Cook

Steven Cook

Doctor Professor Thomas Balasz

English 376, Fiction Workshop

February 12, 2010

Workshop I

WORD COUNT GOES HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERE!

Approaching Light Speed: An Astronaut Tale

Life went as we slept, dreamless. Three thousand years since we depart from

Earth, I wake up in the Kubrick Fault to learn humanity is dead. My wife and I are now

the only living things to crawl from a planet popping and churning in its own ambitious

muck.

She has yet to hear the pop and whirr of that machine releasing her from the cold

of frozen motion. I should not tell her that our world is gone. I’ll tell her that the

transmitting signals got lost bouncing around the stars, losing track of our ship. We went

even too far for the information to travel. Somewhere our planet’s history is being found

by otherworldly anthropologists, and they will pour over our lives in attempt to make

sense of it. It is not our job anymore; leave it to them.

Earth never found life in the stars, though. Beyond our own terrain, we were,

after the struggle, evolution, and revolutions, alone.

Pop. Whirr. I leave the faltering screen for the birth room. I pull a chair next to

my wife’s Zoe. Her eyes are open and have been open for all this time. The machine is

a lead sphere on three stilts. Motion is pulled from my wife by a large gyroscope

spinning around her within the Zoe, pulling out her potential energy and transforming it
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into stored energy for the ship. All we are not, all we never did, powers the ship. As

potential energy falls away from slowing mechanical joints, it returns toward the center.

Her impossibly still arms once again move, slowly at first. Through a window of thick,

plastic glass in the Zoe, between slowing arms of the gyroscope, I watch her head fall to

the right, before her chin moves once again upwards, her skullcap resting on the back

wall. Then she lets go of a deep breath. When she sees me through the square window,

between the blue light of the Zoe, she smiles. The machine stops, the circular hatch

opens, and the blue light fades.

There are no words to greet someone after so long. Once upright she immediately

tumbles over, propelled by the speed of her own standing. I catch her fall and set her on

the ground, checking for dying flesh or cold muscles. “You’re not used to motion. The

Zoe must have slowed too fast.” That’s how I greet her.

It’s been fifteen minutes taking away the unremembered sleep for me and no time

at all for her. Proper voiced, “One minute there were all those people, checking blood

pressure, making notes. Then, I felt a punch like it came from inside my head. And, and

now I‘m here.”

“You’re dazed.”

“I have a headache.”

“Yeah, we’ll need a natural rest.” I lift her. “Give our bodies time to get used to

the speed.”

“How fast?”

“One fifth light speed.” We talk business, all grandeur taken from the moment. I

hoped for embraces and tears. This is good, too. We’ll sleep.
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She sat down in the core of the Zoe across from me. The others scrambled around

us. They told us to let go of all the air in our lungs. They fastened skullcaps on us. Her

hair pokes out from under her cap and is the color of a cat that I found under my house

when I was young. I tried to keep her until one morning I found her rolled over at the

foot of my bed. Her furry side raising and falling. I lifted her, and she was a sack of

water like the ones my father had me walk five miles to fetch from the county FEMA

camp, all the way home,, through the refugee quarter. My cat’s eyes are like that water I

brought home. Clear, but tinged an artificial blue. My wife watched me as her pod

closed. She breathed in deeply, and I wait for her to exhale, but she won‘t. Her blue eyes

keep mine.

I wake up before her and follow the stairs down to the computer that monitors our

speed. In the Kubrick Fault, our ship should be able to move in a path curving against the

spinning of the Universe without running into any debris. At the rate we are currently

accelerating, we should equal light speed in three twenty-four hour cycles. I make a note

of this, and I don’t know who the note is for. I need to keep up appearances. She would

think it strange if I were to lose scientific rigor. The note is for her.

She is now at the foot of the stairs, rubbing her eyes. “Can we open the door

yet?” She motions toward the biodeck. She knows we can open it. I had been waiting

for her, wanting to see her face when we see what lies beyond that small, air-tight, carbon

steel door.

The biodeck was her idea. The company we got funding from had just invented a
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rudimentary terraforming seed. Placing one in a massive enclosure, apart from man,

would be the “ultimate experiment in evolutionary science!” she told them. She asked

for her and I to set the seed before we left the orbiter. The biodeck was then an

impossible cavern with plain steel walls. We saw only by two electric torches. We wore

masks as to not inhale the toxic fumes in the seed. I watched the lines that rippled from

the sides of that black mask, unable to be contained. She asked me to flip the switch of

the seed. When I did, nothing happened. I shone my light to her face, not thinking, but

the smile could still be inferred.

“Breathable air,” I say looking at a line graph on a screen I can’t help from

flickering. “Evolution must have accelerated.”

She is already dressed in a kevlar utility suit. It had dawned upon her. She carries

weight under her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She’s not only far away from her

life by space but by time. She says, “I’m opening the door. You got to push the switch, I

get to open the door. That was the deal.” It wasn’t, but she can have this.

The door doesn’t swing open dramatically. It is stuck by so long’s wait for

opening. She asks me to help her. I take hold of the handle with both fists over her’s,

and we push. Tentacles of indigo vine pull and break through the growing crack between

the door and wall. She looks up at me, never letting go of the handle, and there’s no trace

of alone left in her.

She opens the door wide enough to sidestep into, but more vines block her. We

push against packed vines. She leaves the room and returns with knives, and we dig

upwards, creating a staircase of platforms. We reach light a ninth of the way through the
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biodeck.

In the sky, there is a sky. Low hanging clouds formed in the cavern. Behind

those clouds, light moved as if oil floating in water. Light dips in the dozens,

independent of each other, between the indigo vines emerging from violet trunks. We

climb up the deep topsoil of maddening, indigo tentacles, finding our balance on the

unsettled surface. The air is alive and disruptive like static. Light emanating from above

the sky is refracted by clouds, creating an ever-shifting hue upon all it bounces from.

And there is her, changed in this new world. She is natural. Her hair is free from her

skullcap. I wish that I could feel what she feels, natural wind touching her scalp. I can

feel it blowing on me now, but I want to know all that she is feeling and not myself. Be

something outside of my body. I want to not be contained in this skin.

I have gun drawn and am scowling like on the cover of a sci-fi paperback.

Making first contact. All my childhood dreams are coming true. I see rustling in the

upper vines and blast cavalier into a general direction. I’m a hero on a distant planet

seeking life. Bring me monsters. Bring me strange alien races. I am Buck Rogers.

The foliage becomes dense with trunks and the surface is rising. I climb the steep

hill. Fingers strangle vine as I move vertically through the canopy. My gun swings

below me in its holster. This area is dark and no lights comes here. In the pitch black, I

can’t see where I’m going, but I must know what’s on the other side of this. It could all

continue on to a larger mountain, from the top of which, I could see everything: the

station from where we launched, the church I married in, my parents home before the

flood. I might peak over these clouds to where the light calls home, below me new rivers
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and life. I throw my hands high and feel cold metal. I reach higher and the steel doesn’t

end. It is flat and artificial.

I find her kneeled at the foot of a trunk. Her hands are full of green-blue pulp.

“They don’t depend on soil. There is probably no base soil here at all! It’s all just vines

stemming from larger vines. What if it all came out of the seed, that the seed is just at the

heart of one impossibly large plant?” She couldn’t look happier, and I don’t know how to

respond. She continues, “Did you find anywhere with a lot of those flying lights?”

This time through the woods, I don’t pretend to be anyone. We arrive at the

clearing and the flying lights are strange. They hover over vines and eat them, burning

through the plants. “Their ecosystem formed moving at a ninth light speed. Maybe

they’re more equipped for this speed, turning into almost pure energy to survive.” The

lights are out in such droves that all is lit from nearly all sides by white light.

“You’re quite the persistent worker.” We were laying at the edge of the clearing,

cradled in vines. She could never stop talking about her offspring, the lights and the

vines. We drink rainwater that has pooled in a dense patch near where we lay cradled by

vines, at the edge of the clearing.

“And you are not. You’ve done nothing but stomp around like a kid in dress-up.”

“Do you know who the Flash is?”

“Red and yellow? Runs fast?”

“That’s him. He could move faster than light. One time, death came for him, and

he turned away from death and started running. He even outran death itself. But before

he could, he ran through all of time. He ran straight through to the end of time, into the
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beginning, then back to when he began. He also once moved faster than instantly.”

“Do you think that’s what will happen? We move faster than instantly?

“I don’t know. That’s the joy of it, right?” The lights quit feeding here and move

on to a new area in one jump. They leave before a beat can pass, and we’re in twilight.

The lights are all gone but for a few above the sky. “Call it a night?” I ask.

“I guess we’d have to, but I’m going to look a bit longer. You go ahead and wash

up.” I walk to our hole in the ground and climb down into the dark. The tunnel walls

feel moist.

I’m in the steel-walled wash room. My shower is done. All the blue-green pulp

has been washed from my creases, and I see my reflection, a clean man. He has too

many wrinkles on his forehead. His nose is a bulb. Receding brown hair and reddening

skin. All these things make and contain me.

Over the intercom comes a recorded message, “Approaching light speed.” I try to

process this. I was supposed to have two more days. I barely begin to understand, but

everything lurches and goes dark.

I am on my hands and knees and the floor is shaking. She is in the biodeck. I

scramble in the pitch black, unfamiliar room. The doorknob is vibrating with the rest of

the ship. I flail in failing to find steps. Swing open the biodeck door, and I see a room

overcome with living lights and all vines devoured. I can’t find her. She’s supposed to

be in the biodeck. Then, it moves through me feeling terrible and right. The front of the

ship explodes and the everything is thrown backwards.

My back falls into the back wall of the birth room. She is in her Zoe. Blood is
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motionless as it dances from her nose. I am looking in at her, slamming the emergency

eject, and the door won’t eject. A scream like metal scrapes my mind. I crush my eyelids

down and I’m in the bedroom, with my wrinkles, nose, hair, and skin.

The next day arrives and I won’t tell her. I wanted to call it madness, trying to

shut my eyes for long enough to call sleep. It was a dream, or maybe I hit my head in the

shower. That drop of blood held like a planet in the space between the window and her

face, a red world for her to watch.

She has filled two detailed, organized notebooks by morning. I’m afraid of those

notebooks written for a readership that won’t come. I find her asleep amongst the vines.

The vines had grown wildly, stretching over her and tying her down. She wakes up as I

try to free her, laughing while I’m ripping sickly violet vines. They snap and squeak,

sometimes dropping a thick, sticky nectar. I’m digging for a tumor beneath sinew and

muscle. I carefully remove her from the meat of vines and she had never stopped

laughing. Hair tumbles from roots, drawn out by static.

She is sitting beneath a tree and I’m hoping her cells aren’t degenerating. “Have

you felt sick?”

“Maybe a little weak…” She is feeling a bald spot on her scalp. “What do you

think is wrong?”

“This electric environment is acting like chemo. I think you’d feel better if you

got out for a bit.”

She doesn’t like hearing that. “Then help me get to bed.”

Her arms are on my shoulder and I’m reminded of my first funeral. It was

for my grandfather, and I was a pallbearer. The funeral was closed casket and I could
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pretend that no one was inside that wooden box. But while carrying it, I felt weight shift.

The body rolled toward me. I was the one too weak to carry the weight.

Her eyes stayed open for so long, never shutting across a million years. There

was a screen across from her pod that showed measurements of energy being pulled from

our potential movement. A green and red light flash on it every five minutes. She saw it

all, though she didn’t know. The eye had been receiving the light for so long, wasting her

potential motion. She had been losing life for so long by red and green flashes. She

misses a step and her weight rolls onto me.

She is now laying down and her eyes are melons peaking from rustled plastic

bags. I ask, “Do you ever think everything is wrong with everything?”

“What?”

“That if everything were in balance, then there would be no life. If things were as

they should be, they’d be singular. But long ago, something must have disrupted that

singular unity. Even one extra atom sends everything into spinning, evolving, mutating

chaos. Do you think that everything has been wrong from the start?” I’m bringing her

food and water. She never looks content staying here.

“Sometimes it feels like that, and I guess it makes some sense. But then other

times it feels so wonderful, like falling asleep in the vines.”

“But the vines could have killed you.”

“Still felt wonderful falling asleep in them.”

We fall asleep on the mattress, but I wake and visit the biodeck. Vines have

begun to feel the tunnell. The sky over our hole has turned night, so I lay down and

watch the last light above the clouds dart around. As he moves, light is bounced through
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the clouds, changing from red to orange to yellow to green…

I wake up and she is wrapped around me and vines are wrapped around her. She

had not been able to stay in the grey metal of the rest of the ship. Here the color is alive,

and we are tied into it. I don’t want to be saved from it. I want the vines to swallow us

whole and we could die unified and singular.

My idea, the reason the ship was built, was to exceed light speed. I want to not be

contained in this slow universe. We could, I hope, cut through this universe into a new

one. It could be a populated universe where one couldn’t travel a single light year

without finding some sentient life sitting on planets suspended in space as if from an

infant’s mobile.

She wakes up and tells me the data from Earth should all be received by now. She

had checked the download’s progress before coming into the biodeck while I slept. She

asks me to cut us loose from the vines and I do. She is strong enough today to walk

through the vines on her own. I pause for a moment inside my crater in the vines and

watch her move to our hole, balancing on the vines. I can’t think of any way to stop her.

If she knows then I can’t pretend that it’s a nightmare I had after waking from freeze. I

follow her, because I have nothing else to do. Before we descend into the tunnel, I ask

her to look at me. She is afraid of her own health, but is still happy. She shines like

everything else in here. I kiss her, and I taste the living static in her lungs.

She is sitting before the flickering screen, ready to absorb everything in one pull.

I put the wire into the plug in her nose that leads data into her frontal lobe. She wants

this, so she presses “Transfer.”

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At first it all seemed well. Then the blood began to fall from her nose. Her eyes

never shut. A weak body and a faulty machine. I am alone. If I had told her…

Her body will decompose and then the universe will no longer know her face. It

will no longer know any face like hers. Just this one, just mine. Don’t they understand,

that all of them who die, their weight is passed to me and I can’t carry all this weight.

They’re all selfish. To cease their movement is failing. There is nothing without

movement. We could all just live like light, passing through everything and never dying.

I take her body like water to the Zoe. I lay her inside and shut the pod for good. The

blood is falling lower on her lip. The arms of the gyroscope begin to move, and her eyes

are keeping mine. The blood is frozen in its dance. Light flickers and then is gone when

the ship lurches. I hold onto both sides of her Zoe, watching her face in the blue light.

Over the intercom comes a prerecorded voice, “Approaching light speed.” I could climb

into my pod and this time not close my eyes either, and stay forever there, watching the

green and red lights and her.

I feel sick as time begins to bend. Mass attempting to go this speed against the

curve of the universe will hit a barrier of non-existence that attempts to send mass

backwards through time. We had hoped it would, but the ship can not handle it. The ship

is shaking as it falls apart not through space but time.

“Light speed achieved.” I look at her and ask what I should do. My atoms and

strings vibrate, becoming pure energy. She stays the same. Blood hovers up from the

tip of her nose, stopping when it becomes a sphere, four inches from her wide open eyes.

If I move forward through the ship that is moving at the speed of light, then I am moving

faster. A wormhole may be made by my motion, and I would travel through it. If I could
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choose a world to find myself on, it would be hers, under the blue sun of her iris. I’d

swim through her blood, inhabit her blood, a fraction of her being.

On the other side of the door is myself, caught in soft time, seeing things I

shouldn’t see. On the other side of me are the lights that ate all the vines just to hold onto

some hope of retaining enough energy, enough vibrancy, to run from death.

I open the door and move. My body has lost humanity now. I pass through

myself, feeling terrible and right. All of the flying lights move slow and I burn through

them. It’s all too slow, all of it. My flesh is too slow so I destroy it, splitting every atom

to create energy to propel me on. I feel them all pop and burn and I am so happy to not

be weighed down. I want to be the light that fell upon her face and the tingling on her

scalp. I want to be you as you felt happiness for the first time, and the first time you saw

blood pour from yourself. I want to know everything that pierces through us.

Everything! Everything in me and me in everything. The ship is pushed back into time

behind me, it is all too slow now. I am bodiless and free to tear through this space and

turn it inside out within me. I want to hold the child I could never conceive and brush the

hair from his forehead on the first day of school. I want to know the feeling of putting a

needle into yourself and all troubles melting away. I want to consume it all and be

singular. I think we wanted this. Everything in the spinning universe leading to now. We

made it and we don’t have to feel alone anymore. It will all be born within me as it dies.

I want to be light; I want to be light.

The end.