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“In space, no one can hear you scream” is an often-used tagline for my kind of work. It stems from one of the classical xenophobic flat flicks, dating almost three centuries back. It’s a lie. In space, everyone can hear you scream. If they care. All you need is an operating transmitter unit. You can turn the dial to an unused frequency and scream all you want. That signal will spread out from your sender and go around the entire galaxy at 300,000 kilometers per second, the speed of light. Sooner or later, someone is bound to listen to that exact frequency when the signal passes. The universe is just too vast to think that it couldn’t happen. I like to do that, sometimes. Flip the frequency to something between the cosmic microwave radiation and the normal communication channels. And then I just talk. I talk about life, death, how lonely and horny I am after several months in solitude – it’s become a kind of therapy for me. The radio just sits there, listens carefully to everything I have to say to it, and it never ever talks back. My name is Marvin Darwin. I have anything from thirty seconds to two minutes before I am no longer the sole member of lunar science research team five. Do you have time to listen to me?
Humanity #8: Damn, it’s cold out here. The low temperature makes my throat constrict and I choke. Perhaps I am too weak. I should clear my mind. Perhaps I should think about things I learned at school. Earth’s atmosphere consists of 78% Nitrogen and 21% Oxygen. The surface pressure is 1014 millibar and the average temperature is 288 Kelvin. Measured around equator, the earth has a radius of 6378 km. Around the poles, it’s 6356 km. Earth is the third of the eight planets in the Sol system. It has one moon, Luna, which orbits in a distance of 0,3633 times ten to the power of six kilometers at perigee and 0,4055 at apogee. The atmosphere of the moon is barely existent. The surface pressure at night is three times ten to the power of minus fifteen. Helium 4, Neon 20, Hydrogen 2 and Argon 40 make up over 90% of the lunar atmosphere. 90% of nearly nothing is nothing to brag about. The entire lunar atmosphere has a combined mass of less than 25,000 kilograms. There are vehicles on Earth that outweigh that. Seriously. There’s nothing out there. Just space. But a lot of space, if you look at it that way. On the bottom of the sheet, the last line was printed in bold and italics. “Candidates should be comfortable with enclosed areas and solitude.” Indeed they should. Indeed, when you think about what the position entailed. Lunar research of the unmonitored areas of Luna. For “Lunar research” , read “control and maintain scientific equipment” . For “unmonitored areas”, read “dark side”. For me, read “didn’t exactly read everything in small writing”. I mean, I’m a social guy. I like to hang out with my friends and be around a lot of people every now and then. I’m not the type that feels more comfortable around machines than people. So why the hell did the psychological evaluation pick me for two seasons in the blot? The blot, that’s what we call the black spot. Black because the tiny base is situated on the “dark side” of the moon, and spot because that’s how it looks when you land. A single lone ray of light sent out from the landing pad is the only thing that greets you when you arrive in sub-spatial orbit. And then you think “God, am I going to have to live twelve months in that little spot?” It’s not a spot, they tell you. It’s the blot. The last two weeks before you go off, you spend a lot of time with the veterans. The people that have already been there and done that. They explain how the equipment work, what problems you should be aware of and the most important thing of all -they tell you how they managed to come through it all. A woman of forty or thereabouts, Chazer Hubbard, told me she took up singing. She had never sung in her entire life before, but then she had to find a hobby. The work only takes three or four hours a day. Say you spend two or three hours daily on food and hygiene. Even if you sleep eight hours a day, that still leaves nine or ten hours in which you have to do something, to avoid going mad. Chazer picked singing. She filled half her luggage with recordings of famous singers and how-to books. The dummy’s guide to eight-octave singing. La Boheme for beginners. She brought everything she could find, and even that wasn’t enough. I think she told me that she had read every book at least three times. At the end of the season, she had developed a wonderful alt-voice along with a bipolar psychosis. The doctors said that she would have done better if she’d picked a hobby that didn’t require an audience. For the last three months, she wanted to have someone to hear her sing, and when she finally returned to base, she developed stagefright in front of strangers. Remember, she hadn’t been around live people in six months. That’s why she slit her wrists with a scalpel. Oh, when I said “she told me”, I naturally mean “the debriefing tapes told me”. Chazer killed herself over ten years ago, long before I even knew I was going into space for a living. Hers wasn’t the only case of post-blottal suicide. No one has actually bought it in the blot itself so far. They always wait until they return, as if the only thing keeping them alive is the job satisfaction. Then it ends, and they have to adjust to other people the same way the adjusted to solitude one or two seasons earlier. A lot make it, a lot don’t. Then there are the ones that can’t really make up their minds and spend the rest of their lives in reclusive, not seeking human companionship beyond that which is strictly necessary. The blot really changes you. There’s no other way to put it. The Strategic division wants me to keep an look out for alien forces. They are subscribing to the paranoiac illusion that suggests invaders can creep up on us in the shadow of the moon. The Scientific division, sub-department geology, wants me to see how different metals react with the near-zero temperature and space debris on the dark side of the moon. The exact same experiments are conducted on three other locations, all with different exposure to the sun. I am the control group of darkness and light. The Scientific division, sub-department astronomy, wants me to take a lot of photos from my position, undisturbed by other light sources. The best shots of the universe are taken from the blot. Everybody thinks that the blot is a necessary evil, except for the people that are sent there. During the second month, the dreariness and monotony of the work has long since convinced you that these menial tasks could be performed by any number of mindless droids. You tell this to your superiors during each weekly contact, but they never seem to care. Why should they listen to someone with a 50% likelihood of suicide? Perhaps they think it’s too expensive. Everything around and concerning the blot feels like it’s running on a paper-budget in an eternal state of recession. Travel to and from the blot is restricted to a three-day slot every six months, when the alignment of the planets makes the journey possible in as little fuel as possible. Communication with the other world is in theory guaranteed 24/7 by small cluster of satellites at LaGrange point L2. That very same theory did not compute that the satellites were to be built by the cheapest builder. They most certainly did not compute that they were the cheapest because they left half of the advanced electronic guidance system out, causing the stabilisation rockets to misfire at the drop of a feather. Naturally, all of this was not known when they were launched. After it became apparent, the builder was sued and the Lunar-Science division became creditor number two hundred and twelve of the three thousand other creditors in the great Leyland-Yutani bankruptcy. The already paper-thin budget hadn’t any more resources and the only thing that provides blot/base contact is the very last of the LY satellites, number 533. 533 had a failed launch from the very start, and neglected to find the LaGrange point it was designed They claim everything is going to become more efficient now that it’s called StarGazers. I doubt it. One organisation supersedes another, and the only thing that separates them is the colour of their insignias. Sooner or later, everything gravitates back into the time-honoured way of doing things. Progress by patience. If you just try enough crazy stuff, you’re bound to find something that is useful sooner or later. Take this CHON-food, for instance. Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen particles combine to form cheap, nutritious food. Easy to produce and store. The invention gave Dr. Harland Grave the Nobel Peace Prize almost seventy years ago. It practically eradicated hunger from the face of the earth. And yet I’m told it was a fluke. Grave worked in the research department of a best-selling softdrink beverage company. He was trying to find something that could be dirt cheap, taste sweet and still be low on nutrition value when he came up with CHON, the diametrical opposite. The only problem with CHON is that it tastes…. Yeeecckkkk. Like freeze-dried llama droppings on rye bread. The CHON usually comes in these pseudo-flour packages, and you can do anything with it as you can with real flour. You can even mix it with water and add some flavouring to produce something faintly reminiscent of milkshake. But by itself, it’s gruesome. It swells in your mouth and you find yourself unable to swallow the bitter, fudgy mass. All the artificial flavouring in the world can’t remove the consistence of CHON. That’s why only people who are starving will eat it without complaining. However, if you’re going for a six-months trip, there is very little other food that would do the trick, so you grit your teeth and try not to think of the fact that the faux orange smoothie is partly your offal from yesterday, fed to the CHON producer yet again for god knows how many times. All waste products are carefully filtered and recycled. As perfect a system as it gets. God, I’m sick of CHON by now. Every now and then, the blot gets the best of me. That’s when I turn on the radio and talk to space in absentia autre persona. It feels therapeutic. I tell myself that I am never going to be Chazer Hubbard. I’m not going to overdose on tranquilisers or open up my veins. I’m just going to sit and talk to all the nonexistent green men out there instead. I tell them everything, you know? I tell them of what I think of StarGazers, what I think of the blot, what I think of life in general. All the details from my single one-night stand. What I dreamt when I ejaculated last month. A beautiful woman with full lips, dressed in a pale white dress to give her this ethereal quality. Silent she stood before me, motioning me with one finger to come towards her. I took a tentative first step, and then another, and yet another. I was almost touching her when I felt this tut-tut feeling in my groin, it being my throbbing testicles, pumping out semen. I awoke, and found myself bathed in sweat, the skin on my stomach warm and sticky. She was beautiful. I wish I knew her name, was my first thought upon waking. Never mind that she was a construct of my own mind, interpolating all the attractive qualities from women I have known. I honestly just wanted to know her name, so that I wouldn’t feel so guilty for having cum thinking of someone I didn’t know the name of. It must be the flawed one-night stand, I told myself. All of this is repressal. When you are dreaming, your mind is defragging your brain. It gives you short, random nuggets of sensation when it moves things from your short to long-term memory. Dreams don’t have to mean anything at all. But they can. Everything falls apart. The satellites in the wobbly LaGrange points, the 533 orbiting in 100km altitude, the CHON producer – everything will fall apart, given enough time. Measured on a galactic scale, humanity has only been in vogue for the last nanosecond or so. A billion years from now on, the sun will have exhausted all of its supply of hydrogen, and there won’t be any source of heat to support the core against the pull of gravity anymore. The core of Sol will be compressed by the gravity until it reaches a high enough density to start burning helium to carbon. Meanwhile, the outer envelope will expand and Sol will evolve into a red giant. At this stage, the outer corona will be as far away as Jupiter. Everything inside that orbit will be annihilated in a red mass of gaseous fire. Mercury, Venus, Terra, Mars, Jupiter – All destroyed. The tower of Eiffel, the Sphinx, the library of Alexandria, Mount Rushmore and Niagara Falls -likewise swept away as dust by a damp cloth. The red giant phase of the Sun will only last a few tens of thousands of years, in which it will lose mass in a powerful wind. Eventually, the sun will have lost all of the mass that made up the envelope, and the only thing left will be a hot core of carbon, imbedded in a nebula of expelled gas. Radiation from this hot core will ionise the nebula to produce a colourful spectacular planetary nebula. This nebula will probably be observed on the other side of the galaxy, much like we’ve observed all the other nebulas out there in our brief stint in existence. Eventually, the carbon will cool off and it’ll form a white dwarf, the hyperdense and dim remnant of a once bright star. If not already, then from that point on, everything will seem trivial. There will be nothing left of our civilisation. Nothing to ever say that we lived. Doesn’t life feel senseless when you think about that? This numbing, anestetical feeling that nothing is important in the long run creeps up on you and before you know it, you sit there in your lethargy, unable or unwilling to move your feet because in a billion years, none of this will matter. In a billion years. People that stop caring because of something that is going to happen in a billion years would have stopped anyway. They just needed the excuse. In a billion years, society will be incomprehensible, seen with our eyes. In the short span of 30,000 years, mankind has already climbed from savagery to interstellar travel. The learning curve is logarithmic. Who knows what we’re capable of achieving in a billion years? We could build a Dyson sphere. The mass of Jupiter alone is enough to give us a shell with one meter thickness. Then we’d be able to harness all the energy of the sun, by building a sphere to envelop it, the radius stretching to Mars’ orbit. From the outside, our solar system would look like a dull, red throbbing giant. Perhaps the alien scientists would look at it and think that the sun was going belly-up. But honestly, in a billion years – the devil may care. Predictions makes your head hurt. There are just too many variables to be aware of. I wonder why I sit here again, and then I hit myself for having forgotten. “So, Mr. Darwin, Sir. It has come to our attention that your erstwhile fiancee fell in love with your best friend and best man to be and chucked you rather unceremonial head over ass out of the flat, if I might be so bold as to express it in that a manner. Similarly, your bank statements haven’t been printed in black letters for half a year now, and your parents participated in a popular reality television show and have been eaten by a shark. The broadcasting company rejects all responsibility, but has agreed to cover half of the costs of the funeral. Would you be interested in spending some time in seclusion, far away from society at large? It would be very lonely. That’s appreciated, you say? Well, how about we make this for twelve months instead of six, then. Excellent. I knew you were just the man for us when I read your résumé, Mr. Darwin. The shuttle leaves in a fortnight, have a good trip, Mr. Darwin, Sir.” Woop-de-fucking-doo. I wonder who the girl is again. Perhaps she’s the product of my repressed urge of reproduction. Five months will do that to you. She doesn’t look like Doreen, Miana, Siv or any of the girls I have been intimate with. Well, there was this one-night stand, but I was drunk and awful, and that doesn’t really matter. I would be hard pressed to give out anything but hair colour about her. She had a dido piercing? I wouldn’t have known, subdued from this world by careful appliance of high-grade C2H5OH as I was on that particular night. Was it night? I don’t know. It was during that brief fortnight between I signed the contract and got into the shuttle for the blot. The Foundation was kind enough to advance me half of my salary, to let me take care of unpaid bills and generally drug myself into oblivion. There was this bar. I distinctly remember this bar. Was it a part of the front base on the moon, or in Phuket? Could have been Amsterdam or Grand Rapids for that matter. If you look at the world from within a darkly-lit smoky cellar that doubles as a cheap bar of ill repute, none of the countries in the world matters. They are all alike. The same peeling wallpaper, the same watered drinks, and the same semi-frozen pupils of the girls that sit on your laps and wants you to buy them champagne. Blonde, I think she was blonde. Not really sure if it was bottle-blonde or the real deal. I remember talking to her, not what I talked about, but just that I talked to her. Then I went home with her and after that, my memory of the events starts to fade. The next morning, I awoke alone in my hotel room, and the Foundation was knocking on my door, eager to send me off into space. They say approaching the blot for the first time is something akin to a birth-trauma. I’m sad to report that the approach didn’t do anything for me at all, but that could naturally be connected to the sizable hangover that circulated around in my body. I tried to still my queasy stomach with CHON, which proved to be a bad idea. Bad as in general failure. Bad as in not good. Bad as in running around, looking for the toilet with my right hand clamped over my mouth, trying to keep the regurgitated contents of my acerbic stomach from spilling out. No wonder I didn’t find the toilet. How many people would have thought “Oh, the toilet must be the hole on the right from where I get my food, since this is a recycling system and all?” Well, yes. Perhaps the ones that read the in-flight pamphlet or the introduction handbook for stellar living. So I was drunk. Sue me. In a billion years, the brown blotched stains on the ground where I vomited won’t matter, anyway. Over my head, the 533 spins around, completing a full orbit in 118 minutes at 100km altitude. 59 minutes between each brief period which I can transmit messages back and forth to the outside world. The moon spins on its own axis in perfect correspondence with its orbit around the earth, so that the same side always faces Earth. I’m stuck here, on the proverbial dark side, although I get just as much sun as everybody else, once the moon comes in front of the earth and the sun hits me. How inane this is. Last month, I started masturbating excessively. It became a compulsion. I couldn’t help thinking of this wonderful creature I dreamed about and I couldn’t help thinking about what I’d like to do to her and I couldn’t help getting aroused. But it’s okay, it provides me with lots of exercise and I just flush the sperm right back into the CHON machine. It could be my imagination, but I think the CHON-shakes have become thicker over the last week. Hmm. I wonder if the strawberry flavouring will last until the new supplies come next month. I dream about her every night now. I ask myself the question whether it is because I’m actually dreaming about her, or because I’m telling my subconscious that I want to dream about her. “Switch the channel. I’m not in the mood for narcissistic adventures or the resolution of my own oedepalian complexes. I want dream girl on channel twelve, please.” For each night, she gets more complex. I think my mind is adding details. When I close my eyes and lean back, I can imagine the curve of her nose and pores of her skin. It’s incredible how lifelike she seems to me. All the time, beckoning out for me with her finger. Radio time. I’m just that bored again. This time, I fiddle around and settle for a nice frequency around 150Hz. I’m in love, I tell the radio. Or possibly in lust. There is this girl that I dream about each night and I don’t know her name, and that fact alone is driving me insane. Insane as when the paranoia hits your brain. For a brief flash, I consider the thought that all of my random transmissions has been monitored, that I am in fact a guinea pig of human isolation. In sterile room the beady-eyed accountants sit, counting how many calories that I expend masturbating, how many times I utter the word “fuck” in a 24 hour cycle, how the chemical composition of my feces suggest a psychological unbalance. Oh yes. I think the Foundation would do such a thing. Don’t I? Or is it simply a faux facade that I’m telling myself, keeping up the appearance of importance? Could it be that it’s easier to believe in your utter surveillance instead of waking up to the theory that no one actually cares about what you do, or even if you exist? This job is quite literally a no-brainer. In fact, it’s a prerequisition. Having a brain in this position would be unadvantageous. You’d go insane from boredom if disillusion doesn’t do the trick properly. I think they made a mistake. I’m too smart for this job. I can feel myself slipping away as each day cycles. I so desperately want to be stupid right now. Utter twit. Borderline imbecile. I want to be barely cognisant, to spend my days trying to discover the proper way to breathe and eat at the same time, to think about cause and effects until my nostrils bleeds and then forget it all half an hour later. I want to be stupid. I want to be braindead. Anything. To fully realise my predicament is a fate worse than anything else. Give me the extra chromosome I long for, I hurtle out into space. Come down, all yea gods, wave your wands or otherwise paraphernalia of similar enchantment. Make me a drooling robot, convince me that masturbation is a worthwhile reason for continued existence. Oh, how patethic I am. Now I’m crying over the radiowaves. What will all my listeners think of me? They’ll lose all respect for me in the future. I can’t ever see any of them in the eyes again… I should just kill myself, get the pointless autodegredation over with. Be the first one to go tits-up in the blot itself. Get a head start on the rest of my life. Perhaps I’ll start a new trend. Yes. Yes. Yes. *sob* “Judith,” the radio says. The radio spoke to me. I must be going insane. Or…or could the great statistically probable event have taken place? Did I finally stumble over someone else’s frequency? This is moonbase Luna 5, science delegate Marvin Darwin speaking, I reply. Please state your name and point of transmittal. “Judith,” Looking for Eric buy the radio continues. “That is the name of your dream girl. I’ve listened to you for so long now, but I’ve never spoken up. Whenever you have reached out and touched that dial, I’ve been here. I know everything about you, Marvin. Your solitude, your desperation, how you have masturbated to the thought of this girl the last month.” The voice on the radio is a female one. Throaty but lithe, just as I imagine Jud- I mean my dreamgirl to have. This petite whisper that just slithers up your ear and gently caresses your mind. I repeat. Please state your na- “Why are you afraid to talk to me, Marvin?” In the Loop divx I’m not afraid to talk to you. “Prove it.” How? “Try to turn off the radio.” I stretch out my hand for the button, but something tells me that this is my dreamgirl, regardless of how preposterous it sounds. She is actually listening to what I have said, never mind how impossible it is in reality. I want to turn the volume up, but my vision is hazy and I press the button right next to it instead, marked “disconnect”. There. Don’t you feel much better now? I turn around and indeed, there she is, standing right inside of my humble and cramped stellar domicile. “But, but, but…” Shush, she says. I’m here. Don’t you like me? And then she lets her right hand glide down her body, emphasising her attributes. “Yes, of course… I like you….I like you a lot.” In my mind, I am drooling. Viciously unable to form coherent thoughts except those that have to do with fucking. Then come to me, be with me. Still that finger that I’ve seen so often before, beckoning me, calling out for me. She’s making me come with one finger. I’ve always listened to you. I’ve always been there, only I have never spoken up. Do you want to be lonely together with me, Marvin? “Yes, of course… I like you…I like you a lot.” Brain loosing blood pressure, repeat last sentence to cover for inactivity. Let’s find a place that we can be alone Blink download , this goddess before me says. I think I know of one. Then she pushes me along to the left side of the observatory. Where the airlocks are. Here. We can be alone in here, she says. Just go inside and take your clothes off. I’ll be right there. Hostage buy
“But that’s an airlock. There’s no air out there.” I feebly try to assemble the shredded remains of my common sense. Don’t you trust me, Marvin? I am lost. Of course I trust her. How could my goddess believe anything else. She knows something I don’t. Perhaps the airlocks leads to a hidden paradise of fruit and trees. Perhaps this is all an charade, and the moon base is really a cheap stage in the middle of Utah. I trust Judith. I trust Judith with my life. Just go in here, and take your clothes off. I’ll come after you, but only when you are ready. “Okay,” I say, and step into the airlock. Before the pumps have sucked out all the air and reduced the pressure to moon atmosphere, I have stripped to my underwear. When the doors slide open to let the cold in, I am naked. I step out into the fragile landscape and look up at the sky. Above me, the sun is breaking into a burning crescent. I feel no heat. I feel no anger. Brrr. It’s so very cold. I know she is coming. I trust Judith. I must keep my mind clear. Perhaps I should think of what I learned in school. The surface temperature of the Moon ranges from 100 to 400 degrees Kelvin. It is always turned to the Earth by one and the same semisphere. We can see only 59% of the Moon’s surface due to the irregular motion of the Moon. The magnetic field of the Moon is very weak and contains 0,1% of magnetic field of the Earth that corresponds to the intensity of the magnetic field not exceeding 0,5 gamma. The Moon shines by the reflected light. The visual spherical albedo is 0,075 i.e. The Moon reflects only 7,5 of the solar light beams. I wonder why I’m not dead yet. Judith will know. Perhaps I should turn around and see her coming out. She’s not behind me. I look up at the Sun again, and there she is, her gown illuminated as a halo by the sun. She is wonderful. She’s an angel. She’s mine. Suddenly I remember that I need certain essential things, such as warmth and air. It’s suddenly become so incredibly cold, and my lungs are aching. I collapse to the moon dirt, and it spreads around me. The small particles are jumping into the air with 1/6 of the mass they would have on Terra. They fall down again so slowly, making it all seem as if this is happening in a time-frame. I look up at Judith, thinking “why the hell did you sucker me into this?” Shush, she says, and I hear it although there is no air around us. I hear her voice perfectly inside my head. I told you I’d come for you when you are ready. Bare Witness film My memory is fading to black again, and I wonder if this’ll be another one-night stand and if I’ll ever wake up with a throbbing head. Perhaps I just went insane. The gods might have heard me. I didn’t even feel the wand. I wonder if I’m really on the surface on the moon or just laying comatose on the floor somewhere. Will I ever know? I guess not. But in a billion years, none of this will matter anyway. *** lunacy \Lu”na*cy\, n.; pl. Lunacies. [See Lunatic.] 1. Insanity or madness; properly, the kind of insanity which is broken by intervals of reason, — formerly supposed to be influenced by the changes of the moon; any form of unsoundness of mind, except idiocy; mental derangement or alienation. –Brande. –Burrill. 2. A morbid suspension of good sense or judgment, as through fanaticism. –Dr. H. More. Syn: Derangement; craziness; mania. See Insanity. Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary , Lunatic probably the same as epileptic, the symptoms of which disease were supposed to be more aggravated as the moon increased. In Matt. 4:24 “lunatics” are distinguished from demoniacs. In 17:15 the name “lunatic” is applied to one who is declared to have been possessed. (See DAEMONIAC.) Source: Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary FIN Leave a Reply |
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