Lost in Transportation

I had been awake for seven days now, the glowing numbers hovering on my overhead display told me. I looked up to check my notifications and discovered it was time for another calibration. My mind was swimming as I took out the emergency kit. “One red, two blues, should do the trick” I mumbled as I started chewing the pills, I had to squeeze some water in my mouth from a plastic pouch, it was hard to swallow on a dry throat especially when the water wouldn’t go down by itself, life in zero gravity was not as fun as the movies.

I unstrapped myself from the crash couch and started floating towards the drive chamber. I gently propelled myself towards the innards of the ship, touching hand-holds here and there, more out of habit then necessity, trying to lift the haze engulfing my head. You weren’t supposed to take the stimulants for more than five days in a row but when you’re the only pilot on a busted ship stranded in the middle of nowhere, you tend to bend the rules a little. As the ship was currently under no acceleration, anything not strapped down was floating in mid-air, like a cosmic ballet, I moved through the menagerie of discarded food containers and other refuse, too tired to be angry.

The ship was quiet, only a gentle humming and the sound of my own breathing were breaking up the monotony. “This is all my fault I guess, I was supposed to be on cleanup duty”, I thought wearily swatting aside a half drunk coffee bulb. On a small spaceship like ours it was not uncommon for members of the crew to have multiple duties, the engineer was also the chef, the medical officer was our resident entertainer and the pilots usually got stuck with shit jobs. I was supposed to oversee the cleanup robots, which were so old and outdated that it was easier to take the trash out myself instead of bothering to fix them. Also This way I was the only one moving around in the ship, I didn’t want those creepy things clanging and banging their way in the dark.

There was a heavy fog in my mind, I had never been claustrophobic but moving around the ship on my own during the past seven days made me feel like some kind of trapped animal. I had tried looking out the windows, at the endless blackness of space, it made me feel even worse. It was like floating on the edge of an abyss, you never realize how truly black the darkness of space is, until you’re gazing at it with your naked eyes. I had to immediately look away otherwise I would’ve collapsed in a panic. I could feel it creeping back up, like someone was watching me, I decided to focus on my duties instead.

A pilot’s job was essential but thankless, on a good run, I would just perform routine checks on the ship AI and let it do it’s thing. The cheap ass algorithm running our company had calculated that repairing the ship’s radiation shield before this expedition would not be cost effective, we had been bombarded by a wave of rogue gamma particles right before our scheduled jump to hyperspace, resulting in the ship being stranded.

I was rudely awakened from hibernation by the automated systems seven days ago and told that I would have to manually calibrate the ship controls for the jump and try to repair as much equipment as possible in order to prevent the ship from being ripped to shreds in hyperspace.

On my way to the engine room I briefly stopped by the hibernation pods to ensure none of the crew had any malfunctioning devices. A twinge of jealousy hit me as I looked at their sleeping forms, all peaceful and serene. After this, I would never let those bastards disrespect me again, “Why do we need a Pilot? Doesn’t a ship run itself these days?” they would sneer at me behind my back, well who was out here saving their worthless lives now?

No one had a working theory on why the hyperspace jumps had to be made in hibernation but it was an unwritten law of space travel. My job required me to be proficient in mathematics but even I didn’t know much about hyperspace, despite having gone through it a number of times, I only knew that hyperspace had multiple dimensions, much more than the three our reality had, which somehow allowed us to cheat space-time by traversing the galaxy in days instead of centuries. Only a handful of people had attempted hyperspace jumps while awake, most of them came out the other side either dead or raving mad. My empty pod beckoned to me, which stood open like a broken egg, the cushions looked so soft. Maybe I could nap for an hour or two? Nah… I had to be awake when the Jump sequence started.

I caught some movement in the corner of my eye, it was almost like something skittering, I turned around slowly, there was nothing at my eye level. Then the smell hit me, I recoiled in disgust. I felt myself gag as I looked down at the floor to see a trail of glowing neon liquid, leading away from the room. Being alone in an empty space ship for a whole week had caused to me to become quite aware of my surroundings, and mystery liquid didn’t just appear out of nowhere.

I followed to trail to a dark corner, there was a metallic ripping and grinding sound, as I turned on my flash light, I saw one of the old repair bots, bumping against a wall. How had it turned itself on? as I switched it off, it limped lifelessly before floating back up to my eye level. There was a strange fleshy growth on the underside of one of its legs, oozing the neon liquid. It was somehow refusing to obey the laws of gravity and continued to fall down unlike the rest of the objects in the ship.

I bent down to look at it, It was looked like a dead insect covered in goo. I trembled as I looked closer, something was screaming inside my mind telling me to look away, to run from it but I couldn’t pull back my hand as it reached out to touch the abomination. As soon as the tip of my finger touched the wet blobby mess, my entire body convulsed. I felt the entire ship rip open, my eyes blinked rapidly. I realized that I wasn’t in the ship, I was somehow looking at something enormous. I was floating in space, staring at the center of a black hole, and it was looking back at me… like a giant eye, it blinked.

I felt something touch my mind, like a cold finger, it caused a shudder to go through my whole being. I felt things crawling over me, trying to get inside me… before the terror consumed me, I remember trying to scream.

The ENTITY did not feel emotions as humans would understand them but it felt something very close to frustration as the pilot once again died from hysteria. it was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over again, every time it tried to connect with the pilot, he would lose his mind, at the barest hint of its true presence. The ENTITY dwells in the folds of hyperspace, it’s mind is spread across many bodies. Some large and sonorous, others tiny and crawling. It understood that there were other minds out there but it has never succeeded in contacting them, occasionally it would grab ships passing through hyperspace, it had first thought of the ships as other beings but gradually understood that the ships were just coverings. The beings lived inside them, at first it had tried breaking open the ships but this had disastrous results.

It had tried showing itself to them directly but a three dimensional being waking up in the middle of hyperspace would immediately collapse, so it had studied the ships, probing them with tentacles & fangs, understanding that the being inside was separate from the metal and plastic.

The ENTITY had made some progress by trying to enter their minds directly, playing around with their memories and simulating a new reality where this being could finally understand and speak to it.

Every time the pilot died, the ENTITY would break open one of the other pods and take meat from the bodies to repair him, it was sure that when the pilot would finally be able to communicate with it, he would forgive the ENTITY for ruining a few of his bodies, after all the important thing was the mind, more bodies could be acquired. It never occurred to the ENTITY that each body had a mind of it’s own, after all such small minds would not be worth talking to. It was time for the pilot to wake up again.

I had been awake for seven days now…