Este é " Último contato " de Stephen Baxter. Foi postado on-line por um tempo em que foi indicado para prêmios ... você ainda pode encontrar um arquivo da web dessa postagem ligado à página da Wikipedia.
Indo ponto por ponto:
Uma cientista do sexo feminino calculou o momento exato em que alguma onda de destruição, provavelmente o Big Rip, atingirá a Terra. Ela está esperando esse momento junto com sua mãe.
Ajustes:
“Mum, it’s October.” Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale, and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. “October 14th, at about four in the afternoon. I say ‘about.’ I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted.”
A história é um conjunto de encontros com a mãe durante o período de tempo do primeiro anúncio de que o universo está terminando, até o momento em que a Terra termina. Mais tarde na história, ela passa o momento exato com a mãe.
Foi construída uma sonda que pode sobreviver, mas a humanidade não, portanto, não haverá ninguém para ler os dados.
Sim, há cientistas que investigam o fenômeno até o último momento, mesmo que os dados sejam inúteis:
Caitlin looked at her curiously, but didn’t pursue it. “Listen, Mum. Some of us are going to try to do something. You understand that the Rip works down the scales, so that larger structures break up first. The galaxy, then the solar system, then planets like Earth. And then the human body.”
Maureen considered. “So people will outlive the Earth.”
“Well, they could. For maybe about thirty minutes, until atomic structures get pulled apart. There’s talk of establishing a sort of shelter in Oxford that could survive the end of the Earth. Like a submarine, I suppose. And if you wore a pressure suit you might last a bit longer even than that. The design goal is to make it through to the last microsecond. You could gather another thirty minutes of data that way. They’ve asked me to go in there.”
E, de fato, no final, uma esperança muito fraca é que eles tenham uma investigação que possa capturar dados que sobreviverão ao fenômeno e persistirão para quem vier depois.
E quanto a ...
O seu parceiro cometeu suicídio, já que ele (como muitas outras pessoas) não quer testemunhar a destruição.
Isso também parece corresponder:
"So how’s Bill and the kids?”
“We had an early Christmas,” Caitlin said. “They’ll both miss their birthdays, but we didn’t think they should be cheated out of Christmas too. We did it all this morning. Stockings, a tree, the decorations and the lights down from the loft, presents, the lot. And then we had a big lunch. I couldn’t find a turkey but I’d been saving a chicken. After lunch the kids went for their nap. Bill put their pills in their lemonade.”
Maureen knew she meant the little blue pills the NHS had given out to every household.
“Bill lay down with them. He said he was going to wait with them until he was sure—you know. That they wouldn’t wake up, and be distressed. Then he was going to take his own pill.”