The Flight of Attica

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But, as Communications Officer on the Ark, I’ve started playing screams over the loudspeaker every time someone on the Build Team loses their footing and flies off into the darkness. A commemorative scream, if you will. I choose specific ones from The Compendium’s sound library that I feel express who the person truly was. Like, the big guy Hudson who was really into Scarface (like really into it?) got Janet Leigh’s scream from Psycho. Hudson was a performer, man, I heard him say all the Scarface lines when he was picking up his daily instruction log. So you knew if he was gonna scream, it’d be a blood-freezing winner. Instead of, you know, just his blood freezing like literally freezing in the cold of space.

As Communications Officer, you’d think that I’d be privy to everyone’s final words – that they’d just speak into their microphones and maybe The Company would even, I don’t know, install a net so that we wouldn’t lose – hang on let me check the tally – 78 people this month so far. It’s okay, though – the Ark Build Team has over 5,000 people on it (though not all at once). But The Company decided we don’t really need to talk to each other. Based on some study they did, if we had the ability to speak whenever we felt like we’d spend 46.2 minutes per day yapping instead of building and when the world is ending and you’re building humanity’s only hope they want to keep the yapping to a minimum. I don’t know why they don’t do the net thing, though. Maybe I’ll put that in the Suggestions Box.

So I don’t get to talk to the builders and I don’t know what they’re up to unless I see ‘em fly past my office window – but I do have access to The Compendium. It’s a pretty kickass computer system that the IT nerds got running first thing – long before even the Command Module was finished. The Compendium has everything in it. That’s how come I can access all those screams. Whenever the rich folks get to a new planet and start over again, they’ll load The Compendium into every computer and use all of the knowledge that humankind has gathered over the years. You ever put a recipe online for meatballs? It’s in The Compendium somewhere. That’s why I feel it’s my duty to keep recording everything that happens as the Ark is being built. Somebody far in the future is going to be getting their PhD in History and need to know all this stuff. ‘Course it’s a little funny that the person who does all that research won’t have a chance of being related to me. Us prisoners working on the Ark aren’t allowed to travel on it – only people who make big donations to the project do. Like the guy who donated everything his steelworks produces for the entire year.

We’re prison labor. We don’t got nothin’ and we’re not worth nothin’ and that’s probably why there’s no net.

***

Because we’re in a race against the sun to finish the Ark and get it launched, all us prison workers are on a strict schedule permitting only four hours of sleep per night which is why –

“Stop fucking knocking or I’m gonna kill your whore mother!” I open one eye just enough to throw my boot at the door as it swings open. I sleep in my office – it’s easier when you only get four hours away from it anyway. A hand shoots out and grabs the shoe midair.

“My moms is already dead, G.Z., what you gonna do to me now?”

I open my eyes and sit up. The cook, Jimmy, stands there with my boot in one hand and a spatula in the other and he’s examining the shoe leather like maybe he’s gonna plan a meal around it. He’s a skinny overgrown boy with big blue eyes and a mashed in nose from where his pops hit him over and over again. He’s got a apron on with grease stains all down the front and a red and green bandana holding his unwashed hair back from his face. He drops my shoe back on the ground.

“We’re outta eggs,” he says.

“And I care about this right now because…?”

“You’re the Communications Officer.”

I stare at Jimmy because there are days when I gotta wait for him to make sense and this is definitely one of them.

“Where we goin’ with this, Jimmy?”

“Well – you gotta communicate it to everybody!”

I pick up my other boot to throw it after him but Jimmy’s already out, banging the door shut behind him.