Seeking:
Criticism, advice, etc.
Would mind: Random insults.
Would not mind: Mindless adoration.
And with that, I begin.
The Lonely Cosmonaut
by E.G.D.A.
_______
A man stranded on a barren island in a vast, pitiless body of the merciless unknown with nothing but the clothes on his back and a coconut tree to take shade under. From that tree, hung a single coconut, too high to reach, but ready to fall down. All hope of rescue or survival was gone; he resigned himself to sit underneath the tree and wait for the damn fruit to fall on his head, a kind (albeit anticlimactic) coup de grace on God's part.
Yeah, that was about it.
The lonely corporate cosmonaut in the last surviving (functioning) company space-office might as well have been that guy, on that island, waiting for that coconut to fall. He floated around from work station to work station, hitting a few buttons that needed pressing for some trivial reason. Oxygen regulation, communication calibration, and other very necessary things needed a little tweak every now and then, even though there wasn't much point in keeping it up.
***
Four months ago, the company he worked for began falling apart. It was a giant conglomerate that finally buckled under the stress of antitrust suits, not helped in the least by a certain rogue employee deciding to blow the fuck out of several of their buildings. Their logistics (shipping) division was naturally dissolved and this meant any remote little research outpost that previously relied on sporadic shipments of supplies to live was now royally screwed.
Naturally, this presented a problem for the guys who were stationed in a place that was not conventionally escapable. Seven of the eight space-offices had, at the time, been recently restocked with fuel and spare parts. Prior to the monthly restocking, the eighth office had been generous enough to dismantle parts of its emergency escape vehicle to provide some temporary repairs from some minor damages (nicks from some railguns back on Earth misfiring).
In retrospect, this was a really bad mistake. Not only had doing so been largely pointless (none of the damages were inhibiting to any major degree) but it had, in effect, doomed the man on the eighth station to a slow, psychologically torturous death. To make matters worse, the space-office was designed with proprietary docking procedures and defense mechanisms, to prevent any sort of space shenanigans that could potentially leak company secrets or (even worse!) lead to the death of an employee.
Stewart Jackson appreciated the irony.
***
Stewart had eight things every day for the past three months. He woke up, he went to the bathroom, he ate, he started up several of the office's systems, he sent out an SOS, he did some planning for repairing his escape craft, he actually went out to do the repairs, he stared at a certain photo, and he went right back to sleep. Of all these things he did each and every day like clockwork, it was the looking at the picture that meant the most to him. It was the thing that kept him sane, the last barrier that kept from jumping out of an airlock naked.
In the grand tradition that seems to pop up in isolated men the world over, it was the picture of a girl. A rather faded, wrinkled picture that was worth more to him than all the architectural wonders of empires. She was a work of the highest divine, personally carved by some artistic and manipulative deity, made possible by centuries of genetic blending. Only a supernatural watchmaker could have fashioned that out of the base stuff that made up a man.
***
Every space-office worker was, by nature, an engineer of the highest caliber. They were one-men mechanic shops, capable of maintaining even the most jury-rigged of things running at an acceptable degree. That skill was, of course, needed to maintain operation of the space-office's more delicate instruments, such as the bizarre communication relay that he didn't really understand (it involved encrypting data sent from Earth, bouncing it amongst the other offices, then sending it back to Alaska) nor cared to.
Stewart did not necessarily know why they needed him up there, and money made him apathetic to corporate motives. A robot could do the necessary tasks at a mere fraction of the cost it took to maintain a human being living, and if anything went really wrong a properly trained technician could just remote control it.
Then again, the company was probably too paranoid to allow some sneaky little bastard the opportunity to steal (and then sell) large amounts of data just because he was having a bad week and could use a some spending money.
Being stuck in a little tin can in orbit, there was more than enough time to waste pondering this.
***
Stewart was floating, bathed in the residual glow of the Earth, barely breathing. He was deep in meditation, practicing a fancy space yoga he had to learn as part of his training. It helped conserve body mass while keeping his body running on as little energy as possible. He hadn't done this in a while; panic drove it out of his mind.
There was something profoundly relaxing about keeping his heartbeat so close to being nearly dead, knowing he was in total control of his body.
Or, rather, thinking that he was in total control of his body.
Stewart lacked the proper mental fortitude to sustain the current, pretty-far-out state of his body and mind. A memory began gradually sapping his consciousness, taking him down into a dream on rails. He opened his eyes to stare out a small window, seeing the land of Asia surrounded by the bright, blue ocean. He touched his face to the window, wanting to open it and fly down. Yes, that sounds like a good plan.
He closed his eyes and pushed the window forward. There was a fast rush of wind past his head, pushing him back. He grabbed a metal bar infront of him, brought his body close to it. His eyes opened, and saw only stars in the night sky. There was a weight put on him, closing his eyes, and pushing his back into plastic.
As soon as it started, it was over. Stewart opened his eyes, pushed the bar off, and got off the rollercoaster. It didn't bother him at all, he had to tell his teasing friends, he just had a reflex of closing his eyes with so much wind. And the launch simulators were like a bazillion times worse.
They had to believe him, of course, and the small group began migrating towards the next attraction.
The man himself lagged behind for a few seconds, checked the time on his phone, then sprang forward with a desire not to be left behind. That particular manuever (stop-phone-dash) was well rehersed and devised by Stewart Jackson, master engineer, to get him to where he liked to be: the back of the group. This part, he observed, contained persons most agreeable to him, viz.: the girl in the picture he would carry with him til the end of time.
He felt drawn to her like an isolated Cheerio: irresistably put on an inevitable course across a vast plane by forces intrinsic to his being.
The sendoff was as much for him as it was for her. She was sick of something as nasty as it was rare that she just happened to catch a while ago and would, very soon, requre a few months serious treatment. It had already begun, sapping some of her color, but she could still move.
Stu was in a conversation about something trivial with her about something trivial, trying to lighten her mood. The group, after many dropped hints, gradually realized what he was doing and joined in, achieving a minor victory, and then each of them breaking off into minor discourse with someone else.
They were soon boarding another rollercoaster. The ferris wheel gradually climbed. The carousel stopped. Water hit his head, and a bear came flying. Laughter, then hugs and high fives. Car doors slamming. Airlock doors opened and men in white protective suits came to spray and strip him.
He was sitting on a toilet while he was vomiting in a bucket. Then, he was clean and dressed and carrying a small box of selected personal things into a small room, and in there were seven other men carrying identical boxes and similarily sterilized.
Stewart was practicing yoga. He stared out into space, seeing starlight, only starlight. His mind quickly focused on escape back home.
All in good time.
***
The lonely cosmonaut on space station eight happened upon a rather glaring problem as he ran what he hoped to be one of the last tests necessary on the escape craft (now dubbed the Jackson Eight, for purposes of humor). While he was manipulating the onboard computer to make it accept his earnest jury rigging, he had burned away an alarming amount of battery power that he would need for his descent. The answer was to simply recharge the battery, of course. How to recharge it was an issue not so simple.
Stewart had replaced ''planning'' with ''meditating'' in his daily routine, and tried his damnedest to find an answer. He passed days doing very little save thinking. His resources were abundant: fuel, oxygen, and food he had to spare. The office's own power supply was solar, but such was the drain that it had virtually nothing in the way of excess, an that little trickle would not send a charge fast enough to hold.
One day, while dismantling a part of the office he found redundant, he managed to uncover a pair of Waldoes that had apparently been left inside when the office was built. They were old, maybe a decade or two on them, but they worked, and in addition to being another pair of arms they had a remote control.
After about a week of playing with these new tools, Stewart took it upon himself to liberate the communcations array from the ship. The ordeal taught him two things: 1. He had lost more muscle mass than he should've if he did his yoga right, and 2. The office's power system sent an amount of power to a thing equal to all the power previously sent to things next to it if said other things were suddenly removed.
He felt he had a vague idea of how to go about things, after that.
***
Stewart hit go, the big red button, with a calculated poke that could barely contain his anticipation. There was, then, the ringing silence of technological failure, itself superceded by the primitive green display blinking its intentions at him. The button woke the waldoes, office bound. Stewart had programmed them to deactivate and disconnect everything on board, thus giving that much desired power boost to his batteries. Everything was set and ready. The screen blinked ''full power'' and started an ominous countdown.
He looked once more into the picture, placed in the place where pilots traditionally put them (in the midst of all the various controls before him). He tried to remember her face, voice; imagined her being laid down to rest. There was no funeral - cremation was the order of the day - but he liked to imagine she had a grand sendoff, the kind of farewell that only the most important people get, with kings and queens coming to pay their respects and grandiose displays of sorrow all around. The fancy, with its awe inspiring details, made the thought slightly palatable to Stewart, who became increasingly unable to reject reality.
A soft jerk pulled his attention back to his screen. He grabbed the controls as the ship took on a life of its own. It was picking up various bits of data from Earth, plotting a course down.
The descent startled him. It was not just because of the normal things one experiences when slowly cross the void, but because he had the distinct feeling of Something Important had fallen off. Morbidly, he briefly considered this a positive thing. His motivation to persist was largely gone, after all. If the ship up and exploded in its course down, there was a chance he could see her again, maybe.
That particular train of thought was lost the moment the screen went dark. Coupled with the increase in temperature he could feel, was to Stewart a good sign that things were holding, the heat shield thing in particular.
He stared at the screen, and a gaunt man in a space suit stared back. His eyes had difficulty negotiating the image seen and the reflection he perceived. All illusions of a full, strong body suddenly rose out of the back of his mind like mercury in a thermometer, transposing onto the surface of the screen. This brain glitch, however brief, inspired a desperate want for revitalization, a burning desire for life.
The Jackson 8 bucked as it shedded off now unneeded weight to make way for hitherto unseen mechanisms that sprung to life and helped guide the ship away from some rather threatening rock formations. Most of these more or less broke off as it approached the water, the impact with such clearing off any straggling pieces and forcing the ship to give up the ghost, as it were.
The cosmonaut was stuck in a fatal fandango with his seat; disoriented and sinking fast. This was the moment of truth, fight or die, and Stewart could barely even flail.
***
An apathetic life guard went above and beyond his call of duty, calling for help in a panic the very moment he spotted something strange falling out of the sky. Immediately, a speed boat full of helpful types was sent off at breakneck speed.
By the Grace of God, Stewart was rid of the debris at the expense of the lower half of his suit. The pressurized suit, now lacking proper pressurization, sent him floating upward. The shock of the cold water, his weak constitution, and the landing, together had the net effect of making him pass right out of consciousness, keeping a deathgrip on the scrap of paper in his right hand all the meanwhile.
It took the rescue team no more than a few brief seconds to drag the cosmonaut up, lay him on a gurney, and start connecting all sorts of mixtures to his veins to restore and prevent expiration. By the time a helicopter got around to pick him up to somewhere decidedly more sterile, he was already awake and mumbling through an oxygen mask, staring at the blue expanse above him.
Strong arms in dull black lifted him onto the helicopter, and as soon as they were in the air, the rest of the space suit was gradually hacked off.
His right hand would not easily budge, and he began hyperventilating when they pried it open. They tranquilized him, and the rest of the process went pretty smoothly. A bit of therapy, some heavy vitamin regimens, and his paycheck went to work rehabilitating him.
Stewart Jackson would live again.
