Lost Convoy, Part XXIX: Gabriel Martinez

He waited, nervously as he was surprised to admit to himself, just as he imagined everyone else was, for something to happen. It was like the destruction of the planet all over again. The anticipation. How do you end up treating things like this as if they were a game?

He ended up returning his attention to the information port mounted on the seat in front of him. He had found useful things with it already. And he couldn't stop thinking about his brother. Why had he gone missing? Why had he panicked, and that was the only way Gabriel could describe it, the only way it made sense. His brother had panicked in the face of the work he had done in the final days of the planet Earth. It couldn't have been pressure, exactly, because his brother had always been the coolest person in the room, even when they were children. It had always unnerved him. That must have been what started everything.

He switched through every channel he could find, all the backdoor files, all the coding, all the tricks he had picked up from a lifetime he had once believed, with everyone else, to be wasted. It was in this way that Gabriel discovered the coordinates. His brother had one last miracle up his sleeve.

He found, instead of rejoicing, that he could only think about his brother. He didn't care about anyone else, and never had. He missed his brother. He discovered that without him, he had actually become him.

And maybe that's exactly what his brother had realized.