Or, at least, I assume it’s three - I can’t quite be sure how much time has passed, but it’s been long enough to instil within me that feeling of laborious boredom that surfaces once you’ve spent longer than you or anyone ought to have in one room. The panic and desperation I felt maybe two hours ago has long since worn off and given way to a silent inner affect. I need to get out of this coffin and take stock of my situation.
The fires have died, at least for now. It was an eerie silence, punctuated by the odd electrical sparking, the occasional groan of metal, the intermittent shifting of the “earth” beneath us. Even the console by the cockpit has stopped broadcasting it’s warning message, ceased the blaring of its klaxon to warn us all that we are in imminent mortal danger - as if we didn’t already know. Lance Owens truly was a skilled pilot; I always found his bravado irritating, as did many others within our crew, but when push came to shove he became the tool that we all needed, rather than the tool we all wanted to avoid. He saved what he could, but he did not survive. His body is over there, lazily slumped over the pilot’s controls after the impact knocked his head into them. Dead. I guess the seatbelts, like everything else in this bucket of bolts, were also built by the lowest bidder.
At least the fire suppression system survived the crash. Of all the things to survive, I suppose that was just as likely as anything else. The hull remains intact, too - readings on my helmet’s visor indicate nominal atmospheric pressure within what remains of the craft, although the hydraulics and landing gear have been utterly decimated. I have to admit - it could have been worse. The impact could have killed everyone, but it left me alive, quite unscathed, soundly strapped into the jumpseat. I dared not move for the longest time - I didn’t even bother to check on my comrades. When I regained consciousness, I saw all I needed to see about that, anyway. Joining Owens in death were Captain Rylee Eckhart, a hard and unkind sort of woman whom I only knew for about a week before the expedition was launched, and the systems engineer Jimenez, who’s first name was not known to me - a mousy grunt, who had the pallid and pale look of a man who spent far too long in dark server rooms where sunlight never reached. The Captain would bark orders at him and he would oblige with diligence before fixing whatever it was that needed to be fixed, booting whatever needed booting, hunched over one of the consoles in the far corner - in the darkness between stars, sometimes the faint green glow of his terminal was the only real illumination we had. Now he was all twisted up like a child had tried to draw a picture of him from memory. The Captain looks as if she is indeed very surprised and saddened to have found herself in two places at once. I am the only one to have survived this ordeal.
Unbuckling myself from the jumpseat, I fall down onto the metal flooring a little harder than expected. Either the gravity is a little stronger, or the feeling hasn’t quite returned to my limbs yet. I’ve had quite a bit of overexcitement, after all. No, it’s definitely the gravity. I feel as if the protective suit I’m wearing, normally quite lightweight and mobile, is sodden through with water. It’s hard even to stand, harder still to focus on my surroundings. Not that it would do me much good - I’m a passenger on this craft, unfamiliar with its operation. Still, there’s a large red handle to my right labelled EMERGENCY EXIT in bold lettering, flashing rhythmically at me as if mocking me. Can you read? Yes? Good, there you go then.
It occurs to me, in my disoriented state, that I have no clue what’s on the other side of that door other than what was lectured at me in the pre-flight briefing, and even that wasn’t exactly much to go on. The whole thing was a rushed job, really. Desperate, maybe. They told us to survey the area, gather soil samples (if there was any soil to gather), gather samples of any flora and fauna (if anything lived at all on this rock), gather data on atmospheric composition, determine if general conditions were suitable for human habitation, and report back. They were in the blind, and so were we, but still they valiantly pressed on, and so we did, too. What they didn’t tell us was that our craft would lose all power once we entered the atmosphere and send us plummeting to our deaths - most of ours, anyway, and that I would end up stranded here millions of miles from home, the only way back now lying in a wreck.
From orbit, this particular world looked exceptionally dull - the whole surface appeared like a beige, featureless expanse of nothing wrapped around the entire globe, as if it were a skin. There was not a single definable landmark, not a single blemish, no breaks in the landscape for oceans or mountains or valleys, no terrible storms or ash-spewing volcanoes. It was as if the intergalactic janitor had come round and scrubbed it clean of anything to upset that perfect, boring appearance. We started to wonder if our preliminary analysis was off and there was no surface at all, but we were reassured by Central Command that many probes had landed on the crust and conducted thorough examinations of its integrity. I swear I heard a sliver of fear in the Captain’s voice when she gave the order to commence descent. Fear, and… resignation? In fact, she sounded almost tired, weary, even. In all the chaos of the crash-landing, I never paid attention to the fact that she never once screamed, never once gave any orders to Jimenez or Owens to at least try to save the craft, she just grimly braced herself against the nonfunctioning communications station, jostled around by the careening and spinning of our uncontrolled descent, but seemingly determined to stand on her feet, whilst our pilot did his damndest to wrest control back from whatever had doomed us. What did she know? I suppose I can’t exactly ask her now.
I’m thankful that at least I’m not deprived of light, and can still fumble my way around - the emergency power bathes the whole bridge in a deep, dull and rusted red, slowly oscillating in and out of darkness. In certain moments, I shut my eyes once the light returns, so that I won’t have to see if any of the bodies have moved slightly, or that their eyes, now glazed over and staring off into the middle distance, won’t have fixed on mine, all accusatory, as if it was my fault that I lived when they did not. My gut reaction would be to tell them to fuck off, but that wouldn’t make my own situation any better. The last thing my sanity needs right now is to start talking to these corpses.
I start pawing at the emergency exit lever, not quite ready to yank it downard as the helpful curved arrow suggests. Something about the strange shifting sounds emanating from what I can only assume is the terrain outside has given me pause, makes me wonder if I might be better off slowly dying of thirst inside this red tomb - actually, no, that’s a terrible idea. I’ve got to at least try to get out of here, if for no other reason than discovery alone, to know what it was that brought us down and killed us, if anything out there was to give me the answer. To see if I would open that door and be greeted by a sleek, flat expanse of featureless beige like what we saw from above, unending in either direction I faced. Did we land on the equator? By the north or south poles, somewhere random and indiscriminate? Would another craft above be able to finally spot a blemish on the landscape, something to see, as our ship marks it?
I run a final check on my oxygen reserves - enough for eleven hours. Backup reserve tanks are secured in a floor compartment by the latrine, enough for another week or so provided none of them ruptured in the crash. I would be able to re-engage the airlock, should I need to, and the ship itself would keep me alive, even in its wounded state, should my reserves run dry. I fumble over to the provisions compartment, open it up. Another month or two, if I ration. I limp my way back to the door. Ready.
I yank the lever downward.
The door engages its emergency exit with a hiss, and it flies open outward in a quick motion. A gust of warm air rushes past me and I’m suddenly bathed in a brilliant light. Blinking, I grasp along the sides of the door frame to steady myself as my eyes adjust. I pull down my visor to block out some of the light. The sight that greets me is more or less what I was expecting, though I have to admit I didn’t anticipate having my expectations met so faithfully, and disturbingly. Stretched out before me, through the doorway, I can see nothing but smooth, beige-coloured rock, almost impossibly flat, like a salt pan only with no cracks, no distant hills on the horizon. A dry lakebed, maybe. It can’t all be like this. The sky is equally as formless, brightly lit by a brilliant sun but with only the faintest inkling of colour, like the kind of weak, misty blue you get beside the sea on planets of much greater visual interest. I slowly heave myself out of the craft.
Sure enough, in any direction I turn to face, it’s the same thing. A flat, practically two dimensional landscape, like the sky and the ground had been compressed against each other for aeons. The wreckage behind me is so very intrusive on this perfect scenery, jutting out from the withered and buckled ground beneath it with such stark protrusion that it may as well have been a skyscraper. I feel my mouth drying and notice it’s been held agape. It’s almost impossible to comprehend. The worst thing about it is the silence. It’s so overbearingly quiet, so windless and lifeless, that I feel a pressure building inside my ears, my starved mind now conjuring its own tones in order to fill the vacuum.
I decide to start walking. Slowly. I know I’ll have no problem spotting the wreckage - it’s the only thing on the horizon, after all - so I’m not too concerned with getting lost. It’s not as if it’s such a terrible thing for me to get lost, anyways, as I’ve already started to accept that I’m not leaving this strange place alive. At least if I died out here, my body would be something to discover, to see, for whichever poor souls manage to end up here after me, should they ever come. Perhaps our handlers will send out a probe or a rescue party once they realise that their expedition is no longer responding. I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s possible. Nobody of real value was on board, after all, but some conscientious bureaucrat might inexplicably decide to take a stand and decide enough is enough, cutting all the necessary red tape and bending all the rules required to get us all back home. The cynical side of me wants to be comfortable with accepting this as wishful thinking. I’m not comfortable with it. It’s not the dying itself that frightens me, though there is definitely a bit of that, but rather the waste of it all. The cruelty by inaction. I’d rather die knowing someone tried and failed to bring me home, rather than die forgotten and abandoned. It’s a little insulting.
I’m not too sure if you can call this place a desert, or a tundra, or a steppe, or indeed anything that I can comfortably draw upon as reference; it’s a kind of pure yellowy nothingness that these aforementioned kinds of places, despite sharing a similar bleak emptiness, lack altogether. It’s so nothing that it becomes something - a quality in itself, so lacking in noteworthiness that it becomes noteworthy. I imagine myself walking along the surface of some comically oversized, featureless marble. The ground itself is like solid granite, utterly indifferent to my own footsteps and solidly resistant to my attempts to upturn the surface. Scrabbling with my hands is useless - it’s like smooth ice, only utterly opaque and impervious to cracking. That’s the ‘collect soil samples’ part of my mission out the window. A disquieting thought begins to creep into my psyche that I may already be dead, and this is what comes next.
The silence is all encompassing now, without any of the groaning or sparking of my wrecked transport vessel to stimulate my ears. Even my footsteps seem to be inaudible, like walking on thick glass barefoot. I’ll have to take care not to slip and injure myself further. The gravity here is punishing to the point that even placing one foot in front of the other would be a hard task for the hardiest explorer, let alone a disoriented strandee. If I fall I might crack my visor and expose myself to the elements. Ah, I almost forgot - now is as good a time as any to fulfil another of my initial directives. I check the readings on the side of my helmet display and run an atmospheric diagnosis.
That’s strange. There’s a little warning sign flashing in the corner, like the one that appears to warn me of decompression should I compromise my suit’s integrity. Am I to understand this entire world is a vacuum, with no atmosphere? How is that possible? The sky above might be pale as slightly bluish milk, but I can definitely see the colour, and the only star visible is the sun we saw from orbit beaming down on me. I should’ve been flung from the ship and broken every bone in my body once I opened that door. That’s the ‘gather samples of flora and fauna’ part of my mission out the window, too. My confusion only grows with each laboured step I take, each ragged breath I draw.
I’ve been walking for at least an hour now. It’s been slow going, but the wreckage is now tiny in the distance, like I could just pick it up with my thumb and forefinger. I can’t tell if it’s a byproduct of my ears undergoing sensory deprivation or some genuine external stimulus, but I’ve started to hear a low, almost impossibly faint humming sound, like the buzzing of a turbine reverberating through a wall. It’s making me quite uneasy. To be facing your assured death is one thing, but the prospect of losing your mind here, of all places, becomes an even more frighteningly real and immediate prospect. The sheer lack of sense here in this strange world is starting to manifest itself as a dull pain deep inside of my head, one that I’m not entirely sure is real. It’s odd to realise that I’ve never felt more alone in my entire life than I do right now at this moment. It’s not the kind of loneliness felt by being a social outcast, or being relocated to an unfamiliar place, or losing the ones you love to disease, famine and war.
Instead, it’s like the feeling you get when you come home to an empty house, with nobody on the streets, but the lamps are still lit. Like you’re a child playing hide and seek and your brothers are taking just a little too long to find you, and you start seeing shapes in the dark, hearing a ringing in your ears, a scratching in the walls where mice go about their daily business in spite of your presence. You dare not move, because you don’t want to be heard and spoil the game - but now it’s been hours, the sun is beginning to set, and you slowly realise that you’ve been forgotten by your huntsmen who have simply given up looking for you, because you hid too well, or they found something of greater interest to do in the meantime. So you crawl out of the closet, or out from under the bed, equal parts confused, disheartened and afraid, having intrusively been reminded of why you were once afraid of the dark.
I think to myself that I’m a pioneer, an explorer like one of those many ‘great names’ you read about during orientation. My mentor actually met one of them, a pilot from Arcadia - Yuri something. His name was not the one he was born with, but rather one he bestowed upon himself to ‘honour history’, as if he were taking up the mantle of a legend long gone. I was never interested in the kind of hero-worship that so many seem to indulge in, but even I could not escape seeing that name, just every now and then, attributing some outlandish discovery towards it. Our dead pilot Owens seemingly fancied himself as one of these pioneers, with a cocky attitude and smug roguishness that seemed entirely manufactured, as if he were copying the mannerisms of those renowned heroes like that were all it took to actually be one. We all thought he was compensating for some deep insecurity or character defect and would mock him behind his back. In lonelier moments without the temptation of others to laugh with, I would think about Owens and wonder if he wasn’t simply trying to relieve himself from the drudgery and humiliation of being a pilot for the Coalition, where you’re more likely to be sent on a milk run on three hours of sleep under threat of termination than to discover ancient and glorious alien civilizations, or battle pirates under the rings of a gas giant. I recall how insufferable he became on being assigned this mission, as if this more or less routine observation and analysis job on yet another lifeless rock was somehow his ticket to fame and glory.
He tried to save us, and now he’s dead, and it all meant nothing for him. Even if he had lived to see this, I can just imagine the crestfallen look on his face once he discovered that all that was waiting for him was an emptiness not unlike what he probably already knew.
I stop walking and slowly sit. Did those pioneers ever feel disappointment? Of all the worlds they claim to have discovered, did they ever find one as intoxicatingly bland as this? Were they ever discouraged, tempted to throw in the towel, upon stumbling on yet another worthless dead end, a lead that came to nothing? In all likelihood the answer is yes. Perhaps I really do have something in common with these people, after all. When reality is dull, the myths and the legends you take solace in become the only way you can feel okay. Perhaps, if you’re fortunate enough, you can manufacture some of your own.
The faint humming sound persists. What is it? I can’t tell if it’s getting louder or quieter. In one moment it wasn’t there and in the next it was, with no beginning nor end, no rise and fall, no shape or structure. Is it the sound of this world, the universe, or my own mind? I can no longer tell the difference between them. The barriers have dissolved but left me with no greater truth, no enlightenment. On and on it goes, round and round, a snake devouring itself, a strip of insulation foil floating in a pool of coagulating coolant, a planet hanging in the sky in the middle of an endless void of black. It’s just so large. If we keep going, keep searching for the quintillions of years it takes to find whatever it is we’re looking for out there in that infinite dark, our ancestors will look up into the heavens and see nothing but a reddened patch of sky which would have all but disappeared by the time they filled our shoes. And so the search begins anew. I shut my eyes tight and will this terrible place away. I want to go home.
I wait for what seems like an eternity. This time, the fear does not dissipate, but builds slowly within me. At least with the crash, it was over and done with quite succinctly. You know where you stand when you’re tumbling to your death. Whatever I’m seeing out here, real or not, I can’t be entirely certain it won’t start pounding on the door and bellowing at me to let it in.
Hours bleed into days, days into months, months to years. Boredom becomes an exponential phenomenon. Time is not real - only the hum. I’ve lived a thousand lives inside my head, but I’ve never managed to fully convince myself that I’ve escaped this place, despite dreaming many elaborate fantasies of doing so. The sickly green font of my helmet’s heads up display became another language to me, as the marching of time destroyed my ability to read - I must have lost that after the first decade or so, soon after I first lost my mind, then regained it, then lost it again. I became a part of this place long ago. I did not know what I was now, exactly; had I become something of note? A tree, a rock, a lake? Will this interminable absorption finally be enough to give birth to whatever’s lying underneath the stone?
Whatever I am, I no longer have eyes to see.
To whomever finds me, alive, or dead, or worse - do us both a favour, and blow this miserable rock out of the sky.