yurdamannowdog
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2007
- Posts
- 224
Silence
Space and time might have echoed for a miniscule moment in the darkness of deep space along the silent, sinking edge of nothingness when the screams of terror and fear that can only come from the human heart and soul tried to cry out. If only sound traveled through the void, some distant ear might have heard their screams and cries.
The melting ooze oozed over Sarah’s skin, tickling her groggy nerve endings and sending feelings to her brain that hadn’t received any for so long. She had been in a deep freeze, frozen in the syntheoambio ooze that was now melting away, being absorbed, and draining from her body, slowly releasing her from the cold but loving and complete embrace that it had held her in for hundreds of years with no damage to her perfect body. Her jet-black hair and olive skin shone with the feeling of newness, of rebirth under the film of the fluid that the ooze had melted into, the fluid that was still receding from her naked body, folded up in the fetal position.
Suddenly, with a cough, Sarah came to life. She struggled to roll over, as her body continued to shudder with coughs, trying to expel the syntheoambio fluid from her lungs. Finally, on her hands and knees, she coughed out the last remains of the fluid in her lungs and looked around.
She was still disoriented, but the dark and silvery composite alloy walls of the ship brought with them feelings of familiarity and rightness to Sarah’s mind. Though the room was only dimly lit by the computer monitors and the red lights of a monitoring station, she felt the calmness of recognition. Even the giant, draining, Petri dish structure that she found herself kneeling in felt right, and she wasn’t disturbed when the walls of the dish started to rise, trapping her inside.
Memories flooded back into her consciousness as the first drops of perfectly heated warm water fell from above, washing away the last remains of the embrace that had held her for so long.
As she stood to face the water, to bathe her face in its warmth, Sarah remembered everything. She remembered her mother’s embrace right before departure, and as the water traveled over her reawakened body, she remembered Mark’s kiss right before climbing into the cryo-pod that had frozen, sustained, and was now washing her and delivering her back into the world. With this, she wondered if Mark was awake too, and looked around for him. If it hadn’t been for Mark, she would have never volunteered for this shot in the dark mission.
“Mark. Are you there Mark?” she called out, not really expecting a response, but hoping to hear Mark’s kind voice through the hum of her shower and the plastic shield of the cryo-pod that surrounded her.
“He’s not awake,” a familiar raspy voice answered from the darkness.
Sarah turned her head to see Travis step out of the shadows. He looked exactly the same as the last time she had seen him. The sight of his stocky frame, balding, blonde crew cut, and pearly white teeth gave her the same sense of lasting uneasiness as it always had. Furthermore, he was perfectly dressed in the same standard uniform as he always was, not a button unbuttoned, not a sleeve rolled up. There was something new about him though. He had a smug and secretive look in his eyes as he stood staring at her. Why did their have to be a third crewmember? Why did it have to be him?
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” he responded, taking his time turning to walk off, and then adding over his shoulder, “I’ll be in the mess. Would you like some coffee or tea?”
“No thank you.”
Travis glanced over his shoulder for one more look at Sarah’s perfect body, and then headed off into one of the cramped connecting tubes that linked the various sections of the ship. They weren’t the only way to get from section to section, shortcuts really, but they were faster than walking to the connecting point and Travis enjoyed the lack of gravity and the feeling that he could fly, as with a strong pull of his arms, he sent himself rushing like a torpedo down the tube. And, while most of the others took the connecting tubes for granted, Travis prided himself for always considering the amount of danger that came with traveling through these thin veins in space. He got a certain little thrill from thinking about the small probability percentages and structural differences that made these cramped tubes slightly more dangerous than the rest of the ship, not that any of it really mattered now.
***************************************************************
Several minutes later Sarah came into the mess. Now fully dressed, her thin, tight-fitting uniform didn’t do much to hide her perfect feminine form as she made her way gracefully around the room, trying to stretch and use every single one of her muscles that had gone for so long without even the slightest twitch.
“How long has it been?” she asked over her shoulder, while she prepared a cup of tea.
“Seven hundred years, give or take a year or two,” Travis replied in an almost jovial tone that threw Sarah off guard.
Sarah turned and looked at him, taking a sip of her tea. She tried to study him, to find any change in his outward appearance, some abnormality in his skull shape or skin tone, something that would explain his change in demeanor, because Travis was almost never jovial about anything. In fact, Travis never showed much emotion at all. He was cold, calculating, and unnervingly calm in every situation.
“Seven hundred,” Sarah asked, calmly blowing on her hot tea, “is this a routine maintenance period, or did we find something?”
Travis slowly stood up and walked over to Sarah with a swagger that she had never seen from him. He walked up to her and put his hands on the counter on either side of her, more than invading her personal space, as he held his body inches from her. He looked her in the eyes with a sleepy intensity and replied, “Neither.”
Sarah pushed past him to the side, spilling some of her hot tea on Travis’s arm as she did so, and continued to move across the room, creating more distance between Travis and herself. The wall of the ship stopped her progress. Back to the wall, her attention was elsewhere. Her eyes darted around the room. Breathing heavily now, she studied the room more carefully, but constantly coming back to Travis, who still had his back to her, leaning on the counter.
What was going on? The room seemed normal. The walls were the same walls that she had left behind for sleep hundreds of years ago. The table was the same. The lights. Everything seemed normal. Travis even looked normal. He looked the same, but he wasn’t. He had changed. Something had changed him.
Something had changed in her. Feelings of normality, feelings of calm routine, had been replaced with fear. The feeling that she had when she awoke only minutes before of being back home had now been replaced with a feeling of uneasiness and paranoia. Was it just paranoia? No.
Taking a deep breath and trying to sound calm, she asked, “What do you mean ‘neither’?”
Travis turned, and slowly taking in her flustered appearance, her breasts heaving up and down in a panic breath, her face slightly pinker than it had been before, he responded, “Just what I said.”
“What? What does that mean?” Sarah blurted out, not trying to hide her fear and confusion, “What transmissions have caught up with us from Earth? Does this have to do with any transmissions from Earth?”
Travis began to laugh.
“What’s wrong? Why are you laughing?” she angrily spat back at him, loathing the sound of his laughter echoing down the halls of the ship.
Travis’s laughter continued to echo down the halls of the ship, the sound waves, the molecules bouncing off of each other over and over again, found their way to every corner of the ship. They found their way to another cryo-pod, and with sound so soft, imperceptible to the human ear, they bathed another naked body in their waves. The sound waves of his maniacal laugh washed over the naked, shivering body of another man curled up in a puddle of his own blood mixed with water and remnants of syntheambio fluid.
****************************************************************
“Wake up! Mark! Wake up!” Travis shouted, nudging Mark’s slimy shoulder with a socket wrench, “Something is wrong!”
These words brought Mark floundering to life, his mind in the fog of hundreds of years of sleep and his lungs full of fluid.
“Mark!”
Mark continued to flounder and started to vomit up the fluid from his lungs. Where was he? What was wrong? Why was!
Mark reached up just as Travis brought the socket wrench down, smashing forcefully into Mark’s head, sending fluids flying everywhere.
****************************************************************
Travis stopped laughing and looked directly into Sarah’s eyes, as if he was trying to burn a hole through her. He turned back around and started to re-hydrate an apple. Now he was only laughing to himself.
Sarah stood frozen. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run to. She wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to hide. She wanted to get away from Travis, but she wanted to find out what was going on, so she stood frozen like a deer ready to prance away in any and all directions at once when threatened.
“There hasen’t been anything from earth in five hundred years, and we haven’t found something. We’ve found NOTHING, a whole lot of nothing, a ‘HOLE’ lot of nothing!” Travis chortled, breaking into laughter again, “We are on the edge of a black hole, on the very edge, and we are about to fall in,” he completed, leaning towards Sarah, holding the counter with his hands and then letting go, as if he was going to fall on his face, but catching himself at the last second.
“What? Why aren’t we doing something about it?” Sara said, turning towards the hallway back to the connector, “I don’t even hear the engines. We have to try to escape!”
Travis chuckled, “Don’t you think that I tried?” slamming his hand on the table that now separated them, ”Who do you think you are talking to? I did everything I could!”
Sarah flinched before replying, “Well, why aren’t the engines on?”
This sent Travis into a rage. He rushed forward, throwing the table aside, and grabbing Sarah. With great force, he slammed her against the wall of the ship.
“I am not some stupid little boy!” he screamed in her face, as she began to cry, “I followed all gravitational field escape maneuvers and procedures. None of them worked. I did some calculations of my own, and tried some new vectors. It didn’t work. Nothing worked! In fact, everything made our position worse.”
Letting Sarah go slowly, he backed away. His rage subsided somewhat. He started to look around as if he too was lost.
“So, so what can we do?” Sarah finally asked.
The walls of the ship seemed to be closing in. The walls of humanity seemed to be falling away. Into the black hole, everything that they had been, everything that they could have been was slowly sinking. The ship was the same. The ship looked the same, but humanity was being sucked away with every breath they took. Rules. Black holes break all rules. They break light. They break matter. This one was breaking the taboos and restraints of years of conditioning, of the world that they had left behind. Somewhere in the black hole was Travis’s restraint being smashed into billions of billions of pieces and smashed together again with all the other hopes, dreams, feelings, and laws carried on a beam of light or a wave or a piece of dust. Somewhere in the black hole were all the bonds and chains that kept him from acting on his primordial instincts. The instincts that had driven men and all animals for hundreds of thousands of years, that made every inch of his body want every inch of her body were now free from their earthly bonds, from the laws of society, from the conditioning that held them in their place deep in the back of his mind, deep in his abdomen, hidden away in glands, only coming out in his hands at night in the dark. Now the dark, now the black, now the blackness of the black hole had set them free.
“We can fuck.”
Sarah gave no response. She didn’t even lift an eyebrow. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. Had he said it out loud, or had he kept it inside like he had for so many years?
“We can fuck,” he repeated desperately before continuing, “We can take off all of our clothes and let each other feel another person in their arms, inside of them, around them, before we die.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We need to…”
Travis cut her off, “There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. Maybe the imaginary, benevolent, super-advanced aliens are going to come save us like they were going to save the Earth. Maybe they can save us, but I have tried everything.”
“Maybe Mark can…” she tried.
“Mark can’t do anything. Mark, Mark’s pod…he…Mark is dead,”
“What? How? But he,” she blurted out.
Calmly and with no feelings of regret in his voice, Travis answered, “I killed him.”
“No.” she whimpered half-heartedly, knowing that it was true.
“Yes. I killed him. I killed him. I killed him! I fucking KILLED him!” frothed Travis, growing closer and louder with each bombastic repetition.
He grabbed Sarah and tried to kiss her, but she was totally unresponsive. This didn’t stop Travis as his hands ran over her body, feeling all the curves and valleys of her body that he had explored for years with only his eyes. Ripping off her top, he started to lap at her neck and breasts like a hungry dog, not minding the fact that she was totally unresponsive and limp in his arms.
Inside, Sarah was tied in knots twisting tighter and tighter, keeping her from acting, keeping her from moving, and keeping her from feeling for, at least the moment, the pain and sadness that was growing deep inside her heart. The strangulation or her senses and her sensibilities by knowing that it would all end soon held her and kept her from trying to break free of both the shell she had retreated to and the grips of a man possessed by his no longer suppressed desires for her body. She had lost her will, not to the blackness of the black hole, but to the light of love being blown out.
Her eyes wondered slowly over the arms that held her. She observed the arms and shoulders that moved the hands gripped and groped at her flesh. She observed like scientist that she was. Detached, she made mental notes on how the fabric moved, and she looked for patterns, anomalies, or changes. Her eyes mapped every squared inch of the shoulders, his shoulders until she made a discovery, a small red speck. Was it a variation in some sort of pattern in the fabric? Was it some sort of organism? No, it was blood.
In a flash the knots that held Sarah in emotional limbo pulled so tight that they snapped and she exploded in a flood of emotions. She kneed Travis in the crotch and pushed him away from her with a primal scream.
“Fuck you!” she shouted through the tears that suddenly rushed to her eyes and closed her throat.
Travis stumbled backward, crumpling to the ground with moans of pain, physical, animalistic pain. Held prisoner by the pain shooting through his stomach, he could do nothing buy groan and grope at the air as Sarah ran off down the hallway of the ship towards the connector.
“Sarah!” he finally gasped after she was gone.
Running, where was she running? Sarah looked down at her feet moving, pumping up and down. She was running from the pain, from the fear, from death, from him, and the end. She was running from the end, but there was no running from the end, from the invading blackness, the hungry blackness of the black hole that waited for them to join the destruction, the reconstruction. It waited to turn them into star stuff. It waited to bring them back, to fold them back into the batter that the universe, that the infinite blackness of the universe was baked of. It was going to suck them back into the finite pieces that they had come from, that the earth came from so many billions of years before, atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust. So why was she running, and again, where was she running? She stopped.
****************************************************************
He started to try to get up. His head was throbbing. The pain was almost unbearable, but Mark fought through it, as he struggled to get up and out of the slippery container he had called home, and almost called his grave.
Why?
****************************************************************
Sarah looked around in a confused downward spiral of depression. There was nothing for her. There was only waiting. There was only waiting for the end, dreading it, expecting it, and fearing it. Why? Why should she wait? Why should she torture herself for the days, hours, or minutes that might tick away taking with them, with each tick, a piece of her soul, of her sanity, of her humanity. Mark was gone. He was lucky. Why not join him?
She started running again, this time with a purpose. Her mind was made up, and she was free. The airlock was just moments away, and then freedom. Running. The feeling of her foot hitting the ground grew less and less as she reached the zero gravity connector. Finding the opening she was looking for, she entered it and began heading down the hallway towards the airlock, gravity once again beginning to give her feet traction.
The airlock door stood waiting for her to open it. Space was waiting for her. The back hole was waiting for her. She would embrace it. With one simple action, she would take charge of the situation and end it.
Sarah swung the airlock door open and stepped into the small room, just as Travis rushing down the hall towards her from the opposite direction she had just come.
“Sarah! I love you!” he shouted as she closed the door and locked, “Don’t do this! Why? Why can’t you just let me be with you? Why? Why!”
Face pressed up against the glass window of the airlock door, Travis watched as Sarah tortured him one last time by slowly and ceremonially removing all of her clothing before pushing her beautiful hair out of her face one last time and pressing the button that decompressed the room and opened the outer door.
Travis watched as Sarah slowly dove into the cold of space and the dark hunger of the black hole. Pressing his body against the door and crying, he remembered the time that had lost a balloon as a child. It had come untied from his overalls, and floated off into the sky. Then, as now, there was nothing that he could do to catch his love, his desire.
“Why Sarah? Why? I just wanted to feel you. I just wanted to fuck before we died. But, but…” he moaned with his mouth pressed into the glass, now fogged with his hot breath and smeared with his tears of pain and loss.
His face slammed hard into the glass.
Pain woke Travis. He was disoriented. He was on his hands and knees. He tried to look around but his vision was slightly blurry. There was more pain, and he let out a yelp. He looked down and saw his hands were tied. He looked over his shoulder. More pain shot through his body, this time from his throbbing head, as a savage fist punched him in the back of the head, reopening the bloody wound there. Travis let out scream of pain that came from the very core of his being, a scream that came from thousands of years of evolution, the scream of humanity dying.
“You fucking bastard! You FUCKING FUCK! You wanted to fuck! Yeah? Well, FUCK YOU!” Mark shouted belligerently from behind him, thrusting violently with each syllable.
Suddenly small balls of light started to flood into the ship through the walls, flowing through them as if they were sheets of falling water and not a super strong composite alloy. They moved, pulsated, and subtly changed colors in such a way that it could only indicate an intelligence.
If you liked this at all, or think that I might just have some potential as a writer, please help me out by going here, and rating my spec commercial high.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG58QCeToWY
Space and time might have echoed for a miniscule moment in the darkness of deep space along the silent, sinking edge of nothingness when the screams of terror and fear that can only come from the human heart and soul tried to cry out. If only sound traveled through the void, some distant ear might have heard their screams and cries.
The melting ooze oozed over Sarah’s skin, tickling her groggy nerve endings and sending feelings to her brain that hadn’t received any for so long. She had been in a deep freeze, frozen in the syntheoambio ooze that was now melting away, being absorbed, and draining from her body, slowly releasing her from the cold but loving and complete embrace that it had held her in for hundreds of years with no damage to her perfect body. Her jet-black hair and olive skin shone with the feeling of newness, of rebirth under the film of the fluid that the ooze had melted into, the fluid that was still receding from her naked body, folded up in the fetal position.
Suddenly, with a cough, Sarah came to life. She struggled to roll over, as her body continued to shudder with coughs, trying to expel the syntheoambio fluid from her lungs. Finally, on her hands and knees, she coughed out the last remains of the fluid in her lungs and looked around.
She was still disoriented, but the dark and silvery composite alloy walls of the ship brought with them feelings of familiarity and rightness to Sarah’s mind. Though the room was only dimly lit by the computer monitors and the red lights of a monitoring station, she felt the calmness of recognition. Even the giant, draining, Petri dish structure that she found herself kneeling in felt right, and she wasn’t disturbed when the walls of the dish started to rise, trapping her inside.
Memories flooded back into her consciousness as the first drops of perfectly heated warm water fell from above, washing away the last remains of the embrace that had held her for so long.
As she stood to face the water, to bathe her face in its warmth, Sarah remembered everything. She remembered her mother’s embrace right before departure, and as the water traveled over her reawakened body, she remembered Mark’s kiss right before climbing into the cryo-pod that had frozen, sustained, and was now washing her and delivering her back into the world. With this, she wondered if Mark was awake too, and looked around for him. If it hadn’t been for Mark, she would have never volunteered for this shot in the dark mission.
“Mark. Are you there Mark?” she called out, not really expecting a response, but hoping to hear Mark’s kind voice through the hum of her shower and the plastic shield of the cryo-pod that surrounded her.
“He’s not awake,” a familiar raspy voice answered from the darkness.
Sarah turned her head to see Travis step out of the shadows. He looked exactly the same as the last time she had seen him. The sight of his stocky frame, balding, blonde crew cut, and pearly white teeth gave her the same sense of lasting uneasiness as it always had. Furthermore, he was perfectly dressed in the same standard uniform as he always was, not a button unbuttoned, not a sleeve rolled up. There was something new about him though. He had a smug and secretive look in his eyes as he stood staring at her. Why did their have to be a third crewmember? Why did it have to be him?
“Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” he responded, taking his time turning to walk off, and then adding over his shoulder, “I’ll be in the mess. Would you like some coffee or tea?”
“No thank you.”
Travis glanced over his shoulder for one more look at Sarah’s perfect body, and then headed off into one of the cramped connecting tubes that linked the various sections of the ship. They weren’t the only way to get from section to section, shortcuts really, but they were faster than walking to the connecting point and Travis enjoyed the lack of gravity and the feeling that he could fly, as with a strong pull of his arms, he sent himself rushing like a torpedo down the tube. And, while most of the others took the connecting tubes for granted, Travis prided himself for always considering the amount of danger that came with traveling through these thin veins in space. He got a certain little thrill from thinking about the small probability percentages and structural differences that made these cramped tubes slightly more dangerous than the rest of the ship, not that any of it really mattered now.
***************************************************************
Several minutes later Sarah came into the mess. Now fully dressed, her thin, tight-fitting uniform didn’t do much to hide her perfect feminine form as she made her way gracefully around the room, trying to stretch and use every single one of her muscles that had gone for so long without even the slightest twitch.
“How long has it been?” she asked over her shoulder, while she prepared a cup of tea.
“Seven hundred years, give or take a year or two,” Travis replied in an almost jovial tone that threw Sarah off guard.
Sarah turned and looked at him, taking a sip of her tea. She tried to study him, to find any change in his outward appearance, some abnormality in his skull shape or skin tone, something that would explain his change in demeanor, because Travis was almost never jovial about anything. In fact, Travis never showed much emotion at all. He was cold, calculating, and unnervingly calm in every situation.
“Seven hundred,” Sarah asked, calmly blowing on her hot tea, “is this a routine maintenance period, or did we find something?”
Travis slowly stood up and walked over to Sarah with a swagger that she had never seen from him. He walked up to her and put his hands on the counter on either side of her, more than invading her personal space, as he held his body inches from her. He looked her in the eyes with a sleepy intensity and replied, “Neither.”
Sarah pushed past him to the side, spilling some of her hot tea on Travis’s arm as she did so, and continued to move across the room, creating more distance between Travis and herself. The wall of the ship stopped her progress. Back to the wall, her attention was elsewhere. Her eyes darted around the room. Breathing heavily now, she studied the room more carefully, but constantly coming back to Travis, who still had his back to her, leaning on the counter.
What was going on? The room seemed normal. The walls were the same walls that she had left behind for sleep hundreds of years ago. The table was the same. The lights. Everything seemed normal. Travis even looked normal. He looked the same, but he wasn’t. He had changed. Something had changed him.
Something had changed in her. Feelings of normality, feelings of calm routine, had been replaced with fear. The feeling that she had when she awoke only minutes before of being back home had now been replaced with a feeling of uneasiness and paranoia. Was it just paranoia? No.
Taking a deep breath and trying to sound calm, she asked, “What do you mean ‘neither’?”
Travis turned, and slowly taking in her flustered appearance, her breasts heaving up and down in a panic breath, her face slightly pinker than it had been before, he responded, “Just what I said.”
“What? What does that mean?” Sarah blurted out, not trying to hide her fear and confusion, “What transmissions have caught up with us from Earth? Does this have to do with any transmissions from Earth?”
Travis began to laugh.
“What’s wrong? Why are you laughing?” she angrily spat back at him, loathing the sound of his laughter echoing down the halls of the ship.
Travis’s laughter continued to echo down the halls of the ship, the sound waves, the molecules bouncing off of each other over and over again, found their way to every corner of the ship. They found their way to another cryo-pod, and with sound so soft, imperceptible to the human ear, they bathed another naked body in their waves. The sound waves of his maniacal laugh washed over the naked, shivering body of another man curled up in a puddle of his own blood mixed with water and remnants of syntheambio fluid.
****************************************************************
“Wake up! Mark! Wake up!” Travis shouted, nudging Mark’s slimy shoulder with a socket wrench, “Something is wrong!”
These words brought Mark floundering to life, his mind in the fog of hundreds of years of sleep and his lungs full of fluid.
“Mark!”
Mark continued to flounder and started to vomit up the fluid from his lungs. Where was he? What was wrong? Why was!
Mark reached up just as Travis brought the socket wrench down, smashing forcefully into Mark’s head, sending fluids flying everywhere.
****************************************************************
Travis stopped laughing and looked directly into Sarah’s eyes, as if he was trying to burn a hole through her. He turned back around and started to re-hydrate an apple. Now he was only laughing to himself.
Sarah stood frozen. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run to. She wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to hide. She wanted to get away from Travis, but she wanted to find out what was going on, so she stood frozen like a deer ready to prance away in any and all directions at once when threatened.
“There hasen’t been anything from earth in five hundred years, and we haven’t found something. We’ve found NOTHING, a whole lot of nothing, a ‘HOLE’ lot of nothing!” Travis chortled, breaking into laughter again, “We are on the edge of a black hole, on the very edge, and we are about to fall in,” he completed, leaning towards Sarah, holding the counter with his hands and then letting go, as if he was going to fall on his face, but catching himself at the last second.
“What? Why aren’t we doing something about it?” Sara said, turning towards the hallway back to the connector, “I don’t even hear the engines. We have to try to escape!”
Travis chuckled, “Don’t you think that I tried?” slamming his hand on the table that now separated them, ”Who do you think you are talking to? I did everything I could!”
Sarah flinched before replying, “Well, why aren’t the engines on?”
This sent Travis into a rage. He rushed forward, throwing the table aside, and grabbing Sarah. With great force, he slammed her against the wall of the ship.
“I am not some stupid little boy!” he screamed in her face, as she began to cry, “I followed all gravitational field escape maneuvers and procedures. None of them worked. I did some calculations of my own, and tried some new vectors. It didn’t work. Nothing worked! In fact, everything made our position worse.”
Letting Sarah go slowly, he backed away. His rage subsided somewhat. He started to look around as if he too was lost.
“So, so what can we do?” Sarah finally asked.
The walls of the ship seemed to be closing in. The walls of humanity seemed to be falling away. Into the black hole, everything that they had been, everything that they could have been was slowly sinking. The ship was the same. The ship looked the same, but humanity was being sucked away with every breath they took. Rules. Black holes break all rules. They break light. They break matter. This one was breaking the taboos and restraints of years of conditioning, of the world that they had left behind. Somewhere in the black hole was Travis’s restraint being smashed into billions of billions of pieces and smashed together again with all the other hopes, dreams, feelings, and laws carried on a beam of light or a wave or a piece of dust. Somewhere in the black hole were all the bonds and chains that kept him from acting on his primordial instincts. The instincts that had driven men and all animals for hundreds of thousands of years, that made every inch of his body want every inch of her body were now free from their earthly bonds, from the laws of society, from the conditioning that held them in their place deep in the back of his mind, deep in his abdomen, hidden away in glands, only coming out in his hands at night in the dark. Now the dark, now the black, now the blackness of the black hole had set them free.
“We can fuck.”
Sarah gave no response. She didn’t even lift an eyebrow. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. Had he said it out loud, or had he kept it inside like he had for so many years?
“We can fuck,” he repeated desperately before continuing, “We can take off all of our clothes and let each other feel another person in their arms, inside of them, around them, before we die.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We need to…”
Travis cut her off, “There is nothing we can do to save ourselves. Maybe the imaginary, benevolent, super-advanced aliens are going to come save us like they were going to save the Earth. Maybe they can save us, but I have tried everything.”
“Maybe Mark can…” she tried.
“Mark can’t do anything. Mark, Mark’s pod…he…Mark is dead,”
“What? How? But he,” she blurted out.
Calmly and with no feelings of regret in his voice, Travis answered, “I killed him.”
“No.” she whimpered half-heartedly, knowing that it was true.
“Yes. I killed him. I killed him. I killed him! I fucking KILLED him!” frothed Travis, growing closer and louder with each bombastic repetition.
He grabbed Sarah and tried to kiss her, but she was totally unresponsive. This didn’t stop Travis as his hands ran over her body, feeling all the curves and valleys of her body that he had explored for years with only his eyes. Ripping off her top, he started to lap at her neck and breasts like a hungry dog, not minding the fact that she was totally unresponsive and limp in his arms.
Inside, Sarah was tied in knots twisting tighter and tighter, keeping her from acting, keeping her from moving, and keeping her from feeling for, at least the moment, the pain and sadness that was growing deep inside her heart. The strangulation or her senses and her sensibilities by knowing that it would all end soon held her and kept her from trying to break free of both the shell she had retreated to and the grips of a man possessed by his no longer suppressed desires for her body. She had lost her will, not to the blackness of the black hole, but to the light of love being blown out.
Her eyes wondered slowly over the arms that held her. She observed the arms and shoulders that moved the hands gripped and groped at her flesh. She observed like scientist that she was. Detached, she made mental notes on how the fabric moved, and she looked for patterns, anomalies, or changes. Her eyes mapped every squared inch of the shoulders, his shoulders until she made a discovery, a small red speck. Was it a variation in some sort of pattern in the fabric? Was it some sort of organism? No, it was blood.
In a flash the knots that held Sarah in emotional limbo pulled so tight that they snapped and she exploded in a flood of emotions. She kneed Travis in the crotch and pushed him away from her with a primal scream.
“Fuck you!” she shouted through the tears that suddenly rushed to her eyes and closed her throat.
Travis stumbled backward, crumpling to the ground with moans of pain, physical, animalistic pain. Held prisoner by the pain shooting through his stomach, he could do nothing buy groan and grope at the air as Sarah ran off down the hallway of the ship towards the connector.
“Sarah!” he finally gasped after she was gone.
Running, where was she running? Sarah looked down at her feet moving, pumping up and down. She was running from the pain, from the fear, from death, from him, and the end. She was running from the end, but there was no running from the end, from the invading blackness, the hungry blackness of the black hole that waited for them to join the destruction, the reconstruction. It waited to turn them into star stuff. It waited to bring them back, to fold them back into the batter that the universe, that the infinite blackness of the universe was baked of. It was going to suck them back into the finite pieces that they had come from, that the earth came from so many billions of years before, atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust. So why was she running, and again, where was she running? She stopped.
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He started to try to get up. His head was throbbing. The pain was almost unbearable, but Mark fought through it, as he struggled to get up and out of the slippery container he had called home, and almost called his grave.
Why?
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Sarah looked around in a confused downward spiral of depression. There was nothing for her. There was only waiting. There was only waiting for the end, dreading it, expecting it, and fearing it. Why? Why should she wait? Why should she torture herself for the days, hours, or minutes that might tick away taking with them, with each tick, a piece of her soul, of her sanity, of her humanity. Mark was gone. He was lucky. Why not join him?
She started running again, this time with a purpose. Her mind was made up, and she was free. The airlock was just moments away, and then freedom. Running. The feeling of her foot hitting the ground grew less and less as she reached the zero gravity connector. Finding the opening she was looking for, she entered it and began heading down the hallway towards the airlock, gravity once again beginning to give her feet traction.
The airlock door stood waiting for her to open it. Space was waiting for her. The back hole was waiting for her. She would embrace it. With one simple action, she would take charge of the situation and end it.
Sarah swung the airlock door open and stepped into the small room, just as Travis rushing down the hall towards her from the opposite direction she had just come.
“Sarah! I love you!” he shouted as she closed the door and locked, “Don’t do this! Why? Why can’t you just let me be with you? Why? Why!”
Face pressed up against the glass window of the airlock door, Travis watched as Sarah tortured him one last time by slowly and ceremonially removing all of her clothing before pushing her beautiful hair out of her face one last time and pressing the button that decompressed the room and opened the outer door.
Travis watched as Sarah slowly dove into the cold of space and the dark hunger of the black hole. Pressing his body against the door and crying, he remembered the time that had lost a balloon as a child. It had come untied from his overalls, and floated off into the sky. Then, as now, there was nothing that he could do to catch his love, his desire.
“Why Sarah? Why? I just wanted to feel you. I just wanted to fuck before we died. But, but…” he moaned with his mouth pressed into the glass, now fogged with his hot breath and smeared with his tears of pain and loss.
His face slammed hard into the glass.
Pain woke Travis. He was disoriented. He was on his hands and knees. He tried to look around but his vision was slightly blurry. There was more pain, and he let out a yelp. He looked down and saw his hands were tied. He looked over his shoulder. More pain shot through his body, this time from his throbbing head, as a savage fist punched him in the back of the head, reopening the bloody wound there. Travis let out scream of pain that came from the very core of his being, a scream that came from thousands of years of evolution, the scream of humanity dying.
“You fucking bastard! You FUCKING FUCK! You wanted to fuck! Yeah? Well, FUCK YOU!” Mark shouted belligerently from behind him, thrusting violently with each syllable.
Suddenly small balls of light started to flood into the ship through the walls, flowing through them as if they were sheets of falling water and not a super strong composite alloy. They moved, pulsated, and subtly changed colors in such a way that it could only indicate an intelligence.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG58QCeToWY
