Crossroads Demon

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

If, however, the hardvac suit you’ve been marooned in contains enough trace O2 and power, the last few hours of your miserable life will be full of futile screaming. And yelling. And crying. I have on good authority.

I lost track of how long I had been aimlessly spinning in the void some time ago, the salt of dried tears caked against my cheeks. After first running my voice ragged yelling “Mayday!” into my commband, I started to hyperventilate and definitely also feel sorry for myself. The last time, it was because corporate HQ used a companywide brunch to award Dockson the cushy programming gig in the Jovian Rings over me. This time, it was nothing so publicly embarrassing — I just ended up on the wrong side of a mutiny, got shoved out of an airlock, and was left to die.

Obi Parker, formerly exobiologist of the Water Strider, at your service.

The hardvac suit was an outdated model: to save power, some auxiliary systems had already shut down, including the condensation cycler in my helmet. As I floated, the distant starlight in my field of vision took a more dreamlike state, filtered by the condensation of what I reasoned now were probably my dying breaths.

I’ll admit, when the mutineers broke into my lab waving stolen blasters and murderous looks, the will to live was incredibly overriding. They didn’t even have to rough me up too too badly before I gave them my access chaincode, and I scarcely fought when they used me as a hostage against ship command. Only when they had fully secured our threadbare research vessel (over the dead bodies of Captain Singh and his retinue guard), and beckoned me towards the airlock locker I started to protest. The lead mutineer, an icy-eyed woman named Jinkz, simply wiggled a bloodstained blaster in her free hand and said one word.

“Choose.”

As far as final life-defining moments go, it’s pretty shitty I’ll admit. I kept veering back in forth in my mind whether it would have been better to just let them put a bullet in my head, instead of electing to be jettisoned into space, just on the off chance I could somehow survive out there long enough on a few hours of O2 for some neighborly ship to pass by and find me.

The battery in my ‘vac suit beeped an appropriately sheepish tone and a red warning light flashed in my visor. This wasn’t the Age of Piracy back on Old Earth; my splotch of marooned space was magnitudes of millions of miles from the nearest ship or port of call. I had only been spacing the lesser part of a decade, so it was unfortunately too easy for my tourist ass to forget just how vast the Big Empty was. The lightheadedness that followed the thought likely stemmed from my suit beginning to fail in power, but I had to give some credit to cosmic existentialism too, didn’t I?

People tell you that when you’re close to death, your core memories replay in your mind in some sort of reel of your life’s highlights. But even when I could feel the heaviness creep behind my eyes, and my slimy skin beneath the suit’s failing temp-control, I just felt a growing sense of tiredness. Maybe it was a little embarrassing, after years of dutiful work and study to just snuff out in the sparse backwash of an interstellar shipping lane, but at least Dr. Obafemi Parker Jr would die peacefully.

If you discount the violent mutiny that got me here. Obviously.

I was so caught up in what I thought were these final moments of less-than-comforting navel gazing, that I almost didn’t make out the mottled shape that appeared in the right of my vision.

My float through empty space had seen me stop rotating and adopt more of a languid tilt, so when the shape started to appear, I had a good few seconds to process something ahead. Thinking it was caused by the water droplets inside of my helmet, I actually reached out to wipe it away. I’m sure it’s not the first time an oxygen-deprived space exile thought he could reach himself through the spacesuit. Dumb. As the movement offset my trajectory, I forced my sluggish hand to the rudimentary datalink on the suit’s belt and prepared to speak.

“Identify object in proximity,” I croaked through cracked lips. It was the first time I heard my voice since the first hour spent crying and screaming bloody murder after my sundering from the Water Strider. It sounded so much like a ragged nail on old bulkheads, not in the sexy way.

“Battery low,” the suit AI replied in a voice so warped by energy-save mode it could have come from one of Mom’s horror-sims. “Confirm request to redirect power priorities?”

I hesitated.

I hadn’t realized precisely when I got so acclimatized to the idea of dying, but suddenly there was an ember of hope alight in me. If I got this wrong, I might have just squeezed out the last bit of juice keeping me alive. On the other hand, I had to grasp at any chance that I wasn’t already gonads deep in a DMT fever dream and that the object in my field of vision was actually a ship, potentially capable of recognizing a stranded traveler. If it sounded too good to be true, well, I reasoned that five extra minutes or so of hosing down my own CO2 didn’t make my next decision that much of a risk.

“Confirm,” I replied.

I could sense the whirring of small power conduits in the suit and the visor came to life, diagnostic systems flickering across the damp screen like esoteric religious texts. Angling my body such that the mottled shape was square in my vision for the suit’s analysis software, I drifted closer and closer.

Depth perception is tricky when you’re on the float, and believe it or not I didn’t have any time to 3D print myself some one-use contacts when I was made to walk the plank by the mutineers, so to speak. Still, I squinted and tried to discern the shape. A ship would have been good, a fixed station would have been even better, but as I got closer, a gnawing thought in the back of my mind wondered if I hadn’t just drifted into the path of some space trash or debris.

Imagine my surprise, when the shape waved at me.

“No object in proximity detected,” the suit’s AI diagnostic finally droned.

Huh?

It’s not really advisable to “swim” with your hands and legs when you’re in zero G with no sense of direction: you might end up spinning off into oblivion. But since that was already very much happening, I tilted my body like an extinct dolphin (I’ve only ever seen them on holobands!) and tried to shift my float towards it. The old endocrine system, bless it, was still kicking, even this close to the end, to pump in a healthy dose of “omg-what-the-fuck-is-that” into my gut.

“Run diagnostic again,” I wheezed.

The shape, which was now conceivably close enough to hit with a rock if we were somewhere with an atmosphere, waved again. As a scientist, I tried to ignore the dread building up inside of me and instead fanned the flames of curiosity buried beneath self preservation. Drawing nearer, I could now see the rough outline of a torso, with five outcropping appendages. Unlike my balance, which saw my legs spread out like worms behind me as I swam through space, this newcomer remained perfectly suspended in an upright position.

Was it someone else in a spacesuit, just, lost out here? I was sure when the mutineers ejected me from the Water Strider, no one else had been given the same treatment as me. I watched the fusion engines roar to life once they took over the ship and re-entered Hyperlight space without so much as a goodbye. Did they dump some other poor soul before their treasonous Irish exit from the sector?

“No object in proximity detected,” the suit’s AI belabored one last time. “Entering emergency power save mode. Please charge suit.”

Fat chance, buddy, I thought to myself as the display on the suit’s visor powered down. My energy expenditure probably cut deeply into my remaining time, and doing the math on how much I had left made my brain hurt. No matter — according to the suit, I was just hallucinating the humanoid shape in front of me. Not uncommon for the fevered mind left on the float. But the suit battery was also so low, maybe it just didn't have the juice to properly run its diagnostic program.

No, before accepting the cold embrace of death, I would have to see this the old fashioned way, with the two eyes Ma Burroughs gave me.

I didn’t have to wait too long.

Directly ahead of me now, maybe fifty feet away, was a man. And I don’t mean like, somebody I thought was a man encased inside a spacesuit like I was. I meant a man of about middling height, long hair the color of an Aryan’s wet dream, in an impossibly sharp looking pinstriped suit. My already labored breathing grew more ragged.

Pinstripe suit, not spacesuit.

As I got within spitting distance, I still couldn’t make out his face, but he seemed to cock his head at me. My field of research was always the sciences of the body, not physics… but I was reasonably sure being exposed to the hard vacuum of space was bad for you: boil-your-blood-off-and-turn-into-an-icicle bad for you. The apprehension turning my stomach into knots reconfigured to something like bemusement. It felt hard to refute now that I wasn’t hallucinating, which in some way comforted me. I always had weird dreams my whole life, so it felt apt to have one before I died.

What the hell, I waved back at the apparition.

“My, don’t you have nice manners,” I somehow heard inside my helmet, despite the fact that my commband had long since gone offline. Definitely hallucinating then.

I could see his face clearly now. He had angular, severe features, not unlike some of the spacers I’ve worked with that go through extensive body mods for life amongst the stars. He wore circular glasses with a bejeweled golden rim that stood almost unevenly on a nose that featured a long puckered scar winding from eyebrow to opposing lip. I thought that was unsettling until I saw his yellow eyes in cat-like slits, and the presence of a worn, stained rope noose fitted around his neck like some macabre tie.

“Nnnggfh,” I managed meekly.

Yellow Eyes smiled sharply, revealing rows of perfectly filed down teeth.

“Not too eloquent, though,” he said. I foggily watched his lips mouth the words, but his silky, snakelike voice felt like it was coming from right next to my ear, like he was here in the suit with me. He raised a perfectly manicured hand and suddenly, my forward momentum stopped. Just stopped. I swallowed and tried to speak like a human being and not a mouse again.

“What part of my brain is this dream coming from?”

“Dream?” Yellow Eyes frowned. He moved his hand out in front of him and rotated his index finger like a mini ballerina, which was odd, but not as odd as when my whole body rotated in a 360 arc as well. “Does this feel like a dream?”

His cat-like eyes blinked at me expectantly. Welp.

“Ummm…well, actually kind of. Who are you supposed to be?”

“Who do I look like?”

“We’re…we’re not gonna talk about how you’re just hovering around pure vacuum dressed like an Ayn Rand protagonist?”

Yellow Eyes sighed and slowly reclined as if on an invisible sofa. Something flicked out from behind his suit that I didn’t see before: a long whip-like appendage with a triangular head, the same pale color as him. It lashed around in hard vacuum like a cat’s tail.

“I have gone by many names across many lifetimes, but you may call me Mephistopheles.”

“...Mr..Feliz?”

“More or less,” Feliz replied lazily, jabbing an elegant finger in my direction. “And I’m here to ask you the most important question you’ll ever be asked.”

I ran my tongue across my cracked lips again, scarcely daring to breathe.

“How badly do you want to live?”

I blinked.

“What sort of question is that?”

Feliz smirked. “THE question: how badly do you want to live?”

The oxygen deprivation and fast-cooling hardvac suit was already filling me with a sense of fevered euphoria, but I fanned the smolders of anger somewhere within me. Did I really endure a decade of thankless research, overbearing upbringing, and a childhood spent without sunlight in the tunnel habs of Red Mars to be taunted by my own subconscious on the verge of death?

No, thank you, said Obi Parker’s spine…buried somewhere deep.

“That’s a shit question to ask someone on the brink of death,” I squeaked defiantly.

“Would you ask a man who wasn’t drowning if he needed a life vest?”

Touché, subconscious.

“And you have the power to save me,” I jabbed skeptically. “That’s what you want me to believe.”

“Save is… a loose term,” Feliz responded. “But yes…if I will it, you will live.”

“Unless you have some O2 canisters and lithium charge tucked somewhere behind that tail, I fail to see how you can guarantee that.”

“Mr. Parker, remember that faith is an act of faith first and foremost.” The space demon almost looked preening as he parroted back words Ma Burroughs had often said to me over the years before her death. Maybe it was the slow creep of asphyxiation, but my face didn’t give anything away to the apparition. The gloat faltered slightly.

“Hmm… people usually are more alarmed when I know very intimate details about them. It’s part of my whole schtick.” The tail lashed almost violently behind Feliz again.

I laughed mirthlessly. I’m sure it sounded like a pregnant frog hopping across pavement.

“Well,” I began. “As a figment of my imagination, you should have access to all the same memories I do. Metaphysically not that impressive.”

Feliz nodded and thoughtfully scratched his shaven chin with his tail. It was somehow both totally disturbing and incredibly engaging. I was just as into the fant-sims and horror-sims as the next person, indulging in Gothic vibes around Halloween if I was ever in spaceport or down a gravity well during that ancient Old Earth holiday. But shouldn’t my subconscious choice of deathly apparition be, I don’t know, an alien or sentient amoeba even seemed more up my alley. Exobiologist, remember? As if reading my confused thoughts, Feliz turned backwards and waved a hand in the vacuum.

At first, I didn’t see anything different. Just the same canopy of uncaring stars in each direction. Then the corners of my vision began to ripple like the surface of a pond and space itself melted in a cacophony of different reflecting colors. After a moment, the rippled surface settled into a crystal clear screen ahead of both me and Feliz, maybe hundreds and hundreds of feet across, cinema style. I had to give the space demon credit and let my jaw go slack.

His tail flicked in amusement.

On the ethereal screen was… me. Or rather, a version of me. It was a wide shot of a stainless steel corporate ballroom, filled to the brim with people in baby blue jumpsuits. The twin light of a binary star leaked through polarized windows and the landscape beyond showed miles and miles of auburn tree-like plants. I knew it well: it was the planet New Kinshasa, specifically the Kagura-Davis office I worked out of a few years ago when I first arrived at the company to do exo. Sure enough, there I was in the middle of the whole thing, standing slightly slouched with the same white glasses, the same unkempt braids. It was a posture I used often in that place; the new lab grunt from the Inner Colonies without many familiar faces to schmooze with at company socials. Hopefully not as pathetic as I made it just sound.

But in this visual, people surrounded and cheered me on. There was a confident smile on my face and denizens in the upper decks of the ballroom were uncorking bottles of bubbly, fountains of alcohol spraying down. A flickering news holotape suspended across the top of the room read in bold, pulsing letters: *PARKER MAKES DISCOVERY OF THE DECADE!*

“What is this?” said a quiet voice from within my helmet. Took a second to realize it was mine.

“The future,” Feliz replied. “A future, at least. One where you finally are recognized for your undeniable contributions to the scientific knowledge of the human race. Would you like that?”

My gaze was fixed on the visual apparition ahead. The smile on Future-Me’s face looked wider than I can remember ever doing it. Pearly whites and everything.

“How?”

“How is everyone’s first question,” Feliz said, gesturing dismissively with his hands and tail. “Would it really matter that much, compared with your current circumstances?”

I was silent. Something in the back of my mind recalled the math I had done about my hardvac’s power supply earlier; five minutes had easily passed. But if anything, I felt my breathing grow less labored – even thinking didn’t feel as much like trudging in mud with plexi-slippers. A side effect of this weird cosmic limbo…right?

“Recognized for my contributions,” I began. “So this is what my subconscious thinks I wished for most in life before I died?”

Feliz narrowed his eyes and waved his hand across the space screen. Again, the fabric of my field of vision rippled and the visuals ahead morphed.

The silver and grays of the Kagura-Davis office on New Kinshasa became vibrant greens, golds, and blues of an idyllic beach. This time, it didn’t look like any place I had previously been: miles of pure, untouched coastline with sparkling clear waves lapping gently on sandy shores underneath a blue-white sun. Not a megastructure or trash mountain in sight. A junkrat’s kid from the Martian tunnels could only dream to have set foot in such a place.

“You’ve never been here,” Feliz said. “I know exactly where this beach is. And it’s not on any part of any world you’ve ever had the resources to visit. It can’t be from any of your memories.”

I was mesmerized by the utopian paradise in front of me. I was conscious of my gloved hand rising unbidden to the vision, grasping out across space. The only beach I had ever really seen was the torrential seawall on the Amethyst Coast on Sevastopol Prime, rich in single cell organisms, but certainly not a tropical haven straight out of a painting. My gaze followed the coastline up to a spot of dark color. As if on cue, Feliz wiggled his hand and the frame of the screen zoomed in.

Seated with two other people on a fiber tarp was another version of me. Here I looked older – not by much but, there were little streaks of white in a goatee I had never grown, and cute old person wrinkles on the sides of my eyes. The first person next to me was a gorgeous woman in a red dress, hair as spiky and blue as the plumes of a fusion engine. A little boy of maybe ten years was perched on her lap, wearing an orange onesuit with a whole mess of fruit scraped greedily across his mouth. They were all in bliss. I stared between the woman, myself, and the boy, piecing together the family resemblances in a sort of messed up Punnett Square jigsaw.

Again I looked happy, but a different kind of happy from the vision before. The kind of happiness you get from inhaling the sweet smoke of a warm fireplace, or an afternoon spent underneath a radiant sun.

“You haven’t met her yet,” Feliz mused. “But you can. You could have all of it if you make it out of here.”

“It looks wonderful,” I agreed softly.

“How badly do you want to live?”

The light from the conjured beach lit the back of Feliz’s blonde tresses like a halo. I reflected on the two pathways the space demon had shown me: a world where my peers gave me the accolades I felt I deserved, and a world where I had the family a darker part of me would admit I missed out on in years of dedication to the job. In both, it was a sense of love I reached for, love, in the face of an untimely death, here alone amongst the stars.

Well, not technically alone. Feliz inspected me as I thought, his question still hanging over us. In the lighting of the stars, his scar looked longer and crueler than it had before. Was this my subconscious’ macabre way of getting me to admit before I went, the things I wished I always had?

Why did it still feel like there was something too faraway about them?

“Is this really what you think I want? What I think I want?” I repeated, meeting those unnerving yellow cat-eyes.

Honest to God plumes of black smoke shot out of Feliz’s ears like an antique train from the history-sims. If I wasn’t so alarmed by how impossible it was I definitely would have found it amusing. The space demon turned to the screen in a huff. This time, instead of using his hand to rearrange the vision portrait he was showing me, his devilish tail arced out like a laser. The screen rippled violently this time, cascades of color clashing with each other in a rainbow gone wrong. The light of it all hurt my retinas and I turned my head away inside my helmet. Light radiation was no joke out here.

Through the corner of my eye I felt the picture settling against the black backdrop of the space between stars. The colors took shape and I dared myself the courage to turn one last time and be done with this bizarre version of limbo I was cycling through.

What in the-?

The rippling screen before me was of no place I had ever seen, maybe no place anyone had ever seen. It was some strange new world, completely dominated by purple colors: indigos, magentas, violets, dark blues. Unknown purple vegetation clung to weirder looking angular cliffs of translucent silica. Miles deep below the massive cliffs, I spotted fissures red with the glow of volcanic activity. I almost flinched, which for sure would have thrown off my stable orbit, as a crackle of unstable electricity roared across the bottom of one of the chasms. The sky was totally foreign as well, reflecting another purple hue beside the cold light of a distant red star.

“Zakhuul,” Feliz said almost approvingly. My eyes quickly darted to him for another outburst of information, but he was silent with his back to me, watching the vision as well.

“What are you showing me?” I croaked.

“What are you showing yourself?”

The visual zoomed towards one of the bizarre silica cliffs like a drone-held camera in an action-sim. It was a weird sensation, being in zero gravity in 3D space while watching regular movement across a 2D plane. The zoom stopped as quickly as it began, illuminating a humanoid shape atop a silica plateau. The figure was clad from the neck down in a sleek looking skinsuit, the types of which cost rich plutocrats half a planet’s worth to get made. Instead of a helmet, a bubble of shimmering energy screened the man’s face.

My face.

Of all the iterations Feliz had shown me, this looked the most like me. Almost everything about my face was identical as the mug I was sporting beneath my helmet right at that moment.

Except the eyes. Instead of my usual gray lookers, Alter-Me had eyes of luminous crystal, crackling with a hot golden light. Rivulets of dried blood stuck to his cheeks, undisturbed by the howling atmosphere outside him.

“My eyes…”

“No,” Feliz said. “My eyes.”

Alter-Me stopped in the center of the silica plateau and reached in front of him with a fist. There was the sound of glass breaking, and a stream of green liquid fell from his hand, pooling and bubbling atop the ground. Alter-Me’s new, synthetic eyes stayed focused on the ground below, not giving away anything. After a moment, the surface beneath his feet started to char and burn. The sizzling material resolved into a larger maze-like symbol the size of a starship on the plateau surface.

Whenever I tried to follow the shape of the symbol, I would blink and the pattern inexplicably changed shape in my mind. It was giving me a headache. At the center of the maze, a tunnel opened into the depths below, where light did not penetrate. Alter-Me looked back up at the sky, back up as if to look at me, before turning and descending into the darkness below. Moments later, the surface of the plateau started to sew itself up again. The entrance was gone.

“It’s like a living organism,” I spoke to no one in particular.

“Yes,” the space demon replied, a smile back on his face as he turned to me. “Something only apparent to the explorer’s tenets of an exobiologist.”

“This place is real?”

“And untouched by humans. This place isn’t even on your Protectorate's starmaps.”

“That’s not possible. The laws of physics–”

Feliz cocked his head. “How badly do you want to live?”

Tears pooled at the corner of my eyes. The eyes of a coward who sold out his captain without a fight and let himself be marooned in space to the point of death.

“I want to live.”

“Why?”

All the while, the vista of the lost planet remained in front of my gaze, purples overlapping purples, and mysteries hidden within. A totally uncharted world with boundless potential for discovery, to understand my insignificance in the cosmos that much better.

“I don’t want to die before I get the chance…to see.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder. Feliz was somehow now on my right side, patting me softly like one does a regretful child. With a wave of his other hand, the screen rippled in front of us like liquid mercury, returning to the black and white blanket of background space all around us. The shade of purple from that planet still faded out of the corner of my vision. The space demon spoke.

“What would you trade for this knowledge?”

“What do I have left to give,” I said cynically. “I’m about to die.”

“Not if you give me your word,” he replied stately.

His primal tail flicked out between us and, before I could register, opened a shallow slice in his pal. Globules of pale red blood slowly floated out between us and up into the nothingness. He held the hand out towards mine, completely ignoring the gash.

“If I give you the means to live, will you help me find this world. This planet in the Reach Beyond?”

I felt as clear headed as I’d been since back on the Water Strider. Whatever the effects of slow oxygen deprivation and suit failure I’d been feeling while on the spin earlier, they deserted me totally. But minutes had passed since then; I had to be dead already. The intense visions and relaxed symptoms backed that up. Was this final pathway an attempt to get me to face my internal truth, that beyond a wonderful career and loving family… I just wanted to know?

I just wanted to see something no one had ever seen?

What was the harm in playing along then?

“Yes.”

“Promise it,” Feliz intoned gravely.

Purple vistas across glittering cliffs on strange worlds. Contact with life older and more mystical than our own. Eyes that Saw.

“I promise,” I said, gripping Feliz’s hand in a firm shape. The space demon smiled gleefully, tail whipping around. There was a crackle of energy in the vacuum amongst us, a spine tingling sense of euphoria… and all of a sudden he was gone. He didn’t even leave a flash of light. My stomach felt turned inside out. Like an avalanche of sensation, the fatigue and illness returned to my body and condensation from my rasped breath coated the faceplate of my helmet. In the background of my vision, I suddenly heard the panicked whirring of compromised electrical servos. It took a second to realize it was the suit again.

“Object in proximity detected,” the suit’s AI remarked with an indicator overlay before sputtering.

I turned my sore neck to look at the marker on the screen, and nearly had a heart attack then and there when I saw what was quickly approaching my vision from the right.

It was a planet.