Man From Heaven

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I’d always thought it was a stupid saying when I was younger. Surely you wouldn’t be able to scream in space at all once the air had been torn from your lungs, I would think to myself as I combed through the cheap cosmic horror comics at my dad’s bookstore. I still had to pay like everyone else, and at five cents a pop, a seven-year-old needs to make sure he’s getting his money's worth. All of the best examples of sci-fi pulp fiction had all kinds of different names for things from aliens to spaceships, but they all agreed on one thing: you absolutely will die as soon as you are exposed to the vacuum. As I found myself hurtling away from the ship into the void of space, it wasn't much comfort to find that it wasn’t even true. Hearing myself screaming was about all I could do. All I remember from those first few moments, however long they were, was screaming and spinning.

It only got louder after I started trying to wrangle back some of my brain functions from the void of blind terror to figure out what the hell was going on. Unfortunately, the speed at which I was tumbling through the empty vacuum meant that all of my thoughts and perceptions were dominated by the white streaks made by distant stars as I flew past them, and of course, the screaming. I couldn’t remember anything at first, not even my own name. Just streaks of white and screaming. I was spinning head over feet, faster than I’d ever moved in my life. My knees and elbows might as well have been flapping loose in a hurricane for how much damage they were doing to me. The panic was causing me to wildly flail my limbs, and my lack of motor control meant that it was usually my own body that they came in contact with. Simultaneously, I was flying straight forward, or what felt like straight forward, at about a million miles an hour. God only knows how many G’s I was pulling. The gravity I generated seemed to squeeze my body like a tube of toothpaste, but thankfully my automated suit had taken care of all the vomit. I’m not even sure how I stopped, but I am certain that I had no conscious part in it. I was so scared; I may as well not have even been conscious. I think the flailing of my arms must have at some point become sufficiently synchronous to generate enough centrifugal force in the opposite direction to my initial spinning that they canceled each other out, and I eventually slowed to a stop. Stopped spinning anyway, I was still shooting forward like I’d been fired from a gun. My mind came back to me in sections, as if I was placing jigsaw pieces on a board at random. And the board was covered in maple syrup.

What just happened? I asked myself.

…I was spinning…, came the mumbled reply from my inner monologue. Maybe my brain was still spinning. I screwed my eyes shut and tried again.

Why was I spinning? I grunted from the physical effort required to dredge up the memory of a half an hour ago.

… something hit me…, that was all I managed to come up with. My train of thought was in tatters. What had been the single most reliable sticking point for my perceptions of reality for my entire life, my mind, had been splintered into a thousand pieces. Some single, anonymous fractured nugget of sanity within my mind was all that had survived. It was all I had left. It was, for all intents and purposes, me. It was a single speck of peace and cognition within an endless universe of shattered memories and broken dreams, compacted neatly to fit inside my skull. If I could just concentrate inwardly and stop staring at the white streaks of light carving through the empty black for a few minutes, maybe, just maybe, I could prevent my imminently approaching death. I concentrated. I tensed all of my muscles. I screwed up my face and stopped breathing for a few moments. I felt my mind gaining weight. With more weight came higher gravity. With time, the effort I needed to expend to turn the pile of mush in my head back into organic brain matter lessened. I could feel my IQ points slowly returning to me. I asked the question again. What happened? I concentrated.

Something hit me, came the reply, and then I started spinning. So much for that. Clearly, I was not out of the woods yet.

What hit me? I tried again, and why did it make me start spinning? Because I’ve been hit by lots of things in my life, and none of those times ended in me flying off into space like an asteroid.

… Asteroid…, my subconscious said to me in a voice like it was dreaming. There was an asteroid. That was true. Yes, it was coming back. I’d been hit with an asteroid. A small one. But... that wasn’t the reason I was flying. I released a breath. So, what was? The stars looked like they were slowing down, which I knew was impossible. I knew I’d continue to rocket past them until I crashed into something, deep down. My present lack of cognitive function allowed me to push that information away from my surface thoughts for the time being, thankfully. I redoubled my efforts to figure out what had happened.

... I was working on… a ship. A big ship. I was an engineer on a... spacewalk. Something was wrong with the starboard ...gravity buffers. Yes, it was coming back like a flood of molasses, but it was coming back. I was an engineer for a large colony ship, the kind of thing they send off of earth with a few thousand cryogenically frozen people with a predetermined course to some far-off planet, so that humanity can spread the disease that is their existence to another unsuspecting world. Alright, now we were getting somewhere.

What was happening that warranted me going outside of a perfectly safe spaceship? That one was simple enough, now that I’d established that I was an engineer. The jigsaw pieces were starting to look like a cohesive picture, and I started to put more thoughts together. I could remember a woman with gray hair and a neat, white uniform. She was in charge of everything. She was the one that made me go outside. This was her fault! She sent me to di-!

I opened and closed my eyes and shook the bubbling indignation from my head. That wasn’t right. She’d sent me out there alright, but she didn’t send me to die. I was an engineer, which means she must’ve been the captain. She’d sent me outside to check on something. What was it I’d come up with earlier? I closed my eyes and took another breath from my dwindling oxygen supply. I silently wished for some good Samaritan to come by and wipe all the syrup from the jigsaw.

“Gravity buffers,” I said aloud to myself. The tiny founts of anti-gravity that speckled the hull of any ship classified for deep space travel, designed to push away small to medium chunks of space debris that could otherwise damage the ship. A cluster of about twenty of the little barnacle-looking growths on the starboard side of the crew quarters, my quarters, had stopped working. There had been reports of sporadic impacts on the hull, and outboard sensors indicated that were passing through a small asteroid field. One of the relays connecting these buffers to the main power grid had been damaged. It wasn’t a big job, so I’d been sent by myself to take care of it.

My earliest memory at that point was of me standing alone in a black room feeling the disconcerting sensation of gravity letting go of me. Health and safety interventions in regard to space were never really able to get off the ground, due to the inherent unreliability of basically everything in space. The only real precautions that were universally used by spacefarers were to make all of the necessary preparations slowly, and one at a time, so as to prevent any unnecessary trauma to the individual being subject to them. First you enter the airlock, then you put on your EVA suit. Once the bridge has confirmation that you’ve done this, they will slowly dim the lights, slowly release the artificial gravity, then very, very slowly release the air from the airlock. They also recommend you keep your eyes closed while the external doors open to let you outside, but that’s more to keep the wonder and awe of space travel intact. I watched the doors slowly crawl open and reveal an inky black sea, surface broken only by the unblinking eyes of some tiny white fish, all quietly gazing back at me. I held the unclipped end of my safety harness in one hand and the controls to my booster pack in the other, and smartly jumped off the opposite wall and into the black sea. I activated my booster just after passing the open doors and bursts of carbon dioxide firing from various points of my body righted my position and gently pushed me back to the outside of the hull.

Wait! I snapped back to the present moment. My booster pack! If it was intact, I might be able to get some control over my trajectory. Hell, if only the control module on my back was working, I might not even need the exoskeleton of directional pipes, I could just hold onto the pack and point it away from where I wanted to go. After a few moments of searching my person and stretching around as much as I could in zero gravity, I started to give up on this idea. The control module was only about the size of a couple textbooks, conveniently located right on the center of my back. Since I had unwisely spent all of my years in college studying trigonometry, quantum entanglement, line of sight orbital guidance in a vacuum, and advanced nuclear theory, rather than yoga, I didn’t have the flexibility to reach it. The exoskeleton was out of the question, seeing as it seemed to be completely gone. It must have been ripped off by… by what? I looked around into the black, dark blues, dark purples and occasional brilliant slash of bright color that was space, as if I’d be able to see a human shaped collection of air vents floating nearby. Some of my memories still seemed hazy and looking out into what might as well have been the face of God clearly wasn’t helping. I closed my eyes and sunk back into my memories.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I’d said to the bridge through my comms, crawling with only my arms touching the ship along the magnetically suspended safety rail. I could see asteroids for miles around the Mesquite, none bigger than a golf ball and not seemed to be careening towards or away from the ship. It was like floating in a snow globe that had been shaken and then frozen in time. The scent of freezer burns combined with white hot metal had overtaken the smell of sterility and disinfectant that dominated the inside of the Mesquite, and I took a moment to avert my eyes from the yawning black infinity between the distant stars. I wasn’t out here to admire the vastness of the universe, I’d already gotten plenty of that on this journey. I was here to do a job. Not that I needed to be the one to remind myself.

“Well keep your eyes open,” came the slightly crackling response in my earpiece. “Don’t be daydreaming about the universe out there. You’ve got a job, do it and get back in here.” What she’d meant to say was, “get back inside to safety because I’m at my wits end worrying about every living thing for a hundred million miles around, which just so happens to be this ship and nothing else.” Some people kept their hearts on their sleeves, some people were rough on the outside and soft on the inside, but Captain Aito was more like an oyster with a shell made of diamond. The soft side is still there, and if you look really hard you can almost see it, but unfortunately most people don’t think getting past the shell is worth reaching it.

“Thanks Captain,” I responded, “I had my eyes closed up until now, but it’s easier to get around with them open. Thank you.” It had been a long journey for those of us who had to keep waking back up. Captain Aito didn’t take the bait, and instead I heard the soft click that came when the receiver station she was speaking from was muted. The echo it caused in my UV helmet continued for several seconds longer than it would have under an atmosphere. Once it faded, my fingers tightened on the silver safety rail, and almost of its own accord, my head turned slowly to the right, as if I could see the little noise drifting off into nothing. Off in that direction also lay the Canis supercluster of blue stars, roughly in the shape of a dog. At least, it probably was from Earth’s point of view. Supposedly the space in between each individual star contains two or three black holes, but I was personally skeptical. That was the same thing the Chang-E Resettlement Firm said about the Yanis Paladis dust cloud, and E & N proved them wrong then. It was an easy enough mistake to make from behind a desk in natural gravity, but for those of us who wander the stars, uncertainty over something that can instantly swallow up an entire fleet is something that’s worth losing brand loyalty over. I still had a few friends for whom this was the last straw, and a few for whom it would’ve been, if they hadn’t, in truth been skinned alive by extra-solar pirates. Thankfully for me, I’d seen that company for the blasted conglomerate it was far before that, and I was much happier at Enki and Ninmah. As a matter of fact, just a few years prior-.

“What did I just say!?” came a shriek that was trying to sound like a bark in my earpiece. I blinked my eyes a few times to clear the fog. I hadn’t even heard her turn the comms back on.

“Sorry, Captain,” I said sincerely. “The Dog got me. You know how it is out here.” I made a show of fixing my gaze back to the hull for the benefit of the cameras that I knew were watching me. “Won't happen again.” She clicked the comms back off, and I got back to work.

A few minutes later, I found the faulty buffer, a small chrome base surrounding a shining purple lightbulb. One lost buffer wouldn’t have been a problem, but this one was the focal point for this section of the ship, if it’s connection is severed, so are those of all the buffers around it. This one wasn’t shining. It had a thin wedge of granite lodged in its eye like a nail.

“Just need to replace the IR sensor,” I reported back. “Won’t be long.”

And it wasn’t. I had the little space camera out, in and replaced faster than an Earth lightbulb. I voiced my confirmation, the captain voiced hers, and I started back for the airlock, no muss, no fuss. This, as we know thanks to some of the more esoteric fields of science like quantum mechanics or chaos theory, is not the natural state of the universe, which requires minimum quotas of both muss and fuss. When those quotas aren’t met, the universe shifts and reasserts its hold over reality, and some poor schmuck like me catches most of the temporal whiplash this creates.

After a few contemplative moments to myself, walking with my hands along the safety rail back to the airlock, comms opened back up and Captain Aito was shouting at me.

“Watson! Duck! Now!” I did so without any thought. The command had gone straight to my autonomic nervous system. Unfortunately, she’d used the neural override code, so I couldn’t do anything other than duck, now. After less than five seconds of being glued to the hull by my front, my muscles, no longer under my control and refusing to untense, I made the necessary pattern with my eyes to be allowed to speak. As my jaw unlocked, the blast hit me and took away my words. I felt before I saw it. Searing heat swept over me and my world was replaced with the flesh of a star. Flames danced and swarmed around me. My EVA suit locked up. The ceramic shielding in the suit spared me the worst of the blast, but even still, I felt like a dragon was attacking me. It was like being beneath a space shuttles thrusters during take-off. I used what little autonomy I could manage to clamp my eyes firmly shut. I didn’t know if whatever this was could blind me, but I wouldn’t be taking any chances if I could help it.

The dragon's roar came next. An eruption of grinding, howling noise covered me like a pile of burning mattresses, and for a moment I could perceive nothing else. I took it back. Standing ten feet away from one of the Mesquites thrusters during launch wouldn’t have been half as loud as this. I could feel the soundwaves harmonizing with my bones, and I thought I was going to shatter like a wine glass. Captain Aitos next round of instructions were drowned out by the sound of a volcano erupting onto my back as the second round came immediately after the first, but I didn’t need to hear commands spoken in neural override. Artificial sensors near the outside of my ear canals meant that a higher power, an AI, was able to sift through the noises in the ether, decide which ones were neural override, and force me to obey them. Either what the captain had said wasn’t neural override, or the command she had given me was just to hang on tight, as that was all I seemed to be capable of doing.

The blast went on for minutes. I couldn’t tell what it was, and I’m honestly still not sure. I felt like a pot being fired in a kiln. Then, suddenly, darkness. It was over in an instant, and its absence had thrust me into nothingness, like a sinking ship sucking survivors down into the deep. I’d barely had enough time to think this was the case, realize I was actually just covered in soot, and my suit’s nanobots swarm and clean just enough from my visor to see again before Captain Aito used the neural override to try to marionette me back to the airlock.

“Watson! Get to the airlock! Do not look at anything else! Concern yourself with only personal safety and speed! Now!” My limbs moved of their own accord. Fingers tightened on the railing, arms stiffened like wood. I began moving towards the airlock, my hands moving faster than my feet could if I was sprinting. Neural override is a tricky skill to master for both sender and receiver, but Captain Aito and I put in the hours. I couldn’t even see my hands. My legs were locked and straightened stiff behind me. The carabiner on my safety harness clanged noisily against the railing. I could have made it. Unfortunately, the reason I was sent out blind to fix the buffer was that our sensors couldn’t pick out so many small objects as a fine asteroid field, you have to go out and see it with your own eyes to be sure. It was easy to forget about them if you’re giving commands from inside of a ship

“Captain!” I screamed over the banging of asteroids against my visor. “Asteroids!”

“Watson!” she replied with my activation code instead of my name. “Secondary objective! Avoid the asteroids while keeping the greatest possible speed! Now!” My gaze was now allowed to rise. My head began to bob and weave of its own accord. I lurched forward, now using my feet to shove off of footholds I couldn’t see. Occasionally asteroids would still clack against my visor, and I would wince. Well, I wouldn’t, the neural code prevented that. But I wanted to. My spine folded and unfolded like a caterpillar. I demanded, begged Captain Aito to tell me what was going on, what had hit me. She wouldn’t answer. Extraneous information can cause glitches in the neural code, something about the somatic nervous system interfering with the autonomic, so she maintained complete radio silence. Against my primitive human instincts, I tried to follow her example. I stopped yelling and tried to unfocus my vision. I tried to clear my thoughts. I’d have had better luck pulling the moon back to Earth with a pick-up truck. It’s very difficult to achieve perfect Zen while your body’s being possessed by your boss, but that was what we train for. The added obstacles of hundreds of sharp, floating chunks of rock and ice, as well as some unseen assailant that seems to have my boss just as terrified as I am; those are the kinds of challenges Enki and Ninmah aren’t going to put on their recruitment posters.

“Watson!” Captain Aito shouted, noticeably shriller. “Hold onto the safety rail as tightly as possible! Now!” I did so. Whatever had hit me was coming for round two. The rail was held far enough away from the hull that I could wrap my thighs around it. I quickly serpentined all four of my limbs around the rail, trusting in the immovable magnetism that held it, and tensed all of my muscles. When the impact came, I would either hold fast, or I would take the Mesquite with me.

First came the fire again. I thanked the stars that the manufacturers of my suit and the rail had apparently cut no corners. The temperature reading on my heads-up display showed that these temperatures were well above the melting point of steel before I’d even shut my eyes. Still, it couldn’t hold out forever. Even ceramics will eventually melt, and after several minutes of sustained blast, I could feel the rail softening ever so slightly.

“Captain!” I screamed. I didn’t know what else to scream.

“Watson! Ju-!” She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Something hit me square in the middle of my back. Something big, something… moving. Captain Aito must’ve finished her order, and that order must have been ‘jump forward’, because that’s what my body tried to do. My legs and arms clawed and pushed forward with everything they had, but something had me pinned.

“Glasgow!” Captain Aito screamed in my ear. My neural deactivation code. She was giving my body back to me. “Turn around, Gary! Hit it! Do something!” The alarm sirens were all blending together. My real name? Giving me back control? Uncertainty? The captain was more scared now than I’d ever seen her. More than anyone had ever seen her. More than anyone had ever been. In my short time at Enki and Ninmah, I’d seen this woman fly a 15 trillion-ton colony ship within 10 million miles of the Logi supermassive black hole, then break the nose of the only E&N admiral with the stupidity to question her about it with her forehead. And something that was currently on my back had shaken that woman to her core. If there was one thing in this great big universe that I never wanted to do, it was turn around and look at it.

Then something changed in my mind. Terror had grown to the point of blinding whiteness, and I was coming out again on the side of serenity. I felt the tentative peace of hopelessness. I had control over my own actions now. I now had the capacity for disobedience. Doing so would probably, no, definitely lead to my death, but what else could I do? Fight off a space monster with no weapons in a detritus filled vacuum? No, there was no hope. I was finished without ever having seen my foe. I knew it and Captain Aito knew it. If she wanted to leave this up to me, if she wanted to keep her conscious clear, then so be it. I chose death, and I prayed that it came quickly.

The neural code, on rare occasions, has a tendency to hasten your train of thought to superhuman speeds, so I actually was able to think all of this in the two or three nanoseconds before the entire thing became irrelevant. The monster on my back wrapped what looked like a tentacle made of granite around my midsection and ripped me off of the safety harness. Without the benefit of the neural code, my legs and arms painfully whipped off the rail, and I was sent hurtling through space. My vision blurred and white noise deafened my ears. I searched frantically for a focal point. The only thing in my field of view that wasn’t shooting past me was my visor. I latched onto it with my eyes. The heads-up display was gone. It had been replaced with a faint, hairline fracture. It was visibly growing. My breath caught in my throat as I watched flecks of glass peel away from the outside. First the size of pinheads, then nail heads, then coins.

I stared in wide eyed horror. Not a single muscle in my body was capable of movement, not my limbs, not my lungs, I was fairly certain I could feel my digestive tract and heart seize up while I watched the hole grow. Terror sent an icy tendril back through the blinding white, and dragged me back from my blessed serenity, but this was too much. My mind finally, blessedly, shut off, and I began to scream.

Back in the present, I opened my eyes. Still flying in one direction, the much calmer white noise of the vacuum was significantly more comforting now that I’d found some context. Rather than several shifting white streaks, the stars took their usual form of white pinpricks in a black sheet. I took a deep breath and looked at the bottom of my visor. There it was, just as I remembered it before I blacked out. A jagged hole the size of a child's fist. Sitting on my visor with the black night behind it, this hole was infinitely more terrifying than any black hole could be. But somehow, I was still breathing. It didn’t make any sense, the hole should have sucked all of the oxygen from my suit as soon as it opened. Over two-hundred years of human space travel, and this is still constant.

Dread found its familiar spot alongside my spinal cord as a possible explanation came to me. Experimentally, I tried to move my arm. For some reason, I couldn’t feel my arms and legs, but I did have control over them. I put my arms in opposing angles at my sides, and slowly, to my horror, the stars began to move. Soon, the white stars were being replaced by lights of blue, green and flickering yellow. There was a defined borderline between the white lights of space and the multicolored lights of… a city.

So that was it then, I was right. I was not hurtling through space, I was plummeting towards a planet. I stared down into the third imminent demise I’d faced in under an hour, not making a sound. At that point, I don’t think I could’ve screamed even if I wanted to. I think I had done enough screaming for one day.