Holes
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.
Notes, Codes, Cheaters.
The party started a long time ago, how long?? Everybody knows, nobody gives a fuck. We crashed it with hypodermic dirty dreams and the after party treats of hypnotic television, cross dressed nymphs and drugs.
Always drugs, kills for nothing types eyeing the tiny slick Redtaps, rolling bottle cases across the carpet. The music has subsided, speakers pointing to the floorboards. Love me and I will love you too.
Menzinone dripped in sugar water, RDA40 sipped from a gentlemen’s pipe by devilled faced free worlders.
And the king of them all, nicely tucked away in the dark fringes of the rooms and hallways in this sunken palace. It's soaking into the wall paper, the sweet vapour of ozone... junkies of all social classes plugged up, steamed inside an electromagnetic fuck... bonded with technology, twitching nodes attached to the temple, sitting in a grovel, attached to a socket, perfect.
The prison gates shrunk into the distance as the cruiser hurtled along the dust track. JT struck me as a fair and distinct officer on the inside, looking after those who looked after him. He was a man of god and often read from the bible to those prisoners willing to hear him on a Sunday. A silky ragged scar ran from ear to ear "a gift from a lover" he said as he noticed me looking at it.
She must really love you
You know where I’m taking you?
Nope
There are some things in this world that a man does to make him a man, other things he may do to remind him of the fact he's a man.
Prison make you a man JT?
You may not believe this son but I was a prisoner myself once.
You’re right I don’t believe it.
Huh, yeah. Well I feel the same sometimes, but its true as the word of god.
I was a Prisoner of the Vietcong for 3 years, you think were hard asses on you boys sometimes, well hell the Vietcong, they really know how to treat a man. Starved and tortured me for 2 of them years. Then one day they took us for a trip, me and what was left of my friends, four of us. Took us to this pit, stunk to high heaven, you could smell the rotting flesh a mile through the jungle shrub. This one little fucker, god pardon my language, called himself Elvis even had the quiff, always singing love me tender. This little fellow tied our hands behind our backs, and knocked us to the ground. Kneeling on the lip of the pit looking in at the bodies, Americans, gooks, blacks, whites all rotting away like that. I'd seen death before, that weren’t new to me but this was different, it was the sight of my own death. That little fucking fucker, slit my throat from ear to ear and kicked me in the pit. I heard Tightly and Osborne crying, he shot them both through the head and kicked them on top of me...
Funny because I aint felt more alive than that moment I was sure I was dead. Hell must have been there gone minute or two when I saw about a foot away from me there was this one man, nothin but a naked decaying torso, but tucked in his boot I seen the butt of a knife, took me a minute or two to get the ropes off me. Bleeding out all over the place I reached for the knife and cut at his pants, made me a bandage to go around my neck, luckily the little fucker had missed my main arteries and just cut a sticky hole in my wind pipe. I got up out of that pit and headed due east and after two days walking solid I got to a river inlet, from there I followed it till I seen the most beautiful thing in my life a US patrol boat.
Jesus
God. He took me from that my grave and delivered me from death. The killin I done in Vietnam I thought he aint ever going to save me, but he looked down on me and blessed my wicked soul to make it out alive. He wanted me to serve a greater purpose than just die in a hole in Vietnam. He saved me son and you can be saved too.
I appreciate what your saying JT but I’m a free man now, I don’t need nobody to save me.
Nope?
Nope.
Still don’t want to know where I’m taking you son?
I’m taking you into the Jungle to the lip of that pit.
She must really love you
You know where I’m taking you?
Nope
There are some things in this world that a man does to make him a man, other things he may do to remind him of the fact he's a man.
Prison make you a man JT?
You may not believe this son but I was a prisoner myself once.
You’re right I don’t believe it.
Huh, yeah. Well I feel the same sometimes, but its true as the word of god.
I was a Prisoner of the Vietcong for 3 years, you think were hard asses on you boys sometimes, well hell the Vietcong, they really know how to treat a man. Starved and tortured me for 2 of them years. Then one day they took us for a trip, me and what was left of my friends, four of us. Took us to this pit, stunk to high heaven, you could smell the rotting flesh a mile through the jungle shrub. This one little fucker, god pardon my language, called himself Elvis even had the quiff, always singing love me tender. This little fellow tied our hands behind our backs, and knocked us to the ground. Kneeling on the lip of the pit looking in at the bodies, Americans, gooks, blacks, whites all rotting away like that. I'd seen death before, that weren’t new to me but this was different, it was the sight of my own death. That little fucking fucker, slit my throat from ear to ear and kicked me in the pit. I heard Tightly and Osborne crying, he shot them both through the head and kicked them on top of me...
Funny because I aint felt more alive than that moment I was sure I was dead. Hell must have been there gone minute or two when I saw about a foot away from me there was this one man, nothin but a naked decaying torso, but tucked in his boot I seen the butt of a knife, took me a minute or two to get the ropes off me. Bleeding out all over the place I reached for the knife and cut at his pants, made me a bandage to go around my neck, luckily the little fucker had missed my main arteries and just cut a sticky hole in my wind pipe. I got up out of that pit and headed due east and after two days walking solid I got to a river inlet, from there I followed it till I seen the most beautiful thing in my life a US patrol boat.
Jesus
God. He took me from that my grave and delivered me from death. The killin I done in Vietnam I thought he aint ever going to save me, but he looked down on me and blessed my wicked soul to make it out alive. He wanted me to serve a greater purpose than just die in a hole in Vietnam. He saved me son and you can be saved too.
I appreciate what your saying JT but I’m a free man now, I don’t need nobody to save me.
Nope?
Nope.
Still don’t want to know where I’m taking you son?
I’m taking you into the Jungle to the lip of that pit.
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