Unwilling Explorers

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. If that were true Leo wouldn’t be in this room, looking for a way out. He found this all to be a little ridiculous, having to be here just because people can’t take the slightest -

“I’m fine” he said, realizing that getting lost in his internal dialogue had left a little too much time pass between when he was asked how he was and his generic response.

“I’m fine” he repeated, this time not a response, but a statement.

“Your friends don’t think you’re fine, they’re worried about you” the shrink said, putting an emphasis on friends and using that annoying soothing tone all the shrinks use. Or at least that’s what Leo guessed, this was the only one he knew. The room looked designed to put people at ease. All diffuse lighting, mahogany colored furniture and generously padded chairs. Somehow that annoyed him even more.

“My coworkers are overreacting”

“You screamed at your coworkers”

Leo had the irritating feeling the shrink switched to coworkers just to appease him, giving him a little consolation prize. Truth was his coworkers were the closest thing to friends he had, but this idiot didn’t know that.

“It isn’t normal for you to scream at people, right? So something must be wrong” The shrink added after Leo didn’t respond.

“You don’t know how often I scream”

“You are being confrontational”

“You are being over analytical”

“You are deflecting”

“You are annoying”

Leo got a little bit of satisfaction from that last retort, but knew that it was only hurting his case. The shrink leaned back into his chair, getting comfortable, which could only mean the shrink had just decided this was going to last a while. Leo saw the futility of fighting. Not that he was going to break down and open up. Just that he was going to have to come up with something else to get himself out of this room. He’d have to give this guy something to put into a report that nobody would ever read. In that moment Leo developed a story, a story that would explain his losing his cool, but not one that would mean he’d have to start taking medications or, god forbid, have to come back here for regular sessions.

“Alright I’m sorry. It all started…”

***

Freedom. Twenty minutes of bullshit and he’d managed to get out of there with a three step plan for dealing with stress: stop, breathe slowly, count to five. What a joke. Of course the incident - his screaming, had nothing to do with stress. Leo had been at the peak of an existential crisis of sorts that had lasted most of his life. He, and everyone he had ever known, were on a generation ship, traveling through the interstellar space towards Bernard’s star, where it would be believed they would find a hospitable little planet for them to explore and settle. The human race had made quick work of their solar system and were itching to become interstellar. After almost a century fumbling around trying to invent faster than light travel -

“Idiots” Leo mumbled under his breath, on his walk out of the shrinks office.

- they eventually gave up and launched the Intrepid. Now, 500 people, including him, were unwitting and unwilling volunteers on mankind's biggest gamble. This was the source of his rage, the rage that sent him to the shrink, and the same rage he didn’t want to discuss at length with anybody, let alone that shrink. What in the hell, Leo thought, gave those bastards the right to sign him up to this mission? Fine for the people who volunteered for this thing - people that were many generations removed from the present, smug self important people Leo would never meet and had only seen in history class videos - but when exactly did he agree to be stuffed in a tin can and launched away from civilization?

“Exiled from birth” Leo mumbled again.

He would never know anything except this ship, and boy did he know it. Not just because he was an engineer, and it was his job, but because it only takes so much time to know it when it’s the only place to be. And now he was bored.

“Ah shit” Leo winced.

Steven. If the expression “ignorance is bliss” could be captured, distilled and brought to human form it would be Steven. His happiness wasn’t what annoyed Leo, it was its source. Pure, unquestioning lack of intellectual independence and curiosity. It showed in everything, the way he dressed, the way he talked, the way he ate the same god damn food every fu-

“Leo! How’d.. How are you feeling? Better?”

“Muuuuuch better, thanks” Leo drew out the word, confident in the knowledge the sarcasm in it would blow straight past Steven without so much as a hint making it through into his brain. Leo also noted that Steven was about to ask ‘How’d the meeting go’ which means word was already making it around.

“Great! Hey, are you coming to the latest Earth dispatch viewing tonight?”

In the early days the communication back and forth was basically constant, but now distance had done its thing and it took a lot longer to send and get messages, so they had been reduced to be far less frequent and had become something of a special occasion onboard. Leo imagined it had become not too much unlike the letters sent across oceans in old empires on Earth, when you would write not knowing if there was someone still there to receive. Back when fifty percent of ships would make it to their destination - wonder what Intrepid’s odds were.

“Not tonight, tha-”

“Ah come on, it’s been almost a year since the last one” Once again there was no escape.

“Alright you’ve convinced me!” It pained him to say the words even though he knew there was zero truth in them. Second time he had to capitulate in one day, this was not a good omen.

“Awesome! See you tonight!”

“Don’t count on it” Leo said, but only once he was sure Steven was out of audible range. Times like this he wished a small meteorite would make it past the ships defenses and rip an unsealable hole along the ship's hull. A modern day Titanic, which would kill him, sure, but would remind humanity of its utter fallibility and that might just all be worth it. Oof that was a little dark.

Walking the ship was usually a solitary affair, there were far more hallways and empty spaces than 500 people could fill up. Without even considering that most crew members spend their time in the green spaces. His favorite spot was his office, and it is where he was headed now. Jutting away from the rest of the ship, the space had dozens of screens filled with systems diagnosis, but if you turned them off, as Leo often would, you could see clear through windows to an overview of the ship, and through the rear facing glass of the main hab, a window into its inhabitants. This space was designed with engineering oversight in mind. In a way this office was a lot like what he had become, separate from his peers, a distant casual observer. Leo walked into his office, waved off the automated assistant within the second it took to boot up, before it could even say “hello”. He turned off his screens and sat there and just stared out. Like every generation before him he was enamored with the starry sky. As humans would have done when they first left the tree canopy, as his forefathers did before they could travel to the stars, and as generations past him would likely do on this very ship, he just let the awe wash over him.

And he sat.

And sat.

For half an hour.

One hour.

Two hours.

Then just shy of three hours he saw a massive aurora enveloping the front of the ship, starting on the left and blowing through to the right. In the immediate shock he stood up, he would be amazed if not for the fact that something this big would have an ominous cause. Dances of colors filled his sight and bounced around the room. After the aurora died out he saw streaks of static dance across the ship’s surface like they were bullet trains rushing from city to city. He tried pulling up the screens but nothing happened. He tried calling the automated assistant but that failed to respond too. When the tools he was so used to they had become annoying things to avoid ignored him, like the silent treatment from an unappreciated lover, he truly realized the full magnitude of how screwed he was. Lights on the ship went out one by one, as local power caches would have given in, and then the lights on his own office gave out too. And he found himself in perfect pitch blackness. Strangely his first thought was how much he regretted thinking that he wished a projectile would rip the ship apart, if the power to the deflectors up front went out, as they likely had, it was a stochastic certainty eventually. If he was a superstitious man he would feel guilt, but at least his character spared him from that. Weird noises emanated throughout the ship, their sound having only just traveled through the pressurized maze of hallways and making it to Leo. He could not be sure, but he thought he heard some screams among those noises too. He was frozen.

He took a few deep breaths.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

It didn’t help. There was no-one there to hear him, but he felt it needed to be said anyway:

“Fuck.”

With that he ran out of his office.