Jack of all trades

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

We learned the truth though. They're deafening.

Four days earlier

"Hey Coop, why d'you suppose the Cap'n is so hell bent on gettin' to the new world?"

Some days I thought it may kill Boog to actually work instead of asking me a bunch of stupid questions while I do repairs.

"Dunno," I say, my legs poked out of a small shaft. I'd have given it more thought if 1.) I thought it even mattered a little bit, Capn's business is his own, or 2.) If I wasn't sweating through my coveralls while Boog was just watching me work.

"I think he's runnin' away from somethin'" Boog said, and took a huge swig of what was most likely not water.

"Oh yeah?" I really didn't care. The problem was that the actual repair took precedence of thought. The engineers never thought about how hard electric panels were to get to once inside. All they thought was 'how cool do the hallways look' and 'do the doors make that nice 'ssshhht' sound when they close?' Never mind that it takes three hours to crawl through dense wires just to get to a fuse box.

More than that, Wyatt West, an unforgivably fake name belonged to our fearless captain. Of course he was hiding something. It just didn't concern me, because 1.) He paid me under the table, and 2.) I could see him as the type to get rid of people who asked pesky questions like Boog.

"Yeah. You ask me, he's one of them Jack's." I stopped what I was doing.

"Are you stupid?" I asked from the shaft, maneuvering my way out so that I could see his face.

"I'm just saying he's got one o'them personalities, and -"

"Let's say he was Boog. Let's say that he was a Jack. He pays the whole crew well, has his own ship, a brigadier class no less, and we're on a year long expedition. A Jack with that kind of money is the type of person who definitely wouldn't want his crew spreading rumors that he was a Jack."

"Listen, I-I didn't mean-" he flipped his hands up in defense, but I laid the wire crimpers on the floor, and stood up, trying in vain to wipe some of the dust off.

"Of course you didn't. Listen, it's mostly done. Just one little wire left to slip into slot 13A. I think you got it, I'm gonna go get some Z's while I still can. We're gonna be passing by asteroid belt Delta 3 tomorrow."

"Hey wait, Coop come on, I didn't mean anything I just-"

"I know buddy," I looked back and shot him a smile as I walked away, "I'd just hate to see ya not get any work in today." He wasn't thrilled with having to do anything, and sometimes I wondered how he even got grease on his coveralls in the first place.

He didn't know anything about what it meant to be a Jack.

But you do, don't you?

At first I didn't think I had heard that correctly. It was such a little sliver of voice creeping near the edge of my consciousness. It was the sound version of feeling like there's a spider on you only to find out it's your own hair drying out.

Three days earlier

"Mr. Cooper can you adjust us by three degrees vertical north west?" Captain West asked.

"Three degrees vertical north west", I repeated, then flicked a few switches and turned my little crank two and a half clicks.

"Mr. Armiboog, please decrease thrust by two and a half percent in thirty seconds, followed by an increase of one percent in thirty more."

"Two an' a half in thirty down, one in thirty up" Boog repeated. His station looked a little more intricate, but it was less technical all together. More of a joy stick compared to actual calculations. I couldn't help but notice that Boog seemed distratcted.

Help me.

Definitely a whisper. I turned to see that Boog was not looking at me though, and the captain would never whisper that phrase. Space sickness was a real thing, but I don't recall ever hearing stories of people who just started hearing voices. Well except one, but I hoped it wasn't that.

Two days earlier

They were constant now, and more of a murmur.

Help me. Save us. Die. Forget her. Kill him. My daughter please. I'm coming for you. You'll regret this. Forgive me.

All different voices, all distinct and the same. A cacaphony of madness that I was slowly losing myself to. I don't know where people go when they die, but I was sure their voices stayed here. Near the edge of space.

I hadn't left my room in a few hours, and I had decided that I would stay there until the voices disappeared or I did. Whichever came first.

Captain West came charging through arousing me from a near comatose state, shaking me.

"You hear them right?" He asked.

I nodded.

"Ignore them as best you can, I need you on the navigation deck in twenty minutes." I rubbed the bridge of my nose, I couldn't have heard him right, as my shift in the shafts had just ended.

"Lacey is dead. So is Gerard." He said, not changing his expression to match the words that just came out of his mouth.

Like a Jack.

"Why?" I asked.

"The voices got to them." He shrugged and walked away. Definitely a Jack.

I got dressed and got into my station. The captain and Boog were already waiting. Boog looked deeply troubled and he kept scratching his ears. It looked like no one was immune. This was that then for sure. The edge of the universe. Death's scythe.

"Out of our crew of 115, there are now 47." The captain was talking over the speaker system. A system I think I had fixed on my previous shift, but really couldn't be sure.

"Try not to kill yourselves for the next few days. We'll get through this."

'We' was not a great word.

The day before

Boog hung himself in the morning. I found his body when I went to get him to do some actual work. He really would do anything to get out of it.

The crew had been whittled down to the high teens, and the voices sounded like I was standing in a crowded room or party where the music is turned up a bit too high. Some louder than others, none quiet.

The only difference was, most of them now said more or less the same thing.

A resounding: Join us

The captain and I sat at a table in the mess hall. We didn't have enough crew left to pilot the ship, we were destined to get swallowed by the giant darkness of space, or starve, or kill ourselves as was then commonplace.

"Boog wondered why you wanted to find the new world." I said. The words barely escaped my mouth. I didn't want to yell, but it almost felt necessary against the voices.

"What did you tell him?" The captain asked, his knuckles were white around the handle of his mug. It was good to see that I wasn't the only one struggling.

"That it was none of our business, but I figure since we're going to die I'd like to know," I said.

"I have no intention of dying." He said. I wondered if he actually believed that.

The day of deafening.

In the end it was myself, Wyatt West, and a thin girl from storage. Molly. We were the last survivors. Our craft was already a few hundred lightyears off course. The last traces of visible light had vanished a few hours before we heard the phaser shot that blew a hole in someone's head. He was the fourth left, but I don't remember his name.

They were all screaming. It was hard to hear thoughts. The captain and I stuck to writing down messages. It took minutes just to write a sentence. Another few minutes to read. Molly was trying her hardest to keep it together, balled up in a corner of the mess hall.

I wrote, on a piece of paper. Are you a Jack?

No harm now, what was he going to do, kill me? Please. Please.

It took him a few minutes before he wrote back.

Yes. You?

Yes.

Another few minutes passed, and we each started laughing. Under normal circumstances we might be forced to kill each other. Now? We awaited death like an old friend.

I tried to shake Molly awake so she could eat. She didn't wake up again though. My guess was exhaustion or seizure. It was hard to tell.

Then, a small miracle happened.

There was silence.

At first I thought that I must have died. The quiet was so complete that a part of me ached for the screams in the way that one sucks on a sore tooth just to make sure it's still there.

Wyatt was already looking at me with astonishment. His lips moved but I couldn't hear him. In fact, as I took steps I realized that I couldn't hear anything at all. Wyatt's eyes went wide as he spoke. He touched his mouth then his ears, flicking them a few times. I guessed he was the same as me.

A voice cut through the silence. Still and small. Not a child, but with an innocence that threatened darkness.

Welcome to the new world.