Everyone knew that Colonel Faria had gotten sucked into a jet engine and survived.
At the time he was a mechanic working on the old arc-wings, pulling bird parts out of the intake. Before jets were discontinued altogether the Third Station used them for low-level freight missions over the outcroppings making up most of the Mid Country. Regulations were different back then: you could drink on the job. Then-corporal Faria was, as he has said countless times, working a gull's wing out from between the blades when the whirr of moving parts prefaced a devastating pull upward, a rush of air powerful enough to tear eyelids away, and nothing until two days later when the soft shadows of a nurse's cleavage in the field hospital welcomed him back to reality.
As he would say after that, referring to his furious climb through the ranks, the rest was history. He did not mean it as an imitation of grandiosity. There was no imitation. To Colonel Faria his own history was a part of our history, the world's history, unrepeatable. Of course the fact was lost on him that for all his history he had won a station on a ship experimenting with hydroponics and medicinal plants—a study that, released, would make nearly every person on the earth say "well shit, the plants lose tumescence in null gravity so we can't grow them there. I don't give a shit. Guess I'll have a burger."
Sometimes you get lucky like that and survive being inside an engine for a split second. But every place in a body where one part connects to another is a point of weakness; I broke Colonel Faria's neck and lower jaw with a solid right cross one day. His face relaxed quickly under the sun's sidelight in the lower deck fusion room and when he hit the corrugated floor the echoes broke before the endless black outside.
After that we lost track of the days.
I'd cleaned the onboard brig many times before, unnecessarily. There had never been anyone in there, not even insects, so there was nothing to clean. Bobby the Lieutenant had been in charge of upkeep and he wanted me and Gina to go through the motions, cleaning and other protocols that had no meaning. He'd said outright that the procedures were in fact useless except that they provided the structure that kept our minds in one piece, like bones in a body.
Without a fight I let Gina lock me in.
When she put me in there the protocols suddenly were no longer useless. Over a few days flakes migrated from my skin in droves large enough to roughen the polished surfaces of the bathware. Eventually the sterility of my cell ceased to matter; I let piss splash on the floor in front of the latrine. Gina cleaned the brig now and she had something to do. While I waited in the tube for her to finish she told me about what was going on with Bobby, that he sympathized with me, that he was surprised he hadn't snapped the old son of a bitch's neck himself long before I did. The attitude was that I was taking one for the team.
The problem with that was that the court-martial they would give me back on terra firma would be only a decorated slap in the face as a precursor to the following execution.
Time passed and nothing happened. No word on returning me to Earth or any trial. Things were very still for a long time. Gina wouldn't tell me anything except that Bobby was glad the colonel was dead and he was sorry. My suspicions were confirmed one day when I woke up and the lights were dim. Bobby was in charge now and had scaled back the generators. Evidently the convoys that came every twenty days to replenish our supplies had not shown up.
A few hours later Bobby must have decided to be more frugal because the lights died and were gone altogether.
Usually requests to land are processed in minutes, granted in hours. If you need to get down out of the sky you're grounded in forty-eight hours, max. Someone commits a serious crime on a craft, a request to land is broadcast immediately so the perpetrator can be deposited in the nearest earthbound courthouse for due process. It had been a week and a half since I'd killed Colonel Faria and still we were in darkness. It was not a hard riddle to figure out.
The Third Station had declared our ship a mutiny, disabled our communications equipment and cut off our supplies, before Bobby could even put out a request for landing. The Third Station reserves the right to not ask questions; we were on our own. I had murdered the entire crew.
I assume my mother died before the Third Station cleaned out my memory as part of basic training, so I can't explain why I snapped when Colonel Faria called her a nunshitting cocksucker. Evidently there is something in instinct that we haven't figured out yet which makes you throw a punch the instant someone breathes a bad word about your old lady. But I didn't have a single memory of her. Nothing about the smell of childhood shampoo or the feel of rain-soaked air curling into the house through cracks in the weatherproofing Dad put together one summer. Nothing about Dad or old summers either.
The ache of beauty in small things that you feel as a small child was a mystery to me. I know only stereotypes that I have gleaned through rationalization: this would be the feeling if everything else were stripped away. A complete and suffocating sweetness.
Having helped the guys on the supply ships unload the last time they had come by I knew that we had enough Uranium to refine at least two months' power, provided we didn't try to move the vessel anywhere. Since we were part of a near-Earth mission our navigational equipment relied on relays from the ground—we were blind anyway.
Bobby took energy conservation so seriously that he had me released from the brig, sealed off the lower levels and depressurized them to save oxygen. The only thing below top level that was accessible was the lower deck fusion room. He said there was no sense in keeping me in the brig for a crime no one on earth would see redressed, and that no one on the ship really cared about in principle anyway. Still it was strange to be the one who had stranded the crew.
At first Gina and Bobby didn't really talk to me. Since we were the only three people on the ship this was awkward so more and more we would carry on small conversations, each straining to find the face of the other in the blue half-light of the emergency guides set in the floor. There was no point in taking care of anything because we could not see anything that needed care, and anyway in our torpor we eroded the order of the ship so slowly that it was not necessary to maintain.
We did not speak of a future because the only future we had was of flying soundlessly along the blueblack arc of the planet.
We did not run out of water for several weeks.
At first I recognized all the signs of dehydration I had read about: headaches, cramps, and the like. Eating the dry rations became an unbearable chore and after two days we gave them up waited to dry up and die, wandering slowly around the decks and talking about small things in the blue half-light. Because of our hunger pains our conversations eventually lost memory and melted together into an ever-moving and tiny stream. Through its precious momentum I knew Bobby and Gina for the first time. Gina was shy and thoughtful, and when she laughed she scratched her nose reflexively because it made her uncomfortable to be happy in front of other people. Bobby collected coins, not because they were old or worth money, but because he found them during the small good moments that make all the bad ones worth fighting through. All of us spent much of our time reminiscing about the time between our memory cleaning from the Third Station and this frictionless movement through space, and we all hoarded the pretty bits inside ourselves like precious gems.
After a week without food and water the pain started to go away. After two weeks there was no pain at all.
More time passed, and we kept waiting. After awhile of avoiding the dry rations Bobby tried to depressurize the chambers where we kept them, but found that we lacked the power to do so. Our Uranium was nearly gone.
Fearing that our air system was down, Bobby took a reading of our air for the first time in a week and found that it contained lethal levels of carbon monoxide. He took the temperature—it was seventy below zero.
And there was no pain.
Gina was the first one to say we were in Purgatory, that we were dead and couldn't see our own mummified and frozen corpses stuck to floors of the ship. I didn't say anything and neither did Bobby.
Bobby didn't figure it out until my hand fell off and squirmed on the floor sometime later.
"We're machines," he said, his eyes lighting up for the first time in months.
We were machines and Colonel Faria was human. Colonel Faria had been murdered by one of his tools. We had been left to float as subversive trash until entropy took us apart: apparently some device inside of me had recorded the colonel's death and relayed an automatic message to the planet to obliterate all contact.
"That's the only conclusion," Bobby said quietly, looking down at my still-moving hand.
Eventually we stopped trying to fix the parts that aged and fell off of us. Gina's face had turned to sunburned rubber and was cracking off; her gait was uneven because of the metal squeal that emanated from her hips when she moved. Bobby's limbs had malfunctioned altogether and he was confined to the colonel's old chair in the bridge, where he stared at the black outside. I ran into things constantly because I could see out of only one eye.
I can only imagine how many years that we passed there in that painless void. Over time the boredom became an opiatic drug, making the increments slip by unnoticed, charted only by the tilt of the earth and the sun. We lived in the moments we could steal out of the sameness and shored them up against our memories until our memories were gone and there was only the present. Colonel Faria was a rank pile of dust somewhere in the depressurized lower decks.
Occasionally a derelict satellite would pass by our window, a far-off and dead sail for the burning sunlight. These were Gina's stolen moments; the things outside which moved differently from our own vessel and cut against our great and transparent ocean of sameness.
She loved the flying satellites and when I saw her face split apart to smile I loved her. On the ship without memories we had nothing except love to occupy ourselves—a complete and suffocating sweetness.
rummage, thank you.
Your job is to find kitten. This task is complicated by the existence of various things which are not kitten.
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