Fingers hold onto wire, love the dream and turn off.
The machine had been held up for a decade, fingers hold onto wire, love the dream and turn off. A relay message had been sent:
The date is 2156, we are stranded... 7 years of air remain.
Fingers hold onto wire, love the dream and turn off.
Her hull breached on asteroids, 23 men have perished. They swallowed the cold and braved the emptiness of space. The mainframe held the remaining 17 in carbonic status, wired in to a life support system. 7 didn't take to it and died, the others lived the nightmare of perpetually balancing between life and death.
Fingers hold onto wire, love the dream and turn off. 6 years later:
I am not alone anymore, I see her smile glowing in the mainframe. There is no forever, it ends when it ends... the ship is pursed into almost perfect darkness. Co2 scrubbing units are failing, upper ventilation areas 1 to 9 have been turned into shelters as the blackdamp has sank and filled the bunks and chambers on the lower decks.
3 died in the night, rolling power rationing has killed the co2 detectors. We thought at first our calculations had been wrong and that the air had gone. 3 of the weakest men died first, they had felt faint so we lay them down to rest in the tempra bunks. Unknown to us that we had dropped them into an invisible vat of carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas. Within hours they were gone, we have all began to get skull piercing headaches.. our mistakes have shed more lives but inside I think we are all glad. Now there’s 3 less pairs of lips sucking up the oxygen, we have reconfigured the pages. It's added another 6 months to our lives.
Finger hold on, wired up and plugged in.
I keep seeing a hunter sat on the back of an elephant, how balance of power is only an illusion. I've calculated in my head that I could live 2 more years at the expense of the rest of the crew. I feel no guilt as I'm sure they've all made the same calculations, I'm sure we'd be ripping each other’s throats out right now if it wasn’t for the simple rational that another two years would be hell. We've all come to terms with dying. There is no hope, now all we can ask for is a painless transcendence.
On another note Food and water are still in great supply, the reactor is still hot for another 6 cell burns.. we don't know when we'll cross the threshold of the black hole but once we do we'll be unburdened of it all..
Dream 1923
If only I could breathe radiation, inhale gamma waves and fill my lungs with its rich energy. If only I could suck up everything, process co2 and piss oxygen. If only we hadn’t strayed, if only we hadn’t gone searching for god. What chill this is, a forest of warped steel and only a 22 cubic meter room separating me from light years of nothing but inhospitable emptiness. If only I was an alpha particle, a boson, any beam of energy hitching a ride back towards earth.
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