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Here you go....

Part Five

 

Two years. Saying it made it sound long, the words tasting dry and bitter, like dirt on a persons tongue. Two years. He said the words to himself, over and over again that first day.

An awful lot could happen in two years. People could be born, and die. Wives and lovers could disappear, and move on to other lives, choosing not to wait for their loved ones to return. Wars could start and end. Life itself as he knew it could cease, and he wouldn’t know. What if there was a war back on earth? Or even a freak virus, brought back from deep space by some unwitting star pilot? Some catastrophic event that took the life of everyone on earth? The administrators would die too, and leave him here in this metal casket, billions of miles from home, dying slowly, waiting for a rescue vessel that would never come. He would rot here. A slow death of starvation, or disease.

A million years from now, some alien race would come across the dead OSO, cold and silent, still orbiting a star that no one any longer cared about. They would investigate the strange craft, not understanding its purpose, and find his corpse, perfectly preserved after countless millennia by the merciless vacuum of space. Perhaps when they found him he would be lying across the communication console, his dead mouth open, a silent scream for help, his non-voice reaching out, searching for ears that no longer existed.

These were things he’d run through his mind hundreds of times during the first few days he was out here. But once he got a little bit used to the silence, he began to think that this place might not be so bad. Sure it was quiet, but he was only required to work for twelve hours out of the day, and that left twelve hours for himself. Certainly part of that was for sleeping, but there would also be plenty of time for other things. He’d always wanted to write a book. He had several ideas that he always thought might make for interesting reading, and now he would have the time to work on them. He wished that they would have provided him with some paints. This would be a good time too, to practice his landscape painting, which he’d never been able to find the time for back on earth. But they hadn’t, so he’d have to let that one go. But still, he could write.

However, he found that it didn’t come as easily as he’d hoped. He wrote, and re-wrote the opening chapter to his novel three times, and still was unsatisfied with how it sounded. He put that idea off to the side, and began to write another story on a different idea, but it was turning out no better, and the frustration quickly got the better of him. After several weeks, he began to realize how difficult this whole ordeal would be. Each day became more difficult. He worked for twelve hours, then slept for six or eight, and spent the rest of the time sitting in front of his computer terminal, hands poised over the keyboard, wanting to write. But the thoughts and sentences never came easily.

There were countless things here that could drive a person right out of their mind-the justice system was far less interested in rehabilitation than it was in punishment. Fear of the unknown. Loneliness. Boredom. But perhaps the worst were the hallucinations. He’d heard rumors before, about convicts losing their grip on reality, and accidentally (?) killing themselves because of the odd things they imagined they saw out here. Any person, all alone, in a situation like this would eventually get to the point where they would imagine things; it was perfectly natural. However, the close proximity to the unrelenting radiation from the star (the OSO had heavy shielding, but was unable to block it out completely) had a tendency to make these visions seem much more real. Some of the shades he saw were terrifying, and he knew that it was the same effect that was making his dreams (and nightmares) so much more vivid, and bizarre. If the radiation was doing this to him emotionally, he wondered what physical effect it had upon him. Was it even now, twisting his DNA, causing his body to build terrible tumors? He might be dying from it and not even know. Great. There was something else to worry about.

How would he ever make it through two years of this, and retain his sanity, he wondered at first. The trick to it, he reasoned, was to get a routine set up. Something he could always count on.

He even went so far as to rearrange the furniture in his living quarters, pushing everything slightly in toward the center, and using the outer circle between the wall and his furniture as a running track. Out of sheer boredom, he paced it off and discovered that twenty-one times around it was equivalent to a mile. So running became part of his routine. He kept a runner’s journal, and was proud of himself as he saw the time it took him to run the distance decrease week by week.

Even so, he had no illusions about the fact that when he wasn’t running, his life was an empty, quiet thing. Every day had the same monotonous routine to it. There was never anything different. During the first three weeks he read through everything that had been provided for him, which amounted to three novels; a western, a romance novel, and a work of historical fiction about Samuel Jackson. He wrote in his journal several times a day, but that wasn’t the same as talking to someone. He sent out repeated text messages, asking for confirmation that his observations were indeed being received. He knew his equipment was working fine, but he used this as a ruse, just hoping to elicit a response from someone. Anyone. Anything that would allow him to know that others were still out there. That he wasn’t the only living thing left in the galaxy. But there was never any response to his messages. It was maddening!

He never thought it would be this difficult. He was nearly at his wit’s end. Everyday became a repeating, never-ending play; the OSO was the stage and he the lone actor, with the script that was his life, a redundant story with no end in sight. He talked to himself incessantly, sometimes yelling at the top of his lungs, listening to his voice reflected back to him from cold, uncaring walls. He had heard no voice, save his own and felt as if he would go mad unless he could talk to someone. He knew there was no way he’d be able to handle two years of this. And that was when, after sixty days, everything changed.

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My cousin Jack can speak to beans. That's right.... Jack and the beans talk