Message_Failure (Mothership Microfiction 02)

 

[Short fiction written for Mothership Month!]

IO_PERS.LOG_193

Brownout. Insistent shine of the clouded sky comes like knives through the window-slats, broken around the statuary shape of you, standing, looking onto the city. Cannot forget that. Cannot scour it out. Try and try and try.

In that dark space, something dwelled. Not in you, but your shadow, in the eddies of interrupted photons. I saw it come for me, through the opening of my eyes, a hundred thousand things at once, wriggling in from the lightlessness, a hungry static.

I remember it in the moments you did not speak. The hesitation before you answered, sitting across from me in the dinette, ration packs disemboweled before us, plastic strewn on the pitted composite surface, like some futile haruspicy. And outside, the atmosphere was turning sour. It chewed into our lungs already.

"I can't follow you."

Above us, the sky was murky and pitiless. Stars prickled out of gaps in the stack exhaust. We watched clouds of particulate dissipate on the newborn wind, porthole sucking up light from outside. Two tickets lay in a plastic sleeve on the tabletop.

And they lay there for a long time.

# 538_VESSNOM_URV18_MORGANA

We are expelled from cryosleep in a thin liquid bath. Steam rises in the chamber. The walls sweat. The Android offers us each a polyfiber cloth to wipe the runny fluid from our shivering bodies as we stumble up from the Pods in the basin, all naked and waterlogged. We check each other for frostbitten extremities, dreading the feel of blackened, wooden flesh.

And in Pod 3A, the occupant does not awake. Something vital has slipped away in the sleep, and will not return, and his body looks pallid and rubbery, when the technical specialists go to crack the pod, a scent of decay floods the chamber, and settles in our noses, mouths, and lungs as an awful, intoxicated presence.

Nobody knows him. The medical team open the chest in autopsy, find the cavity within frilled and bleached. Lungs have shriveled like some elaborate coral. A smell of ammonia washes up from inside. After they are finished with their investigation, the body is sealed within a waste pouch and consigned to recycling. Proteins are stripped and unincorporated. Limbs peel apart in the belly of machine. Piece by piece, he becomes part of our expedition.

There is an inspection of Pod 3A. The report is sealed by the officers, who will say no more. There are rumors of a jumpspace leak. Allison wants to go on a hull inspection, but requests for EVA are denied. We continue in freefall, extended radiators blotching out the lesser dark of the stars.

We absorb the loss. Watch schedules are shifted. The jaundiced glow of terminals bathes cryosick faces. The familiar sweat and shake of acclimation comes in waves. We take stimulants with nutrient paste along each shift, not medically recommended, but almost universal practice for long-haulers to jolt the body back to wakefulness. That long sleep may take us all some day.

Waking from such a depth is delicious, all-consuming agony. The return from an annihilating darkness to live again. The slosh of fear and excitement surges out through every branch of the nervous system. But there is a moment, as enervating fluids suffuse peripheral tissues and the sensorium tingles after decades of abandonment, that to be hauled up from oblivion is hateful and blasphemous. It is revolting to become flesh from nothing.

The sickness of having fingers again, forcing an estranged body to heave air in and out and in, dragging unfamiliar limbs through microgravity. Sensations worm inward. So long without them that it feels deceptive to see, hear, touch. 

Annihilation, and not the thin flicker of consciousness, begins to feel like our rightful state. And so, as we descend into our next sleep cycle, having briefly refueled, conducted maintenance, said our prayers, we slip away, and hope to join him.

# EXREP_THERIA89aX_CYC98

Grey rock swims in every direction. Wrinkled moon-mass crumbles under the boots of our vaccsuits. Marching 10HRS/day now. Resting when we can. Sun temp hazardous. Still carrying the body, wrapped up. It moves, sometimes. When it thinks we aren't watching. 

I cannot believe it. Maybe it isn't real. Maybe nothing is. I want so much for this to be a joke at the cosmic level. For the walls of this stage to peel back. For the ground to give beneath me and swallow us up. For her to come back. For it to leave forever. For the body to sit up and walk away across Mare Ascension. Leave us. Get the fuck away from us.

They look to me, for guidance. I try each cycle to draw accurate records of travel, cross-referenced by glossy printouts of surface imaging, long crumpled from my map case. Each day, we gather together around the rugged umbilical of the oxygen machine, refilling our tanks for sleep as the sun burns overhead. If the machine gives out, we die. If we cannot find shade, we die. If we are lost, we will not find the supply drop, and we will die.

I think we are lost. I cannot say this. I am afraid to write it. I think everyone already knows. And still we march. The endless wash of grit beneath us, soundlessly scraping as we pass. I feel the slippage. The uncertainty of footing. I tumble down hillsides in a fraction of my natural gravity, unhurt but disoriented, the colorless spray of sand powder in my headlights, helpless against the momentum.

The moon doesn't want us here. I am convinced. Otherwise it would pull harder. Let us grip the surface. It does not. It does not want us here. It wants us dead. It does not want. It does not care. It does not.

There is no sound when the body moves, reflective tarp shifting against the cargo lines. I do not know what brings me there. We are camped beneath a monolithic escarpment. Sunlight burns around us. The others are gone. I don't know why. The umbilical for the oxygen machine slithers into the shade. The lump of the machine sits out in the brightness, solar panels white and rippling off the sand. And it moves. The body moves.

I do not know why I come closer as it struggles, the cords biting around. Or why I pulled the tarp away from the thrash where a head should be. Or what I expected to see when I looked into her face.

I want to die I want to die I want —