He tilts the phone, adjusts his stance, checks the lighting, deletes the first one, takes it again. This is a serious business, getting the angle right. In the mirror behind him: rows of machines, other people doing the same math on their own bodies, fluorescent light flat and honest on everyone.
I don't find it vain. I can't anymore. Up there, when we passed into Earth's shadow, the whole planet went dark except for the thin curved line of the atmosphere lit at the edge, and that line is nothing. Thinner than the shell of an egg, proportionally. Everything you have ever loved lives underneath a film you could scratch through with a fingernail.
He is a warm, blood-pumping, oxygen-breathing animal standing upright inside that film, and he has built a room full of iron specifically to make the animal stronger, and now he wants a record of it. Of course he does.
The strange part isn't the photo. It's that he checks it against the mirror, then against the screen, then against the mirror again, like he's confirming he's really here. He is. That's the whole thing. Out there is roughly a hundred billion galaxies of confirmed nothing where no one is flexing in a tank top, and here is one guy, in one building, on one small warm rock, wanting proof he exists on a particular afternoon.
He'll post it. Someone will double-tap it and forget it in nine seconds. That used to seem like a waste to me.
Now I think: he made a picture of himself alive, and he sent it toward another living person, across a planet that from where I sat was one unbroken thing with no lines drawn on it at all. Let him take twelve.
I'd take a thousand.