow. For all that, I did love him; so when he fell from a ladder and ended up in wheelchair, I made the decision to try and reconnect with my parents.

It wasn’t easy. Beyond the greying of her hair, my mother hadn’t changed, and the reconciliation I’d hoped for never really came. I spent my visits biting my tongue, or getting into vicious fights whenever I wasn’t able to. But I could always see on my father’s face how much he liked to see me, how happy he was to have our small family together again, so I persevered. I think she saw it too, to be honest, and whenever he wheeled himself painfully into the room, she would try her best not to antagonise me. After a while we came to an uneasy peace.

There were practical issues as well. They’d retired to the small village of Draycott in the Somerset countryside, and as I lived in London and didn’t have a car, it was two trains and a long bus ride anytime I wanted to see them. But I made the effort.

I even conceived a reason to go more often - I’ve been doing some freelance work this summer for the British Library, recording and compiling oral histories on various topics, and it so happened that during her time as an academic, my mother had been something of an authority on English and Welsh folklore. In fact, one of the reasons she always gave for retiring out there was how many myths and legends made their home in the area.

So I proposed that I make some recordings of her, telling and discussing them for the project. She agreed, though not before telling me how pointless the whole thing sounded, and over the last few months I saw them several times. My father was happy, the recordings I got were surprisingly usable, and everything seemed to be getting better.

Two weeks ago I went to see them, and someone else opened the door. Someone I didn’t recognise. She wore my mother’s clothes, but they shouldn’t have fitted her. My mother is tall, rail thin and always keeps her hair cut short, but the woman who answered my knocking was shorter, rounded about the middle and wore her curly white hair down almost to her shoulders. I had definitely never seen her before.

I asked if my parents were home, and she laughed. It was a soft, joyful sound that was so unlike anything I expected to hear in that house that I had to take a step back to collect my thoughts. My father wheeled round the corner and shouted a greeting as though everything was perfectly normal. He moved up beside the plump old woman standing in the doorway and looked at me, smiling. The image made me feel queasy. I’m not even sure why, at this point I had no reason to think this person was anything other than a friend of my parents, but something wasn’t right.

I asked where my mother was, and they both got very quiet. I repeated the question with more force, and my father looked up to this strange woman in confusion. She smiled sadly and stepped towards me, opening her arms as if to hug me, but I yelled at her to get back, demanding to see my mother. My father’s face grew dark, and he told me that my joke wasn’t funny. With the most force I’d ever heard from him, he told me that however angry I was, this wasn’t the right way to deal with it. I looked back at this woman, standing there with open arms, and she smiled at me.

“Come, give your mother a hug,” she said.

The hour or two after that are a bit of a blur. I have vague memories of being numbly taken through into the living room, sat on the sofa and handed a cup of tea. I tried to drink it as they talked on at me, but it was ice cold, so I must have been sitting there a long time. I nodded once or twice, I think. My dad clearly thought I was having some sort of breakdown, and was just talking about whatever came into his head in the hopes of calming me down. The woman who was not my mother just talked cheerily, as though there was nothing at all amiss.

She had a kind voice, and her words were warm and friendly. She was nothing like my mother, and I was very quickly becoming deeply afraid. Had she done something to my real mother, and somehow convinced my father she was her? It seemed a ridiculous thought. My father may have been disabled but his mind was still sharp, and he’d never showed any signs of the sort of dementia that would let a stranger pose as his wife. Was he her prisoner? Maybe, but he didn’t seem to be acting as though anything was wrong, and if that was the case why bother trying to convince me of so obvious a lie?

I excused myself, and moved quickly out towards the back garden. Neither of them made a move to stop me. I saw a phone near the back porch and grabbed it, intending to call the police, when something caught my eye. It was a series of photographs on the wall, showing our family in happier times. It had been there for as long as I’d been to the house, and likely a lot longer. I had spent a long time staring at it my first visit there, lost in pleasant nostalgia, remembering days at the beach or the trip we took to Hanover when I was eight.

But now, in every one of them there stood this new woman where my mother should have been. She looked younger in these pictures, just like my father, and across the dozen pictures on the wall I could see a timeline of this woman growing old alongside him. There was no way these photos could have been staged, and I could even see a small crease on the bottom corner of the Hanover picture. I remembered I’d sat on the pictures by accident on the journey home, bending the corner out of place. I’d got a nasty talking to after that, and certainly not from the kindly fraud currently putting the kettle on in the kitchen.

It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t make any sense. After dinner I insisted that we get out the photo albums, spouting some nonsense about catching up on memories. My father and the woman who was not my mother agreed readily enough, and so out came the albums and I began to look through them. I must have looked at well over five hundred photographs that evening, and not a single one was out of place or failed to feature this stranger where my mother should have been.

As my turning of the pages became more and more frantic, I spotted a look on the face of this new mother. It was amused, almost mocking, and I became sure that she knew. Whoever this woman that called herself Rose Cooper was, she knew it was a lie as much as I did, and my confusion and fear delighted her.

For all that, though, I was at a complete loss to explain any of it. Every piece of photographic evidence I can find supported this woman’s claim to be my mother. My father’s memories agreed, as did the memories of the two neighbours I was able to talk to the following day - Tom Harrison and Joanne Fisher. Both of them told me that they’d known George and Rose Cooper since they’d moved in, and when I asked them to describe Rose, they said she was medium height with a kind, round face and long, curly white hair.

I even took a walk up to the Church of St. Peter’s, where I knew my mother occasionally visited, to ask the vicar, a polite man named Neil Angus. He told me the same thing as the others, though he did ask after my mother’s health. Apparently she’d had a bit of a fall the week before outside the church, and the vicar had come out to help after hearing her cry out. He turned a bit pale when he said this. I pressed him further, and he told me that, although she’d seemed fine when he had reached her, the scream was like nothing he’d ever heard.

I asked the woman who is not my mother about her ‘fall’ near the church. She looked me right in the eyes, smiled, and said it was nothing. She’d just had a “bit of a funny turn”.

That’s it, really. I left immediately and haven’t been back. I’ve never been a believer in the supernatural before, but it seems clear to me that something attacked my mother near St. Peter’s church, killed her and somehow replaced her completely. The only piece of evidence I can find is the recordings I’d made of her beforehand. The tapes still have her real voice on. I have a few, so you can have one for whatever tests you might want to do. I’m going to go back to my father and play him the others. Maybe it’ll jog a memory, or maybe he’ll try to have me put away. Either way, I have to try.

I used to think I hated my mother; I really did. But now I can’t stop listening to those tapes, now I know they’re the only way I’ll ever hear her voice again. All of them except the tape we recorded on the old myths of the fae, of changelings. I’m not ready to listen to that one yet.