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Silence has never sounded so loud.
It’s oppressive. It beats down on his ears, bleeds out through his eyes. It makes his fingernails want to curl up, exquisitely painful, and embed themselves in some other part of his body. There is no one to talk to. The machines don’t make as much as a trill for him. Psychological tests do nothing for him—in the first hundred days of that stifling isolation, you just live, simply living. Thumping a spare tool against the desks for sound before it gets swallowed up by space.
Space. So much space, nothing but black and distant, barren planets, distant stars, distant. This is space. Roy has lived here for practically more than half his life. This is all he has ever wanted. Space, silence, to be alone.
From time to time, the shuttle is filled with some distant light. Otherwise it is dark. Filled only with the glow from the instruments and fitted gadgets. Light itself becomes too much after a while, so much light it almost becomes sound. Incoherent static interference, sensory overload.
Only what needs to be on stays on. It casts unearthly shadows across the steel innards. Roy observes them and wonders.
The generals had debriefed him personally.
This is a matter of utmost importance. A great killer pulse from Neptune threatens the lives of everybody on Earth. We don't know what's causing it. We don't know why it's coming, only where it's coming from.
We sent out a group to discover the cause many many years ago, said the generals. A group of ten or so, made up of scientists and soldiers and astronauts. You remember, don't you, Roy? It was your father that led this team.
It is your father that leads this team, they said, correcting themselves. We're not sure if they're all alive or dead.
And that's why we need you, Roy. We need you to go looking for your father, floating out there in deep space.
Roy never knew his father. His father very likely never knew him. Yet here Roy is, on a ship aimed towards Neptune, in search of a man who might as well be a stranger.
Maybe it would be much easier if he really was a stranger.
Roy has no idea where his train of thoughts go to at any time. He roams pointlessly through memories. Eve, his absent father, his empty childhood, the colonels debriefing him about killer pulses from five massive orbits away, held together by the miracle of physics, drawn to the far-off sun.
The far off sun. He has forgotten what it feels like. He is headed the opposite way.
Away from light. Away from things he has known, towards things he doesn't.
His eyes deceive him.
He sees Eve. With her long, longing look.
She was always so beautiful. Eve, who asked him where he was, even when they were together. She hid her sadness behind a soft voice hoping Roy couldn't hear it, when he did. He heard her sadness, and stayed who he was anyway. He laughs out aloud and the sound is swallowed. Perhaps he never laughed at all.
Space is such a confusing thing. It has no boundaries, no respect for boundaries. Eve had respect for his boundaries. So much that she left Roy to them. To his boundaries.
That's why he's here, that's why they've chosen him for this assignment. A man untethered, on a dead man's errand.
His mother called it purgatory.
You created your own little hell on earth for yourself. Turning people away no matter who they are or who they could be to you someday. Why? Because you don't trust us? Anybody? Not even me? We're answering for what your father did, aren't we? Are you listening to me, Roy? This is wrong, Roy. It's purgatory.
Pathetically, he reaches his hands out to the shadows. They don’t dance like they should, they don't move in reality. They morph into the silhouette of every person that he has ever refused. His wife, his mother, his teachers, his mates at the Academy. Fellow passengers on public transport who looked at him with pity when he awoke from bad dreams. The military doctor who told him he wasn't ready, wasn't ready.
His body has begun acting of its own accord. It shakes violently. Suffers spasmic episodes of lights and visions. He thinks he might die—his temples hurt, and while he can hear something (or somebody) scream, there is not a sound in the shuttle except for his rapid breathing. He doesn't know if he's awake—most days he isn't even aware of himself. He isn’t even aware of the days.
His breaths come in great shudders; he barely feels his breaths, or even his heart pumping—he just floats, nothing to anchor him, a speck of dust. Untethered.
Time loses meaning. Words, lose meaning. Doesn't think. Not in thoughts. In rapid, vivid images. Spasms with each. Wishes it would stop.
What do you call a man intent on his own destruction?
This is a mission of utmost importance, say the generals. Earth's fate hangs in the balance.
The lives of billions hang in the balance, who sleep unknowing of the death that awaits them.
Death awaits. It awaits for everybody.
Death is the final frontier. One that we will all meet.
Why is Roy floating here in space? To prevent what death?
Why is Roy searching for the father that left him behind?
Roy's father wanted to be alone. He is Roy's blood.
The sins of the father are laid upon his sons. Roy's father has only one.
Only one? One what?
Death will come for everyone. There is no escape, there is no preparation.
Death will come when it wants.
Roy is waiting. For his father, for Death, for something substantial.
All his life he has been searching. All his life he has been bereft.
Never, Eve says. You were never bereft.
You are bereft now, says Roy's mother. You should have listened to me.
Funny that the truth reaches him in what feels like the final moments of his life.
Space.
Space, stretching. Into him, around him.
Space, filling silence. Filling spare space, emptiness.
Space. Rends him to pieces and leaves him be.