The Outside Within

No one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say, but Miriam Bennett wasn't so sure. She could hear it. The first time she had heard it was three weeks ago. Her sleep cycle had finished, the lights of her personal area had flashed on, and she had rolled off her mat to get dressed and go to work, repeating a series of events that never seemed to change. Only this time it did change. This time, as she looked bleary-eyed into the deep black void beyond the window of the waste cubicle, her ears tuned out the whirring of the toothbrush sweeping her gums and detected something else, something previously unknown and altogether different.

The sound had been there one second and gone the next, the blink of a vocal eye. Miriam paused and pulled the cleansing tool out of her mouth, looking at it blankly as it purred mutely in her hand. Then she shrugged, finished off her ablutions, and carried on as normal.

When she heard it again the next time she awoke, it sounded a little different. Longer? Louder? Closer? Miriam couldn't be sure, thought that maybe it was a stressed ignition box in one of the lights of her personal area, or perhaps the calibration was off on one of the nearby air filtration systems and the echoes of it were reverberating through the conduits. Such faults were not unheard of in even the most advanced farspace stations, but they were always picked up and corrected immediately. Miriam was as dutiful as any other crew member, reporting what she had heard and thinking nothing more of it.

She heard it again the next time her sleep cycle ended and it was time to get up, and again the time after that. Every instance of it was reported, and Miriam had visits to her personal area from technician after technician, each one trying to determine the root cause of the disturbance. She didn't mind these gentle intrusions. They broke up the monotony of existence, gave her something to look forward to, almost. It became part of her routine, became so infused with her life that she grew numb to it, came to expect it.

It was at this point that the sound at the very edge of her hearing got closer. A lot closer. This time when she heard it, it blasted into her mind like a punch to the face and left her on the floor shuddering with chills as if she had been swimming in the Arctic Ocean. Miriam spent many wide-eyed minutes searching her personal area, looking for the other person surely hiding there, the one that had screamed in her ear. She found herself to be as alone as she always was when her sleep cycle ended, her personal area empty of all but herself.

Even so, Miriam sensed something lurking beyond the reach of her cognitive powers. Recognising an urgent need to leave, Miriam hustled into her olive jumpsuit and stepped into the corridor beyond the portal of her personal area. Her heart quavered to find the space unnervingly empty, impossibly quiet. Miriam had the sudden sense that the farspace station was barren, that she was its only inhabitant. It was a ridiculous notion, told herself, but she found herself walking quicker than usual along the curving length of the passage.

A light went black overhead as she passed beneath it, black like the void beyond her cubicle window. It flickered on and off in time to her racing heartbeat, the blood pounding in her ears blocking all but the resonance of the scream that had so set her soul on edge. Miriam's feet moved that bit faster, driving her with dread haste toward the communal hall. She was almost out of breath, ready to release her own jet of frightful sound as she rounded the corner and came to an abrupt halt at the communal hall's threshold.

The man Miriam had charged into found her quaking shoulders quickly with his hands, steadying her with a look of alarmed concern on his face. Life was here, sound and familiarity all jumbled together in quantities as welcome and comforting as a hot shower at the end of the working hours. She was late for first meal, nothing more! That's why there was nobody else in the passage, they were already here. Miriam deduced that she must have spent more time searching her personal area looking for phantoms than she had thought. The fear scraping her bones gave way to grateful relief, and she allowed herself the smile of a fool with an over-active imagination.

The man guided her to a seat even as she thanked him apologetically for his forced intervention. Miriam had taken no measures to hide her earlier distress, and in response the man booked her to see the station doctor. Miriam gave a 'don't be silly' wave of her hand, passing the whole episode off with as brave a face as she could muster, but something inside her was glad for the chance to relieve this strangeness upon a sympathetic ear.

Miriam had a couple of trips to see the doctor the following week. The first was to talk about her symptoms and to have samples of essential bodily fluids taken for testing. The second meeting was to verify the results of those tests. Everything was normal. Medically, Miriam was as fit as she had ever been. She just needed to try and sleep more. Eight hours was regulation, scientifically proven to allow the human mind and body to restore itself from the rigours of the day's work, but the doctor set her sleep-cycle to measure ten hours for the next week to see how she got on.

But Miriam couldn't sleep ten hours a cycle any more than she could sleep eight. The scream wouldn't allow it. It was with her every moment, a perpetual resonance that followed her every time her sleep-cycle finished and it was time to get up, whether she had slept or not. Every time she looked out of her window into the vast nothingness beyond, it crept closer, louder. Beckoning her to join it.

The scream was to sound like a shadow was to sight, insubstantial, hardly existing at all, but there nevertheless and just as unmistakeable, just as unavoidable. No matter how much light you shone there was still a shadow somewhere. It was forever, whistling through Miriam's mind like a tragic song on repeat. She ached for the haunting melody to end and knew what she needed to do. She had been running from the sound all this time, trying to shut it off, but she couldn't. She needed to confront it, to embrace it, to take it and make it part of herself.

How Miriam found herself gazing out of a window that was not the one of her waste cubicle where first she had heard the scream, she did not know. She didn't care. All that was left was the scream, and she heard it louder and closer than ever she had heard it before. It was nearly hers! Miriam's arm drifted out to the right, aiming for the control that would make the sound as real as she had always known it to be. The door opened in the blink of an eye and Miriam was torn from humanity's confinement, thrown into open, endless abyss as if it were desperate for the company.

The cold was immediate, devouring every part of Miriam's limbs with all the hunger of the terminally starved. Her body drifted with distant purpose, hanging in the void with puppeteer's patience. The breath in her lungs vanished as hard vacuum burned it out. Every particle of water in her flesh turned to ice beneath her skin. It was as hideously painful as it was blessedly numb. Miriam couldn't see the farspace station shrink behind her. Both the aqueous and vitreous humour in each eye had crystallised as her freezing brain frantically shut down her bodily functions one by one in an effort to keep both it and her heart warm, but however valiant the effort was it remained only seconds long.

At least the scream Miriam had been hearing all this time was at last her own.