The Time Watcher.

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say, but you can smell a fart in an airlock. Neither is in your best interest though. So why try? Because we can? Not sure that's the highest and best use of what limited time we have. Working in space has giving me a better understamdment of what time really is. It's a limit. A unforgiving, brutal taskmaster. Time doesn't care what your position in life is. Doesn't care how much disposable income you have nor what your needs may be. If you have 15 minutes of oxygen left, that's your limit. Then you're on borrowed time of what you have left in your body. Whether or not it's three minutes or 5 minutes, you've reached your limit.

Event Horizons Commidites contracted me to work in the Kuiper Belt Object Fields. Finding valuable and rare commodities to mine and send back to a depleted Earth. This week we're in Sublot 1045643 - object 12456: A rather small resource target of one mile by five miles. Stable cold KBO orbit for our purposes.

It's a lucrative line of work, not easy but it beats most Earth-bound jobs. My accountants tell me that I can retire at any time I choose and not be able to spend most of my income. My future heirs will be spoiled by it. The government will also be very happy with me by what they take of it.

I'm on a one-year contract and I've renewed it multiple times. Six months away from my next re-up window. I wasn't even thinking about it since I thought I had time. Now I don't which is why I'm in an epiphany about epiphanies, why do they seem to happen when we can't do much with them?

The hardest thing about working out here is the sheer beauty of the Cosmos and the field of view. Even the starkness of the asteroid is something to behold. Unfiltered light strikes the surface with an intensity not seen on Earth. It can be distracting which is when accidents happen.

That's how I got it. Not being diligent as I should have been. We had been drilling down and I wasn't paying any mind to the pressure readings when we hit a pocket of methane. Normally that's no big deal since the automated systems would have kicked in to shut down the drilling. Except I had turned off the safety feature since we expected no methane to be there. The speed of the drill increased quickly and cause the pressure to blow back up the drill path. That led to a series of small events which in turn caused a disaster. Small events are how disasters always start out.

My payment for staring into the face of the Universe came due quickly. The blowback caused a eruption of methane at the rig which caused debris to strike the command console, which was my station. While I was not injured by the explosion I was by the damaged console. While we were at low gravity, the console still had a high mass which transferred its energy to my worksuit when it struck me with a glancing blow. This caused me to be hurled backward through a scaffolding that I bounced off of into a rock wall of the asteroid.

The blast energy wasn't totally expended yet. I floated back towards the crumpled and destroyed scaffolding with twisted metal and razor-sharp edges to greet me. I wasn't going to be able to avoid hitting it. My worksuit saved my life as per its design but it was bleeding out its life-sustaining power and fluids. I only had the ability to move my hands and head slightly. I knew this was a slow-moving train wreck and I wasn't the train. I didn't have the energy let alone the ability to help myself brace for the impact.

In the one minute since the accident started, I realized that I was in serious trouble. When I struck the scaffolding, my worksuit once again did its job well. No damage that I felt save for one small sliver of metal that pierced my face shield. Remember when I said a series of small things led to a disaster? Well, the sliver of metal from the destroyed scaffolding, kiboshed my personal H.U.D. which controlled my worksuit. My control pad on the wrist of my worksuit was beyond my ability to reach as well. I was in shock since I felt no pain. Yet. I was moaning though. Not able to move I could still move my eyes and I noticed that the sliver of metal was getting smaller. No, I realized, that was the crack getting larger around the sliver. The worksuits are overpressurized and that meant that my oxygen was venting out. While my environment was still life-sustaining I didn't know for how long. At this point, I was losing the ability to care or maintain consciousness.

What I do remember is the surreal vision of what just happened. The control panel was destroyed but still had power and was producing electrical sparks. The blow-back was still venting out of the drill path. I knew that I had very little time left. That I would slowly run out of oxygen and just stop living. My pain was easing and my vision tunneling into a point of nothingness. All of this and the only things I could think about was that I was staring out into the beautiful face of the Universe and how Time was a harsh taskmaster.