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“Holy suffering fuck it’s hot out here… holy shit. I mean, God damn.”

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She howls, as she stumbles under the immense heat from the triumvirate of sun’s high in the reddish tinged sky. Beads of thick sweat pour down her ebony hued forehead inside her make shift helmet. The barren steppe upon which they’ve crashed is strewn with only a handful of scrub foliage, and no shade or cover from the glaring, harsh suns. Behind her lies a badly damaged Falcon-Heavy Class star hopper, it has a massive black scar along one side of the hull. A cavernous gash exposing all manner of wiring, pipes and life support systems to the open vacuum of space prior to falling out of the sky and crashing like a putelant child, into a lump of crumpled steel on a rugged strip of dirt on some unknown planet. “Fuck me.” Shouts her copilot from inside the wreckage. “We have a couple of weeks of repairs to undertake here Katayna. And that’s if, if, our stores hold enough raw materials for the mill and lathe units to process us our replacement parts… not only structural pieces but full fucking hull plates too. Nozzles and fairings.  Fucking hell.” The co pilot is diminutive three foot tall, three armed blue-purple biped with large bulbous multi faceted eyes, and is completely hairless. Besides being a copilot come navigator, Errebor is also a mill Wright and does all of the ships servicing herself. Katayna, the lithe pilot and owner of the vessel is standing stock still admiring the damage wrought by their tumultuous landing. Muttering to herself soundlessly with her microphone turned off.  making a mental list of parts and repairs that will need to be made to the exterior hull plating, and environmental shielding apparatus. “Does this planet look really red to you Kat?” Pipes in Errebor over the helmets comm’s unit. Taking a step back from the massive stretch of ragged black burned and torn hull, Katayna turns to look out over the steppe and really take in her surroundings. “Why yes, yes it does. Almost rusty. Why?” Asks Kat while standing motionless in the stifling heat of the mid day glare. “I’d wager a fuck tonne of that Pengar cock you love so much that this here planet is ferrous. I don’t think we’ll have to dig that far down to gather enough materials to smelt us up some ore of  a useful sort. That’s what the fuck I’m thinking, Kat”.  The short co pilot is now hanging from the mangled rear bay doors, observing the barren wasteland through a pair of range finding binoculars. With four limbs hanging from any available surface, and the last available arm clutching onto her binoculars she has a higher vantage point than Kat, and notices rising clouds of dust well into the distance. Alerted to the motion Kat moves along the steppe to the edge of a precipice. Way down below, in what could have once been a valley are strange beings. Strange hairy four legged creatures that appear to be running at an enormous rate of speed. “Oh me, oh my. Oh me, oh my!” Quips Errebor. “From here to there, strange things are everywhere.” Responds Katayna with a slight smirk.

PART ONE The Company: Sisters in Arms.

“Do you suppose that you could describe a lone space probe as wistful”…

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Mused the middle aged communication’s technician to himself quietly while seated infront of his old and grimy beige-grey terminal. The man and the large analog terminal were situated well away from the hum of the science decks closer to the moons surface, stashed way down in a long forgotten corner of an unused deck aboard the lunar base. The walls in this buried portion of the base were a deep grey, nearly black silica rock that absorbed all of the heat in the room, leaving the technician and all of his instruments a clammy and tepid temperature. Not exactly cold but not in the least bit welcoming. The dimness of the light down here was not a function of neglect, but rather due to the technician’s desire to view a live stream of what data the probe was sending back to him from deep in the void. He had various readouts of the data code playing alongside his monitor which for the most part was essentially just black with slow moving pin pricks of light scattered across it. Looking at the blackness was hard enough to do let alone having a bright glare present from an all too bright overhead lighting system that permeatesthe lunar base. So dimness was the order of the day for Bertrick. He was stationed in a U shaped room with his massive three hundred channel analog control terminal to one side and slightly in front, like an L shaped sectional, with a massive central video monitor hung on the wall directly above the console and six smaller monitors showing the data from the major sensor arrays from the probe hanging on the exposed portion of the wall to his right. Each item broken down into their own designated stream. Radar, lidar, spectrometer, GPS / Navigation, engineering and a cluster of other more niche sensors. The technician did not design the probe, or have any input on what went on it for the expedition. He just happened to have a love for oversized and deeply complicated analog twentieth century technology. The terminal itself, all grungy shades of grey and beige and possibly off white, was a jumble of toggles, switches, buttons, sliders and dials. In amongst that were pops of orange and yellow labels that had their most pertinent data faded into oblivion. This particular item, once at the forefront of audio wizardry was now so completely foreign to most humans it could have been alien technology. Bertrick’s great great grandfather’s grandad has once been a pastor and musician who had hours and hours of home video showcasing his mixing and overdubbing skills. Skills which Bertrick was fascinated with, and had thus purloined his knowledge over four decades of pursuing his hobby in wrangling one such audio board. That endeavour brought him to his dream job of watching the latest probe data for two shifts per day for the next ten to fifteen years. He had no idea why it was sent or what they expected to find. Turns out they withheld the reasoning so as to not colour the analysis. They wanted the data reporting to be as unbiased as humanly possible. But job security was nothing to pass up, and Bertrick wasn’t afraid to work unsupervised and virtually alone in his mostly comfy work station. To keep himself from falling asleep he ran the feed through his audio terminal and narrated everything he saw that warranted an explanation. But mostly to make certain he scrutinized every single second of audio and visual data he received. For Bertrick knew, surreptitiously that this particular probe had been launched not on a whim of the science academy but with a specific set of coordinates in mind. It was mostly hearsay and rumor, but to launch such an extraordinarily overpowered probe out to the middle of nowhere was not exactly the type of science that Torus Station science graduates are known for. The Company has a reason for everything, no exceptions and no exemptions!

Bertrick sat watching the screen twisting knobs and turning dials as he attempted to hone in on a certain pitch of whine that was being transmitted back to him from the probe. It, the probe had an official designation but they were long and dull and full of strings of letters and numbers. Although since Bertrick only had to monitor and report on one such probe, he had shortened it down to an easily identifiable acronym. One which the higher ranking science officers didn’t reject out of hand. So the probe a.k.a. St3v3 or now “Steve” was the main focus of Bertrick’s every waking moment. Though Bertrick was mainly an audio and visual technician it was his responsibility to plug in any navigational changes sent to him by the other divisions attached to this expedition. Which didn’t bother Bert in the least. If he logged enough of them over the next few years he could earn another new designation and an ample raise. Praise be! To The Company. They really did pride themselves in continuing education and certifications. Given the time lag between himself and Steve, Bert’s slow typing speed was not going to be an issue. As he could follow along with each message to see it ping off of and get pushed through all of the repeaters on its way out to the far flung edges of who the fuck knows where.

“So Steve, what are you going to show me today? Come on gimme something extravagant to monologue to!” Whispered Bert to his terminal in a sing song fashion. News had come down from above that some of the ranking officers were gathering from different divisions just to watch and listen to the high light reels Bert provided as part of his analysis. He’d fought the urge to sneak into the briefing room to see for himself, but after sixteen hours of every twenty four devoted to Steve, he couldn’t muster the energy or the enthusiasm. Bertrick knew he could sing, his deep bellowing voice came from the pipes he inherited from his great, great, great, on and on, grand father who lived his whole life in one town on earth. He was a pastor with an outsized congregation due to his musical ability and skills as an orator. He might have had a flair for the dramatic, but he never strayed from the path, though to hear the elements of ole Maw-maw he had plenty of offers and propositions. The deep south might have gotten him all hot and bothered, but the press of young available ladies didn’t turn his focus away from his love for Maw-maw. To hear it told she was a wild and sordid sort in the sheets, so he was perhaps too tired and worn out to pursue other such feminine wiles. Much to Bertrick’s surprise he had become rather deeply in tune with the ‘sounds’ of the cosmos. He had managed to fine tune his sound board to a degree where even the casual listeners to his analytical reports could tell the differences between items that Steve had flown by. The ability to isolate and achieve the cleanest output of unadulterated signal was truly mental. It was a factor of the many lonely months Bertrick spent pouring over the terminal tweaking, and twisting and dialing in each little snippet of audio that piqued his ears. Bertrick was becoming renowned for his audio specificity. He was a rock star in the sciences, something he didn’t realize he was able to achieve. The fidelity of his craftsmanship was being broadcast throughout the system and requests for him to take up a teaching position with Torus Station were becoming hard for the science division to ignore. The supposedly confidential mission was starting to turn a profit for the lunar base with the streaming of Bertrick’s audio visual logs of Steve’s expedition. His ‘Steve-Cast’ was number two on The Company’s educational broadcasts provided to the whole Sol system. Advertisers had requested on air plugs, and the Torus station entertainment sector wanted pre-roll and end-roll video commercials for their numerous science fiction books, movies and television shows. None of this was ever disclosed to Bertrick, but he was given a substantial raise for his part in the covert business venture. The popularity of the ‘Steve-Cast’ stemmed from Bertrick’s use of colourful, yet poignant prose. His ability to humanize the Steve probe, and its lonely trek out to no where. By musing on the state of humanity, while simultaneously explaining the audio & spectacular visuals of the long and worrisome trek, billions of paying consumers were hooked. The deep baritone register he played in vocally could really set a sub woofer to purring. His velvety smoothness intermingled with a breathy occasional rasp set most people’s speakers on fire. Figuratively speaking. Through the broadcast, Bertrick had laid bare his lonesome soul, and honed his craft to a especially fine point.

AU after AU traveled, Steve just kept on keeping on. He performed admirably doing fly bys of nebulae, quasars, black holes, dust clouds, radiation clouds, and all sorts of colorful and interesting things. But whatever he was supposed to find, those weren’t it. Every so often Bertrick would key in some minor course corrections, or make a note on the navigational logs and sit back and hum to himself in the dim isolation of his work station. The years of watching and waiting had little affect on Bertrick’s mood or attention span. He was as faithful an analyst as one could pray for. Never missing a beat. He logged every single item, anomaly, hiccup or obstacle that presented itself. Regardless of whether or not Steve sent back the desired final outcome Bertrick was on track for several commendations and a sweet posting of his choice anywhere within Sol system once the ten to fifteen years were up. Unless they offered an extension on the expedition Bertrick was to start to think about where he wanted to go next. And if that was to teach at Torus Station, it meant only a move of some seventy miles up from the surface of the moon to the massive floating bulk of the Torus itself.

PART THREE of : The Company A Call To The Void

Amid the bustle and commotion in the…

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Command decks stately ready room, a very startled Jaz was huddled by a bulkhead staring blankly out into the inky black depths of endless space. As commanders with their cadres of junior officers rushed about the room, pulled out sheets of paper, maps and rushing to monitors to account for this point of conjecture or that. Raised voices and shouting permeates the massive room. With sixty people plus their retinue of advisors, councillors and experts the room was a shambles of order and coherence. Arguments bursting here and there, with academics butting heads regarding every single data point imaginable. It was heaven for those inclined to be pedantic, and hell for everyone else. The slow moving bureaucratic creep of something completely unexpected.

For Jaz and Jorec it had been seventy two hours of hostile interrogation and questioning, and unabashed harassment from the security divisions, senior science officers and almost the entire rank and file aboard the UB313 research outpost. Jorec wasn’t in much better shape for being slightly more senior than Jaz. Seems that in their vigor to get a jump out of archiving the old tight beam network they had maneuvered themselves, by leaps and bounds no less, over top of the appropriate chain of command with the news of a far off human distress signal. The Admiral, captain and station CO were not impressed to say the least. Both of the recent science grads had been separated and grilled harshly on the finest details and minutia of their seemingly tall tale. But after blood tests, psychological evaluations, additional strenuous back ground checks, extreme vetting of their lineage and current health records the command team had no choice but to review the details of this once in a lifetime dispatch from the brink of the void. A call from some where out passed the boundaries of the known universe. It was pretty tense for all involved. The security team had not only withheld food, water and sleep in an attempt to coax out even one millimeter of difference in their statements, but pulled out each science graduates catheter and colostomy bag. Rendering them dependent on an actual physically working toilet which the security forces guarded fiercely. The inquisition team had a plan of repeatedly attacking their recollections of time stamps, and the order to the series of events. Was this a direct quote, was that paraphrased, how do you know if you remembered seeing it, did the other person tell you to say this, to say that, did either of you attach a contraband device to initiate the call. Do you have friends working with you on this, are you a terrorist, an insurgent, do you realize the enormity of what you are saying here today? Would you testify to this in a court of law, will you sign away your life on the strength of not only your recollections but that of your colleague. That sort of thing. Extraordinary – high intensity, with no rest, no bathroom breaks except under direct personal supervision. Which in the case of Jorec meant a security escort would have to hold his member in order to allow him to evacuate his bladder into a sealed and then later tested container. They even pulled their biometrics out to monitor the internal body receptors at specific time stamps to make sure each aspect of their subconscious bodily responses were genuine. In the case of Jorec, he suffered many – very real hours, of government mandated torture. He was currently wrapped in a thermal blanket hiding his sudden lack of finger nails and all of his broken toes from the rest of the gathered group. His swollen visage dismissed by everyone in an orange or maroon coloured jumpsuit. His lowly cyan coveralls soaked in blood and vomit didn’t even register with this crowd. He just sat in a heap, rocking himself almost imperceptibly as he too stared out the view ports in the cavernous ready room. Watching Pluto, which was the only thing that could be seen with the human eye way out by the UB313 research outpost anyway.

Up until recently this branch of humanity had assumed they were the furthest humans from earth. During an early schism among the highest ranks of The Company one intrepid individual broke away from the monolithic business entity and struck out on his own and fled beyond the easy grasp of the populations of the earth and moon. This particular order of scientists had not been present during the Nano Tech boom, nor were they aware of the technological breakthroughs that came about decades after the For E’s engine debacle aboard Margot’s Fever or the mysterious disappearance of the oil refinery come research flag ship The Lark Song some five hundred years ago. In fact this faction of people was not privy to a great many important details surrounding humanity as a whole. Being fractious and isolationist meant that they were only as good as their echo chamber allowed them to be.

Back in the cacophany of the ready room the question at hand was what to do with the news of this distress call. If they’d managed to hear the call then surely The Company back on earth would have heard it too. Do we ignore it, or do we send a probe back to gather more intelligence? At no point did anyone seem to care that the message had travelled several billion light years one way and thus whomsoever set the distress call was likely long dead. This discussion revolved around the potential to discover new territory and to lay claim to new resources. But primarily they wanted to know if the call was a trap. An ambush lying in wait for them. The heated and tumultuous discussion carried on for months. In the mean time two new items were able to be seen by the naked eye from the ready rooms observation windows. Those were the flash frozen, and boiled bodies of a badly beaten Jaz and Jorec, recent graduates of the Torus Station science academy post graduate program being taught on UB313 with five hundred year old out of date knowledge.

PART TWO of : The Company A Call To The Void

The deep space exploration beacon floated…

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Around in the vast expanse of nothingness that made up the majority of the dark and empty cosmos. Its many rows of small green and blue and amber indicator lights blinking steadily in the near perfect darkness as the large autonomous bulk drifted aimlessly along its course. The beacon, a long lost science tool several centuries out of main stream use, was various shades of a drab grey with only a few pops of bright orange and yellow painted onto the many metal panels and facets of its exterior. Weathered and worn, battered by debris, ice and the increasingly less common collision. With four massive booms with the now defunct sun light catching solar panels reaching out from the central body, like the dead arms of a desiccated witch, with gnarled and withered fingers at the ends. Between those four gangly booms are four matching but tattered solar sails which haven’t billowed with the energy of light particles in quite some time. Hanging limp, like a lifeless flag with no energy with which to fill them. Those ghastly witches fingers were actually the clumps of gathered sensors and radar dishes and the tight beam radio antennas. The unmanned science beacon had been gathering vast stores of near worthless data for many many decades now. With the satellites battery drawing so few amps, and the solar panels gathering next to no power the beacon is nearing the end of its life cycle. That is until an unexpected blip of the dimmest and softest glow of light became visible in the near endless ocean of black. Ever so slowly the dim pinprick of light grew to that of a grain of sand, a pea, a fat blueberry, then a grape, and with the sudden increase in light the sails ballooned full and the solar panels tattered as they were began to pull in and store energy. The jump in size from a grape to a melon to a gigantic mass of flaming gas was extraordinary. Near instantaneous compared to the many lifetimes it had spent careening through the farthest reaches of space with nary a hint of anything besides radiation and microwaves. As the beacon gathered up momentum and incredible speed it sent off one last tight beam of interesting information before plunging deep into the gravity well of a massive new star, and melting away into its constituent molecules and then atoms. Not even a whiff of smoke to denote the centuries old satellites passing. The ignominy of it all.

“Oh… Jorec we have something substantial coming in via the old tight beam network. Doesn’t appear to be the same old shit as before. Want to give it a look over?” Says Jaz the junior science officer on duty. Jaz has been one of three people in charge of monitoring the science decks tight beam communications system. Now that it is several centuries out of date, with it having been decades since they had anything worth looking at, it was primed to be dealt with by fresh out of the academy science grads. Archiving data and doing maintenance on non essential programs and hardware. Perfect for busy work and the day care of green horns. The slightly senior science officer, named Jorec looked up from his interface where he was storing old data clusters on physical hard drives. “Oh really? Wow – huh. Would you look at that. Must have seen something way out there, the file size alone is insane compared to the last, what, four thousand nearly identical recorded info dumps. Strange eh? Usually the signal decays to the point of the data being a corrupted useless tranche of absolute garbage. But this one, this one looks to have managed to catch all of the working repeaters to get back here.” Typing in a few short commands on his hand held tablet Jorec looks deeper into the incoming stream of information. “Wow man, the lag on this is atrocious. Like billions of light years. How did this ever get to us in such good condition? I don’t know of any overriding command codes that would trigger all of our deep space repeaters to function at top notch quality. The power consumption alone would be astronomical. We’re talking enough juice to power three Torus stations for a thousand years a piece. Holy shit Jaz, this could get interesting. Might be our ticket out of here early!” Says Jorec standing up from his chair. Turning around in the cramped room, switching the scrolling text from his personal lab view screen to the large central monitor hanging from the wall in the claustrophobic room as the data really begins to stream passed their eyes in lines of green code on a black background. “Oh – fuck. Call the CO, call the Captain, call the Admiral… call every fucking one!” Shouts Jorec in a frenzy. His face flushed red, as the veins in his neck and forehead nearly jump out of his body. Intermingled among the lines of code from the farthest reaching sensor arrays is an SOS, of human origin. From an area of space that no human has ever been recorded going to, or being from before. Accompanied by a very weak biometric life sign. Life for Jorec and Jaz was about to turn upside down, with them planted up to their knees in feces, while they are in the wrong orientation.

PART ONE of The Company: A Call To The Void

“Calvin are you listening to me? We have a problem…

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That needs your undivided attention.” Drones the beaten up orange cube of an educational tutor bot named Ed. The tank like treads have begun to wear away very rapidly over the last six months, and the noise Ed makes while maneuvering on the ships metal grated floors is unpleasant in my ears. “I’m sorry, did you just call me Calvin, Ed?” I say, coming out of my revelry rather sluggishy. “No Kelvin, you must have misheard me while your attention was wandering. I was in the process of explaining to you the dire situation in which we now find ourselves.” Barks the science tutor bot. “Wait, wait. I thought we decided to sleep on the bad news then come back here today to gather up our stuff for the grand adventure! I was so excited last night I could hardly sleep. I was kinda hoping we’d find some tucked away corner of The Lark Song that still had living people in it. Silly dream to get swept up in, I know. But, the hope is still there. The dreams are so vivid Ed. I can touch, and taste and feel it. It’s really all I can think about Ed. So what say you? You in, for some gallivanting about today?” I say it with a dopey grin upon my face, with a thousand mile stare in my moist eyes. Sweat has started to dapple my brow. The daft hope of human companionship this far into my forced isolation is tearing me up inside. The sheen of sweat upon my brow glints in the brilliant phosphorescent lights. “I fear that we will have to put the adventure on hold, for now Calvert.” Says Ed in a monotone. We are sitting facing each other, at one of the science labs work benches, even though Ed’s built in sensor array could locate and analyze me from any angle within a fifty meter radius. His sitting and ‘looking’ at me is just an artifact of my personal preferences, stored up in his memory and doled back out to me by his learning algorithms. “You did it again, Kelvin, my name is Kelvin. What’s wrong with you Ed.” I say. “Kelvin, pay attention. I’m not calling you by the wrong name. I said we have some major issues to attend to before we go traipsing over the ship to find that massive blister at the for of the vessel. Can you focus. What is the matter with you Calvin?” the pitch of Ed’s voice has begun to rise. To think of it, Ed’s voice modulation has been all over the place recently. Some times instead of talking he just emits a high pitched whine that rings throughout my head for hours at a time. Hours at a time. Huh. Funny turn of phrase that. I used to crawl through the virtual darkness with only a helmet lamp on to direct me through my adventures between the vessels double hulls. Now that I am out in the open, there is just so much brilliant white light. I can see everything even through my eyelids. The deck lights have begun to emit a strong halo, and a stretched glare across my eyes. Oh lord, I can hear Ed nattering on at me again. Jesus it’s getting hot in here isn’t it. “What did you say Ed? Sorry, I’m just all over the place lately. Oh wow, would you look at that…” waving my hands in front of our faces, I can see a delayed staccato view of my hand as it passes by, as though a blinking strobe light were blasting in my eyes. I can feel the distinct sting of sweat pooling on the surface of my eye balls. Colours are beginning to run together as I feel like I might just drift off to sleep. “Kelvin, my sensors are showing you with a heightened temperature of forty one degrees Celsius. Perhaps you should lie down.” Ed pulls back from the spotless work table we are seated at, and comes around to my side. In the growing dimness of the ship, I try to swat him away. “Leaf me, Leaf me!” I shout, but only a garbled jumble echoes about the room. “Kelvin, I’m going to deliver you to sick bay, and then I have to get to the command deck and check on the status of a few things. I’m going to slave your wrist comm’s to my internal sensor bank so I can monitor you from afar. I’m going to have to leave you unattended for quite some time Kelvin, do you understand?” All around me is dimming into total darkness. I can hear the tank treads rolling over the floors in the halls, and the power lifts whirring under the burden of our weight. Sudden flashes of light, and waves of pain take me as I am jostled harshly. I come to rest in the cool embrace of the med pod quite some time later. I feel the nano bots streaming through my bloodstream, and it feels like I am awash in a thick cool liquid. Then silence. With a loud gust of air, all becomes still.

With tortured movements the orange cube continues to circle the vessel as a silent guard. Stopping in at the science labs, command decks and engineering to perform as many of the required tasks as it is able. To conserve power all life support throughout the ship has been disabled except for the portion of the sick bay where Kelvin sleeps motionless in isolation. His weakened body was put into a medically induced coma once his brain had started to swell. Even in a mostly empty ship a microbial vector had managed to lodge itself deep inside Kelvin. Seems our DIY approach to implanting the new fangled Nano tech left a gaping blind spot in which a bug managed to manifest itself. Having worked it’s way through his ventricular, respiratory, gastrointestinal systems it managed to find an even more dangerous purchase in the brain. Kelvin had been quietly fighting a vicious internal battle, while slowly depleting the sick bays med pod of vital medicines and resources. After a while the med pod had requested Kelvin be transferred out to palliative care where he could be fed a steady drip of whatever could keep him comfortable. But Ed came by every few days to kick on the over rides from various high ranking helping hands. But as the flesh was deteriorated from age and use that would not be an option for too much longer. Ed was the first EDU bot to have ever had all his ai infused programs enabled at once. He had managed to tailor his speech patterns and work schedule to Kelvin specifically. Though Ed was not sentient, he was functionally closer to being so than any other mechanical bot ever created. This left Ed with the knowledge of emptiness, but no ability to feel anything specific about it.

Once it started to take Ed four days to travel between engineering and the sick bay med pod he had to make a difficult choice. Either maintain Kelvin’s over rides or remain within crawling distance of his charging station where his malfunctioning battery could be juiced up, and do whatever operations he could still perform for the now badly failing ship. Having spent four and a half years with Kelvin, it would prove to be the hardest decision the beaten, and badly abused orange cube had ever been entrusted to make. Let the sole survivor of the GCR burst aboard The Lark Song die in the hands of a doubtful med pod algorithm while convalescing, or let the badly damaged research vessel continue to drift off course and succumb to a cascading series of malfunctions and errors. The warning klaxons had long ago burned themselves out. Warnings and blinking lights had all gone cold due to negligence. As the vessel struggles to stay together, a difficult choice remains to be made.

Sitting still in the pitch black sick bay med pod isolation room Ed’s last blinking light has transitioned from a vibrant green, to a bold amber, then to a violent red, and was in the last waning stages of a faintly visible brown. In the vast blackness of the room, a cold Ed has come to rest with his finger poised above the override button. Manually keeping the heavy red button depressed, so that the med pod could not eject the sleeping patient.

After the ship has passed beyond the realm of human explored space, floated through the cold, isolated depths of the cosmos. Inside a massive research vessel The Lark Song a lone, and sudden cough can be heard followed by a sharp and deep gasp for breath. The med pod springs to life, with its white lights sparking to life, to reveal Kelvin, emaciated, cold and twenty years older encased in a small isolation room with no jumpsuit, and no way to get out buried in the depths of a dying ship.

PART FOUR of The Company : Chronicles of Kelvin

“That is quite the bruise you’ve developed there…

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Kelvin, perhaps you need to visit a med pod down in the sick bay?” Croons the orange EDU bot I’ve nick named Ed. I know, I know, not exactly the most original thing I could have come up with, but Cunty Mc Cuntface or Sir ShitTeeth just don’t slide off the tongue so gracefully. “Oh this?” I say pointing down to the purple and yellow cluster that rings my left elbow just below the bicep. “It’s just an artefact of the reattachment surgery. I set it to leave a noticeable scar so I would know that the accident had actually happened and I didn’t dream it up one night. I suppose part of leaving a scar meant leaving some issues in the blood vessels or capillaries or some shit. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. Doesn’t hurt though, so that’s nice.” We are currently in the massive and wide open commissary. The scrubbers keep this whole ship immaculately clean. Plus with no other people alive on board besides me and the Educational tutor bot Ed, it doesn’t gather up much dirt. A vast white walled room with massive round tables bolted to the floors with permanent stools surrounding them. Spartan and very utilitarian, designed to keep servicemen moving, so they don’t linger after eating. A place to rest your backside long enough to gorge on a meal, but not something you want to hang on to for hours on end for social calls. The outer most portion has a bank of floor to ceiling windows that look out to the stars, with a portion of the vessel splayed out below it in a rather grand vista. Dotted with blinking running lights, and radar dishes and a few other observation domes. Just at the very edge of visibility is a massive grey bulge. Nothing beyond that point can be seen from this vantage point. Part of my daily routine is coming in here to eat and chat with Ed as I float in front of the enormous air vent with the output set to maximum. Imagine floating on the edge of some bluffs as you are perpetually buffeted by gale force winds rushing in off of the coast. Makes me feel like I’m back on earth. Although it makes carrying on a meaningful conversation with Ed a challenge. It’s starting to feel like a residual habit from an earlier, and less successful coping mechanism. As an early attempt at escapism, bury my face in a windy vent sounds fairly stupid, but it was the best thing I could come up with that offered me even a sliver of comfort. Drinking was what got me a long, arduous crawl into the sick bay while carrying my severed arm in my teeth in the first place, so I cut way back on the booze. Seemed like a prudent thing to do. It was a total fluke that I discovered Ed in the science departments largest lab. Gaining access was, and still is a disquieting and upsetting task. My collection of ‘helping hands’ has grown over the years. As new needs and requirements made themselves known. For example, as I wore out my slippers from three years of walking all over the ship, and doing extensive maintenance tasks across all of the various departments. I had to gain access to the procurement depot and upgrade my footwear, harnesses, jumpsuit, the inner body sock, oh, oh and I even switched over to the new fangled Nanoparticles that removes the need for a colostomy bag, and catheter for urine collection. That was an amazing day, let me tell you. Removing the catheter for the last time was a moment I will cherish for the rest of my life. The technological upgrades that materialized in my wrist communicator and biometrics was nothing short of dazzling. Like it now has the ability to project a three dimensional holographic display. My eyes can adjust to near total darkness, and I just don’t feel cold or hot anymore. I feel like a god. It’s truly remarkable.

With the sound of drive wheels whirling, and the harsh patter of tank treads hitting the metal grating on the floor, I’m pulled out of my reverie by Ed moving to position himself directly below me, and closer to the exhaust port of the central commissary fan. Opening my eyes makes them water in the down draft, so I pull away from the stainless steel vent hood, and float back down to the floor. Once I make contact the magnetic locks contained in my jumpsuit keeps me firmly planted on the ground, but free to move about without too much lag. “Hey Ed, i have a strange question. One i wouldn’t really have ever thought much about.” Standing face to face with the EDU bot, or what I approximate as a face for Ed. A plate at chest height, that can extend upwards on a neck like column, full of lights, lenses, a speaker and various sensor arrays. “I’d expect no less from you Kelvin, the lack of questions that is.” Blurts out the bot. “Gee, thanks Ed. My question is… what the fuck is the name of this ship anyway?” I ask in as casual a manner as I can muster, seeing as how I’ve been employed, and deployed on this vessel for little more than three years now. “Well, Kelvin. We are on The Company research vessel The Lark Song. How does that make you feel?” Chirps the lump of orange tech on tank treads. It is rather disjointed how such a formerly stuffy grad student science tutor has started to look so drab and beaten up around the edges after two years of being my daily companion. I’ve put him through his paces helping me run maintenance jobs around the ship. “The Lark Song huh? That’s not anything like what I thought you’d say. Not even close. Ha.” I chuckle to myself. Thank god for the BOTKEY and the command codes that I discovered only months ago. Being able to trigger real time conversation in psychiatric mode has really brought me out of my shell. Though, I prefer being introverted on a busy ship, and not being extroverted with a machine because I have no other choice. See the difference there? It’s subtle, but meaningful. “Ed, I’ve been thinking. I have looked through every deck on this ship and I can not for the life of me figure out where, or what that massive blister is that you can see from the commissary windows at the very edge of visibility.” Pointing back through the brilliant white room to the black empty windows. “I would have to observe it for myself, and I could extrapolate approximate coordinates from the schematics I downloaded when I hard wired to the ship. Since I don’t have GPS, I will have to guess rather than give you a definitive answer.” Ed turns about on a zero radius, a space saving feature thanks to his tank treads. A neat feature we didn’t initially know was that he has a two tonne towing capacity. Would have come in very handy when stacking the bodies of the dead, but I digress. Taking the forty or so paces from the central vent out to the windows we stand motionless shoulder to orange coloured chest cube. “Kelvin, that particular portion of the ship is not listed under any directory I have seen or accessed. But I estimate it to be about twenty one hundred meters forward of us, and possibly eight to ten decks below. Near the waste water treatment sector, on top of the sanitation department faring.” Turning to look at each other Ed speaks before I have the chance. “Kelvin, not to be morbid but we might need to go aft to dig up an extra ‘helping hand’ to gain access.” His low tone is somber. Snapping my fingers I say “Beat me to it. Yeah, but who do we borrow from? Sanitation? Water works? Engineering?” I say with a shrug of my shoulders. “Might I suggest we use the commanding officer, and bypass any extraneous jury rigged surgery.” Beeps Ed in response. “Good call, nice to know that at least one of us is on the ball.” I chuckled, to which Ed whistles in rapid succession. “Well Ed, we don’t have any scheduled maintenance tasks for ninety six hours, so let’s bag some food, and go-go juice, and have ourselves an adventure!” Looking back to the boundless void beyond the windows I guffaw wistfully while I clap my hands once, loudly.

PART THREE of The Company : Chronicles of Kelvin.

Overview of March

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Bit of a strange month as you all can imagine. I didn’t do anywhere near as much writing, but I turned to sculpting and painting for a spell. Needed to do something less mentally taxing, since a lot of my waking hours have been spent in one form or another worrying about the global pandemic COVID-19 / Coronavirus. But, I did do a few bits of writing once a story caught my eye, and I turned to a subject that I know well. Being socially isolated, feeling lonely, stir crazy and just being desperate to talk to someone. All things I had a fair bit of experience with in my last year of High School, then working a full calendar year prior to college, my initial Sheridan college experience, then later on, as a freelancer working from home. But I’m more introverted than ever, so it doesn’t bother me as much now that I’m into my forties. With age comes some sort of wisdom I suppose. Ha. Plus I felt as though that twenty one chapters to my interconnected series was enough, and i didn’t want to write anything too topical, so I had to sit, wait and ruminate on a few ideas I had jotted down in the last few weeks, and let those ideas percolate through my brain. I decided to use the same universe, but all new characters, a new ship, and I steered clear of the large scale war building up in the background, that I tried to cover in one or two extra stories, but ultimately gave up on. I’m not good with writing scenes of that scale. I prefer to have two or three characters who do most of the talking, maybe one peripheral character to add exposition, if i don’t feel as though I have set the plot up well enough. But yeah, character heavy, dialogue and only a little bit of action, even if it tends towards large sweeping events that kill lots of people. Broad strokes here people, I’m aiming for quick, decisive broad strokes. I also like the format of trying to stay between six hundred and three thousand words. Short fiction. Evocative, if missing a few pieces of finer detail around the edges. Keep the story moving, if that’s what it calls for. Though I do like to linger in the quiet spaces between major events. Hurry up and wait, right? Something huge is on the horizon, but you have to wade through the usual tedium of your every day life to get there. The stuff often behind the scenes in a major movie. Boring to watch, but interesting to explore in writing. Since most of us read in isolation, or to ourselves even in public.  Anyway, to those who have read any of my stuff, thanks! To those who might find it in the coming months, thank you too! I wish you all the best during these awkward and trying times. Stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope to keep writing more until we make it on to the other side.

“Congratulations Kelvin, you’ve failed in absolutely…

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Spectacular fashion”, chimes the uppity education bot sitting behind me in the science departments largest lab. The robust orange cube like unit was typically used to tutor grad students during their first rotations aboard a science vessel, but I had it dumb things down for me so that I could try to figure out what had happened to my ships crew. About a year ago while I was crawling between the inner and outer hull plates of this ship, all seven hundred members of the crew just up and died simultaneously. At some point during the fifty two hours I was under radio silence, something catastrophic happened. Something that was not readily apparent upon my return. I admit, I took to denial and burying my head in the sand for a while afterwards, but one evening while floating in the commissary with my eyes shut and a gale force wind was blowing in my face I had an epiphany. Now, I’m just a mid level technician. I do a bunch of general tasks associated with small engines, electrical and mill work. But my forte is that I don’t mind isolation, small confined spaces or hard laborious tasks. The ‘epiphany’, as such was that I needed to gain access to as many of the ships systems as I could using the integrated biological over rides. In a moment of clarity while gathering up the deceased, I decided that storing the dead crew in our largest airlock cargo hold might be useful. And after using the ai enhanced scrubbers and cleaners to drag the bodies to one such location, disrobe them and store the associated ID tags and key cards on the right wrists of each of the dead. I made a point of having officers, or as high up the chain of command for each department set aside at the head of each enormous pile of bodies. I had a plan. An unpleasant plan at that, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

It took quite some doing to gain entry to all of the other departments but a little bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of free time meant I could figure out how to do it. So with the help of a reciprocating saw and the right hands of every department head and their personal ID cards, I had a chance to figure out how everything turned to shit on me.

“Kelvin, I do not understand how you failed to account for so many variables when preparing the simulations and models. Your ineptitude should have disqualified you from serving on a science vessel.” Quips the EDU bot again, disrupting my deep thought. “Fuck you Ed. I’ve told you repeatedly, I’m not a part of the science team, I’m a mechanical technician, I maintain the ships closed systems between the double hulls. I’m more of a spelunker than anything else. And, by the way – fuck you.” I curse at the beaten up orange bot. It has been seated in front of me in the lab for the last three hours as I attempt to run simulations on what could kill several hundred people without leaving a mark on them. “Apologies Kelvin, I was built to tutor grad student level science majors, and their speech patterns and repeated turns of phrase are logged and reused according to my learning algorithms. I assure you, my ‘personality’ is purely unintentional.” The units lights blink and glow softly as if showing some kind of contrition. I think it’s more a case of me going slowly insane, rather than the EDU bot gaining sentience. “Well, thank you, I suppose. Do you know anything about what happened? Have any additional insights I can add to these simulations we’re running?” I ask it again, hoping for a better answer. “We both know that I am unable to do your homework and/or assignments for you Kelvin. That is cheating and outside my operational parameters.” With a hum and the whirl of internal fans, the EDU bot continues to sit still doing very little to help me figure things out. “Tell you what Ed, I’m going aft to grab a helping hand from one of the science officers, I’ll be back shortly and I’d just love it if you could put any new information we uncover into layman’s terms for me. Could you do that for me, huh?” Sitting across from one another at the lab table, ED visibly grows taller in response. “Oh, yes. That is something I can do. Shame you don’t know any of my hot button commands, we could do so much more if you knew them.” Chirps the bot, as it’s head and neck extends out of the cube base where the tank tracks are mounted. “Why are you telling me this now! We’ve been at this for months, with little to no new knowledge uncovered. Jesus. Maybe lead with that info next time!” Rising out of my chair, visibly angry, face going red, veins in my forehead and neck throbbing. “Apologies Kelvin, I assumed you knew. All EDU bots have an extensive list of hot button commands for analysis and a laundry list of practical science related tasks we are capable of performing.” Answers the bot quietly. “Ok well, riddle me this Ed. After I return from the aft airlock with a severed hand and appropriate ID card to over ride the login commands on the research decks work terminal, could you direct me to where I would find those commands. Like a document, book, binder or app located somewhere on this ship? Do you think you could do that for he, huh?” Looking at the bot from behind the desk, I walk out the door and head aft of the ship. From behind me I can hear Ed nearly shout in the affirmative.

Walking down the spotlessly clean halls with their brilliant white lights, it can be easy to imagine that on a vessel this size that you are merely out of view of others and not entirely alone. Thinking about the mysterious deaths of the crew has brought a new vigor to my daily life. Though morbid, it has allowed me to channel my efforts into something constructive. While I still fulfill my assigned duties, it seems as though without any additional wear and tear from a crew that I can go longer and longer between maintenance checks. I wired the duty logs to ping my wrist biometrics when something pops up. So now that I have down time I figured I’d try to have some answers ready when the mission ends in another two and a half years. Turning the corner at the last T junction on the ship I come face to face with a massive set of atmosphere rated titanium double doors. Looking at a hand written sign posted on the door I can find the helping hand I’m after without having to dally among the dead. Smell isn’t really an issue, neither is decay. I keep the airlock in vacuum ninety nine percent of the time. After I dehydrated the bodies, I used the coldness of space to flash freeze them all in place. Locating the senior science deck officer, I pressurize the airlock. With a loud clunk I can hear the air tanks pumping oxygen back into the cargo hold within. As the doors glide open, the dimness of the space within takes over. Near the front of the room is a small table with a reciprocating saw, a charging station, cloth bags and box of masks and goggles. Picking up the PPE and saw I wander down the aisles to find the appropriate body. Kneeling down beside her, I set about gathering up the helpful hand. Having done something similar to myself only a year or so ago, I feel a strange sort of kinship with the lifeless body. Picking up the hand I place it gently in the beige cloth bag and head back to my work station. Keeping everything orderly and in it’s place. With a soft goodbye I close the airlock doors and depressurize the cargo hold. With a soft hiss the air returns to the tanks and the rooms temperature drops to below freezing.

“Welcome back Kelvin. And who do we have here?” The bot crawls over to me at the lead science officers work station. I run her ID card through the input, and when the login prompt comes alive I place the severed right hand, with it’s manicured metallic flecked green nails on the biological scan pad. A brief pause, and then the screen jumps with streams of data, and unintelligible code. “Whoa, holy shit. Looks like we might be able to get some answers after all. So Ed, where do I go, and what do I need to do?” Standing beside the EDU bot at the terminal, a previously undisclosed view screen flips out of the bots belly, and a blue schematic and a list of directions appears. “You may take this tablet with you, go grab the command codes and the command key and we can go over the new directives step by step.” Looking down at the schematic i feel a sudden sense of dread and fear trickle down my spine. Oh fuck no, I do not want to go back there. Not now, not ever. Why did they have to keep the command keys down in the sanitation department. Stored right next door to the waste containment canisters and that mother fucking thresher unit. Yeah, the one that took my arm off at the fucking elbow. “God damn it.” I shout. Ed pulls back several paces. “Is there an issue Kelvin?” He nearly whispers the question to me, either that or my ears are ringing from shouting at the top of my lungs in the lab. I can’t even clearly recall just how it happened either. I know I was drinking, and thought I’d have an adventure down in the bowels of the ship. I came out of the service tunnels I had been exploring and entered into a cavernous room with these massive steel tanks, they extended upwards like sixty or seventy meters. The tops disappeared in the dimness of the rafters. I was looking up, and up and up at one of the largest canisters, and fell backwards into something sharp. And immediately knew I had fucked up. My jumpsuit got caught and these exposed gears pulled my arm into the mix and then jammed. I had to use a miniaturized saws all strapped to my harness to cut my arm free at the elbow. Screaming and shrieking along with the tool as it cut through bones, muscle and sinew. Then in a foul daze I crawled to the medical bay and holed up in one of the few pristine white medical pods with automated surgery technology. Carrying my own arm, or what was left of it with me in my teeth, after I somehow managed to pry it out of the gears. God, that was a waking nightmare. The thought of going back down there for this fucking key is really giving me cause to pause.

Sitting on my bunk staring blankly at the Jean-Luc Picard quote etched into the bulkhead over my doorway I breath in sharply, and exhale in a long slow whistle. Steeling myself for all of the feelings I fear might paralyze me as I venture down below decks to the sanitation department and the waste storage canisters. Dressed in my dirty red jumpsuit, I dress in my work gear. Adding my various harnesses, links, hooks and carabiners. No real need for them, but that crushing hug from the tight fitting gear makes me feel complete, and thus comfortable. Rising to stand, I kiss my finger tips and press the pads of my fingers to the roughly etched proverb. Hoping against hope that I will come back unscathed and still in one piece.

Walking the three kilometer stretch between my crew quarters and the sanitation decks below. I follow the winding path, that winds and rises and leads me along gangways, gantries, stair cases and finally a large service power lift. The tablet has been invaluable in getting me down below with the most straight forward route. After about thirty minutes I’m looking at the brown signage that denotes the sanitation sector. Looking around I am amazed at how spotlessly clean the waste reclamation processors are. You could eat off of every surface down here. Following the schematic I realize I am only ten meters from where I found calamity as a drunken fool. Still quite taken by the sheer size of everything down here. Across the hexagonal room, flanked by several waste containment canisters is the storage lock up. A beaten brown steel safe with no discernible locking mechanism. As I get within a meter of the unit the tablet chimes, a green light flashes suddenly, and the doors unlatch and pop open silently. I am met by a strong citrus scent, the stringent cleaning agents sting the inside of my nostrils. Inside hanging among some goggles, a couple of canvas aprons, rubber boots and several buckets of industrial cleaners is a sizable black and yellow hand held unit. It has the words BOTKEY stenciled in white spray painted on it. A matching icon on the tablet is rotating 360 degrees in an isometric view. Looking around, as though something or someone might burst out of a corner and toss me bodily into the thresher unit, I hesitantly grab a hold of the BOTKEY and gingerly close the doors. With an anticlimactic shrug, i turn back to the hallway to walk up to the science lab. Looking over my shoulder at the thresher unit as i pass, i can see a tiny streak of red down the front of a bent guard plate. With a laconic smirk i say aloud “Not today mother fucker.” And promptly slip on a tile transition and fall flat on my ass, bumping my tailbone in the process. “Ok, you got me! I’ll just get the fuck out of here now!” Punching the communicator at my wrist i call up Ed to let it know to meet me at the science officers terminal post haste.

“Thank you Kelvin, I am now able to interpret, analyze and utilize the data from the ships sensor arrays to answer your queries. What would you like to do first?” The timbre of Ed’s voice has dropped with the operational parameters being edited. The unit is standing taller than before, and several extra data screen and ports have materialized on the bots cubic chest cavity. Rubbing my sore tailbone I say “Ok, Ed. Well… if you could take a look over the sensor data and see if the cause for all of the crew deaths was either internal or external. That makes for a great start. Can you give me a sense of how much data you have to sift through?” Standing shoulder to shoulder with the EDU bot at the dimly lit terminal on the work station underneath massive video monitors. Ed is currently plugged in using a hard line direct into the ships data banks. With a deep boom Ed says “There is approximately six thousand teraflops of data from the external sensor arrays. It could take anywhere between seventy two weeks and three hundred weeks to find the pertinent data sub sets…” blurts the EDU bot unit. “Well… shit. What if you look at the data just before I logged the second crew death aboard this vessel?” I offer in rebuttal. “That would narrow things down quite considerably. Might I ask why only at the time of the second death logged?” “The first death aboard was my best friend Keith. The second death logged would be the first of the seven hundred crew that died all together. Thanks.” I say gruffly. Turning away to sniff back the worrisome threat of a tear. Not sure why I care so much about getting emotional around Ed the tutor bot. A brief pause, then “Kelvin, this ship experienced a catastrophic dose of GCR from a localized supernova. Traveling at a speed of C.99 the speed of light there was no warning possible and they all received many times the allowable Sieverts/Rems of cosmic radiation. How you managed to survive is beyond my ability to compute.” Ed disengages from the terminal and rolls back across the room to the well lit work tables. Standing there dumbfounded I follow behind him. Out of the dimness by the huge wall monitors showing massive streams of code and data, towards the low hanging spot lights, and the lighted table top surface. “Jesus. GCR huh? Damn. Microwaved their brains in a nanosecond. God damn.” A lone tear wells up and threatens to pull more out of my eye. Hanging on the surface of my eye like a ten tonne weight. With a snap of my fingers. “The bladder!, it was the water bladder. I had to contort myself to get around it, underneath it. Practically in it to fix a wiring issue under the bridge. I was hidden behind eighty thousand gallons of plain water. It protected me, by fluke. God damn.” With a beep and a blinking series of lights Ed does a few calculations and concurs with my hypothesis. Millions of miles from anywhere, the answer provides little comfort to me. “Hey Ed, I think I saw some psychiatric protocols in that menu that would allow us to chat without me having to ask any task related questions. You feel like a conversational upgrade or what?” With a series of blinks and beeps I have my answer.

PART TWO of The Company: The Chronicles of Kelvin

You know, I’ve been down into

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The deepest depths of the ocean on a year long solo mission, I’ve been left stranded on a rocky out cropping of an island somewhere in the south Pacific for what I later learned was nearly three years, and now I work hauling minerals and ore for The Company out in deep space on an immense refinery freighter. Do you know what these three things all have in common? Isolation, misery and a total lack of any kind of quality amenities. Put those locations together with a vivid and increasing sense of impending doom and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. You know it’s kind of funny how we always assumed that our salvation would come in the form of a generational colony starship that could shuttle humanity off deep into the cosmos. But, as a species, humans we aren’t very well equipped to deal with the dread and despair associated with the isolation that accompanies deep space exploration, and trans generational travel. It takes a certain type of psychopathy to be able to deal with those particular stressors found during extreme cases of isolation. I for one, am just the right kind of crazy to pursue those types of careers where these issues are present. I’m as close to a recluse as you can get. Like a full on level ninety nine introvert. Nothing makes me happier than to spend time alone working on all sorts of shit. I also have little concern over tight spaces, like those found in the void between a star ships double hulls. To perform such pleasures required of me during regular maintenance I get to play BDSM dress up in various harnesses and tight fitting gear over top of my jumpsuit and poke around in these labyrinthine crawl spaces that criss cross these massive vessels in a lattice work of dead ends, bolt holes and conduits full of cabling and pipes. Deep, dark and for the most part endured in entire radio silence. The captain of my last vessel said that when his ship runs out of coolant they will ask me for a blood transfusion so that my life blood could keep the transport running ice cold. My nick name is Zero K, the K is for Kelvin. People who don’t like me much call me absolute zero, but eh, fuck them. I enjoy hard labour away from crowds of people. I’m the guy who volunteers for shite details so I can work off peak hours, and all alone. Or at least with minimal supervision. I have one friend. An angry, short & hirsute fella who doesn’t know how to speak in anything other than a yell, or monotone. We usually sit in silence and drink until one of us slinks off to bed without saying good bye or goodnight. A lot of guttural grunts and groans pass between us as a kind of idiosyncratic language. He’s great. Likes the same beer, works similar shifts doing the same work as I do. We have matching burns and scars. We’d have made an excellent couple if either of us were gay. Well, you know we would have if he hadn’t of gotten killed during an ammonia leak from a pierced pipe. What do you know, done in by a random sharp edge on our industrial strength PPE. You see, technically we’re considered to be inside the ship, even if we are actually between the inner and outer hull plates where all the majestic inner workings of the ship are contained. That means we don’t qualify for the over the head fully encased respirators with individual environmental controls. We just get an over the mouth and nose mask with change out pads for dust, debris and moderate airborne contaminants. He stood no chance against that leak. It blew aerosolized ammonia right over his face at point blank range. Hell, at 8 PPM, that shit kills, let alone a full jet stream dumped over the back of your head. After that I filed down every hook, link and carabiner on my tattered, dusty red jumpsuit. No point in repeating the sins of my only friend. Crawling in there after him and having to drag his cold lifeless body through the darkest reaches of the ship was not something I ever wish to do again. As it would happen, I would never have to. As all of them, the whole crew that is, all seven hundred of them just up and died while I was doing maintenance on the main bus panel wiring underneath the bridge several months ago. A fucking dick of a job too. The sort of job that requires about sixteen hours of crawling, bending and twisting to contort my body through the minimum sized access ports that are located around a massive water bladder just to get to the appropriate junction, then only needs forty minutes of upkeep performed on it. Like, what a piece of shit. Then you guessed it, another sixteen hours to extricate myself. All told – with food breaks, sleep and an abominable amount of crawling, that job was fifty two hours on. I went in and everything was hunky dory, I come out to a ghost ship with nothing but the dead bodies of the crew laying around. Mysteriously, with no known reason that was readily apparent. And just like that, I find myself in isolation again. For what it’s worth, our course through the stars was predetermined, and we will come home after our five year mission is completed. I have enough resources for seven hundred people over a five year term, so I shall not starve, nor will I be dehydrated. I just have to remain sane, and do my scheduled tasks, and pray. In the sage words of the twentieth century philosopher Jean-Luc Picard “You can do everything right and still lose. This is not a personal failing, but a fact of life.” I read that quote every day at the start and end of each shift. I have it etched into the bulkhead over my bunk in my crew quarters. Really makes you think – huh.

The loud hum of the air vent is echoing deep in my ears as I float, eyes closed, with the gale force breeze blowing into my face. The ship as a whole gets very quiet these days, and the loudness of the moving air makes me forget the ominous lack of activity aboard. I can almost imagine the sound of passing cars, birds or the far off indistinct muffle of an overhead conversation. When you spend years alone you learn to developed methods of finding inner peace and forgetting the banal repetition of your average day. My current trick is to crank up the lights, close my eyes tightly, and bury my face in the central air vent in the commissary. It moves the most air, and offers me enough room to just float in place while my imagination runs wild. Auditory hallucinations abound. Sometimes I can even feel the sensation of my communicator buzzing or hear an alarm sound. As I while away my time, face buried in the vent, the ship continues to perform the vast majority of it’s automated tasks. I keep to my work schedule, and eat the same things on the same decks as before. I know all too well the dangers of getting trapped somewhere strange by myself. That is not something I wish to repeat. I made a tough decision that weekend, and I still have the scars and emotional baggage associated with my extrication. Crawling three kilometers through the bowels of the ship to reattach my left arm at the elbow in the med-bay medical pods is not something I will likely ever forget. The trail of blood was gone by the time I felt well enough to leave that pristine white pod. The ai infused scrubbers had removed all trace of my nightmare. I kept the scar so that I know it really happened and I didn’t just dream it up. I do that a lot these days. I leave notes and etchings and drawings so that I remember having been there, and not run around the whole ship thinking I’m not actually here alone. When I am. Entirely alone. Isolated. With another three years and eight months left to go. In the cool cacophonous hum of the air vent I almost feel normal.

 

******

And for something different in these odd times, you can listen to me narrate this short story.

THE COMPANY : A Series Of Interconnected Short Stories

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Found here are the titles for each of the twenty one chapters (or self contained sections) of [The Company: A Series of interconnected short stories] BOOK ONE. If you like these, you can comment and I’ll send you the entire BOOK TWO as a pdf, for free.

  1. “You know what I love the most about being out here?… (613 words)
  2. “Hey, we’ve got an alarm here, main bus three, now four’s on the blink too, five and six… (1410 words)
  3. “Welcome aboard the Non Sequitur capsule, flight commander… (1094 words)
  4. It’s strange, the things you come to miss while out here… (1492 words)
  5. “Hey, Dougie, wake up!, Somebody’s called in sick and I need another able bodied mechanic for the… (2527 words)
  6. “Yo, Daryl, you’ve been summoned.” (1597 words)
  7. “What do you remember about the accident out there, anything you can give us… (1433 words)
  8. “Good evening everyone, welcome to orientation!” (3248 words)
  9. Pulling up the lane way to the massive Company induction office… (973 words)
  10. I can’t believe I’m sitting here, cowering in my room like a god damn child… (2249 words)
  11. “Do you have any idea how much these treatments are going to run The Company!”… (1622 words)
  12. “What is it you said you guys do again?”… (1003 words)
  13. “Dude… don’t lump me in with THAT fucking Martian… (1065 words)
  14. “Rolling in five, four, three, two…” (1520 words)
  15. When they told me I had been selected for the maiden voyage of… (2421 words)
  16. The official report on the events surrounding the launch of Margot’s Fever. (2190 words)
  17. “And now – for the exciting conclusion to…” (1480 words)
  18. “What an insufferable lot of twats these people are… (3813 words)
  19. “I heard you the first time… (944 words)
  20. In the dead silence of my jumpsuit, the heavy rush of blood pumping… (1631 words)
  21. “Some jobs are hard no matter where you work… (2789 words)

**Possibly more entries for this line of adventure to come later on this year.

You can also find various other micro short stories in the archives that aren’t set in space. If this is helpful, then I will also gather my other short story links together.