A Space Dilemma

Chapter One

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Which is what made the scene before me all the more nightmarish.

He was dying.

And he was screaming. But you couldn’t hear a word of his anguished cries. That made it all the more horrendous. I was forced to stare at his face with no sound spewing from his thrashing body. To observe his pain through only his expressions. And it was so much worse.

I had never known that a human face could be that red. That it could be that convulsed. That it could be in that amount of pain.

You could see it in his eye. You could see just how hard he was fighting to live. How desperately his body was working with the lack of oxygen to keep him alive. But there was no use. He was dying and there was nothing he could do about it.

And in a cruel twist of fate, I was forced to watch it all unwind before me. I wasn’t upset that he was dying. Quite the opposite. I didn’t really care for Tom. I was upset because with him dead I would be alone. Alone in this spaceship, travelling through space with no way of getting home.

But it didn't matter that I didn't care for him. Because death, any death, is just cruel to witness. Regardless of your feelings toward the victim.

When our spaceship broke down and we lost contact with the space station, I realised that we would most likely be stuck here until we died, or until they sent a search party to look for us. Whichever came first. And with our depleting supplies, option one seemed the most likely.

I wasn’t afraid of death. I especially wasn’t afraid of death in space. There couldn’t be a better way to die. I would go down in history as an explorer, an adventurer, a legend. I would be remembered. More valuable dead than alive. I knew that, and I was more than ok with it.

What I was not ok with was being alone. Tom is single-handedly the most annoying man I had met in my entire life. He is arrogant, he is selfish, he is rude and he is more stubborn than a mule. I couldn’t honestly tell you if we spent more than 10 minutes on this three-month-long mission not trying to rip each other’s heads off. But at least he was here. Even if just to be the bane of my exitance, he was here.

And now as I watched him suffocate outside the spaceship, I realised that I would be alone here. Waiting to die or to be rescued and honestly, both options sounded equally terrible.

With one last violent throttle, Tom’s body stilled. And an eerily quiet set in. Not that there was any sound before. But now that he was still and his body was no longer screaming in pain, I was acutely aware of the silence that was space. I stared at his still body for a moment.

For a brief second, I considered if I should go out there and bring him inside. That way if we were rescued at least his family would have a body to bury. But almost instantly I slapped some sense into myself. A dead body in the spaceship? Of course not. As if I wasn’t traumatised enough already. There was no way I was going to be on a spaceship with a dead body.

I would rather be alone.

I think.

Besides, the whole reason I didn’t go out there in the first place was that I knew I didn’t have enough oxygen in my tank to go out that far and return. That is why I had made no effort to go and save Tom’s life as he died, and that is also why had I tried to tell him not to go out there in the first place.

Which of course he didn’t listen to. And naturally, I was right because as he was on his way back from collecting the ship’s broken propeller his oxygen tank had emptied, and he had no way of getting back to the ship in time before his body gave out.

I should feel guilty. I should have tried to save him. Yes, I would have died in the process, but it would have been the more human thing to do. And maybe the better thing to do. If we both died then problem solved really. No more trying desperately to communicate with station control, or ration our supplies, or mend the broken spaceship, or keep from going insane. It would be over.

But annoyingly, that was the moment that my survival instincts decided to kick in. Maybe I had made the wrong decision ethically. But in a life-or-death situation, I guess you just have to throw out all the ethics.

I looked back outside to catch one more glance of Tom. Whether it was to cement my nightmares or because I had completely lost my mind I couldn’t tell you. But as my eyes searched the dark expanse outside, I came up short.

Tom was not there.

Even if his body had drifted away from the ship he couldn’t have gone far enough that I could no longer see him. I ran towards the window. Desperately scanning the abyss for any sign of him. Panic set in. Something was wrong.

In an instant the lights of the spaceship went out, covering me in darkness. I breathed quietly and turned around slowly in the dark trying not to make a sound. But when I felt something wrap around my neck, I screamed.