Authors: Heath Pfaff
A deep silence fell between us. I don't know how long it lasted because my mind was racing in circles, trying to make sense of what was happening. It didn't feel real. I felt as though I was still dreaming and that at any minute I would wake up on my bunk in a cold sweat, and this would all have been nothing more than a delusion caused by a dinner that had been too spicy.
"Hello?" The chief's voice broke through the silence like a pebble shattering glass.
"I'm still here." I said. My voice sounded far away, even to me.
"No, not you. Someone just knocked on my door. Someone’s out there, in the corridor. I'll call you back in a minute." As Fuller's voice cut off, two chirps sounded indicating he'd broken our communication link.
I stood up from my bed and began to pace the small space of my cabin. The room was large enough for my bed, a desk, a steel chair, and a storage closet. Pacing in the open space between them was barely manageable, but I suddenly found that I didn't want to be sitting still. I felt like I was in a prison cell, and not merely the cabin of a ship. On a vessel the size of Odyssey, it seemed that the crew cabins should have been much larger. Not that it really mattered under the current circumstances.
If Chief Fuller's information was correct, I was living what could be the last few hours of my life. I just kept telling myself over and over again that it wasn't possible. There were safety systems in place. Even if the hull had been severely damaged, there were still slipspace escape pods with entangled homing beacons. Space travel was incredibly safe. There were redundancies built into the redundancies!
A heavy banging sounded at the bulkhead to my cabin. It struck three times, slowly, deliberate and heavy, and then there was silence.
"Hello?" I called out, feeling stupid as the word left my lips. The cabin was sound proof. Whoever was outside wouldn't be able to hear me, but why could I hear them? Why had Chief Fuller been able to hear someone knocking on his door? Every cabin onboard the ship sealed the same way. It allowed for damage to be compartmentally sealed, to preserve as much functionality as possible in the event of a catastrophic hull breach.
Another deep pounding sounded on the bulkhead.
"Odyssey, connect me to Chief Fuller."
"Connected to Chief Fuller."
"It must be a rescue party of some sort." The chief said as our connection resumed. "I kept trying to call to them, but I just realized there is no way they can hear me through the walls." He chuckled, sounding relieved.
"I've got a knocking here as well. It's real deep in the wall. Shouldn't the soundproofing block noise from outside?" I felt particularly ill at ease. My dark room with its constant red blinking light was becoming increasingly unnerving.
"They probably have a way of signaling us to let us know they're out there. I'm sure everything is fine." He chuckled again, though it sounded forced this time. "There’s probably been some kind of glitch with the computer systems, and they're just getting everything patched and working. Maybe even the hull damage is just a false reading caused by… what was that?" The last three words came out in a gasp.
"What was what?" I asked, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
"I think there is someone else in here. Maybe one of the other Engineering guys, but where… Simons?" The com chirped twice and went silent.
"Odyssey, please reconnect me to Chief Fuller." I was startled to hear an air of desperation in my own voice.
"There is no connection available at this time."
"But we were just connected, Odyssey, how can there be no connection?"
"I'm afraid I cannot answer hypothetical questions."
"Connect me to anyone… whoever is closest to this location." I asked, suddenly eager to have any human communication. I was afraid to be alone. That primal part of me that I'd buried in my childhood, the part that feared the dark and created monsters from shadows, was roaring to life, and I needed a voice to send it away.
Odyssey didn't answer.
"Odyssey? Please connect me to the closest crew member." I waited and only silence answered. Desperation pulsed through my veins with the pounding of my heart.
"Odyssey, what's the cabin temperature right now?" I didn't want to know, I just wanted to hear the computer answer. Quietness.
A hiss punctured the silence, like the sound of air slipping from a pressurized canister. The onset of the sound was so sudden that I jumped with a start of surprise and backed into the bulkhead at my back. My eyes searched the black of the room, unable to focus on anything in the darkness. The red warning light blared on, and I locked my eyes on the source of the hissing, just at the opposite end of my cramped cabin, near the corner of my bunk.
There was a shadow hunched there, balled up in the corner, something so dark it seemed to turn the sharp red light away from it. The hissing sound was emanating from it. It moved with a jerk, just as the red light blinked off.
I screamed. Nothing could possibly be in that small space with me, certainly nothing with the ability to move on its own. My terror crawled up the back of my throat and burst free from me in a shrill screech that might have embarrassed me under other circumstance. The hissing grew louder, bearing down on me.
Forceful, clawing hands gripped me all over, cold as ice, pushing me back against the door to my room, and though I struggled against the binding grip, I couldn't break free. I knew that the red flash of the emergency lights would trigger any second, and then I would be face to face with my assailant, that impossible thing of darkness. Even the anticipation caused my entire being to quake with terror, and I screwed my eyes shut with all the force I could muster, I didn't want to know what had me. I was terrified to look into the darkness, terrified to see what matter of monster had torn itself from nightmares to attack me in the sanctity of my own room.
"We're dead now, remember." A child's voice whispered through the black.
A sharp pain bit into my neck, and an antiseptic smell wafted over me. The hiss of the monstrosity became a crackle, and then it broke into a stream of voices, a legion of whispers coming from across a great distance. I couldn't make them out, but they sounded agitated and angry. They grew louder, closer. I forced my eyes open, though a part of me still didn't want to see what was happening.
Bright white light caused me to close my eyes the moment I managed to get them opened. The intensity of that glow burned after the darkness I'd grown accustomed to. I forced my eyelids apart again, and this time I fought the brightness, tears welling up in my eyes as I began blinking away the painful glare. As my eyes adjusted, I became aware of motion. I was moving, but there were still hands all over me. I blinked, attempting to clear the tears from my eyes, and slowly shapes began to take form. Human shapes. People. I was surrounded by people dressed in military medic outfits.
"...like he's coming to." A female voice said from my left, and as I turned toward the voice I found myself gazing into a set of vivid blue eyes.
"Jim Wright, Sir, can you hear me?" Another female voice, older, from the other side. I looked up into the brown eyes of a medic whose rank insignia told me she was senior staff. I nodded dumbly, in shock. What was happening? Was this a rescue party? What about the thing in my room? I was certain I could still feel the chill of its touch on my skin.
"You can let him go. The stabilization chemicals are working for now, but stay alert." The chief medical officer ordered, and suddenly the hands that had been pinning me to what I thought was my cabin door released me, and I could see several other medical officers, a mix of men and women, stepping back away from me. I was lying on a mobile stretcher, and I could tell by the lights passing by over head that I was being taken somewhere rather quickly. Probably the medical bay.
"Is the ship being repaired?" I asked, trying to understand what was happening.
The medical staff looked at me in confusion for a moment, and then the chief medical officer spoke up.
"James... do you prefer to be called Jim or James?" She spoke in a soothing tone.
"James." I offered. Really I had no preference. Since starting my space fairing career most people just called me Wright, or Cadet Wright.
"James, there was an incident in your section of the ship and you were exposed to raw deep space without the benefits of a stabilizing field. You seem physically unharmed, but your brain has been traumatized."
"You're suffering from a severe case of DSD, James. Do you know what that is? Do you understand what that means?"
I squinted my eyes for a second, trying to focus my thoughts. I knew the acronym. It was an important security detail. DSD. Dense Space Dementia. Navigable space was divided into seven dimensions. The first three were relative mass space, and the other four were dense space. Slipspace ships were able to pass through some of these different dimensions in order to speed up travel. Level One was standard space. Levels Two and Three were also physical realms of space, but compressed in such a way that passing through them was much faster. Of course, in levels Two and Three we still had to be careful not to set a course through a planet or a sun, because the collision would destroy a ship. That is where dense space came in, and why it had become the singular preferred method for interstellar travel.
Once into dense space, normal physical constraints disappeared, and travel speed increased exponentially. Instead of being able to jump from one solar system to the next through only empty space, suddenly you could jump from one galaxy to the next, passing directly through super cluster cores without the worry of smashing into a black hole, or a pulsing nebula. Dense space travel was safer, and much faster. Though, as with all great technological leaps, there were hurdles to overcome.
Slipspace ships with 4
th
+ capable cores required huge amounts of power to use, and an equal part of that power was divided between slipping through space dimensions, and in creating a very powerful energy shield that locked the inhabitants of the craft in a bubble of less-dense space. The human body and mind were prone to suffering distortions when directly exposed to dense space. The most common symptoms of those distortions had been dubbed ‘Dense Space Dementia’, or DSD. The cadet security manual said that those suffering from DSD should be treated as high-risk targets.
DSD sufferers were violent, sociopathic, and psychopathic, often incapable of differentiating reality from fantasy, and prone to murderous rampages caused by a severe paranoid state. I groaned inwardly.
"I'm crazy." Everything I'd experience since I'd woken up in my bunk had been an illusion crafted by my traumatized mind. I would say it was difficult to believe, but none of what had happened had really made any sense. My memories of the events in my room were crystal clear. Even my memories of the sensation of the chill that had crept through me, and the feel of my bunk as I'd laid in the dark. It was all so clear, and yet none of it had seemed possible. It was so obvious. I had been hallucinating.
The doctor smiled. "We prefer to say that you've suffered trauma to your cognizance that is directly affecting your behavioral control. The important thing to know is that your condition is treatable. We've injected you with a chemical stabilizer and a host of nanites that are able to deliver those chemicals to very particular receptors in your brain for a short time. The result is that we're forcing your brain to send and receive information the way it's supposed to, despite having been rewired by your exposure to dense space."
"Now this is only a temporary solution to the problem, Sir. We need your consent to perform a cellular rebuild of your neural pathways based on your most current full cerebral scan. Which is..." she glanced down at a small translucent tablet on her wrist. "...only one week old. This means you will lose all memories acquired since the time of that scan."
I nodded shakily, trying to absorb the reality of the moment. "So I won't remember anything I've done for the last week, not even the stuff that has happened since the DSD started?"
She put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "It will be like none of this ever happened. You'll feel absolutely fine, and there should be no complications with the procedure. Modern rebuilds have a 99.999% chance of success, and even in the event of complications, most are so insignificant that they don't impact daily life at all. In the history of the procedure, only six people have had catastrophic failure that resulted in death or impairment, and those were all during the early stages of the procedure, before nano rebuilds were as refined as they are today."
I had the utmost faith in modern medicine. My father had been rebuilt after suffering injury during the Pandora Expanse War, and he'd been better than he had been before his close encounter with death. The medical benefits were the best reason for serving a run in the military. One hundred years of service, four treatments of Vigor, and then you had the next five- to six-hundred years to live out your life the way you wanted to, and the military med facilities would be open to you any time you needed them. Otherwise, you had to pay for Vigor treatments out of pocket, and not many people could hope to afford that. Seventy years of life without Vigor, or a hundred years of service for almost ten times that? The answer was simple for most people.