The sun beat down like a hammer, taxing my glare-blind eyes. The desert stretched to the sky in all directions, flattened and burned into a deadpan diamond-hard surface. There was no night, the sun circled the horizon, taunting the surface with leering promises of setting. The compass spun, never the same way twice. The planet teetered on it’s axis, drunkenly orbiting the star it would fall into one day. I hoped I would be gone by then.
Wind blasted everything flat here, the sand ground to vapor, the ground swept like polished tile. I watched the metal around me dissolve, etched and eaten by the wind: the corners first, then the center panels. The gears of time had ground the world to powder. Would grind my shelter to powder. Would grind me to powder.
I pushed the button one last time. Nothing. The shell and the apparatus both dissolving. The wind ate at my flesh. The last person on the planet and his time machine, soon to be no one’s memory, wiped clean by the winds.
The sun beat down like a hammer.