The Five Stages of Self Pity

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I screamed anyway. I pissed my pants and cried my eyes dry too for that matter. The airlock sealed shut, and my life slipped away with it.

My crew had been cruel enough, or kind enough depending on how you look at it, to give me a suit before dumping me in the airlock. I’d barely had enough time to get the damn thing on between hyperventilating and the tremors wracking the whole of my being. Struggling into the formfitting kevlar, I’d secured the helmet shut just as the hatch opened and the little atmosphere left in the chamber and I were sucked into the abyss.

So I spun, surrounded by great gaseous nebulae and the distant planets of the Aetheran System, flailing about in zero g like a Graundilan floating through the upper atmosphere of their gaseous home world. I kept telling myself it wasn't happening, that this was just another cryonightmare and I’d wake up shivering and safe back on the shuttle any minute.

But I didn’t wake up, and I resigned myself to surpassing the first stage of what I termed the five stages of self pity: denial. I didn’t want to believe it, I couldn't accept that my whole crew had turned on me, dragged me from my bed kicking and screaming like a child pleading not to go to school. I couldn't believe they’d doomed me to a slow death in the void. But there I was, with my catheter full to bursting and dried tears that I couldn’t wipe staining my cheeks, I supposed there was no reason to continue denying it then.

I wished I could have wondered as to why they’d done it, why they’d mutinied, but I was a craven, not a fool. I’d seen the signs for months, but there was little I'd found I could do stuck inside a vessel less than 600 square feet wide with a full crew as we were. I’d called meetings, taken votes, done everything I could think of to boost team morale, they’d only scorned me.

My wrist display flashed: Oxygen Levels 50%. I felt a surge of anger at my crew then, at the petty bastards, and I realized I’d surpassed the denial stage and entered stage two.

I embraced my rage like an old friend, and old friend it was. They’d called it a Napoleon Complex growing up, I’d called it hating the Universium and all its inhabitants. Though like most adolescents, I’d slowly grown out of that foolish unbridled fury long ago. I'd developed coping mechanisms, and if I'm being honest losing my virginity all those years ago had helped too. All that pent up angst exploding everywhere as I had, that’s the one tempering technique they don’t tell you about in therapy. I wondered idly how many serial killers had been virgins as I floated, oxygen levels growing ever lower by the minute.

My wrath eased with the ridiculous thoughts, my breathing settled and according to my wrist display my heartbeat had cooled to a reasonable 80 bpm. Logic and minor reasoning having returned as I calmed a little, I decided to assess my situation, and found myself gliding into the depths of the third stage of self pity: bargaining.

I chimed the helmet comm, my idiot crew hadn’t cut its mic, they couldn’t even manage a mutiny without me holding their dumbass hands.

“Hey jackasses, remember me?”

No response. Static. A dead line. Damn.

Bargaining was short lived and I decided to retitle it: depression.

Or maybe depression should be the fourth stage? Either way, I was hit then with an unbearable tsunami of self doubt and melancholy I hadn’t felt since my dog Rufus had died all those years ago. A sadness at knowing my death was inevitable, and not a clean death either, the slow, agonizing descent into suffocation.

A horrid sickness of the cerebrum that had wrought my being for so many winters returned as though the darkest of cumulus storms overcast my subconscious. I should not dwell on the blackest depths of my mind here, for I thought only of killing myself then as I floated helplessly through the cosmos. Though inside a spacesuit as I was, it proved surprisingly difficult to take myself out. I could've opened my suit to the vacuum and froze my flesh and boiled my blood, or I could've cut my oxygen line and expedited the inevitable asphyxiation. I was fond of neither prospect.

Oxygen Levels 20%. Bummer. The fourth stage lingered even as I entered into the fifth, depression being one of those things that does not simply disappear as so many fools who’ve never felt the cold hand of misery can understand. Can’t you just be happy? Imbeciles. Sadness must be accepted, adapted to and worked around. That’s what had always worked for me at least, but hey, I’m no psychotherapist.

The fifth stage of self pity I deemed in my flailing to be acceptance. As I accepted the depressive state and tried to remember the techniques my high school guidance counselor had suggested for easing the silent sting, I came to accept my fate in the ether. To die a deliberate death in space.

I was where I’d always dreamed of being. I'd spent the whole of my young life staring at the sky, daydreaming of ways to soar amongst the quasars, to witness the eruption of a neutron star, to watch a blackhole eat through all the light in its path. I’d seen tens of solar systems, cryoslept through the void between systems, flown by asteroid belts and comets of ice, seen entire galaxies splayed out like speckled pancakes of the expanse.

I’d seen all I'd wished to, and maybe as I floated hopelessly through the abyss, I’d see something new. A secondary intelligence, vacuum adapted microbial life, maybe even a ship emerging from interstellar light-skip, anything at that point would have brought joy beyond any that I could have imagined given the fate I faced.

I squinted without my helmet visor, there lay the harsh crimson dwarf star of the Aetheran System the crew and I had been about to light-skip past. The sickly yellow gas giant Pagir and its plethora of moons hung nearby, and in the far distance, in the midst of the system’s Goldilocks zone I thought I saw the blue twinkle of Aetheran itself. My wrist display stole my attention from the majestic planetoids.

Oxygen Levels 5%. Woof. I sighed, fully accepting the fifth stage then, my time had come, I took in the scenery and awaited my demise.

Then, amongst the stars and everblack, I saw a new glimmer, a comet perhaps? But no, far too slow, a stray asteroid of the Reviri Belt? No, I had to be almost six AUs away from the belt this deep inside the system as I was. Then I saw the flickering of green and red nav lights. Holy shit it’s a ship.

I increased my flailing, all hope returning in that moment, flagging the ship down as best I could with my wild waving. It was coming closer, they must’ve caught me on scan. The ship loomed ever larger, and soon I realized this was no mercenary ship, not a craft of a guild or a petty freighter, this was an Impyrial dreadnought. The massive warship spread across my vision, all no nonsense straight edges and weapons systems. I’d read of the monstrous vessels used by the Empyre to quell the small bands of resistance across Impyrial Space, but had never seen one in person. Hundreds of artillery cannons lined the hull and evoked the spines of a mighty Spinatrous, I marveled at the masterpiece of deadly engineering that the two kilometer long spacecraft was.

Oxygen Levels Critical. I didn't care anymore, the dreadnought had me in their sights, it swung about, pressure seals released and I read the name of the mighty vessel emblazoned above the landing bay doors, Slaughterer. Cool name.

I silently told my crew to suck it as I was brought aboard the dreadnought. Not today fate, not today.