The view from inside the capsule
space fiction flash
Hey
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Hey, kid!
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Phil! Wake up!
From freefloat of deep sleep I crawl back into the remembrance of being me.
I know once more where I am: further from home than I could imagine. Further from home than anyone could imagine.
Many thousands of miles more than when I went to sleep. Further than anyone has ever been, except for a handful of astronauts and the three other people in here with me now.
If I were capable of panic then I would now be panicking. But I’ve been carefully selected and I’m not the panicking kind.
You awake?
Mmmm
Four of us in the capsule. A coffee capsule. A capsule of vitamin supplements. A space capsule. A can coasting through this immensity of void, midway between Earth and Moon.
Outside, infinite. I hook myself up towards the porthole window and gaze out. A single disc of blue and green and white. All else: a million million million million stars set in nothingness. The infinite: which is without end.
My gaze falls into a vertigo of the furthest far. The unique surprise of our planet right there, a defiant something in all that encompassing nothing. All the life we know, all the life there’s ever been. Looking like a child’s toy, a saucer for a little girl’s teaparty. And if that colorful little doll-plate should break, what then? What happens?
You’re up on deck, Phil. Your watch.
Mmmm
My gaze wanders back into the deep dark and the many stars. What if I stopped holding on to myself? (I won’t) What if I let my consciousness slip out there? (I mustn’t) What would happen to me out there in the endless nought, this compound infinite composed of an infinity of infinitesimal vastnesses?
So you ready for work or what?
Greg, the commander of the expedition. What am I saying, expedition? Greg is the commander in chief of our can. Boss of all the cubic centimeters of this small container amid the unmeasurable void stretches of all the nothing outside of it. Boss of me.
Yep, yep. I’m awake, chief, what’s up?
Now I’m shipshape and squared away. Crewmember of the month. Loyal dependable Phil, reliable Phil, down-to-earth Phil. No longer down-to-earth. What happens now?
Can you check our position, Phil? Confirm we’re on the correct heading, all that?
Roger that, Greggeroo! ¡A sus órdenes, jefe!
He chuckles, team-player-patient style, and bags down for shuteye. I get on with the job, designated navigator doing my navigating. Pull up the sextant, run the charts, plug in the numbers.
Of course all crew members could do the same task. So could the onboard computer, the tracking stations on the ground. But it’s my thing. We all have responsibilities, and navigation is mine. I am the navigator.
What would happen if I weren’t here? Someone else would do it. And then the next. And so on. All events have a plan, a protocol. Contingencies have contingency plans.
What would happen if something wasn’t listed on the plan? Everything is on some plan somewhere. Even if not strictly true, this is how it has to be. To think otherwise would be to allow our drift into the deep to gain the upper hand, to lose out to the nothing.
Err, Greg
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Boss! Greg! Wake up!
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Hey Greg, it’s off!
What’s off?
The trajectory, skip, we’re off course.
Well, then, we make a course correction. One scheduled in two hours, right?
Greg, the numbers are WAAY off. Like, there’s been a leak or something? Something pushing us way off course.
What you sayin’?
We’re on a distant fly-past trajectory, not a free return to earth.
Greg stirs, debags, hoists himself up. He looks around at the others, sleeping in their bags.
What’s the sit-rep?
Looks like the fuel leak depleted our fuel so much we might not even be able to course correct.
Not possible.
He hauls himself towards the control panel, gives a yank against the seat and propels himself there. Looks at the fuel gauge all in red, at my numbers, the plotted course.
An error of one or two percent on the trajectory, caused by outgassing of a fuel tank. The line traced by our capsule, our tiny can full of life, now stretches out way past the moon’s weak grip. It curves but doesn’t bend. We don’t swing gently round to the moon’s dark face and back again to our planet. We keep threading that line out into the infinite always.
We’ll be going where no-one has ever gone before. But not boldly. As cold dead corpses.
There’s a plan in place: call up mission control. Greg’s on it.
Come in cap-com, over. Come in control.
No panic in Greg’s voice. If he were capable of panic then he would panic now. But he’s doing what I’m doing: crunching the numbers, running the contingencies, working the problem. The other two sleep on. What sense in stirring them?
Greg’s switching through radio channels. Static on every one. The static hisses like what it is: the whisper of cosmic background, the sonic trace of the bang and the birth of all we’ve ever had, coming through as a radio ghost of becoming. All those billions of years of travel only to hiss through our empty ears at this moment. What persistence.
I haul over to the port-hole window and look to where the disc of blue and green is. Where it has been. No longer.
I watch a plume of dust and fire, a wave of shock crawling across the sphere like a new continent on the move. The doll-house plate is broken. That toy is gone and the toyshop is shut forever.
We two float at the porthole and watch the world burn and our breaths cease now as we come to know our situation. If we were capable of panic, we would panic. But we won’t... no, not even now. We have no plan but we know we won’t ever lose our professional poise.
The other two astronauts dream on. Let them. They don’t know yet what’s going to happen. But we watchers in the quiet dark, we do. We know of our future with all the assurance of shackled gods.
===== // THE VIEW FROM INSIDE THE CAPSULE — END // =====
Hope you enjoyed it! I’d be grateful for any contribution you could make with a tip in the jar
[This one was written for my open-mic group on February 27 and was my first-ever story composed in the Catalan language, this being the subsequent English version.]