With the passage of time, the omnipresent buzz of the generators - and God knows what else in the bowels of that cathedral of circuits - had become like a second skin. Funny how the white noise coming from the racks was indifferent to him and could, at the same time, launch its messages in the most modulated and subtle of languages, in a perfect symbiosis. After months, Ethan was instantly aware when something in the monotonous chanting cracked, foretelling one of the increasingly frequent system errors. He was developing a third ear in place of a third eye.
He just smiled at the thought, his gaze fixed on the secondary pylons n. 6 and 11, the last still working in the experimental orbital station DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, renamed "The Decaf".
Silence was a mute vowel screaming inside him. Always. React to the atrophic thinking. Dodge the anguish, sharp like the debris of that day. The slashed modules were like scenic elements for a cheap movie. All the modules except his one. Follow procedures, rituals, checklists. All this to not raise his gaze and stare, right in front of him, the hangover of so much pain.
Castaway. At some point, he had renamed the pylons Romeo & Juliet. For each orbital period, about 90 minutes, the two arms were almost touching each other. A fleeting kiss and again far away. From the beginning of the mission, he had liked to play the game of renaming equipment and modules with funny nicknames. He allowed himself a slow sigh.
The inclination of the station displayed the earth down there. He had promised never to look in that direction again but the mauve colour, so iridescent, so alive, so omnipresent, took him by surprise once again. He thought for a moment that it was.. beautiful.. and the remorse for that thought flooded him soon after. Ethan hid his face between his hands as the tears surfaced and many names knocked on his heart's door once again. Inside him, a spark of curiosity wondered if it was possible to locate one of the 19 towers between the mauve nanoparticles' clouds.
“Ethan, I suggest that you sleep in 30 minutes. I detect slightly high levels of cortisol, are…”
“Thank you. I was going right now, old scrap”. He replied to the metallic yet familiar voice through the speakers.
He suddenly suffocated all those idle musings, it was time to rest. According to Querquobad, tomorrow was going to be the day.
He twisted the dial. A laughable relic of a bygone age, this was his only chance of escape. His face looked back at him, mirrored upside down in the chrome convex panel. A tear rolled up the veneer like an electron in a gravity well.
He turned the dial, one half round and then a quarter. The same each day for the last seven months, an extra quarter. Just enough not to trigger the security system. He didn't even know why he bothered anymore, it should have worked by now. The damn AI was probably readjusting it while he slept.
The orbital divested its employees of all power when they signed up. Sure the pay was good but he was starting to wonder if he could last out the sentence. Productivity at the cost humanity. That was the deal. That was what you signed up for. Par for the course, half-baked AI projection of reality. Stuck somewhere between the real and a projection. He knew the other workers were out there, parsing circuits, connecting diodes to substrates, cleaning the clouds of nano-particles and generally doing everything that wasn't worth droid time. Not worth wasting the anti-matter on. They were all around him, he just couldn't see them.
Romeo pylon traced a silhouette across singing metal out at the edge of sight. Silver silt-like particles sparked into life in shifting streams from the moons reflection. Juliet was only an hour away, tracing her slow path through the glimmering star field.
Earth pulsed in the swoon of the morning. Life flowing from the trail of atmosphere, translucent white tracers flaking from a skin in constant shed. The perfect expression of renewal. She was somewhere down there, wrapped up in the embrace of atmosphere.
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
Ethan traced a finger across the scar at the nape of her neck just as she let out a gasp. She pulled away, as she always did and he pushed into her, grasping her hair as he finished. She moved to sit on the edge of the bed hugging her knees. She rocked back and forth singing that annoying tune he hated. Ethan's eyes narrowed.
"Why does it always have to be like this?" The soft brown of her irises caught him as her pupils dilated. He knew things had been different since the genorupture, but honestly, he liked it. No more thoughts of pain or niggling empathetic musings. That other part of him was pathetic.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" He looked her up and down, grinning. "You know you love it."
She unfolded slowly, looking at him like a stranger "I'm getting a shower. Don't be here when I'm finished."
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
The suit encased him so perfectly it felt like a second skin squeezing his organs in place. Stars smeared into scars of light across the black night of space. Time to unleash the mayhem... he fucking loved this part.
The suits Basic flashed information across his visor.
| Information | Display | Console |
|---|
 |  |  |
Nothing better than a Basic for a job like this. Those AI hunks of junk had a habit of communicating and if one had a bigger substrate than the other it could quickly take over the suit.
Wipe out its wimpy cousin with a single thought. This was safer, his suit had no substrate, no AI to speak of, he was insulated from any chance of circuit field espionage.
Ethan flicked the switch on the faze-cannon and hit the propulsion to maximum. The orbital loomed large in his periphery as he guided the suit around the curve of earth's gravitational pull. Silver nickel reflected in fire from the lip of the sun which crested the space horizon. He pulled the cannons across and put the first of the orbitals in his cross hairs.
₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪₪
Ethan watched the human comet approach through the space port windows.
He remembered a sunny day on the school field, grass smell and a warm breeze in the swelling glow of nostalgia. He looked down at the boy on the ground and felt a slight pang of guilt as he swung his boot, kicking soft flesh savagely as an eye blossomed a violent violet bruise. As quickly as it had arisen the guilt was replaced with anger, this little weasel had made him weak. Red fire descended. He kicked and kicked, until he heard ribs crack, bringing him back to the sunlight, friends cheering him on and the boy's eyes pleading as he choked on blood.
It ends here, that part of him wouldn't win this time. The genorupture had only been partly successful, he remembered everything.
"Querquobad, are you there?" The panel flashed once, twice and then a voice resonated inside his head.
Ethan Schroeder... IDent number 38574620997333... work placement status...
"We haven't got time for this Querquobad." He interrupted the metallic voice that itched inside his ears. "Do you see that comet?"
A shiver ran through him as the AI took over his body to point at the comet, now on a collision course with the orbital.
"Yes. That is a maniac in a modified genosuit. He has been paid by militcorp to destroy these orbitals to artificially inflate the price of silica."
How do you know all this?
"Because it is me Querquobad, that maniac is me. I know how that part of me thinks."
Ethan spun the dial as Querquobad took over his arms, both seemingly of the same mind. He felt a strange duality as the AI's impulses mirrored his thoughts and actions.
The orbitals began to speed up their spin. Out in the blackness, canons fired, nano-particles fried as Ethan unleashed hell. Juliet rushed toward Romeo, each with arms outstretching to the other, molten fire streaming from the pylons. They touched finally, where a mad human comet hammered the field of nano-particles with faze-canon fire.
A halo bloomed in an implosive boom as liquid blue fire coursed along the length of an event horizon. The two star-crossed lovers and the mad comet flashed out in a brief orgasmic roar of destruction.
The end.
The pictures used in this post are all creative commons licence from pixabay.com (modified by me using GIMP Photo Editor). Please follow link 1 2 & link 3 to credit. If you have enjoyed this short sci-fi fiction you can check out my other work on my homepage @raj808. Thanks for reading.
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