I’m not sure what day it is, nor what week or month. I guess Earth’s time-zones don’t matter out here anyways. The knocking at the airlock door continues, though it doesn’t really bother me much anymore. It’s….sort of the routine now. Everyday I wake up, brush my teeth, clean myself off as best as I can in these tight corridors, and I finish off with a meal before getting to work. The work I do, well, it’s pointless. I’m stranded out here, and I’m well aware of that.
Somehow I am able to transmit this message back to Earth, but I’m not sure where it’ll end up, or even how I’m able to do so. I won’t question it, this might be my only chance. Earth could be years into the future by now. Everything I know, gone. But that’s just me thinking about the worst case scenario. At the same time I need to let someone know I’m out here. Maybe I can get help. Maybe I’ll survive. Maybe I’ll go home, or what’s left of it at least. Still, I can’t shake the feeling like something is with me. And yes, some thing. I’m not sure what it is yet. All my experiments have failed in my attempts to identify it. It’s with me always, and it’s been with me the entire time. Sometimes I catch it looking at me; peeking around the corners like….like I’m its prey. The thing itself doesn’t make any sense. It seems to be formless, taking the shape of whatever it wants to at any given moment. It could even be the keyboard I’m typing on right now. Stupid I know. Crazy ramblings from a crazy guy about crazy monsters in his space ship. I would read this and believe it’s all just some scheme, but I assure you…it’s not.
534 days. I stopped counting after that number. I kept track as a way to keep myself sane. None of us back at the academy ever thought something like this could happen. We set out to colonize. We were finally going to Mars. What a short lived dream. Atlas was the last place humans had; our last city. And it was up to us; Sarah, John, Carlos, Xavier; to save everyone. We needed a home, and damn right we were gonna get one. So we thought. 3 months into our journey and….we were lost. And I mean really lost. In the middle of complete darkness lost. Contact with Atlas was completely gone; strangely enough, all of our supplies and support systems were fully operational. More than operational. They were in absolutely perfect condition. Everything was. Except of course our comms and navigational systems. We had everything we needed to survive, but nothing that we needed to navigate. It was as if we were in a completely different part of the solar system.
Constellations didn’t match after further examination once they finally came into view about 30 days later, visual anomalies around stars, and this hum. I can still hear it now. The hum. Now that I think about it, ever since we got into space we could hear the hum. It was a low tone, so low that we didn’t truly acknowledge it. We could all hear it, yet none of us said a word about it until it was too late. This hum must’ve been the reason astronauts stopped going to the moon in the early 21st century. We never did go back to the moon. That was always a question I asked myself while in the academy. They had taught us everything about the stellar body. Everything except what actually happened there. I mean specifically what happened there. Not just the stuff you hear on the news. The things NASA would never tell the public. It appears somewhat unsettling to possess the extensive knowledge that NASA accumulated, even though it was instrumental in establishing an empire that ultimately paved the way for our current endeavors, such as venturing into space with the aspiration of discovering a new habitat. Our voyage wasn’t the inaugural expedition. The first three failed. NASA was aware of this fucking hum. They knew the entire fucking time and never even warned anyone. Sorry for my language. It’s getting really claustrophobic here. It’s starting to wear on me.
Anyways after the first three expeditions to Mars, with no word from the astronauts that had left previous, NASA planned yet another expedition. Ours. What they were thinking of sending us up here without knowing anything, I have no idea. If they wanted to help save the people of Earth why would they send humans somewhere they might never return. Maybe they have no choice. Our Earth is dying, and we only have one place we can go. Space. It’s our final frontier. If we can’t make it out here, we’ll definitely go extinct.
When we got halfway through our journey that hum became louder. So loud that it started to drive some of the crew absolutely mad. Sarah eventually plucked her eyes out after what we saw as pure hallucinations. She said it was her mother. Her own mother told her to gouge her eyeballs out because it was the only way to complete our journey. The next day she passed away. We weren’t trained to handle a situation quite like this. We were prepared for the worst, but we weren’t prepared for this. We definitely weren’t prepared for what happened after she died.
John had been doing maintenance on the engine’s core when the hum became so loud that it shook the entire ship. And just like that, our engines went offline. Our solar generators kept the power running throughout the ship, keeping life support and anti gravity systems in check, except now we were drifters in an infinite pitch black expanse. None of us could figure out what happened to the engine. To be honest I think it’s quite clear. John went fucking nuts down there. That hum finally got to him, and convinced him to damage the engine. When we asked what happened, he just ignored us with this cold stare in his eyes. A stare that was always looking at something that we couldn’t see. But I could feel it. Xavier and I were getting fed up with John ignoring us. He spent every single day mumbling to himself in his personal capsule, never opening the door. We had no clue how he was surviving there. He had barricaded the door shut, preventing us from assisting him. For weeks, hell maybe months we tried to convince him to unlock the door. He just kept mumbling to himself like he was having a never ending conversation. Quite frankly it scared us so bad that we stopped trying. All this time the hum was present alongside John’s constant rambling. The hum was always there, just toying with us in the back of our minds. I began to see things too. My sister lay dead on the floor, my brother hung by his neck, eyes gouged out, with those black pits staring right at me. And those fucking smiles. Nobody should be able to smile that wide. The visions came and went, but they only got worse as time went on.
Xavier eventually lost it too. Banging his head so hard against the wall that he cracked open his skull and let his brain slip onto the floor. It shouldn’t even have been possible for him to keep bashing his head over and over like that. It was impossible. Something was making him do it. Keeping him alive so he could feel every single minute. He never became unconscious. His eyes. God the way he fucking looked at me. I’ll never forget that. It must’ve been months until I finally heard from John again. After Xavier died he just went silent. But then he started asking me to open the door. I had no clue how he was still alive. He had no access to food, water, even a damn bathroom. He had nothing in there but a bed and a capsule window. It would be impossible for him to break the window, and there were no vents large enough for him to crawl through. It was pretty much like a personal shell. He started whispering to me directly. Saying my name, telling me what the hum wants. It was us to see. That’s what he said at least.
He just kept going on and on about how we needed to join the universe and that they were calling to us. He told me I needed to lose my eyes to see. To truly see. Obviously I thought he was completely insane by this point, nonetheless a part of me wanted to perform what he was requesting. I had been on this ship for so long that I don’t even know my own name anymore. I’ve forgotten just about everything about myself, my life, who I was, and who I wanted to be. All I remember was the mission, and my crewmates.
Eventually I caved; the door was unlocked, un-barricaded. That didn’t make any sense. When I found John, his body was so decomposed that only the skeleton remained. Aged blood stained every single inch of the walls. Bones spread throughout the entire capsule, shattered, almost as if he had a bomb inside of him and it fucking exploded. In blood on the wall: “We will see.”
He was trapped in here.
I’m all alone now. Well, not fully. The hum has kept me company. Telling me of the great world just outside. My wife has been looking at me through the airlock window for days now. She whispers to me stories, how wonderful it is out there. How free she is, all the wonders there are to see. All I had to do was want it. All I had to do was see it. I went to space to save the world, but now….I want to see the universe.