Content Warning: Blood, suicide, death, vomit, drowning, suffocating, nausea, and triggers for megalophobia are present in this piece of writing.
If you wish to skip to the gallery, please select "TAKE OFF YOUR HELMET" below, and then click "CONTINUE TO GALLERY".
Surrounded by void, you first see the gentle flittering of far off stars. You struggle to wake yourself. Body and mind try to tug you back into sleep. They whisper, "it's time to rest more, the sun isn't out yet. It's not even morning yet, don't wake up."
Coddling words do they whisper, incessant on your slumber, until you notice the weightlessness.The weightlessness grabs you by the neck. Your eyes are ripped open, you can't think coherently, and each breath cuts like a knife, deep and sharp. There are lights surrounding your face that make a mirror of the bulbous glass helmet windshield in front of you. You see your confused, frantic expression on it. Behind your eyes, the same far off stars as before. Between them, where you are, a cold and inescapable abyssal plain.
Surrounding you is absolutely nothing, everywhere, except where you're not, because you are, effectively, nowhere.Nowhere, that is, except for the inside of a suit. Your heavy breathing fogs up the glass, preventing you from seeing much outside of it. In turn, you are given the chance to calm down.
Calm down. You're wasting air. Calm down. You're wasting air.
Calm down. You have things to do, scientist.You begin to feel reasonable again.
You reach up to your helmet and fumble around the latch. Without the light of the sun, your hand is little more than a silhouette against the dark of space, but that isn't stopping you now. Your choice is made, you're not living like this.
You unlatch the helmet, and the universe goes dark.
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last updated 4/21/2023, 5:14 PM
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The first thing you do is try to rotate your body around. The helmet's periphery isn't good and you can't really turn your head in it, so momentum is all you've really got here.
With a jet of air from your suit's propulsion system and no thought put into the repercussions of this movement for some reason, momentum guides you through a full, very slow 180 degree turn. You're spinning, but it actually feels like the stars are moving around you.
A good 86 degrees later, the fog on your helmet that you had hoped would be cleared by now isn't, and the most that's visible through the windshield is still pretty hard to decipher. Whenever they glide by your vision, you see multiple gleaming, orange, almost spherical objects orbiting nothing, and that's all your observation chalks up to. At least you're moving.
After 134 degrees, a few things become very, very evident. Firstly; space is frictionless. You're spinning forever now. Secondly; brain fog takes a while to clear, and you're realizing that spinning was not such a good idea after all. And, thirdly; you're getting a bit dizzy. It might be a good time to take some breaths.On your second rotation, strategic inhalation has cleared some of the fog on the glass. You notice the glowing objects are spread far apart, like shotgun fire. Where the proverbial barrel of this shotgun is, though, you still can't tell.
Erelong, steady breathing is no longer working, and the dizziness, now evolved into queasiness, is far from ignorable. You don't know how much more of it you can stomach.The third rotation now, the foggy glass is almost cleared. You can see the glowing objects pretty well. And when you do, despite the weightlessness of space, everything in your body, all at once, begins to feel heavy.
You see molten rock glittering in the dark. Large chunks of spacecraft debris surround them like flies. The rock has a familial feeling to you, like you recognize some of it's up's and down's, it's valleys and mountains. You connect all the dots in your head, and suddenly those gleaming, orange objects have a name again.
That's Earth.
Residue is all that's left of it. Small parts of a larger, once so beautiful, watery green rock now shuffle, quietly, as the only lighthouse in this dusk-washed, infinite sea. There's not even a sun anymore.
During the fourth rotation, the fog on the glass of your suit has all but cleared. It's more visible to you now how the world you used to live on was snuffed and gored for an audience of stars. They cheer and dance around its remains, pirouetting, making circles, in your scope of vision. They taunt you. Insignificant you.Your fifth rotation. The sun flashes by as a memory, one of many. You've been nothing but an unmoving rock for these past two rotations. Your breath is steady, unwavering; you are wasting no air. But you are horrified. Or lonely. Maybe you're hopeless. Homesick, or feeling sick in general. Probably everything all at once. You're not so used to losing a planet.
You have nothing to return to. It almost feels compelling to radio Houston, but you know what fat load of good that'd do. But... you just need to know if you're not dreaming. Calling in is probably the best way to find out. It is, after all, rather hard to pinch yourself inside a space suit.
It takes the build-up of every nerve in your body to call on Houston, but two full rotations later...Two full rotations later, you notice that all the molten chunks of Earth are not as much like shotgun fire as you thought. Rather confusingly, they appear to be going towards a specific direction, falling precisely away from you.
They're... falling. Houston, they're falling.
Things don't fall without gravity. Gravity doesn't exist without something heavy.And then it hits you all at once. The pirouetting stars, the "falling" debris, the lack of a sun, it all makes sense now. Each time you've passed it, you never even noticed it. How could you have? It's practically invisible. It's the only thing in the universe you may never see. And you're falling into it too.
Houston, that's...
You are as much holding the hand of Death as you are adrift. An audience of stars watches over you, a lone sailor, as you have no choice but to drown in their ocean. Imagine a boat with no shore. Imagine a house burnt to ashes. That's here. That's home. That's us.You've lain down the idea that you need to save your air, even for the smallest chance that you could find someone like you. You're one in a million right now, scientist. Houston never responded, they're gone for good. Everybody's gone for good. Air doesn't matter anymore. An explanation for any of this doesn't matter anymore. Not the how's and why's, not the "what happens next", none of it. All you've got, and all that makes a difference, is the memories, and you're taking them with you.Those eyes of yours have seen a great many things. Each one of the fragments of time sitting in your head are, cosmically, so beautiful. A mindscape of white roses, planted by you. You are lucky to have been, even if it all ends so soon from now, because not many things have. Not yet, anyway. And that you're able to remember your being at all, that mind and body can be cast back to the past at your whim, is a miracle. Life itself is a fluke, just as much as Earth's destruction was. So be proud. Both the beginning and the ending are out of your control, but you still made the most of the journey, scientist.In the end, it's the constant spinning that gets to you. You've been at it for 1,567 directional degrees now, in total. Combined with terror, grief, and a broken heart, you feel a burning well up inside. You weren't feeling well before, but now...There it is. A gag. A heave. A release. It's okay, just let it out.
Your helmet fills with a liquid concoction of vomit and tears, aimlessly drifting wherever it pleases. It's enough that if you're not careful, you could drown in it. But then again, who am I to say what you should be careful for? Right now is your time, so it's your call.
You decide to let your humanity end you. All that you are is how you've chosen to die, as that's all that's left. Bile, spit, and tears line the walls of your helmet. They block your vision and offer you little opportunity to breathe. And whenever you do, the stench makes you heave all over again, and the amount of bile in the suit rises.
You're stuck with this. In the vacuum of space, with no ship to return to and no one to help, you've got no way to air it out.It's not a death you yearn for, which makes it even harder to handle. The alternative is to suffocate the moment you unlock that helmet, and truthfully that scares you shitless.
But it's not a death that waits for you either. Erelong, you're forced to suffer it. Your body gives in, it needs air.Drowning burns all the way down. It fires up your innate instinct to live. In the haze of a desperate mind, everything in you says to make the pain stop. You try your hardest to break the glass. There's nothing you have to live for, the pain just needs to stop.
Pound. Pound. All you want is for the liquid to leave. Pound.
Pound.
Pound.
...Oxygen isn't reaching your brain anymore, and it's not long before you stop moving. The pain has ended, but not how you would've wanted. Blood joins a pool of bodily fluids, collected in a dormant space suit that wanders the dark.Goodnight, scientist. Rest easy.
“Excuse me, sir?” I had tapped on a man’s shoulder, who was standing upright like an oak in front of an arcade machine. The tap jolted him away from the screen to catch a quick glance at me, just to see who I was. I was the owner of a laundromat.
“Yes? One second,” he mumbled deeply in one breath, his shoulders relaxing again while he continued twiddling the stick. This somehow correlated to a mustached man crushing pies with a hammer.
“No, uh,” looking at him dead on, straight faced, and ignoring the game, I said, “no laundry, huh?”
“No.”
“Just the game?”
“Of course.”
He said it so deadpan, eyes wide, zoned in on his dancing pixels, an expression you might find on the face of someone who had encountered a dead man. It caught me off-guard.
“I am, uh, going to have to ask you to leave, sir,” I motioned my eyes to the front wall of my laundromat: a large glass window with an equally glass door in the middle of it. I had hoped he caught my directions from the corner of his vision.
In the game, the mustached man jumped from too high a distance and fell to his death. In real life, the man backed his legs away from the machine while still keeping his hands tight on the sides of the control panel. He turned his brown, unkempt tumbleweed of hair downwards to face the screen, bent his body from the waist a nigh 45 degrees, sighed through his nose, and with a couple nods, drew a grin on his face. All in that order. His ovoid-lensed glasses slipped a bit down the bridge of his nose, and in the very same angled position he just set himself in, he turned to me, his new attention: the subject of an annoyed, yet still grinning, question.
“And why’s that?” He no longer mumbled, and instead only spoke quietly.
I laid my answer down for him, just as flat as his own dialogue not even 3 seconds ago.
“You are not using the intended services of my store.”
He blinked and turned his head a bit, looking off. Thick brows lifted and he lost his grin. It was replaced by a hand stroking a bare chin. 45 degrees was replaced by 89, a slight lean as one arm was now resting on the machine, thematically matching the other arm, which was placed at his hip. His voice was still quiet, deep, and even the slightest bit raspy.
“What are the intended uses of your store? To get quarters, correct?” I had opened my mouth to respond to that first question, but he spoke before me. I crossed my arms, and in anticipation of what he would say next, I decided only to look him in the eyes and wait. Clearly he had something to say. And even if there was an expression in my eyes that told him not to pull that kind of shit again, he ignored it, musing that, “you wouldn’t have decided to make this shop, or any shop for that matter, were it not for, y’know, the money.”
I had the store-owner intuition to jut out, “this doesn’t have to be a huge deal, sir.”
And, “no, you’re right,” he quickly agreed. “It doesn’t. But you walked up and decided,” he pointed a thumb back, “let’s have this kid lose his game. So it’s a big deal now. Now I’m just curious, right? If I drop 30 quarters in this thing every day, consistently, why am I being asked to leave?”
I rolled my eyes and reiterated, “you are not using the intended services of my store. We are not an arcade.”
The kid leaned his back up against the machine and crossed his arms just like me, although he meant something different than me. He looked down, sparing a couple more though-provoked nods.
“Alright, consider this, uh, Rudy.” I assumed he knew from my name tag, though he didn’t glance down at it. “You want me to do laundry here, right? Let’s say that’s 2 quarters per load.”
“It is.”
“Let’s say it is. 2 quarters per load, and I come in every day and do both washing and drying. Altogether that’s 4 quarters, yeah? Easy math. That’s generous, though, washing my clothes every day. I would spend maybe 8 quarters a week in actuality, so I am being very generous. And then we compare that to me coming in and pouring 30 quarters into this machine every day. Big difference, right?”
Somehow I hadn’t noticed before, but he did have a good few stacks of quarters left waiting to be used, sitting on the control panel.
I took in what he said.
“It could be, but you’re 1 person out of many, that doesn’t make much difference to me.”
He looked behind my shoulder, which he had to lift his head to do so. He was, in actuality, shorter than me. I was a 6 foot 5 inches bearded sack of meat with a shaved head. Not the kind of guy you’d fuck around with, else I’d pummel you with whatever was on hand. The kid was so much scrawnier, but I guess his overall confidence and sarcasm made it hard to notice. That got on my nerves.
While looking behind me, he peered around my laundromat and took in what very few people were in it at the time, just to dip his chin down and let his eyes mock me over his glasses, as if to say, ‘it should make much difference to you’. That also got on my nerves.
“Okay. Well then let’s also consider services. I have a washer and dryer at home, yeah? They’re nice. Much nicer than these ones, and they don’t cost money to use. I don’t actually have a reason to use your ‘intended service’. But, you know what I don’t have?” I hadn’t answered this time. I knew he would’ve interrupted. “A Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, correct. That’s not in my collection at home. Therefore, I come into your store, I bring in my 30 quarters a day, and I don’t use your laundry services, no. But your cabinet is a service to me, intentional or not.”
It was, in truth, hard to admit why exactly I needed him to step away from that machine. I can’t even admit it to myself let alone to this douchey kid. What else can I do?
“Son, I have asked you to leave. If you don’t, I’m going to have to call the police.”
He perked up his head, tilted it, and his arms shifted to have his palms rest on the machine.
“Do it, then. Hell, it might even work,” he shrugged.
So I picked up my phone.
“But it might be hard to get them to take you seriously when you tell them there’s a kid playing on the arcade machine you got with your own money.”
I got ready to dial in 9-1-1.
“That, and if they did come around, it might be a bit suspicious how adamant you are that no one touches that cabinet. Especially as you only make 500 coins a week, right? They may even try to get inside it.”
And then I stopped. Those last words froze me solid. My fingers hovered above a final “1”, and my gaze turned back up to him, sharp.
“Rudy,” he said, and that was all he said.
I could see it on his fucking face. Cop bastard was looking into me the whole time. No way. Fuck this cop piece of shit.
“What are you, a police officer?” I quivered, calm only on the outside.
“No,” he was deadpan again, “my name’s Frank, Rudy. My friends know me as Frankie.” His next words were whispers sharp enough to push the sinking feeling in my gut down further. “I know what you put in that cabinet.”
I turned to the people left in my store. None of them were paying attention.
Did I accidentally meddle in his life? This Frank kid, is he pulling some revenge stunt on me? Who the hell is this?
I whispered along with him, although much quieter, “is, uh- did I,” I hesitated at admittance and turned around again, “I can make up for things if, uh, if who I put in there was, uh, someone you might have known. I can pay you as much as you want.”
“No, no. I don’t know whoever’s in there.”
“Do- do you know me?”
“No, I don’t. But I do know your secret, Rudy. And I guess for that reason, I can let you call me Frankie.”
Some of the pit in my stomach latched onto this.
“I know you didn’t mean to, friend,” he continued, “so I can make this all go away for you, if you’d want.”
I would have been an idiot to say no. I would have been an idiot to say yes.
“You… can?”
“Of course. That’s my kind of work, Rudy. It pays well. Who has 30 quarters lying around every day?”
“Then, uh, please. Please do. Please help me.” my whispering shivered as my head fell with gravity.
“Alright. Let me go through the rest of my coins tonight, then. And when you leave, keep the door unlocked, but turn the lights off like you usually do. I’ll handle everything from there, okay?”
“Okay,” which I barely got out of my mouth.
“Okay,” smiled Frankie, “okay.”It was a quiet drive home. Music was the last thing I wanted, so the radio stayed off. The only sound was the silent repetition of every worry I could ever have. I know I fucked up. I wouldn’t have put the body in an arcade machine of all places were I not panicked. I know what I did wrong. Why can that never be enough?
I didn’t sleep at all. It was the same story as the drive home, only this time I laid on a pillow wet from frustrated tears. When I wasn’t loathing every inch of myself, every little noise, whether it was from this old apartment settling or from the neighbors stomping around, shattered any of my chances of sleeping, every time. Frankie was too smart to just do something like that. And then I realized something I should have thought about at the time: he would be clearing my crimes for free. The panic, the sheer unadulterated dread that I just fell prey to something that would cost me dearly, made me sweat and turn over until the sun came up.
Dear Christ, it was 6 A.M. I decided, on that realization, that it was best to head to work.The morning isn’t as silent as the night. Birds can ease your mind more than anyone realizes. Or maybe I just needed a way to distract myself.
On my way up the road, I saw cop cars lined up along the outside walls of my laundromat. When driving by, I saw them dotted around the parking lot too. Sirens blaring, lights hurting my exhausted eyes, some cops lined the store’s front window, and were even inside the building. The lights of the store were on too. I slammed my fists on the dashboard. Fuck.
While I don’t know why I didn’t try and make a break for it, I figured later it wouldn’t have mattered. I would have been caught anyway. I pulled up to the store, parked my car, and made my way, swiftly, up against the glass to study the crime scene. I saw the arcade machine was gone, unplugged from the wall and all. In its place was a cabinet-mangled fresh body. And folded halfways, placed on a laundry table like a nameplate; a laundry table which was the closest to the front window, just so that I could see that it was a note.
“Thank you for another addition to my collection. Good luck, friend. - Frankie.”
Cops gathered around me, and I got on my knees and placed my hands behind my head. I sobbed as I was arrested and pleaded innocent and set up. They didn’t give a damn.
In the following month, I was tried for the murder of 28 year old Patrick Cain. He was an old employee that got on my nerves. That Frankie shithead could have never known him.
Now, while Bob is digging, is a good time to talk about humanity.
I can only assume you, the reader, are a human, since you’re able to understand the language I speak to you in, whereas any other creature couldn’t. They simply didn’t evolve to do so, just like you didn’t evolve to speak in the languages of lions or ribwort plantains. And as a human, you’re naturally innately curious about the wellbeing of your own species. Maybe about how they’re doing, what with them potentially being stranded around the last star in the universe. Or maybe they never even got the chance to see this final star, and are now drifting endlessly in space without a sun. You have a lot of questions, I'm sure. And, well, to answer them, and to put it shortly, they're gone.
We’re 100 trillion years in the future and any semblance, even if it’s subtle, of humanity has been rubbed out to near-invisibility like marker ink on a whiteboard. But rest assured. There’s still very faint traces of you left: the smallest speck of black ink that won’t remain on the whiteboard forever, but is, in fact, definitely present. And in the case of humanity, which is to say the case of you, this metaphorical microscopic splotch of ink takes the mighty form of human history.
History is a large part of you, no? From your point of view, probably 1,000 years ago, the Roman Empire fell, and changed the way governments worked forever. Or, even further back, billions of years ago, with the dinosaurs and all them. If not for their plight, you might not really understand that asteroids are frankly terrifying.
When all the leading scientists of humanity several thousands of years into the future from the point at which you’re reading this all sat down and had a think for a moment about their predicament, they all decided: they would learn from their history. And while they made that decision, what was once their tiny oasis in the endless fishtank of space was now becoming a soulless rock, not unlike Mercury, or Venus, or, yes, even Mars. There was an obvious answer to this, and all across the dying globe it was agreed that the best course of action would be to leave and find a new home somewhere already established, and that humanity would have to evolve alongside a completely new planet’s flora and fauna to remain alive.
Now, contrary to what you might expect, this actually worked.
Before they left, however, they wanted to send one final goodbye message into the ether. History, my friend, is what comes into play from here on out. And fair warning, it’s about to sound like I’m completely derailing here. But, just, hear me out.
Voyager I and Voyager II were the greatest machines humanity ever invented. Little parcels of memories shipped with no return address to Jupiter, your local bodyguard, and Saturn, your local cool-looking-thing. They were directed to your nearest neighbouring star, too, which it might get to in a very long time from your point of view.
Don’t worry. It did. It didn’t make it very far beyond that point, but it did see the star, which is nifty.
However, I’m inclined to believe that these 2 majorly significant probes were sent out all too early. Recent events, that have been so far unmentioned by me, on Our Unknown Introspective Creature Named Bob's home planet would show that precise timing, intentional or not, was all the same level of importance to the success story of humanity 100 trillion years in the future as location was.
Now, I’ve been very vague about what’s going on because I wanted to lay it out to you with a bit of background first. Hell, maybe I've even sounded a bit contradictory.
"The success story of humanity? Didn't you say that humanity is dead?"
Correct. It's all part of something I've been building up to, and now I can tell you flat-out.
Human scientists didn’t look back at any particular moment in time to decide to leave the planet for good. That was a completely new idea; no member of any of their species at that time had ever even attempted to do that. Instead, they thought back to the Voyager probes, the ones I called the best machines ever made. And humans, with a great revelation, the knowledge that they would be leaving their old rock behind, and memories lining their bookshelves of a time their ancestors used to cherish, went and completed a trilogy that no one ever expected to be a trilogy.
Welcome into the equation, the Voyager III probe.
A beautiful, massive piece of technology. Although, I know, the name is unoriginal. We’ll get to that soon.
With all the knowledge humans acquired about the dangers of space, it could handle anything that could possibly happen to it.
No asteroid would hurt it, big or small.
No star would degrade away the materials that made it, except for if it got too close, of course.
No planet in this universe, even if the probe entered it at the worst possible angle, could ever burn it up.
Voyager III was not a dinky little bottle rocket made to melt away when coming back from orbit. Voyager III was made to last for years. Years and years and years. 100 trillion years. An unimaginable amount of time.
And it was sent out into space as humanity’s last “hoorah” with absolutely no destination in mind.
"Whatever happens, happens," said humanity. It didn't matter anymore.
Off it went into a completely unmarked location with no planets, stars, or anything that would prove to be any form of obstacle in its very certain, absolutely clear as day, and totally not unexpectedly blocked-with-a-very-significant-mound-of-dirt path.Clunk!
Oh, hey! I think our friend Bob finally found something.