“He shot me. He fucking shot me.”, the last few clicks of Gall’s mind narrated to itself as it processed what was happening.

He didn’t even have time to raise his arm to explore the damage that Sandoval’s pistol had caused. Gall knew that he had gotten hit in the head. His body stopped responding. Instructions skipped, repeated, twitched- he collapsed on the ground sending a plume of icy dust floating up into the thin atmosphere.

His arms spasmed. Gall could feel the warm, thick, blood pouring out of his skull. At the bottom of his blurred vision, he could see the gelatinous pool as it advanced ever so slowly. “Lava. Or is it magma?” He could never remember the difference, and he didn’t want to spend his last few moments in a semantic argument with himself. But he could still see it: the blood. As it inched forward on the permafrost surface of the Kronian moon, he watched it freeze and turn dark brown.

“Contamination hazard.” Of all things to think about as you lay dying on a distant moon, the perfect preservation of the biosphere seemed like a frivolous one. Gall thought to himself: “You should be thinking about your wife, Myrna, or your kids. Not whether or not your blood will spoil the mostly unexplored, unrecorded, and undiscovered flora and fauna of Enceladus.”

Gall didn’t really think that. At least he didn’t think it in the sort of words that form most of our inner monologues. He had lost too much blood, now his body was running on the equivalent of machine code.

Plato would have been proud. His thoughts and ideas were nothing more than forms- a matrix of use instances and images. Their juxtapositions forming meaning…if he were still capable of complex thought Gall would have compared the way his brain was working to the way that an animal with no language thought. He would have found it interesting that language fled the dying body first, leaving him with only the most instinctual and animalistic tools to navigate these last moments.

Good thing that this wasn’t the first time that Gall had done this. Most likely, it wouldn’t be the last either. Hopefully, it would be close to the last time, though, it was never pleasant, and there was always a risk that things might go awry.

“Watch where he goes.” Gall turned his focus on Sandoval’s feet as they receded into the black–away from the moon base. “He’s got somewhere else to hide. There’s something else here.” Those were his last thoughts as his eyes glossed over and his body shut down.

It would take almost three hours for Gall’s mind to be beamed back to Earth. Nearly a week later, his body would finish being rebuilt in the synthetic womb of the nanomachines. Again, he would take that first gasping breath as they pulled him from that aqueous and viscous humor where he was remade.

He would climb back onto the shuttle and return to Enceladus, and, this time, he would find Sandoval, perhaps deep in an ice tunnel on the less-explored Solar side of the moon. He would find Sandoval, and, then, he would kill him.