Part 12

It was utterly dark. He looked around in all directions in an attempt to find some sliver of light somewhere. Something that would tell him where he was. But there was no light. He reached out like a blind man trying to feel his way through a room. He wondered if he were in a room. Or a cave. There was nothing for his hands to feel. No point of reference to let him know for sure where he was. Panic welled up within him. He spun around drunkenly, staggering, clawing at that darkness as though it were a living thing for him to lash out at. He felt as though he would fall over, but in the overwhelming blackness, there was no point of reference – was he about to fall down? Or up? Was there a down or an up? What was there?
He tried to scream out, but realized that there was no air – there was nothing to rush through his vocal chords. No sound came out. He couldn’t breathe. He tried to gulp down a huge breath of air, but only drew in the blackness. Thick, black nothingness filled his lungs, displacing the last whisper of oxygen that remained. His throat constricted. His heart pounded. His chest heaved, desperately trying to breathe. But there was nothing.
His life was draining quickly away – he felt it. He was dying, and it was horrible. Painful. His lungs burned, his diaphragm heaving spasmodically, trying to draw in non-existent oxygen. Black lightning flashed through his limbs, crackling into his fingers and toes. Pressure inside his skull made his head feel as if it were an over-inflated balloon, ready to pop. He thrashed about in torturous agony, his mouth a silent scream of the most exquisite pain. He crumbled, knowing he was about to die. No human could tolerate this kind of pain. He knew it was happening and he begged death to take him – to drink him in and drown him in the mind-numbing ecstasy of complete nothingness.
An abrupt feeling of peace rose within him. He was dying, but it wasn’t so bad. Consciousness was flowing away from him, but it didn’t matter. His oxygen starved limbs twitched, but it didn’t hurt. He felt his brain shutting down, but he didn’t care. It would all be over momentarily. Then he would drift away. Drift away to… to who knew what? But mercifully the pain would be gone. Even now, it was draining from him. Life was leaving him. Everything would be alright. He was about to be free from everything bad. There would be no more OSO. No more regrets about his life and the choices he’d made. No more guilt. No more anything. Even if there was no heaven (he wasn’t certain he’d be going there anyway) whatever awaited him had to be better than this. Death had begun with an electrical storm of agony, and had now faded to a whisper, a soothing voice caressing him like a lover, telling him that it would alright. His dying heart boomed in his ears, an ancient tribal drumbeat, slowing. Boom. Boom. Boom. The insistent knocking of death at the door of his existence. He opened the door. Invited death inside. Welcomed it. Yearned for it.
Light suddenly flashed in his eyes blinding him. Explosions of green light flared behind his eyelids, and a violent, icy wind scoured him, blasting his ears with the sound of a thousand thunderous screams, rolling him over and over, tumbling until he came to rest against a solid object. He tried to open his eyes, but the light was like the core of the sun, a dichotomy of blistering hot and the whitest, coldest light. He squeezed them shut again, reeling as his body was battered repeatedly by the terrifying wind, and hundreds of small objects pelting him. The wind forced his mouth open and shoved its way in. His lungs, moments before empty, were now filled nearly to the bursting point. He tried to exhale, but the wind was so strong he could force no air back out. The sweet oxygen his body craved was now a forceful enemy that threatened to kill him.
He was certain that death had changed its sinister tactics, and that the peaceful end he craved had been a cruel trick. He would now die from an exploded chest cavity, from the horrible battering his body was sustaining. Tears, mixed with blood, began to crawl from beneath his eyelids, the wind dragging them into pink streaks across the side of his head and into his hair.
Just as he was certain he could no longer take it, that his insides would burst through his ribs, smashing them into bony splinters, the wind began to subside, the noise to abate, and the light to become more tolerable. Slowly, carefully he opened one eye, then the other. He managed to push some air from his lungs, in a painful coughing spasm, and he realized that he was lying on his back on a flat surface. He propped himself up on one elbow, as the wind faded to a low hiss. The cold interior of the OSO greeted him. His breath puffed in front of him, in a moist gray cloud. A damp mist hung in the air, and furniture, tools, writing instruments, papers, and all manner of loose objects were scattered around the floor.
He painfully stood up, dancing from one foot to the other, in a failed attempt to avoid the floor which was colder than anything he’d ever felt. His feet were bare, and he looked down at himself to find that the rest of his clothing was torn and tattered, barely hanging onto him. He saw a chair lying on its side, and he tip-toed over to it, wincing each time his feet touched the floor. His fingers felt as if they would freeze to the metal as he gripped the chair, standing it back up. He quickly sat on it, finding it bitterly cold, but not as cold as the floor, which he drew his feet up, and away from. His knees were up against his chest, and he circled them with his arms, trying to generate some body warmth. His breath escaped between his chattering teeth, in tiny clouds.
What the hell had happened? Had there been some kind of accident? An explosive decompression? What had he been doing before it happened? Perhaps something had struck him in the head, and that’s why he couldn’t remember. His thoughts did seem scattered, and disjointed.
Numerous lights blinked on the control console, begging for his attention, silent alarms of all types. He ignored them, trying to gather his wits. His chest ached. His head throbbed. Nausea rolled over him in waves.
The pain was awful, the cold biting. But he ignored it all trying to figure out what was going on. Perhaps a stray asteroid had banged into the OSO, breaching the hull. After all, the thing had no defensive capabilities. No way to protect itself from an approaching foreign object. But that didn’t make any sense: if the hull had indeed been breached, nothing could have stopped it from turning the OSO inside out, expelling everything, and him, out into space. There were no redundant safety features to prevent such a scenario from occurring. The administrators deemed them too costly. Once the hull was open to the vacuum, there was no stopping it, and that was one of the hazards that they deemed as an acceptable risk. After all, the only people out here in these damned metal cans were convicts of one sort or another. If a few of them died while serving out their sentences, they didn’t consider it a huge loss.
So if it wasn’t an accident, what the hell happened?
The lights flickered and dimmed. The floor rumbled. Terror rose inside him, as he feared that at any moment, the tear in the hull that he’d just convinced himself was non-existent, would open wide, and he would be sucked out into the cold, empty waste.
A red glow flared in his peripheral vision. He looked and saw that it was a light blinking insistently on the main control console. It was a light he couldn’t recall ever having seen before. He put his feet down, and pushed his wheeled chair over to see what it was.
The light was a glowing trail of text that blinked quickly, angrily, as it scrolled across the portion of the console that was reserved for incoming messages.
It read: “LAST OBSERVATION DISSEMINATED THREE HOURS AGO. SCANNERS INDICATE ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS INSIDE OSO TOLERABLE. CONVICT LIFE FUNCTIONS NOMINAL. NO RESPONSE TO REPEATED HAILS. INSUBORDINATION WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. PUNISHMENT PHASE ONE IMPLEMENTED, AND COMPLETED. PUNISHMENT PHASE TWO IN 45 SECONDS PENDING RESUMPTION OF WORK. ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT.”
The message began again. Punishment phase one? What the hell? Looking around, he saw his coffee cup, and a half-eaten doughnut sitting on the console, right where he had placed them earlier. He saw his sketchpad sitting there, the outline of the woman he’d been drawing trailing off the page. He looked at the clock, and at the dissemination log, seeing the discrepancy.
“Jesus…” he muttered to himself, now realizing what had happened. He had fallen asleep in the middle of his shift. In between observations he had been drawing and he had fallen asleep! When the administrators couldn’t rouse him, they thought he was rebelling, and decided to punish him. They had opened a vent somewhere and let the vacuum suck out the air, then pumped it back in right before he succumbed. They were crazy!
The floor rumbled again. If what he had just been through was phase one of punishment, what was phase two? Phase one had nearly killed him - or at least made him pray for death to end the nightmarish agony of his insides expanding like an overfilled balloon. Phase two would have to be much worse, but what could possibly be worse?
The floor rumbled again, and he decided he didn’t want to find out, so he quickly slammed his hand down on the “acknowledge” button, sending out a single electronic pulse to let them know he understood.
The lights continued to dim, and the rumbling increased until he felt like the metal plates beneath his feet would buckle under the strain. The wind began again, slowly, but increasing. What was happening?! He’d acknowledged their message. Small objects began to whirl around, and electrical charges crackled light tiny blue lightning across the console, the floor, the walls.
The air was thinning, and it was getting harder to breathe.
“Dammit! I acknowledged! Stop it!” He screamed at nothing. His knees gave out and he toppled to the floor, gasping “Stop it! You’re killing me!”
Wind roared through the OSO now, and spots flickered in front of his eyes, as he began to lose consciousness.
Abruptly the wind ceased, the lights brightened and he could breathe again. His foggy mind reasoned that the punishment had begun again, because of the delay it took for the trans-space signal to reach those maniacs running this thing, then time for their signal to reach back out to the OSO and tell it to stop trying to kill him.
His head pounded. His throat and chest burned with invisible fire. His battered body ached and had the strength of a glob of gelatin. He lay on his back, eyes closed, wheezing.
A shrill alarm sliced through his hearing, impossible to ignore. He rolled over, clutching at his ears, screaming in pain, his voice impossible to hear over the din.
The angry red letters again scrolled across the console again: “NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY. NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY. NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE….”
“Jesus, give me a minute – you just tried to kill me!”
The cold response came “NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY. NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY. NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY. NEXT OBSERVATION NOW DUE. DISSEMINATE IMMEDIATELY.”
Again the floor began to rumble, and the lights dimmed.
“Oh my God!” he staggered the short distance to the console, and fell into the chair, crying. His implanted instructions took over, and with no conscious thought, his eyes scanned the sensors, his mind processed the information, calculated the parameters, his hands keyed the necessary controls on the console, and after several terrifying seconds he pressed the “disseminate” button.
The alarm ceased. He found himself suddenly in a massive deep ocean of silence, punctuated only by the sounds of his wracking sobs.

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