Wreak Havoc With Naïve Minds

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Sometimes I am comforted by that. Most of the time I wish I was never involved in the first place. The pain I have seen inflicted upon my now dead companions will linger with me until I finally succumb to death myself, but at least I won’t ever have to hear their screams or the sounds of what was being done to them. The terror in their eyes was almost too much to bear as it was. Their faces are in my mind and I can picture them fighting the thing we brought back from LD1054-226. “Thing” doesn’t even begin to touch what it was. I haven’t thought long enough about it to be able to describe it to myself. Did it have a body? Was what we saw its body or an extension of control upon other objects that we perceived as its body? Did we assume what we saw was the thing itself or was it an illusion? I’ll have to think more on that later.

“Investigate for possible signs of life.” That's all we had to go on. That’s all we really needed. We weren’t a reconnaissance team. We were scientists. Our expedition was going to be for years of our lives and everyone involved decided it made more sense to send a manned flight than sending robots to collect data. Humans could adapt and make changes on the go if “life” was found. We would be able to adjust our instruments or change the parameters of what we wanted to do with the information rather than waiting on it to be sent back to earth for study and subsequent probe missions. That also delays “progress”. Waiting for years on information that might prove useful or not and then subsequent missions to find out more. Robots wouldn’t be able to do this mission “with enough degree of accuracy to make a full assessment”. Robots only have the ability to collect the data with the instrumentation we send them with. Knowing what to send them with is a guessing game anyway.

We know based on previous expeditions what has been useful and can make educated guesses based on that, but every world humans have surveyed has resulted in vastly different outcomes and circumstances. I can understand why we went. There are several groups like us exploring different areas of the galaxy searching for “life”. So far, a few have come back with some success. Mostly bacteria or some tiny plant life in the oceans of a few worlds. Others have found the remains of great civilizations that have destroyed themselves with no one left alive as far as we can tell. We were “lucky” in a certain sense to find something so new and different that shows “life” can be created (or manifest?) in such different environmental circumstances than our own that it will change our perspective of how life comes into being in the first place. We were the ones that had to find something that I hope was the only one in existence. I’m not a military supporter. I never have been. I wouldn’t say I’m a pacifist but I do feel there are more civilized ways of handling disputes and finding common ground. This thing, however, did not “reason” or “offer forgiveness” if those are even ideas that would be considered. All it did was feed. In all honesty, “Feed” is a loose term here. I don’t know if that was what it was doing. I hope to never know otherwise. Unfortunately, I am the only one left who has any knowledge of what happened there. Is that a good thing? Will the information I have be a good account of what actually transpired? Does it matter?

It has been about two weeks since I was able to take off from LD1054-226. I was able to get enough power rerouted and make the repairs necessary to leave the surface. My ship is now a lifeboat. I should be able to make a few more repairs en route but will it be enough to get me home before I run out of food? Unknown at this time. Will I ever see home again? I am doubtful. If I do, will anything I say be believed? Unknown. Maybe. We managed to save some visuals from our time there before everything went to hell. Will it matter? Can anyone take visuals from out of context and extrapolate some kind of theory as to what it means? Will anyone return after me to find out more? I hope not for their sake. For all of our advances in space travel and scientific discovery, I don’t think we have grown enough, as a species, for our view of what space travel can uncover. This mission was straightforward in what our objectives were to encompass. Yet, I am now the only one left.

The objective was obtained in that we did find life. What does that mean? I think the goal has always been to find life beyond our own world so that we can bridge some gap in technology or find some deeper understanding as to why we are here. That is assuming we are able to communicate with these other forms of life in a meaningful way. This mission proved to be a failure of finding something that we can exploit. The opposite happened and we now have to figure out how to take that information and come to terms with it. I don’t think I will ever come to terms with it. However, I have far too much to finish. The human spirit is strong in its determination to stay alive and that is where I am now. I still need to attempt to get my radio working to try and make contact with anyone close enough to respond. It may be months before I get a response. If I can get the beacon working, someone should at least be able to find my ship if I don’t live long enough to see them in person. How I am still alive is a story for another day.

I am tired and want to rest. I don’t sleep well after…. that. I don’t ever fully relax anymore. I want to sleep but my mind circles back to those silent screams in the glow. How long did the thing work on them? What did it get out of it? Was it pleasure? Was it purely sustenance? Was it trying to extract information from them? All of my thoughts circle around “what ifs” and hypotheticals that no one has the answers to and maybe never will. I am hoping there is something onboard that will quiet my mind so I can get some restful sleep. I don’t think that I will last too long out here without some peace. If I can manage to make it to the next outpost, there may be a chance the people there can help piece together what happened. How that will help, I really don’t know.