Joshua Gardner

One Earth Week

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. I knew it well enough- Confederated Logistics and Defense didn't waste its time hiring spacecrew without at least a couple semesters of university physics to their name. But cartwheeling there in the belly of nothing, a million impossibly distant stars spiraling across my splintering visor, I screamed all the same. It was the kind of unfiltered, instinctual scream that reveals you for the dumb, panicky animal you and your arboreal ancestors have always been. I knew no one could hear me, not even through my comms, whose delicate circuits some twerps at CLAD’s R&D labs had cleverly integrated into my now-fractured helmet visor. I knew, but the screams just kept coming, consuming whole gulps of my finite oxygen reserves, and my oh-so-developed primate brain didn't seem to care one bit that it was only killing me faster.