From behind her plexiglass visor, her eyes were fixed on the sky. After 18 hours it was, technically speaking, still daytime. The Sun was up, shining on her along with a myriad of stars piercing the otherwise all-black backdrop of space. But the light was faint. If the Sun was the size of a coin held up in front of your face on Earth, from here it seemed more like the point of a needle. No more than a few times brighter than the stars around it, it was a bleak and cold Sun.
The constellations however, were a lot more familiar. She had known it would be like this, but when everything else felt so far away, it came as a surprise to find that the Big Dipper, Gemini, Leo, Cassiopeia, any constellation she could think of a classification for, looked largely the same as back home. A little distorted perhaps, but clearly recognizable.

Then there was Charon. A dark, brownish moon, it hovered about halfway between horizon and zenith like an oversized tinfoil popcorn dome, never moving. In spite of its apparent size, about six times that of a terrestrial full Moon, it took her awhile to notice it. Charon didn't shine, but rather stood out like a piece of furniture in a dark room, visible once your eyes got used to the darkness.

Her gaze swept down along the horizon and ended up on what was left of the rocket ship, and, inevitably, the ground just in front of it. Four rough, wooden boards sitting in a neat row, an astronaut's helmet resting by each of them. MacKenzie, Jaacobs, Nesbitt and Stevenson. All dead on impact. The first humans to set foot on Pluto, and, she sighed with the thought, the first to be buried there.
Slowly, she turned and walk-bounced from the tiny ridge she was standing on, down toward the wreck. Weighing no more than five and a half kilos on Pluto she'd found she could jump tremendous distances, but something told her she'd better save the energy. There was a fifth board lying on the ground by the others. She didn't count on anyone showing up to make sure it was ever put to use, but while at it, she'd figured she might as well make that one, too.

Eileenalana Amanda Angelantania, it read. Eileen for short. Her father had come up with it, claiming it to be the name of a dragon, a white dragon in a book he'd enjoyed as a kid. She had never really shared his love for fantasy novels, but figured white dragons came along with ice and frost. Perhaps not altogether unsuitable, considering her location. The heads-up thermometer had gone down to 36K/-237°C before it malfunctioned, and now she suspected the power cell keeping the suit warm didn't have much left to give. Once gone, she knew any remaining heat would be sucked out in a matter of minutes. The boots were already starting to feel cold.

She touched a button on her arm panel, and with a soft humming a tiny metal claw folded out inside her helmet, positioning itself in front of her mouth. It held a thumbnail-sized, shiny black pill. The Space Explorer's Last Resort. She thought about it for a few seconds, then touched another button twice, and the tablet was exited through an airlock below the visor, dropping down in her glove. The glossy, for-easy-swallowing coating crackled up immediately in the cold, forming a web of fine lines. Turning her hand over, she watched it fall in slow motion, and shatter in a multitude of clear shards against the ground.
Alone or not, she had spent too much time dreaming of other planets to commit suicide on one.
"So. Either the cell dies," she thought, "or the oxygen supply runs out. This could turn out to be exciting."

Bouncing back up the slope, her arms and lower legs began to chill. Like a human body, the spacesuit concentrated warmth to the essential body parts when in critical condition.
Her eyes wandered back to the sky, and a bright dot not far above the horizon. It wouldn't have been possible to tell just by looking at it, but she knew it to be Neptune. A frigid gas giant about four times the size of Earth, and right now, her closest planetary neighbour. She found herself staring hard at it, squinting and straining her eyes, trying to make the planet turn blue. Blue like the ocean, the Roman god of which had given it its name. Blue like Earth.
But Neptune remained a dot of white light. There was nothing blue around here. The ground was all grey and brown shades, rock along with frozen methane and nitrogen. No oceans. Not even anything liquid.

She thought of a story her father had told her once, about mermaids. It came, supposedly, from a movie he'd liked, and said that in order to meet a mermaid, you had to go down deep into the ocean, where sunlight couldn't reach you and the water wasn't blue anymore. You would float there in the darkness, and decide that you would die for the mermaids. Only then would they start coming out.
That deep down, she figured it might look like this. Dark and barren, no sun and no life. Mermaids would be hard pressed to find a place to live on Pluto, though.

The sudden wave of homesickness annoyed her slightly. She'd always known she'd prefer to die on another planet than to stay on Earth forever. She'd been trained for this. She'd spent three months on the Lunar surface, getting used to darkness and low gravity. She had, as first woman, gone to Mars along with the geological survey team. She had slungshot around Saturn on the way here, rocketing away at 50 kilometres per second, the famous rings lit up below her like endless rows of Los Angeles freeways on fast forward.

But all the time, the Earth had been comparatively close. Visible, or within reach. Now it was gone. She was on the last planetary outpost of the solar system, marooned on the Plutonian shores.
She turned, and looked as far as she could away from Neptune, and away from the Sun, toward the opposite side of the horizon. There were no more planets. Out there lay the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. The realm of the comets.
After that, there was nothing. A whole, goddamned lot of nothing, up until the next star took over, a lone firefly in a billion-acre field.
"Far away," she thought. "This is far away."

With a final sigh of static, the displays in her helmet faded and went out. She felt like a kitten put in a bag and tossed into icy water, cold pressing against her from all sides. Hardly feeling her limbs any longer, she laid down on her back and stared at the Sun. It couldn't be long now.
Forcing her arm up, she glanced at her old-fashioned, quartz calendar watch. Ironically, while all the technological marvels had given up, the watch still worked.
It was set on home time. In a Wisconsin left behind what felt like a thousand years ago, children were being put to bed. Five billion kilometres away, twilight descended upon the great lakes.

Eileen closed her eyes, and thought of mermaids coming out of the darkness to get her.