Post by Pyromaniac275 on Jan 10, 2024 2:58:55 GMT
There was a minute or two when she first returned to consciousness that she sincerely wanted to just go back to sleep. She awoke with a dull throbbing ache in her forehead. In her neck, the pain was sharper and more pronounced. It felt as though her muscles had been removed, and her neck filled with shards of broken glass that stabbed and throbbed with every movement she made. Despite the uncomfortable surface, despite the cool air surrounding her, she wanted nothing more than just to go back to sleep and wake up sometime later, maybe feeling a little less like shit.
Then the screaming registered.
It wasn’t loud, or at least wasn’t so loud she could make it out easily over the hum of the starship around her. But after a minute or two of wakefulness she could hear the distant irregular noise breaking through the hum of the ship. Whatever wish she had to return to sleep evaporated in an instant and she sat up suddenly.
Too suddenly, it turned out, as the movement sent the pain in her neck emanating through her shoulders, and the dull ache in her forehead intensified to a sharp disorienting stab. She grunted involuntarily, and brought her hands to her temples. She tried to massage away the pain, moving her hands from her temples to the back of her neck, but the effect was limited and the pain lingered. She soon abandoned her attempts, and instead focused her attention on her immediate surroundings.
She was in a supply closet it seemed. The space was small, dimly lit by a red emergency light, and scattered with chemicals and tools she figured were probably for cleaning. A small steel sink was bolted to one wall with a dirty mirror positioned just above it. With another groan, and yet another brief intensification of the pain in her neck and shoulders, she managed to get to her feet under her. She moved to the sink, turning on the water and splashing what little ran from the tap on her face before looking at herself in the mirror.
Seeing her own reflection was unsettling. Not because there was anything particularly out of place about it. She looked a little pale she supposed, and her hair was a mess… but the real problem was that she quite simply didn’t recognize herself. She stared into the blue eyes looking back at her and it was like she was looking at a stranger. She moved her hands to touch her cheeks, gently tug at the flesh around her eyes and confirmed that it was indeed her reflection in the mirror and it wasn’t some trick.
There was a rising sense of dread beginning to settle into the bottom of her stomach that only grew as she tried to think back and figure out what exactly she had expected to see when she looked in the mirror. What *did* she think she looked like? Her heart quickened as it began to dawn on her that she didn’t know.
That thought began a cascade of equally troubling realizations. That she didn’t know what she looked like soon lead to the realization that she couldn’t recall what her name was, followed soon by the realization that she didn’t know where she was, or why she was there, or her occupation, she didn’t know how old she was, she didn’t know who here parents were, or the faces of her friends all finally coalescing into the twin epiphanies:
She didn’t know who she was.
She didn’t know why she was here.
Her breath was coming rapidly, there was a pain in her chest to match that in her neck, her fingers were tingling, the room was spinning and she felt like she was falling. It took more effort than it should have to lower herself to the floor without falling. She pressed her hands over her ears but it did nothing to drown out the distant screaming. If anything it was easier to hear without the hum of the ship to cover it up. She squeezed her eyes closed and willed the sensation to pass, begged and pleaded with a god she couldn’t remember the name of to let this all be a horrible dream from which she would soon wake.
Unfortunately, she was already awake.
Minutes passed by like hours. She felt the starship around her shudder and groan as it entered slipspace and then leave it sometime later. Slowly the all consuming terror began to subside into a more manageable perpetual dread. She wiped tears from her eyes, and used the sink to pull herself back to her feet.
Her eyes were red and puffy now, but at least her reflection hadn’t changed. She wasn’t sure she could have handled it if she found herself staring at a completely different unfamiliar reflection. She tore her eyes off her reflection and soon found a folded white sheet taped to the top left corner of the mirror. She had been too focused on panicking over her reflection to notice it earlier.
She reached out a hand and tentatively pulled it off the mirror. She unfolded it and let her eyes rove across the page. It took her a moment to realize most of the page was irrelevant. It must have been the only thing available to write on at the time. The page’s original purpose seemed to be as a lyric insert for a music album. Stylized blocks of writing, with track names and numbers, were spread across the page recording the words to songs about being a rebel in a tyrannical system of corporations and the governments that bowed to them. That was the irrelevant part. The part that mattered was the hastily scrawled messages in red marker that filled every available space not taken up by the lyrics.
Bad bad things you need to stop
The next line was crossed out so aggressively she couldn’t read what it once said and scanned to the next line.
*Get to engineering and shut down reactor core*
Then a set of highly detailed (and often misspelled) instructions on how to do that. She’d need to find a particular console, and use it to manually override safeties and pull all the moderating rods out of the core. Something felt… off about that. She didn’t know what, or even why she felt the instructions may have been… off. She didn’t know anything about reactors… but… why did you need to override safeties to turn it off?
She turned the page over. The red scrawling continued on the reverse side.
No one else only you It repeated.
Trust is a weakness
No one coming to help you
They're all going to kill you
Trust is a weakness
You are blind deaf and dumb
You are blind deaf and dumb
You are blind deaf and dumb
Blind
Deaf
Dumb
She scowled and flipped the page back and forth several times, re-reading all the information. No explanation of who she was. No explanation of where or why she was. Fucking hell, it didn’t even give directions to engineering. How big was the ship anyway? Where would she go just to find out how to get to engineering?
She very nearly crumpled the sheet, frustrated with how much of the limited space the author had wasted on rambling incoherence. But she restrained herself. If she was going to do as it instructed she would need the instructions to shut down the reactor when and if she got to it. Carefully, she folded it up and put it in the outer pocket of her blue coat. Her fingers brushed against something cold and metal as she deposited the note and after a moment’s hesitation she pulled it out.
It took a moment for her mind to put together that it was a handgun, and then a moment longer to remember that the slide being locked back indicated there was no ammunition left in the weapon. Nonetheless she ejected the magazine (though she didn’t know how she knew what button to hold to do that) and confirmed that it was indeed empty. She set the weapon down on the sink, and then patted herself down, looking for spare bullets or magazines in her other pockets. She came up empty handed, and with a sinking feeling that luck was already against her.
She took a deep shuddering breath, trying to ward off another bout of all consuming panic.
“What do I do?” She wondered aloud, staring at her reflection. “What the fuck is going on?”
Another deep breath.
“What are five things you can see?” She cast her gaze around. “An empty gun… a sink, a bottle of bleach, and uh… a mirror…”
She rubbed her eyes.
“What are four things you can touch?” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “This isn’t working,”
She picked up the gun, put the magazine back in and cocked the slide forward. Still no ammunition, but maybe if she ended up in a bad situation she could at least threaten someone with it and they wouldn’t know there were no bullets. She took one last deep breath, hesitated at the door, and then finally pushed the supply closet door open and cautiously peaked out into the corridor. She looked left, and then right and seeing no one in either direction slipped out and eased the door closed as quietly as she could.
The ship shuddered and groaned around her. Her heart skipped a beat, and for a moment she thought something terrible was about to happen. When nothing did she took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes.
“Just dropping from slipspace,” She said, picking a direction at random and beginning to walk. “Not a big deal. It’s all good. Everything’s fine. Just going to shut down the reactor…”
The lights overhead dimmed, and then for a moment went out. The whole ship shook with the force of… well she couldn’t even really begin to guess what and then the lights flickered back on. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding and rubbed her eyes again.
“This sucks,” She muttered. “This isn’t fair. Why is this my responsibility? I don’t even know what’s going on. I don’t even know who I am. Someone should be taking care of me. This is bullshit! You hear that?!”
She turned toward the ceiling.
“IT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!” She screamed at the lights. She regretted it a moment later when she heard her voice echoing down the corridors. She furtively looked in both directions, expecting some monstrous enemy to appear at any moment and tear her asunder. When none did she resumed walking.
“It’s fucking bullshit,” She repeated, voice just barely above a whisper.
The minutes began to tick by as she wandered the corridors, looking for something (anything really) that could help her figure out where she was and how she could find her way to engineering. Signs were the most prevalent, identifying corridors that were supposed to lead to engineering. She followed them as best she could, but often after a few forks and bends she’d find herself staring at a sealed bulkhead. Then she’d have to backtrack and try to find a way around and more often than not that would just end with her in a different part of the ship with no signs to follow.
She wasn’t sure how long she wandered like that. She had no way to mark the passage of time other than the periodic groans and moans as the ship entered and exited slipspace. Sometimes she’d feel another vibrating power surge between slipspace jumps, sometimes she wouldn’t. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what any of that might have meant.
She had to stop when the headache started getting bad again. It had eased up when she first left the storage room, but it had creeped its way back into her skull. It started in her neck, a dull throb that grew in intensity and slowly crept it’s way up to the base of her skull. There, it grew to a constant stabbing pain before finally lancing forward and settling behind her eyes with an ever growing intensity. She had to stop when the pain became dizzyingly intense and eased herself onto the floor with a groan. She covered her eyes with one arm, offering herself some small reprieve from the blindingly bright lights overhead.
It was hard to muster the willpower to continue when she felt like she was perpetually lost, her head felt like it was splitting in two, and all she really wanted was to find a quiet dark place and sleep for an eternity. But the screaming was there. Constant, omnipresent, growing in intensity… well maybe not the last one. She told herself she was just being paranoid. The screams weren’t getting louder; she was just paying more attention to them.
“Get up,” She told herself. “Get uuuuuuuuuuuuuup,”
She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. Keep going. Find engineering. She had to be getting close. It couldn’t be completely sealed off. Whoever it was wouldn’t have told her to shut down the reactor if there was no way to get to it…
She froze hearing the sound of footsteps ahead of her. She spun in a circle, looking for a room to duck into or an alcove to hide in. She came up empty, and then her mind went blank trying to think of something to do. She stood there, frozen in place as the footsteps got closer and then a man rounded the corner and began stalking down the hall toward her.
“Uh,” She said. “I was… that… um…” She stammered trying to think of something to say in her own defense. She fumbled for the gun in her pocket but it got caught and she was left cursing and desperately trying to get it out before…
He reached her, brown eyes bored into her…
And then he looked away and kept on walking. Her eyes followed him, slack jawed as he went. Did… did he know her? Is that why he didn’t question her presence? She nearly called out to him, asking if he knew her, or if he knew how to get to engineering.
Trust is a weakness,
She closed her mouth, watching him as he went down the corridor and disappeared around a corner. She swallowed, turned, and continued.
It felt like it could have been hours before she finally found some more signs pointing the way toward engineering, but at last she felt she was starting to make real progress. She was able to keep following the signs, only forced to stop as the ship periodically experienced those power surges which would turn out the lights and momentarily plunge the corridor into an impenetrable inky blackness. Her headache wasn’t improving, but at least she was getting somewhere.
At least she hoped she was.
She tried not to dwell on the screaming. It was hard, on account of she didn’t really have much else to think about, but when she thought about the screaming for too long she soon found herself wondering about some rather uncomfortable questions. Chief among them was where it could be coming from. It was always there, but even after what felt like hours of walking the screams hadn’t gotten any closer, nor had she come across anyone who might be responsible for it. The lone man she encountered was the only person she’d seen this whole time, and he definitely hadn’t been screaming.
Where were the screams coming from? Why couldn’t she drown them out?
She stopped for a moment to massage her temples and force those intrusive thoughts out of her mind. She was only going to psyche herself out thinking too hard about the screaming. She had a job to do. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t just run back to the closet she’d woke up in and wait the whole nightmare out.
No matter how much she wished she could.
She passed one more person just before she finally found her way to engineering. The encounter played out almost identically to the previous one, albeit she didn’t try to pull a gun on him. He appeared, she stopped walking, and he passed her by with nothing but a glare in her direction. It was creepy and unsettling, but having finally made it to engineering she decided not to dwell on it.
She stepped inside and took a deep breath before glancing around. She walked the perimeter of the room, looking at walls full of switches, dials, gauges, and displays showing a variety of readings and data. She tried to take it all in, reading some of the neatly printed labels as well as a few that seemed to have been made with red marker on masking tape. Those gave her pause. She squinted at them, comparing them to scrawls on her lyric insert. Some of the labels seemed to share the same handwriting. She pondered that for a moment before deciding she didn’t really know what the significance of that might be. Whoever had written the instructions must have worked in engineering she supposed… but then why was it up to her to shut down the reactor? Shouldn’t they have done it themselves?
She sighed for the umpteenth time and rubbed her eyes. The labels, switches, and dials all meant nothing to her. The labels may as well have been written in a foreign language for all the good they were going to do her. One more sigh and then she looked down at the lyric sheet and began following the instructions.
“Find master control,” She mumbled aloud as she began her circuit around the perimeter of the room again. “Master flow control… is that the same as master control?”
She read the next part of the instructions and when none of the switches or dials it mentioned were present on the panel she decided it wasn’t. Back on the circuit, it wasn’t until she had reached the other side of the room that she finally found master control. She nodded and then moved on. Flip some switches, turn a knob, get down on your hands and knees and unplug the safety module from the underside of the panel. It was clearly labeled, and the plug came out with little resistance…
An alarm began blaring, a loud rhythmic klaxon that started so suddenly she jumped and smashed her head into the underside of the panel. She muttered a curse and scrambled back to her feet. It took her a moment to find a screen on the panel, which helpfully informed her the alarm was due to the safety module being unplugged. She pressed the ‘clear’ button several times, and while the warning vanished from the screen the alarm continued to sound.
“Shit,” She muttered. “Shit, shit, shit,”
She wasted several minutes trying to find a way to silence the alarm before someone heard and came to investigate. In retrospect, that was a mistake. She probably could have completed the rest of the instructions before the man from the hallway showed up to see what the commotion was about. She could have shut down the reactor and avoided everything that happened next.
But she was dumb, and what precious few minutes she had she wasted looking for a way to silence the alarm.
She managed to actually get the gun out of her pocket when the man came into engineering, even managed to point it at him and give some vaguely threatening instruction for him not to move. He paid no attention to her, entirely unphased by the gun in her hand or her insistence that she would use it. She wasn’t sure she would have. Even if there had been bullets to shoot she wasn’t sure she was the kind of person to gun a man down.
Although, she supposed she hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of person she was.
He grabbed hold of the gun in her hand, and without a word slammed the palm of his hand into her chest. It all happened so fast. She barely registered he had grabbed the gun before his palm hit her chest, forced the air from her lungs, and sent her sprawling to the ground gasping for breath. She tried to get her feet back under her and run while he expertly dropped the magazine, yanked back the slide, and upon confirming the gun was unloaded tossed it aside. She managed to get to her knees before he grabbed her with two hands and began dragging her toward the door.
She shrieked, squirmed, and managed to wriggle out of her coat. In the moments that followed he stared at the now empty coat in his hands, momentarily perplexed by the lack of a human occupying it, before he cast is aside, turned on his heel and started after her. She desperately searched the engineering room for a wrench, or a crowbar, or anything at all she could use as a makeshift weapon. She came up empty handed, turned, and threw a punch into the man’s face.
Pain blossomed across her hand. It felt like punching a wall… or at least it felt like what she imagined punching a wall would feel like. No give, just solid unmovable flesh and bone. He retaliated in kind and once more she found herself on the floor, this time with stars dancing across her vision and tears coming unbidden to her eyes.
Broken nose will do that, A voice at the back of her head said with a mirthless chuckle.
She managed to scramble away from him before he grabbed her again, trying to blink the tears out of her eyes.
You’re really making a mess of this, The voice commented. Not so good at the fighting thing are you?
She shook her head, trying to divide her attention between staunching the blood flowing from her nostrils and keep away from the silent man pursuing her.
I could help you with all this, The voice went on. All you have to do is let go. Let someone actually good at violence take over,
He grabbed hold of her again, this time with a vice grip around her arm. She flailed against him a few times, in a fruitless attempt to get him to release her.
Just let go, The voice purred. Close your eyes and let me help you…
She choked on a glob of blood and squeezed her eyes closed.
Help me.
She opened her eyes and the man was at her feet in a crumpled bloody heap. She stared down at him and then at the blood covered ball peen hammer in her hand. She let go of it, dropping it on the ground with a loud clatter. The blood wasn’t just on the hammer, it was on her arms, face… all over her. She started to feel her breath coming in short sharp gasps again. She had no memory of the hammer, or the killing she had used it to brutally commit. How could that be possible? How did you just… just…
Just what?
Forget?
Probably the same way you forgot everything about yourself.
She brought her hands halfway to her eyes, remembered they were covered in someone else’s blood, and then let out a wordless cry of anguish. She took a few deep breaths and blinked more tears from her eyes.
“Okay,” She said. “Okay, okay… shut down the reactor. Shut it down. That’s why you’re here,”
She moved back to the master control panel, and grabbed hold of the lyric insert. She took a few more deep breaths, steadying her frayed nerves to try and make sense of the instructions.
“Okay,” She said. “Find… rod control…”
She began looking over dials and readouts, reading faded labels aloud to try and keep focused.
“Rod control…” She said finally finding it. “Okay so the next step is…” She muttered, turning back to the lyric sheet.
Only then she was falling.
Or… maybe falling wasn’t the right word for it. Falling implied movement. Rapid movement at that. There wasn’t any movement in the moment that followed her turn to the lyric sheet. It felt almost like she had lost time again. Like she’d closed her eyes and opened them to find a dead man at her feet and a bloody hammer in her hand.
Only she hadn’t closed her eyes. She wasn’t even sure she had blinked. She just turned, and then everything around her was gone. She was in the dark, surrounded by an infinite expanse of nothing. For a moment, she thought the lights may have just gone out again… but when she tried to fumble for the panel there was nothing there. She tried to sit, but there was no floor to sit on. She was just…
Just what?
Untethered, The voice supplied. Untethered in a room without walls. I think that’s from a song…
“Who are you?”
Who are you?
“Why are you doing this?”
I’m not doing anything,
“What’s happening?”
I know as much as you do love,
She brought her hands to her face. She didn’t care about the blood. She covered her eyes, pressed her fingers into them and tried to focus on anything but the absurd hopelessness of her waking nightmare.
“This isn’t fair,”
The voice didn’t answer that time and left her alone in the infinite expanse of the empty void. If she had thought time was hard to track before, then it was impossible now. There was nothing in the void to mark its passage. Hell, for all she knew time didn’t even exist here. Maybe she was dead. Maybe this is what death was like, just infinite nothing until you decided you were ready to stop existing.
She sighed, holding her hands at her sides and staring at what may have been the sky in this place.
Then the screaming registered.
It wasn’t loud, or at least wasn’t so loud she could make it out easily over the hum of the starship around her. But after a minute or two of wakefulness she could hear the distant irregular noise breaking through the hum of the ship. Whatever wish she had to return to sleep evaporated in an instant and she sat up suddenly.
Too suddenly, it turned out, as the movement sent the pain in her neck emanating through her shoulders, and the dull ache in her forehead intensified to a sharp disorienting stab. She grunted involuntarily, and brought her hands to her temples. She tried to massage away the pain, moving her hands from her temples to the back of her neck, but the effect was limited and the pain lingered. She soon abandoned her attempts, and instead focused her attention on her immediate surroundings.
She was in a supply closet it seemed. The space was small, dimly lit by a red emergency light, and scattered with chemicals and tools she figured were probably for cleaning. A small steel sink was bolted to one wall with a dirty mirror positioned just above it. With another groan, and yet another brief intensification of the pain in her neck and shoulders, she managed to get to her feet under her. She moved to the sink, turning on the water and splashing what little ran from the tap on her face before looking at herself in the mirror.
Seeing her own reflection was unsettling. Not because there was anything particularly out of place about it. She looked a little pale she supposed, and her hair was a mess… but the real problem was that she quite simply didn’t recognize herself. She stared into the blue eyes looking back at her and it was like she was looking at a stranger. She moved her hands to touch her cheeks, gently tug at the flesh around her eyes and confirmed that it was indeed her reflection in the mirror and it wasn’t some trick.
There was a rising sense of dread beginning to settle into the bottom of her stomach that only grew as she tried to think back and figure out what exactly she had expected to see when she looked in the mirror. What *did* she think she looked like? Her heart quickened as it began to dawn on her that she didn’t know.
That thought began a cascade of equally troubling realizations. That she didn’t know what she looked like soon lead to the realization that she couldn’t recall what her name was, followed soon by the realization that she didn’t know where she was, or why she was there, or her occupation, she didn’t know how old she was, she didn’t know who here parents were, or the faces of her friends all finally coalescing into the twin epiphanies:
She didn’t know who she was.
She didn’t know why she was here.
Her breath was coming rapidly, there was a pain in her chest to match that in her neck, her fingers were tingling, the room was spinning and she felt like she was falling. It took more effort than it should have to lower herself to the floor without falling. She pressed her hands over her ears but it did nothing to drown out the distant screaming. If anything it was easier to hear without the hum of the ship to cover it up. She squeezed her eyes closed and willed the sensation to pass, begged and pleaded with a god she couldn’t remember the name of to let this all be a horrible dream from which she would soon wake.
Unfortunately, she was already awake.
Minutes passed by like hours. She felt the starship around her shudder and groan as it entered slipspace and then leave it sometime later. Slowly the all consuming terror began to subside into a more manageable perpetual dread. She wiped tears from her eyes, and used the sink to pull herself back to her feet.
Her eyes were red and puffy now, but at least her reflection hadn’t changed. She wasn’t sure she could have handled it if she found herself staring at a completely different unfamiliar reflection. She tore her eyes off her reflection and soon found a folded white sheet taped to the top left corner of the mirror. She had been too focused on panicking over her reflection to notice it earlier.
She reached out a hand and tentatively pulled it off the mirror. She unfolded it and let her eyes rove across the page. It took her a moment to realize most of the page was irrelevant. It must have been the only thing available to write on at the time. The page’s original purpose seemed to be as a lyric insert for a music album. Stylized blocks of writing, with track names and numbers, were spread across the page recording the words to songs about being a rebel in a tyrannical system of corporations and the governments that bowed to them. That was the irrelevant part. The part that mattered was the hastily scrawled messages in red marker that filled every available space not taken up by the lyrics.
Bad bad things you need to stop
No one else only you
The next line was crossed out so aggressively she couldn’t read what it once said and scanned to the next line.
*Get to engineering and shut down reactor core*
Then a set of highly detailed (and often misspelled) instructions on how to do that. She’d need to find a particular console, and use it to manually override safeties and pull all the moderating rods out of the core. Something felt… off about that. She didn’t know what, or even why she felt the instructions may have been… off. She didn’t know anything about reactors… but… why did you need to override safeties to turn it off?
She turned the page over. The red scrawling continued on the reverse side.
No one else only you It repeated.
Trust is a weakness
No one coming to help you
Avoid everyone else
They're all going to kill you
Trust is a weakness
You are blind deaf and dumb
You are blind deaf and dumb
You are blind deaf and dumb
Blind
Deaf
Dumb
She scowled and flipped the page back and forth several times, re-reading all the information. No explanation of who she was. No explanation of where or why she was. Fucking hell, it didn’t even give directions to engineering. How big was the ship anyway? Where would she go just to find out how to get to engineering?
She very nearly crumpled the sheet, frustrated with how much of the limited space the author had wasted on rambling incoherence. But she restrained herself. If she was going to do as it instructed she would need the instructions to shut down the reactor when and if she got to it. Carefully, she folded it up and put it in the outer pocket of her blue coat. Her fingers brushed against something cold and metal as she deposited the note and after a moment’s hesitation she pulled it out.
It took a moment for her mind to put together that it was a handgun, and then a moment longer to remember that the slide being locked back indicated there was no ammunition left in the weapon. Nonetheless she ejected the magazine (though she didn’t know how she knew what button to hold to do that) and confirmed that it was indeed empty. She set the weapon down on the sink, and then patted herself down, looking for spare bullets or magazines in her other pockets. She came up empty handed, and with a sinking feeling that luck was already against her.
She took a deep shuddering breath, trying to ward off another bout of all consuming panic.
“What do I do?” She wondered aloud, staring at her reflection. “What the fuck is going on?”
Another deep breath.
“What are five things you can see?” She cast her gaze around. “An empty gun… a sink, a bottle of bleach, and uh… a mirror…”
She rubbed her eyes.
“What are four things you can touch?” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “This isn’t working,”
She picked up the gun, put the magazine back in and cocked the slide forward. Still no ammunition, but maybe if she ended up in a bad situation she could at least threaten someone with it and they wouldn’t know there were no bullets. She took one last deep breath, hesitated at the door, and then finally pushed the supply closet door open and cautiously peaked out into the corridor. She looked left, and then right and seeing no one in either direction slipped out and eased the door closed as quietly as she could.
The ship shuddered and groaned around her. Her heart skipped a beat, and for a moment she thought something terrible was about to happen. When nothing did she took a deep breath and rubbed her eyes.
“Just dropping from slipspace,” She said, picking a direction at random and beginning to walk. “Not a big deal. It’s all good. Everything’s fine. Just going to shut down the reactor…”
The lights overhead dimmed, and then for a moment went out. The whole ship shook with the force of… well she couldn’t even really begin to guess what and then the lights flickered back on. She released a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding and rubbed her eyes again.
“This sucks,” She muttered. “This isn’t fair. Why is this my responsibility? I don’t even know what’s going on. I don’t even know who I am. Someone should be taking care of me. This is bullshit! You hear that?!”
She turned toward the ceiling.
“IT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!” She screamed at the lights. She regretted it a moment later when she heard her voice echoing down the corridors. She furtively looked in both directions, expecting some monstrous enemy to appear at any moment and tear her asunder. When none did she resumed walking.
“It’s fucking bullshit,” She repeated, voice just barely above a whisper.
The minutes began to tick by as she wandered the corridors, looking for something (anything really) that could help her figure out where she was and how she could find her way to engineering. Signs were the most prevalent, identifying corridors that were supposed to lead to engineering. She followed them as best she could, but often after a few forks and bends she’d find herself staring at a sealed bulkhead. Then she’d have to backtrack and try to find a way around and more often than not that would just end with her in a different part of the ship with no signs to follow.
She wasn’t sure how long she wandered like that. She had no way to mark the passage of time other than the periodic groans and moans as the ship entered and exited slipspace. Sometimes she’d feel another vibrating power surge between slipspace jumps, sometimes she wouldn’t. She hadn’t the foggiest idea what any of that might have meant.
She had to stop when the headache started getting bad again. It had eased up when she first left the storage room, but it had creeped its way back into her skull. It started in her neck, a dull throb that grew in intensity and slowly crept it’s way up to the base of her skull. There, it grew to a constant stabbing pain before finally lancing forward and settling behind her eyes with an ever growing intensity. She had to stop when the pain became dizzyingly intense and eased herself onto the floor with a groan. She covered her eyes with one arm, offering herself some small reprieve from the blindingly bright lights overhead.
It was hard to muster the willpower to continue when she felt like she was perpetually lost, her head felt like it was splitting in two, and all she really wanted was to find a quiet dark place and sleep for an eternity. But the screaming was there. Constant, omnipresent, growing in intensity… well maybe not the last one. She told herself she was just being paranoid. The screams weren’t getting louder; she was just paying more attention to them.
“Get up,” She told herself. “Get uuuuuuuuuuuuuup,”
She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself unsteadily to her feet. Keep going. Find engineering. She had to be getting close. It couldn’t be completely sealed off. Whoever it was wouldn’t have told her to shut down the reactor if there was no way to get to it…
She froze hearing the sound of footsteps ahead of her. She spun in a circle, looking for a room to duck into or an alcove to hide in. She came up empty, and then her mind went blank trying to think of something to do. She stood there, frozen in place as the footsteps got closer and then a man rounded the corner and began stalking down the hall toward her.
“Uh,” She said. “I was… that… um…” She stammered trying to think of something to say in her own defense. She fumbled for the gun in her pocket but it got caught and she was left cursing and desperately trying to get it out before…
He reached her, brown eyes bored into her…
And then he looked away and kept on walking. Her eyes followed him, slack jawed as he went. Did… did he know her? Is that why he didn’t question her presence? She nearly called out to him, asking if he knew her, or if he knew how to get to engineering.
Trust is a weakness,
She closed her mouth, watching him as he went down the corridor and disappeared around a corner. She swallowed, turned, and continued.
It felt like it could have been hours before she finally found some more signs pointing the way toward engineering, but at last she felt she was starting to make real progress. She was able to keep following the signs, only forced to stop as the ship periodically experienced those power surges which would turn out the lights and momentarily plunge the corridor into an impenetrable inky blackness. Her headache wasn’t improving, but at least she was getting somewhere.
At least she hoped she was.
She tried not to dwell on the screaming. It was hard, on account of she didn’t really have much else to think about, but when she thought about the screaming for too long she soon found herself wondering about some rather uncomfortable questions. Chief among them was where it could be coming from. It was always there, but even after what felt like hours of walking the screams hadn’t gotten any closer, nor had she come across anyone who might be responsible for it. The lone man she encountered was the only person she’d seen this whole time, and he definitely hadn’t been screaming.
Where were the screams coming from? Why couldn’t she drown them out?
She stopped for a moment to massage her temples and force those intrusive thoughts out of her mind. She was only going to psyche herself out thinking too hard about the screaming. She had a job to do. No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t just run back to the closet she’d woke up in and wait the whole nightmare out.
No matter how much she wished she could.
She passed one more person just before she finally found her way to engineering. The encounter played out almost identically to the previous one, albeit she didn’t try to pull a gun on him. He appeared, she stopped walking, and he passed her by with nothing but a glare in her direction. It was creepy and unsettling, but having finally made it to engineering she decided not to dwell on it.
She stepped inside and took a deep breath before glancing around. She walked the perimeter of the room, looking at walls full of switches, dials, gauges, and displays showing a variety of readings and data. She tried to take it all in, reading some of the neatly printed labels as well as a few that seemed to have been made with red marker on masking tape. Those gave her pause. She squinted at them, comparing them to scrawls on her lyric insert. Some of the labels seemed to share the same handwriting. She pondered that for a moment before deciding she didn’t really know what the significance of that might be. Whoever had written the instructions must have worked in engineering she supposed… but then why was it up to her to shut down the reactor? Shouldn’t they have done it themselves?
She sighed for the umpteenth time and rubbed her eyes. The labels, switches, and dials all meant nothing to her. The labels may as well have been written in a foreign language for all the good they were going to do her. One more sigh and then she looked down at the lyric sheet and began following the instructions.
“Find master control,” She mumbled aloud as she began her circuit around the perimeter of the room again. “Master flow control… is that the same as master control?”
She read the next part of the instructions and when none of the switches or dials it mentioned were present on the panel she decided it wasn’t. Back on the circuit, it wasn’t until she had reached the other side of the room that she finally found master control. She nodded and then moved on. Flip some switches, turn a knob, get down on your hands and knees and unplug the safety module from the underside of the panel. It was clearly labeled, and the plug came out with little resistance…
An alarm began blaring, a loud rhythmic klaxon that started so suddenly she jumped and smashed her head into the underside of the panel. She muttered a curse and scrambled back to her feet. It took her a moment to find a screen on the panel, which helpfully informed her the alarm was due to the safety module being unplugged. She pressed the ‘clear’ button several times, and while the warning vanished from the screen the alarm continued to sound.
“Shit,” She muttered. “Shit, shit, shit,”
She wasted several minutes trying to find a way to silence the alarm before someone heard and came to investigate. In retrospect, that was a mistake. She probably could have completed the rest of the instructions before the man from the hallway showed up to see what the commotion was about. She could have shut down the reactor and avoided everything that happened next.
But she was dumb, and what precious few minutes she had she wasted looking for a way to silence the alarm.
She managed to actually get the gun out of her pocket when the man came into engineering, even managed to point it at him and give some vaguely threatening instruction for him not to move. He paid no attention to her, entirely unphased by the gun in her hand or her insistence that she would use it. She wasn’t sure she would have. Even if there had been bullets to shoot she wasn’t sure she was the kind of person to gun a man down.
Although, she supposed she hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of person she was.
He grabbed hold of the gun in her hand, and without a word slammed the palm of his hand into her chest. It all happened so fast. She barely registered he had grabbed the gun before his palm hit her chest, forced the air from her lungs, and sent her sprawling to the ground gasping for breath. She tried to get her feet back under her and run while he expertly dropped the magazine, yanked back the slide, and upon confirming the gun was unloaded tossed it aside. She managed to get to her knees before he grabbed her with two hands and began dragging her toward the door.
She shrieked, squirmed, and managed to wriggle out of her coat. In the moments that followed he stared at the now empty coat in his hands, momentarily perplexed by the lack of a human occupying it, before he cast is aside, turned on his heel and started after her. She desperately searched the engineering room for a wrench, or a crowbar, or anything at all she could use as a makeshift weapon. She came up empty handed, turned, and threw a punch into the man’s face.
Pain blossomed across her hand. It felt like punching a wall… or at least it felt like what she imagined punching a wall would feel like. No give, just solid unmovable flesh and bone. He retaliated in kind and once more she found herself on the floor, this time with stars dancing across her vision and tears coming unbidden to her eyes.
Broken nose will do that, A voice at the back of her head said with a mirthless chuckle.
She managed to scramble away from him before he grabbed her again, trying to blink the tears out of her eyes.
You’re really making a mess of this, The voice commented. Not so good at the fighting thing are you?
She shook her head, trying to divide her attention between staunching the blood flowing from her nostrils and keep away from the silent man pursuing her.
I could help you with all this, The voice went on. All you have to do is let go. Let someone actually good at violence take over,
He grabbed hold of her again, this time with a vice grip around her arm. She flailed against him a few times, in a fruitless attempt to get him to release her.
Just let go, The voice purred. Close your eyes and let me help you…
She choked on a glob of blood and squeezed her eyes closed.
Help me.
She opened her eyes and the man was at her feet in a crumpled bloody heap. She stared down at him and then at the blood covered ball peen hammer in her hand. She let go of it, dropping it on the ground with a loud clatter. The blood wasn’t just on the hammer, it was on her arms, face… all over her. She started to feel her breath coming in short sharp gasps again. She had no memory of the hammer, or the killing she had used it to brutally commit. How could that be possible? How did you just… just…
Just what?
Forget?
Probably the same way you forgot everything about yourself.
She brought her hands halfway to her eyes, remembered they were covered in someone else’s blood, and then let out a wordless cry of anguish. She took a few deep breaths and blinked more tears from her eyes.
“Okay,” She said. “Okay, okay… shut down the reactor. Shut it down. That’s why you’re here,”
She moved back to the master control panel, and grabbed hold of the lyric insert. She took a few more deep breaths, steadying her frayed nerves to try and make sense of the instructions.
“Okay,” She said. “Find… rod control…”
She began looking over dials and readouts, reading faded labels aloud to try and keep focused.
“Rod control…” She said finally finding it. “Okay so the next step is…” She muttered, turning back to the lyric sheet.
Only then she was falling.
Or… maybe falling wasn’t the right word for it. Falling implied movement. Rapid movement at that. There wasn’t any movement in the moment that followed her turn to the lyric sheet. It felt almost like she had lost time again. Like she’d closed her eyes and opened them to find a dead man at her feet and a bloody hammer in her hand.
Only she hadn’t closed her eyes. She wasn’t even sure she had blinked. She just turned, and then everything around her was gone. She was in the dark, surrounded by an infinite expanse of nothing. For a moment, she thought the lights may have just gone out again… but when she tried to fumble for the panel there was nothing there. She tried to sit, but there was no floor to sit on. She was just…
Just what?
Untethered, The voice supplied. Untethered in a room without walls. I think that’s from a song…
“Who are you?”
Who are you?
“Why are you doing this?”
I’m not doing anything,
“What’s happening?”
I know as much as you do love,
She brought her hands to her face. She didn’t care about the blood. She covered her eyes, pressed her fingers into them and tried to focus on anything but the absurd hopelessness of her waking nightmare.
“This isn’t fair,”
The voice didn’t answer that time and left her alone in the infinite expanse of the empty void. If she had thought time was hard to track before, then it was impossible now. There was nothing in the void to mark its passage. Hell, for all she knew time didn’t even exist here. Maybe she was dead. Maybe this is what death was like, just infinite nothing until you decided you were ready to stop existing.
She sighed, holding her hands at her sides and staring at what may have been the sky in this place.