The Distance

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I’ve come to believe that there are many things we are told about the way the world works which do not always align with our experience. For most of my life I held this tenacious and, you could say, almost zealous worldview that the fundamental features of the cosmos we find ourselves in could be mapped, observed, calculated. Predicted.

Of course, this was a perfectly rational belief, given all. One easy glance at history will tell you that our true inception was that golden era men graduated from the rudimentary realm of myth into the firm earth of the sciences. Our past spanned thousands of years of civilization, of culture, of change, but it was only when our ancestors started thinking about the world around them, instead of merely inventing stories about it, that we could finally begin. Where would we be now if this had never occurred?

An intriguing question, but one not really worth dwelling on. We are here now, in the age of transvolvers and immortality; mankind, being incurably curious and innovative, would have inevitably reached this point at any rate.

I suppose I’m getting sidetracked. My point is that I was subject to a way of thinking over a millennia old–but now find this mentality at serious odds with my own personal experience. It’s troubling, but I realise this is why I’m writing at all in the first place. When life gets confusing I poke around with words until something sensible bubbles up through the verbal detritus.

What is confusing to me is a pattern I’ve recognized in my life, (which I realise is ironic, considering the problem I’m tackling is how I thought the world could be predicted). It is that there are certain events in my lifetime which have simply been too perfectly aligned to be merely regarded as “blessed circumstance”. Something in me hesitates to use this word but I would almost say there is an intelligence to this pattern, yet I say so while acknowledging it only seems that way. It remains uncanny nonetheless.

And now we qualify: you cannot hear a scream in the vacuum of space, true. There isn’t sufficient molecular material in open space for sound waves to vibrate within. However even in space, sound could theoretically still be registered through a material dense enough to receive acoustic energy, but not tense enough to cancel out the resulting kinetic vibrations. I say “theoretically”–but this is actually exactly what happened. In this case, with the hyper-tensile carbonsteel canopy protecting one of the auxiliary reactors that flank the Distance.

I’ll explain: lithium reactors, as we know, generate a truly absurd amount of power. While being extremely efficient, they are unbelievably volatile and become dangerously unstable when exposed to exterior energy forms. They are especially vulnerable to sudden kinetic energy, and so must be kept in a suspended environment where they can be protected from the slightest of movements, even from those of sound waves.

Even with only one to three percent potential loss to heat and light energy, lithium reactors still emit temperatures of over 4,400 degrees celsius, and so the reactor chambers are filled with super-viscous WF6/silicone gas that serves the dual function of facilitating rapid heat absorption, discharge and near impervious motion and sound deadening. The gas only does half of the cooling work, however. The rest of it is done by space itself, through the medium of the carbonsteel chamber.

It’s a bit of a clunky system if you ask me: the gas absorbs the heat, expels it to the space-cooled carbonsteel dome, which is itself protected by a thixotropic shield hovering 3 feet from the surface. The canopy protects the gas, the shield protects the canopy.

The reactor chambers are also the only surfaces on the ship which can afford the massive amount of energy to run the shields. If they weren’t protected, a large fragment of space debris impacting the carbonsteel canopy could set off a shockwave in the silicone gas which, although extremely improbable, could possibly nudge the reactor, in which case…well.

I’m expounding too much, aren’t I? Let me simply get to the point: I should not have been aboard the Distance for this venture, but I was. I should not have the anomalous ability to see 10% of the infrared light spectrum, but I do. I should not have gone down into the powerwright sector of the ship two minutes after we capped starspeed, but I did. These three things in combination, like so many other occurrences in my life, resulted in something beyond extraordinary.

Once we had stabilised to cruising speed, I was ordered by the Distance’s primary controlwright to initiate the lockdown/tagout procedures on the botanical chamber’s cryo systems. It was an order a bit beneath me, but the comms to that sector of the ship were oddly malfunctioning and I was the only other person present in the wright at the time authorised to access that sector. Another “blessed circumstance”.

I had to pass by the powerwright sector on my way and wondered if I should stop to see Dale for a moment. He happened to be passing on through the adjacent corridor and beckoned me over.

“Hey wifey,” he said as I approached.

“How’s the core?” I asked.

“I presume you’re referring to my lovely bout of indigestion and not the superheated liquid sun I’m supposed to take care of.”

“Are you still feeling off? Did you take the dylol I gave you?”

He scratched his neck and flipped through a manual he was holding. “Maybe.”

I looked at him flatly. “I see.”

“They do nothing for me anyway.”

“Yes, well, you’re supposed to take them with food.”

“Ah yes, food.”

“Have you no–”

He suddenly snapped his manual shut and looked up at me. “Okay, I can’t find it in here. Could you take a look at something with me?”

“Why, what do you need? I can only spare a moment.”

“Good. This will only take a moment.”

We started down the corridor towards the powerwright sector. Dale seemed somewhat troubled, I could tell. Anyone else observing would never have picked up on it, but to me it was obvious.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, noticing how he kept tapping his manual against his fist as we walked.

“No, no. Nothing like that. It’s just… weird.”

I followed him into the core access chamber. Two glass portholes on both auxiliary reactors lit the small room in a fluttering, pearlescent light, casting delicate little shadows over everything. Dale set his manual down in a corner and began typing commands into a console. I glanced about idly and realised for a brief moment the place reminded me–oddly enough–of my childhood bedroom. Like remembering for a split second what you dreamed the previous night, my brain lit up in a spot it hadn’t for 45 years and I was suddenly a child again—but then the feeling vanished. With no warning of it’s coming and no trace of it’s passing.

I hate it when that happens, I thought. It was a beautiful, albeit maddening experience—and for whatever reason, becoming increasingly more frequent.

Dale started to explain something about how a sensor was not aligned with a certain reading–and then I heard it, only I can’t really say hear. Strictly speaking, I hadn’t heard anything. But saying I “heard” it is really the only way to describe it that makes sense.

It was like a scream.

I held up my hand to shush Dale and focussed on the ground before me, straining to make sense of the “sound” I was hearing.

“What?” he asked, hands frozen over the console.

“I don’t know.”

I could “hear” it coming from a specific direction: the left aux porthole, but again it wasn’t like there was sound coming from that direction. I just knew it was coming from there.

“Gwyn?”

I went over to the porthole and peered through. The reactor glowed dimly in the thick gas, like a star peeking through the clouds in the blue of early morning. I looked past it toward the top of the dome.

There.

I only thought I was somehow hearing it before, but now I was seeing it. A dim pulse of infrared light coursing a few feet into the chamber from the top of the dome. The “scream”.

As it turns out, it really had been an actual scream. At the moment, the full results of the investigation of the incident and autopsy of the culprit are still to be released, but essentially the scream I heard was from that of a very, very clever stowaway.

Some poor soul, sex still unknown, had transvolved him/herself into an insulated block of biocarbon they had somehow managed to graft onto the side of the reactor canopy, squeezed right into the tight space between the shield and dome. Apparently, a transvolver receiver, oxygen generator, and latch hooks for their flight suit had been welded onto the side, which actually gave us a clue as to how this person pulled it off. To weld onto carbonsteel, one would need a siG welder, which are only used by certified ground crew. It must also have been done in between the final greenlight checks and pre-priming, as the involved personnel were the last to have been in contact with any ship surfaces before launch.

It is assumed, for now, that this person managed to impersonate one of the ground crew, then smuggled all the equipment needed into the launch site and overrode one of the site’s transvolver security codes to match their receiver. Their timing and execution would have to have been perfect for this. Launch happened only eight minutes after pre-priming protocol, and it takes a minimum of six minutes to fully transvolve into biocarbon.

Evidently, the idiot succeeded. I mean, it’s understandable why they tried it. This was to be the first venture outside of our own galaxy cluster, the farthest we’ve ever been able to go in history. All of mankind was watching this voyage with expectations rosy and pregnant; that there was at least one desperate soul seeking a new start away from a broken world was not surprising at all.

But it was tragic. The stowaway would have easily made it through the launch and the initial flight phases, but the change in velocity from lightspeed to starspeed, though relatively gradual, had forced most of their body’s blood into their legs and hands too quickly and literally exploded them. They would have survived if they’d been registered on the ship’s gravity network, but that would mean showing up in the system as an additional crew, and they had to remain undetected, naturally.

I happened to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to witness the evidence, and am also one of the only people ever in history that could have anyway. To be honest, I think this may have been the first time in my life where my condition proved to be genuinely useful. Not only useful, I should say, but also crucial.

The scream had sent a very subtle vibration through the silicone gas, which unbeknownst until now, actually causes a reaction in the gas that generates infrared light—and I was standing right there to see it. A code was called and the Distance was forced to slow out of starspeed to address the emergency. If the surface of one of the reactor canopies was compromised and there was a gas leak, we could have been instantly obliterated in a catastrophe the equivalent of a small supernova. The Distance slowed to complete stasis, and repair crews were sent out as a standard prefatory scan was performed of the surrounding area.

This was the moment where history changed. It was also the beginning of this crisis I’m experiencing concerning the nature of the universe and our basis for existence within it.

It has never been hard for me to regard coincidence as what it is: just coincidence. I’ve never tried to draw out meaning or purpose from circumstances that happen to align with or please my current state. I think that sort of thinking died out a long time ago. Yet I cannot help but feel something like awe in the face of what I’ve experienced over the past few months. So little of what I am and what has happened to me makes sense anymore.

Why am I the way that I am? That I was born with an exceedingly rare optical disease–or is it a gift? That I have this myth-like ability to sometimes feel and know things that are rationally outside the bounds of my intellect? That unlike most people, I do not experience the benefits of cell regeneration that come from frequent transvolving? I’ve lived as a mortal among immortals and have been reconciled with it all my life, but it is all changing now, and not just with me, with everything.

Call it a miracle of chance or what have you, but ironically, the Distance had only travelled a mere 400 terameters outside of the galaxy before it stopped for repairs and had found itself right at the edge of a small planetary cluster, one of which was found to be hospitable.

Extraordinary seems such a pathetic adjective to use to describe something that miraculous. I might even go against my better instincts and just use the word miraculous. Nothing makes sense at this point.

A probe was sent out and returned after a few days with a series of yet more unbelievable discoveries. Not only was the planet more than ideal for human habitation, it actually carried hundreds of species endemic to earth, flora and fauna alike.

And they were big. There were forests with trees taller than mountains, birds with wingspans so vast their passing dispersed cloud formations, jungles so densely verdant that the ground from which they grew actually had a separate climate. It was revealed that the atmosphere, much deeper than earth’s, consisted of approximately 15% more oxygen. This is speculated to allow for more rapid and stable growth in all native life forms.

The atmosphere itself was also encapsulated by a layer of water about one hundred feet thick, hovering far above, just beyond where the planet’s gravity could hypothetically pull it down. How it actually got there and how it stays there is still a mystery, but all that is known of it now is that it drastically reduces the exposure of UV light on the surface, which they are now saying is why everything on this planet is so old.

Discoveries aside, I can’t even really describe what the place has come to mean to us in these several months since we found it. There is so much to this planet that is scientifically fascinating, yes, but it also carries this almost spiritual quality that I have no other word for other than innocence. Being there, breathing air that smells like the dawn of time, somehow resonates with the darkest parts of my memory, places in my psyche that have been dead all my life and I hadn’t even known it. It has felt like a new springtime for me, and for everyone else who has been down there.

I could go on, but by far the most incredible discovery of all is one that likely will take many generations to fully reveal, and more still to understand. It is one that has usurped all that we ever knew of our place in the cosmos, of where we have come from, of where we are going.

We had been there before.