Defenestration

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

The crushing weight fell upon him, he knew he could not pierce the veil to find what he had lost or to alleviate their suffering. Both had met their end, their status, alive or dead, was illusory. An indistinct pain tore at him slowly, a corrosive ill that he knew held a potential to destroy him. It had to be attenuated, its vast dark energy as powerful as the stellar masses he chronicled. For now, the death of others and his role in determining the failure, the fault, the cause of annihilation, temporarily displaced his existential torment that manifested after he thought about her. Reviewing the data in his room, he cycled through the latest exploratory disaster that befell a crew of 70, a routine resource gathering mission that led to their death during their return back. The crew members came from all quarters, sending a shockwave across various segments of the station, driving an intense focus on his chosen profession. The error had to be located, classified, and discarded as quickly as possible. The hope, that drive for exploration could only be maintained if the failures were documented and dealt with, the unremitting terrors of the cosmos had to be reduced to cartographic or navigational errors, otherwise the exploratory edifice would collapse.

For Silas, this burden of post-collision audits became an unwelcome routine, a time consuming endeavor that required his navigation section to pull extra shifts to produce each report. The bulk generally yielded likely piloting error, although there were periodic incidents where a jump to another system was met with an abrupt and cataclysmic end because of an uncharted object that had been waiting millions of years to destroy them. What was particularly distressing about this event was the final audio comms they received as the vessel slowly defenestrated its crew when the vessel slowly granulated into a planetary atmosphere following a collision with an unknown object.

The purported intentionality of humanity’s exploratory vectors, over time, seemed to be as random as the objects they collided with. All the framing, the planning, the resources devoted were stripped away in an instant with incidents that he was charged with reviewing. Once the reports were chronicled, the drive from his leadership in Station 5742 was to move on, look forward to the next system to map and classify—enable expansion at all costs. Silas was precisely in this trough, knowing that he would have to steel himself after addressing this latest incident and display his enthusiasm for the next venture. This cycle was tolerable when he was with her, a constant that he could affix to as he weighted the fluctuating risks as part of his duties, but no more. The days passed as he waded through this ordeal again, cataloging the anticipated errors, providing the timely report after pulling a double shift, only to then retire for three days to sleep or drink away the anxiety.

Message format_-999_Outgoing_All Stations_Sectors 232789_encompassto_320302_inquiry_data_2342_personnel_status:Origin Station_5742: Actual: Originator_Silas Overbee_Nav_1stClass Begin: Requesting personnel status, disposition, and location of Pilot 1st Class Marie Elsaa. Indications of intended future destinations also requested. [Background-Departed: Station_5742: 24Sol4203_Aboard: Ajax^| Destination: Cerulian-8Outstation. Route932-AvoidancePath2040. End background.] Repeat transmittal_1 Sol_995303LY_advance. Station_5742 primary receipt station for reply transmittal. ^89980^enciphered. End transmittal.

Silas finalized the transmission on his data entry pad from his cabin quarters, regretting that he had not completed the request sooner. He stared out his narrow window into the deep, his face partially illuminated by the binary system that the station was astride of. He normally liked this time of day before he resumed his shift, however he felt rushed and a sense of unease. Since he transmitted the request, her eyes flashed before him for moment. Like a wave it passed, leaving him in a listless state. He collected his water ration bottle and jacket and prepared to make the five minute trek to his assigned navigational work center. He had to relieve Hu soon, otherwise there would be complaints, again.

Silas approached his work center quietly, hoping he could start his work without anyone casting an eye on him. Since her departure he sensed the gaze of many, beams of pity only reinforcing his attenuated anxiety. Hu Mora, his counterpart but technically his superior, prepared a tranche of navigational projects for his shift. Once his eyes caught Silas entering he called above the hum of air handling systems, “Overbee, your quarters are practically next door, let’s get started I have to discuss this new quadrant sub-sector before I leave.” The other team members were already well underway with their respective shift turnovers, the glare of both artificial light and the two observation panes yielded a second momentary glimpse of the binary system, which tugged at Silas again who wished he could return to his quarters to stare out into the deep,

“Silas, this new system I’ve been slogging through is a bear, but it has some interesting features, lucky for you I took care to denote the boring parts, left you some interesting phenomena to capture.” Silas and Hu were working the same navigational chart for months now, dealing with a System 598sA4 system quadrant and two appendant systems that would provide a potential jump point for deeper exploration. While auto-reference analysis were fed into the nav terminal that was shared across multiple inhabited systems, fleeting phenomena still needed to be manually classified and captured, including potential navigational hazards for transiting craft. Hu spent the next half hour discussing the tasks at hand, he always proclaimed he was in a rush to depart but loved to stay behind to share his insights with Silas. Hu’s persistence and thoroughness in his turnover was all the more heightened given Silas’ overall demeanor over the last four months, which triggered two administrative reviews. Hu vouched for his performance, but felt that his fate was now tied to Silas if things went south. “Despite the mainframe’s intake, we still have found several discrepancies due to the latent nature of some of these anomalies.” Silas took on the guidance, his attentiveness selective to the priority at hand, maintaining his position as a navigational cartographer at the station.

An hour in, Silas finally felt the flow of the shift come upon him, sipping his coffee as he examined the latent anomalies first. The call of despondency started to grow, but he held firm, aware that his work was characterized as sloppy at times. Silas tried to reassure himself that Hu and the mainframe would always catch any of his errors. As he grew weary hours later he was jostled when he received a notification on his screen that he would be required to attend the graduation event following his shift. “Dammit, Hu didn’t tell me about this.” He cursed under his breath and quickly deleted the message on his data interface. Resting his elbows on the graphene and acrylic work surface, he slowly recalled who was graduating today from both the navigational and explorer classes, a long list of cadets to support the the larger push for an unusually aggressive exploratory effort in an adjacent system.

Six hours later, Silas joined the rest of his shift, some 20 in all, for the ceremony in the cavernous observation deck. The station conducted a pitch roll which placed a distant nebula in the background. “No doubt that Sora planned the graduation ceremony at this time so the system could be in the background for maximum effect,” blurted out Silas to two of his co-workers, Xavier and Karaa. “Well she is the executive officer of the station Silas, you just better be standing in front today so she doesn’t think you dodged another ceremony.” Xavier’s annoyance with Silas was palpable as it clashed with his own ambitions. Silas represented an obstacle, not just for Xavier’s rise, but also for the navigational section in Station 5742.

The ceremony was laborious as usual for Silas, segmented classes of both navigators and exploratory pilots were called out and recognized. Each were broken down into further sub-specialties, including station-based navigators and exploratory navigators who would accompany pilots on long-haul missions that could last decades or longer. Sora’s speech to the candidates again proclaimed the unending necessity of pushing further out as part of key jump point for the 32 Systems Coalition, which only unsettled Silas more as he thought of Marie. “We must push on, as we have learned the price of complacency from the Harapy-9 event, our security is in our continued pursuit of new worlds for settlement.” Humanity, once clustered so tightly was now ever expanding in a tenuous web, concealing an unremitting fragility.

As the formal ceremony ended, the new class and the experienced hands looked across at each other with slight mutual distrust as refreshments were served by orderlies. “Look at the bio-enhancements on some of the pilot cadets,” Xavier noted with a tinge of envy as he nudged Silas. Xavier was always keen to talk shop despite his displeasure towards him. “Usually they wait at least after their first tour to get replacements, which is sometimes a necessity when they get dosed heavily during a mission.” Silas remarked, “Yeah, but you know that this class has been charged with some of the deepest exploration so far, I’m sure it’s far easier to do it now than to deal with in-flight cancer treatments for a crew of five.” Their working level banter was interrupted with an unmistakable imperious tone. “Silas, good to see you, I’m sure you have already completed the navigational cartographic set for these graduating students!” Silas tried not to recoil from Sora’s interjection, but he was unable to hide his unease. “Yes Ma’am, I’m wrapping it up with Hu over the next 72 hours, given the broad expanse we are charged with we are cross-referencing all collected data so far.” Xavier smiled wryly, enjoying Sora’s interrogation of Silas. “Ok, have a drink Silas, and mingle with some of the navigational graduates please, act like you care about their future.” She pushed off quickly, heading down the narrow corridor back to the command section of the station. Xavier chucked as Silas stood enraged, his only recourse was to follow orders and get a drink.

The crowd petered out over the next hour, with Silas standing at the middle of the observation deck, gripping the rail as he looked at the nebula recede from view, only the merciless void standing before him. Hu arrived late, wanting to at least be seen there before he began his shift, and he quickly joined his subordinates Xavier and Karaa who were standing near the makeshift bar that was carted out for these events. “He won’t let it go, will he he?” Hu asked as he looked beyond them toward Silas at the edge of the observation deck. “Hu, he’s a pain in the ass now since Marie left, he needs to go to med and fix it,” Xavier shot back. “How long were they together before she left?” asked Karaa, hoping to stop Xavier from going on another extended rant. “They had a three year union, which of course was automatically annulled when Marie received orders to depart beyond 15 LY,” Xavier couldn’t help himself, “Yeah, orders, let’s paper over the selectivity, the choice in all of this was hers.” Hu had enough of this trivialization of Silas’ predicament. “You know they are both descendants from the Harapy-9 event, right? That generation launched over 1000 key explorers, it’s practically encoded into their lineage.”

The graduates finally departed for more promising after parties, the model of human perfection in its pursuit of more worlds orbiting promise or destruction. In this unyielding existence and imposed drive, Silas more than anything desired to be flawed, or to have any flaw, as a revolt against the tide of time and distance that obligated humanity to reach unparalleled levels of precision. A desire to rid both external and internal weakness, always measured against the scale of technological advancement and exploratory expansion. Silas sought to rebel against the inert and sterile, which encompassed both the destinations and the vehicles by which they inhabited. He rested on being passive and indifferent as his mar, knowing that it was not hidden, content in his position as he watched others flow around him, through him, and away from him.