Deathlessness

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuums of space, or so they say. Drifting through the big void alone, naked, and without air for so long would prove that statement correct. From Kail's point of view, he was tired of trying to scream; It was pointless, and he didn't feel like it amounted to much, all things considered.

He'd forgotten about the mysteries space exploration was supposed to be since he'd lived it for far too long. In fact, it had been so long since he encountered any stimulating activity that he wondered if he could recall any memories. He probably forgot how to speak, let alone remember how to scream. But he thought, why not try it for old time's sake?

Nothing. No point.

Instead, Kail decided to open his eyes for what seemed like forever. Slowly his eyelids, which felt like led doors, began to gradually open. Letting in the dazzling patches of light, he had forgotten how bright space was. What used to be a marvelous sight was another reminder that he was trapped. Free-floating, stuck on an unknown trajectory, moving at speeds he believed to be well over three hundred thousand miles per hour, non-stop.

"I guess that's not really drifting," Kail tried to say but ended up thinking it to himself.

Regardless of how fast he traveled through space, it felt like he was only standing still most of the time. When he opened his eyes, he was reminded that there was only a slight sense that he had moved at all. He saw that the stars had shifted slightly between the extended periods he slept. With his eyes closed, there were no reference points to help him determine that he was moving. Sure, he could bend his arms and legs, tilt his head, and sometimes curl up into the fetal position. Mostly only when he was tired of spreading out like one would if they were relaxing in a pool of water. But it really was just for showing off his human figure to the stars around him; it didn't help make the feeling of travel seem any more effective. He didn't even care much for his appearance; modesty was a thing of the past. Floating there with no clothes, his hair constantly being burned off by the radiation. His skin re-molding to a soft, slightly tanned texture underneath the crystallized flakes that regularly dried off and left behind a small trail from where he's been. Though without enough light, it was nothing Kail could see once it all went further than an inch away from his body.

Surprisingly not having clothes or hair made no difference when it came to keeping warm in space because space itself was neither warm nor cold. Kail eventually lost the concept of temperature altogether after a while. It was just as distant as his memories of home. He no longer felt the tingling sensation as his skin constantly grew back. Besides his own fingers brushing his skin, he never even gave the feeling of touch much attention.

The reminder that no air was in his lungs was subtle as he didn't really have the strength to try to inhale. Kail once in a while remembered that he had lungs and wondered if he would ever use them again. Back on Earth, breathing was a luxury, something he no longer needed to do. Still, Kail used to enjoy the feeling of air entering his lungs, the expansion of his chest, and the stretching of his muscles. It felt good, and It was a memory he held on to.

He recalled people. Humans, the short-lived race he originated from, were a dominant sentient lifeform, and they called Earth home. He remembered Corians, the taller, thinner race with slightly more intelligence and fur than Humans. They would have lasted longer than humans, but they became too ambitious too fast and never took the time to learn how to swim. Ironic when you think about it, considering the third dominant race on Earth lived the longest. The Magnorans were just smart enough to evolve and not die out. They could have easily outlived both predecessors had they been smart enough to figure out how to leave Earth. Something that really would have come in handy just before their home was destroyed.

His home.

All of them dreamed of immortality, yet none fully understood the gravity of the long-term effects. True immortality was more than some fictional superhero stuff you would read about in comic books or science fiction novels. It was more than some religious belief preached amongst a population. Deathlessness was beyond any scientific understanding when you got down to it. If any of those races lived long enough, maybe they could have developed the technology to help Kail understand it more. Something he, instead, had to do without their assistance with only limited progress.

At first, it didn't seem like a mistake he had made. He learned to accept his immortality and did great things with it. He helped people learn new things, he saved lives, and he moved mountains, so to speak. But within his first one hundred years of life, he was already reminded of the curse of immortality. Watching his wife die was one thing; he loved her and was prepared to see her pass. However, he was not ready to see his kids, and eventually, his grandkids die. And while time healed his wounds, it gave way to another element he was unprepared for… fear.

Fear was something that all emotion-based lifeforms had. While the Corians and the Magnorans accepted that there was a life form amongst them that was immortal, the Humans did not share this level of acceptance. They grew fearful of Kail instead of embracing his state of being. The concept that someone could outlive them should have been a scientific marvel. Instead, people tried to use his gift as a weapon. People, in general, are scared of things being used against them if it means they could die. And when that weapon has a mind of its own, it is all the more reason they need to be scared. Kail remembered when artificial intelligence proved difficult to control by humans. It didn't take long before they believed that an immortal human could also be a reason to question if they were safe.

Throwing religion back into the mix, Kail even had followers who thought he was a god at one point. Kail was no god, never wanted to be one, and never stood idle when people asked him to be theirs. Regardless, it didn't matter because it still happened. And when things went wrong, it was easier to blame him than to admit that their own ignorance led to their demise.

Kail always imagined the death of the humans as going to be a turning point for him. Still, since he was exiled during that time, he never got to actually see it. Being sealed in a metal box at the bottom of the ocean does strange things to your concept of time, it would seem, even though it was nothing compared to floating in space.

At least in that box, he had gravity. Something that would pull him down, so he knew which way was up. "Which one was better, though," he thought. He would occasionally ask himself this question when those memories came flooding back. And he ended up laughing when he realized that he was comparing being trapped in a box to being trapped in space for an eternity.

Maybe being exiled in that box was meant to train him to better deal with being in space? Perhaps it was a foreshadowing of what was to eventually come millions of years later. He knew that finally, something would change when he was in his small, dark metal chamber. And he remembered pondering if the Earth would swallow him up or if he would melt with the rest of the planet when the sun exploded. What would be his demise? Would he even have a demise, an escape from life itself?

In time though, his release from that box was rather anticlimactic. Nothing seemed worth telling a tale about, and it was more a story of patience than anything else. Regardless, what did happen was that he learned how to ignore time and, more importantly, not go mad in isolation. He was eventually grateful for both skills once he said adieu to his solar system.

Now that he thought about it, it also taught him that screaming served no purpose because whether you were at the depths of the ocean or out in the furthest reaches of space, no one could hear you scream. No one would even know you existed either.

Kail raised his left hand to his face, rubbing his eyes with the index finger and thumb. It had been a while since he had them open, and he wanted to give his eyeballs a "wake-up massage" in hopes it would help him focus better. When it didn't, he winced and scrunched up his eyelids a few times, hoping that that was enough.

When he opened his eyes again, he peered onto the interstellar wallpaper. He saw a familiar sight of billions of stars in front of him. However, none of them were apparently bright enough to illuminate his hand. Instead, a black silhouette of his hand simply cut out the stars in its path until he moved it so he could get a better idea of where his friends were.

Stacey and Aster were two reddish stars he called friends. Typically placed in front of him, they now appeared to have moved down and far off to his right. Clove, Angie, and Vivian were three stars clustered together in a perfect triangle that had moved even further down, almost out of view. And his old pals, Nanno, Zanfier, Lith, and Bob, had moved entirely out of his sight. They were probably behind him in a spot he could no longer turn his head to see.

His friends amongst the many other stars were the only ones he felt comfortable conversing with. No one else seemed to understand where he was coming from when he was talking about his memories, and of course, all the other stars seemed to ignore him. Either that or they didn't have the telepathic abilities that Stacey, Aster, Clove, Angie, Vivian, Nanno, Zanfier, Lith, and of course, Bob had. In fact, these 9 stars were the only ones that seemed to care at all. They were traditionally the first to greet Kail when he did wake up, and they were the ones that gave him any sense of direction. Both emotionally and physically.

Seeing how far off his friends were from view told him one of two things. He had traveled longer than he thought since his last sleep, or something had messed up his slow spin. It didn't take long for him to realize this in his head since he's had millions of years of practice doing math.

Though something just didn't add up for him. And he was intrigued by the angle of where his friends were located. Sure, they moved, but not all at once or in the same direction, it would seem. Did they all decide to team up and play a practical joke on Kail? Maybe as he slept, they picked themselves up and moved because they were not where they should have been.

This was exceptionally odd and led Kail to run the calculations in his head. He also tried to recall if he ever had woken up slightly because of feeling the presence of something coming in contact with him. This would have explained the adjustment to his almost non-existent rotation, considering it originally had been constant since he was ejected from his Solar System. What caused this shift in position between his friends? He looked around but couldn't see anything, at least not from his vantage point. There was no sign of a distant planet or interstellar rock nearby. One that could have possibly affected his trajectory by any gravitational pull. Then again, that wouldn't have moved the stars like it did; he would simply be seeing them all at once, at a different angle.

Maybe he was asleep so long that he forgot where his friends were? "No," he thought, "when you've had friends as long as this, you know where they stand. I have looked at them for so long that I know my friends, and I know they don't just move…or am I maybe just not that good of a friend? Maybe I did forget where they all are at."

No, that was not it. Something actually moved the stars around. And while Kail acknowledged that he was still slowly spinning, there was something out there that had to have moved his friends around. Whatever it was, it had to be something massive. But what? He didn't see anything. Was it a black hole?

Kail began to get excited. Maybe it was a black hole. Perhaps the inevitable was now here. He had wondered what would happen to him if he actually encountered one. He pondered if it would be the one thing to finally end this curse of immortality. Would he ever meet one? The vastness of space is so immense that the probability of encountering one, let alone anything else, would be nearly impossible to fathom, yet maybe here it was. The odds were not as stacked up against him as he once thought.

To think, this constant healing body of his would finally meet its match, and he would encounter a force that would ultimately be strong enough to end this. He would be free, and he could just taste it. For once, he could even feel his heart beating again. It started like a rocket at launch, bringing his senses to life.

His brain began to take over, now with more of his senses online like a captain manning the control center of a ship that had been in hibernation for a long time. And now it was time to start waking up the rest of his crew.

As his senses started coming online, skipping the routine systems checks, he started trying to better understand his surroundings. He wasn't going to need his sense of sound, there was nothing to hear, but his brain kept it on standby just in case. Same for his sense of taste, though he could taste the adrenaline. The bitter-sweet experience flooded the space between his tongue and teeth in an unexpected wave of intense flavor. His sense of touch was already seeing if anything was pulling or pushing him. Could he even feel that since he had no sense of direction, he thought? It didn't matter, his senses were already in overdrive, and there was nothing to stop him from trying.

Did a black hole have a sense of smell? He tried to take a whiff of his surroundings. A feeble attempt considering there was nothing around him that could carry particles for his nose to pick up and inhale. Besides, his muscles were not awake enough to bring much into his lungs. He set that sense aside, just like his sense of hearing.

He instinctively focused his energy on his sense of sight. The sense that started this cluster of emotions in the first place. Kail cocked his head to the side and moved his head forward more as if it would allow him to look at the wall of stars any differently.

Nothing. No change, not one thing. The stars were just stars. But maybe, there was a bend in the light? Kail looked again, desperately looking for evidence that light was bending around some gravitational force at the epicenter of his view. He returned his hand to his face to create another silhouette cutout blocking the stars' light. Hoping he could use that as a comparison.

Moving his hand a few times in front of his eyes, then frantically adding his right hand, he tried to make sense of what he was or wasn't seeing. He determined that he couldn't find any empty void containing a gravitational pull so strong that light itself would be warped and stretched. Nothing, not one hint of a dark presence or anything that could have moved his friends.

Then what was it? Was he going mad? No, he remembered what that felt like. This was not him going mad. Did he just forget like he previously assumed? He spent some time reviewing the possibilities and memories of his surroundings. All these years, nothing had changed; he was just traveling through space.

After a half hour of trying to figure things out, he allowed himself to calm down. His mind had gone from DEFCON one down to DEFCON four, and he began to think clearly with more intent. He acknowledged something wasn't right, and taking the time to doubt himself wasn't helping him solve the anomaly. He knew something must have altered his course, sped him up, slowed him down, or possibly changed his vision. But how? And more importantly, what? He was moving at such a speed that if anything tried to stop or move him, it would have caused severe damage to them. He surely would have woken up and felt it.

The scenarios continued to flow, and each one made less sense than the next. Gravity from a planet, star, or black hole could have altered Kail's course and his view of the stars. It could have been a rift in space that swallowed him up and spit him back out, changing his velocity. Maybe it spat him back into a different dimension where the stars were not in the same place as the previous one? Perhaps some alien ship saw Kail shooting through space, and they wanted to be friendly, so they tried to stop him by grabbing him with their tractor beam. Instead, the force was so strong that it ended up tearing their ship apart, and he indirectly killed hundreds of crew members as their ship was ripped into pieces. That could mean he was now a wanted space criminal too.

That last one didn't make sense, though he wondered about life in space again. Another topic he often contemplated as he contemplated statistics and the probability of other life forms on other planets. He let his mind wander and began thinking about different possible life forms. Sometimes he wondered about how they would communicate or what they would eat. Other times he thought about their living environments or how their cultures dictated how they acted. Would they be less advanced than life was on Earth, or would they be more advanced? What would they look like?

He often thought about that last one. Earth and a few of the moons around Jupiter had life forms that Humans began to see as "natural" looking. Kail knew that the possibilities of different physical features on a life form made a lot of sense. And when the human race disappeared and was replaced by other dominant species, it was not that far-fetched of an idea. The biped and quadruped lifeforms he grew to love and connect with were examples that anything was possible in regards to what other life forms could look like. When still on Earth, he remembered looking in the mirror to compare himself to the Magnorans. They were a short four-legged species that could have quickly learned to walk on two legs but chose not to; he was reminded of how different life can change. They were nothing like their forerunners. They were…

Kail paused. A mirror, he thought to himself. "That's it!" Kail thought, "What if I'm looking at a reflection or something? Would that alter the position of my friends?"

Kail opened his eyes again, realizing he had closed them as he thought to himself. He looked with an intent to prove this theory. Kail noted that all the stars were there, and everything was crystal clear. It was the cleanest mirror he had ever seen, if it was a mirror. Still, it didn't explain how his friends were not just reversed in position. There needed to be an explanation for why they were in a different order. It was almost as if several mirrors were pointing in different directions.

Kail still had doubts about his new epiphany, especially since he couldn't find any seams between mirrors, nor could he see himself in the reflection. Either he was up close and personal to these mirrors, or they were huge mirrors further away. None of it made sense! Kail was still drifting back to the idea that he was making up some very off-the-wall scenarios that were probably impossible.

It was then, at that point in his thought process, that everything had suddenly changed. During Kail's intense scientific discovery, he hadn't once thought to tilt his head back and look straight up. He didn't anticipate that the long journey would end when his head suddenly came into contact with a large metallic structure. He could feel a crack ripple through his head and neck, temporarily paralyzing him and dazing his vision. The sensation brought his senses alive as it rushed through his entire body from his head down to his toes. He vaguely recognized once again what pain felt like.

As Kail regained control of his vision and could once again move his arm, he noticed that the object he smacked into gave into his presence. It started to drift away as if to clear a path for Kail to pass by. There was no light to help him see what he had actually hit, but he reached out for it nonetheless, hoping there was something there he could grab hold of.

As he was feeling around, he knew it was only a matter of time before the object would drift outside his reach. He desperately tried to grab onto something. He had missed his window of opportunity, and it didn't take long before nothing was there.

Scrambling to reorient himself, he tried to see what was out there. Nothing could be seen, and he could now tell that whatever it was, it had pushed him to spin around more than he would have liked. Seeing the previously stationary canvas of stars suddenly move drastically was dizzying, and he tried hard to find a fixed point on which he could focus.

"What the hell was that?" he asked himself, "And where did it go?"

Kail was spinning faster than before his chance encounter, and he really didn't like the fact he couldn't stop his new form of motion. He was comfortable and lucky to have had a nearly straight path this entire journey, and to suddenly be knocked off guard was less than ideal, to say the least.

Within moments, he felt the revealing passion of pain strike him again as his right knee came crashing into another invisible object. This time, however, Kail was ready to start looking immediately for something to grab on to, knowing he had a short window of opportunity. Luckily, this time with success!

Kail grabbed onto a small lip thick enough for his fingers to curl around slightly. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough; he lost his grip almost as fast as he had managed to grab onto the edge. The spin of his body in tandem with the moving object before him was enough to help his own rotation but still with enough inertia to eject him from the elusive thing.

This was not working well, Kail thought to himself. He was confused about how he was moving slow enough to not destroy whatever was hitting him and why he couldn't see these objects. He paused his thought as he continued to regain his position and figure out if anything else was coming his way.

Within moments he felt one more smack, this time head-on. His face and chest impacted another object, only more rigid than before. And this time, he had more than enough to hold on to. Kail felt around briefly and grabbed an edge he could wrap his body around. Ignoring the pain, he was not willing to lose what could have been his last chance to stick a landing.

As he established his grip with his right arm, he tried feeling around with his left hand. The object felt like it was part of a hull or piece of shrapnel that was part of something bigger. This time he could see it was metallic on one side as if plucked from a junkyard. A light pattern shone on the surface as if the source was slowly orbiting around him. He must have been spinning and tried to pinpoint the origin of the light. There was no star that he could see, so there must have been something else generating the light. He looked around and eventually saw something significant spinning towards him.

He couldn't tell if it was spinning or if he was spinning, but he did realize it was huge, and within it was the light he had been looking for. He could see a surface that looked like it once could be a platform or some sort of ground someone could possibly stand on. Seeing that it was coming up close relatively fast, Kail quickly adjusted himself hoping it would be enough to brace for impact.

Suddenly he felt like he was shot from a catapult as he was launched towards the platform when the objects collided. He quickly grabbed the first edge he could find, and due to the size of this new object, Kail felt like he had landed on solid ground for the first time in a long time. However, this solid ground, he realized, was still without gravity. It would be easy for him to be flung back into the vast space. This prompted him to play it safe and hold on for dear life as he began to scale the platform, grabbing any crevasse he could come in contact with.

Within minutes he managed to crawl to the light source and held on to what looked like a beacon. This beacon was a round sphere with a light in the center shining in one direction. The globe was anchored to a cone-shaped base that looked like part of the rest of the structure. This technology was unlike anything he had ever seen. However, the purpose of using it as a flood light or beacon was familiar.

For the first time since he cracked his head on the invisible objects, Kail took an opportunity to look around to see what exactly he had come across. At first glance, he didn't see much, but more elements were revealed as he concentrated his gaze. These invisible objects were free-floating, and their positions began to be disturbed by the chain reaction that Kail had created. As the things floated and spun in various directions, he could make out their structure more. On one side, as predicted, the surface was like a mirror. Perfectly reflecting the images of space seamlessly becoming invisible. As they turned and crashed into other things, the objects would reveal actual metallic structures and pieces that signified the remains of a possible more extensive system. Kail continued to look around; he noted more and more parts of debris ranging from small chunks the size of his head to larger pieces of what appeared to be… an actual ship, or what was left of one at least.

Kail surveyed his new surroundings again to verify he was seeing what he was seeing. After confirming that he wasn't dreaming, he realized what he had just run into: the wreckage of someone or something's ship. And this ship had a story to tell that Kail was eager to hear.