Simul

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

In the eons aboard the torch, the passengers had never tested out the adage. Therefore, when Wun awoke inside their pod, and stepped naked into the hall, it was the prelude to a momentous occasion.

Wun had smooth, unblemished features, and no hair at all to give a hint towards their age. To look into their eyes, however, one would be compelled to guess an exponential number. In fact, yawning wide, and padding barefoot down the hallway, Wun recalled a day they'd experienced an impossibly long time ago.

It had been a warm day, and bright. The Nile River glittered in the sunlight, reeds danced beneath a gentle breeze, and no horizon failed in its duty to proclaim the greatness of Akhenaten the All-Powerful. Here were spires capped in gold reaching into the sky. There, an entire mountain carved away to reflect his royal likeness. Inside the tomb that awaited his convenience were more treasures than in the rest of the world combined.

He had been old, standing bent-backed and pulling himself along the waters edge with a jeweled scepter that made a little chh each time it broke the soft crust of the sandy shore.

His people had few complaints about his long and storied reign, though they said he often drifted, near the end. Perhaps these drifts began when his beloved wife had passed away before her time, joining their sickly, deformed son in the afterlife. Others insisted that with nothing left to triumph over, the godking ceased to have a point, and so he wandered around with the ghosts of his favorite days, waiting for the gods to come and claim him.

Wun could still hear their jeweled scepter in the sand, though beneath their feet was only steel. They wondered, impassively, walking down a hallway in the cold dark edge of space, why that day among so many others had just now come to mind.

There were other days catalogued aboard the torch, others more impressive in significance, or more satisfying to the senses. There was a scientist who'd relieved her people of the need to age, bathing in the glory of their appreciation. There was a glutton of Olympian proportion... a mollusk, shifting softly in the tide. Wun had live their lives, and then, for lack of more to do, they'd lived them all again. And again, and again...

Ahead, an elevator opened with a hiss.

There were three others aboard, three metal worker bees waiting patiently for their floor. Soft jazz played from overhead speakers as the elevator doors slid shut and the cabin lifted upward. One of them snuck glances at the naked passenger, noticing the goosebumps on their flesh, and their vacant, glassy eyes. Vitals were normal, it also noted. The elevator stopped, Wun pressed a button on the console for the doors, and was ejected into outer space with a final, silent scream.

One of the drones lifted an unsure appendage, and then lowered it again. The passenger was spinning away into the boundless distance, streaming ebullism.

A respectful moment passed, or perhaps an awkward one, if the metal bees could feel such things.

"Believe me darling, the stars were made for falling..." a drone suddenly burst into song as it exited the elevator into the muting vacuum. There were a thousand others outside, tending the enormous ship. Their headlights illuminated the hull as they worked; patching and mending with bursts of yellow sparks, surveilling and analyzing in beams of red.

A snug blanket of crystal ice had begun to form around the passenger, reflecting flashes of the drones' efforts. And then, from the vantage of a ship that was bound across eternity, Wun was lost to sight forever.

*

Carry this torch... it was the last command of a long dead leader of a long dead planet. Later, it would become the name the captain gave their ship.

The Torch, in those days, overflowed with honeymoon emotions. Their species had struck a mortal blow against impermanence, crowds gathered in the viewing port to point at distant constellations and hypothesize the wonders which awaited them, and the captain was inflated with a shining sense of purpose. It was humanity's grand adventure, and it would last for all eternity.

Eternity had come and gone since then, and now the sky was dark. Passengers shunned the viewing port in favor of their pods, where various cords delivered nutrients and electric pulse to keep the atrophy at bay (and above all, to help them dream of better days). A command which once filled the captain with fire, and which later, at least, required no justification, now invited questions in the captain's mind. For how much longer? Why, and where..?

There was a lonely candle burning in the night sky beyond the viewing port. Perhaps it was the last that hadn't flickered out. A good a place as any, the captain supposed. Hapless drones floated by and toiled, against a backdrop of waste ejected from the ship, entropy's debris, and icy diamonds spinning off into the distance.