DUST

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But how could we when everyone was screaming?

Excerpt from Presidential Pardon Request per Article II, Section 2 pursuant to United States Space Corps general court-martial of Commander Viggo Visante, courtesy of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, dated December 6,2065.

Viggo’s head lunged towards the hand-rolled cigarette that wobbled between his twitchy fingers. Stainless steel manacles welded to a metal table dug raw grooves into his wrists as he stretched over the cold surface to take another drag. A thin smoke trail mingled with the manufactured air (an oxygen dense mix perfect for deep space travel) of the recovery vessel’s holding chamber. He sucked the mint infused smoke deeply, savoring its burn throughout the husk of his aged body, and then exhaled hard at his captors, slouching back into the interrogation chair.

“You’re not listening,” he snapped, his eyes skewering the interviewers. The Talker, as Viggo named him, looked like a living postcard, pleasant but forgettable. His considerable girth was crammed into a gray uniform, pressed and clean. Listening to him was like drowning in a room filling slowly with water. Viggo figured to be about chest deep so far.

Behind The Talker stood a thin, cold woman. Clad in the same gray uniform, she surveyed Viggo expressionless. A blue badge Viggo didn’t recognize hung from her breast pocket. His knee started bouncing thoughtlessly as he watched them.

The Talker pulled an embroidered handkerchief from an inside pocket and dabbed at his weepy right eye, flipping through his notes again.

“I believe I have heard everything.”

Viggo snorted.

“Well, what did we miss then?” The Talker replaced the handkerchief and picked up a pen.

“We?” he rasped, gesturing to the woman standing board-straight behind the Talker.

“I’m not sure your comrade counts as a ‘we.’ She hasn’t said a word in two hours. As a matter of fact, she hasn’t shifted her stance in two hours.” Viggo leaned forward, squaring up to the Talker. “Actually, she hasn’t even blinked in two hours.”

Viggo’s knees rapped the bottom of the table as he scratched the sole of one shoe over an already torn patch of skin around his other ankle. Bloody rivulets formed as he tried to relieve his discomfort.

The Talker frowned.

“Now, stop that, Captain, or we will secure your feet as well.” He nodded at Viggo’s hands, crossed in jagged lines of reopened scabs, bloodied by the captain’s own picking.

“That is how it started, you know.” Viggo calmed his foot and thought for a minute. “The itch, a slow, nagging thing barely perceptible. I think—” Viggo drifted, his sullen eyes unfocused towards the ground. “I think I noticed the itch even before I was aware I had been disconnected.”

“Disconnected?”

Viggo noted the Talker’s eyes as they widened ever so slightly, as if the man's pudgy face was not under his own control for a moment.

“Disconnected?” he questioned again, shifting awkwardly in his chair. “What do you mean?”

The pulsing din of the star-ship’s power systems groaning to life interrupted them. From smooth screened intercoms a general warning sounded in the cool tone of a feminine voice.

“All crew report to station and prepare for immediate departure. Repeat. All crew report to station and prepare for immediate departure. Travel time estimated to four years, eleven months and eleven days.”

Viggo slipped into quiet memory for a few long minutes. Both interviewers waited in silence. The Talker intermittently sifted through papers, reviewing the notes gathered prior to the captains interview. He rubbed the pen along the side of his face as he read.

The captain slid back into the present.

“You, ah, you are obviously young, I’d say 24 or 25, yes?”

The Talker nodded.

“So you’ve spent your whole life pacified by integration, yes?”

“If by pacified you mean comforted by the advancements of technology and staving off the dread of solitude, experienced by the bulk of humanity throughout known history before integration, then yes, of course,” the Talker scoffed.

“So this may be hard to understand,” Viggo cautioned. “We were dis-integrated. I didn’t realize it at the time but we were disconnected from the entire system you’ve grown up in. There was no soothing comfort. No controlled dispersion of pacifying hormones in reaction to outside stimuli. No pain management, post- or pre-experience.”

Throughout the ship a warning claxon boomed. The crew prepared to launch proton warheads at the Redoubt, Viggo’s tortured command vessel, obliterating the horrors within.

“We had no preemptive care plans and were forced to deal with daily life with our own peace of mind. My ship became crewed by unwitting isolationists, unconnected to each other. Imagine what that must feel like. To look at someone and have no idea what they were truly thinking or feeling. Now imagine rocketing through deep space, the aching cry of the silent void wracking the minds of every soul on my ship as the soothing comfort of integration slipped from them.”

“This is not possible,” the Talker argued, struggling with the concept. “People do not just quit being integrated, that is preposterous.”

The captain continued. “Imagine careening through deep space, knowing you were destined to live out your life and die on that generation ship. Now imagine what it felt like to lose everyone around you. You notice the silence of your disconnected mind first. But, that silence is quickly overwhelmed as you tear past the screaming birth pains of a million-billion stars churning in their helium plasma. And just when you are as unconsciously distraught as you could possibly be, the discomfort manifests under your very skin.”

Each of their bodies tensed slightly in reaction to the ship readjusting its distance to prepare for detonation, placing them safely outside the blast radius. Even with all their advances, inertia was a difficult force to counter.

“You rub your hands, thinking you’re just cold. Perhaps you just need a bit of rest or, astonishingly, that maybe you’ve become ‘sick,’ as I remember my parents calling it. But throughout all this, the itch never stops, it never abates.”

Viggo jerked against the restraints again, thumping his hands on the table. “It’s the damned dust. I can feel it! It’s always there, everywhere. It’s a constant, nagging agitation prickling beneath my skin.”

“Captain Visante, this is ridiculous. You are a highly decorated officer in the United States Space Corps, and you will dispense with such nonsense. As you well know, each neural control node, or ‘dust’ as you so eloquently put it, is 1/20,000 of a cubic millimeter. Even with one attached to every muscle fiber in your body, the cumulative volume of such nanotechnology would fit on the tip of this pen. And even if you could feel it, our well being monitors would easily mask any discomfort from that or an array of similar irritants. You in no way, shape or form could have ‘felt’ the dust.” The Talker dabbed another tear, pooling at the inside of his eye.

“Besides,” he continued, “neural control nodes have been a boon to our program. You know as well as I that neither your crew nor ours here could survive the rigors of deep space travel without them.”

The captain took another drag, the cigarette flaring bright orange as he inhaled. He frowned, the soothing burn overshadowed by the crawling itch beneath his skin.

“We felt them,” he insisted. “All of us did. Some of us handled it better than others. I was lucky. I grew up un-integrated. Alone in my thoughts and raw in my feelings. I learned to deal with life. But those on my ship that only knew a life ever comforted by the dust? Well, they fell apart very early. Each in their own way but we were on the same sinking ship together. Some drank whatever they could ferment, some smoked anything they could grow, but everyone itched to some degree or another. While I was able to limit myself to just my fingernails, by the end of it others like Billy—” Viggo choked up, “Corporal William McLeary was using a cheese grater. As you know, it didn’t stop there. There were such horrors on that ship at the end.” Things I dare not remember. Destroy that cursed thing.”

The Talker jotted a few words. “The Redoubt will indeed be decommissioned and destroyed where she floats,” he said without looking at Viggo. “The carnage on that ship will never be recorded nor remembered. But what you are saying is so implausible I am afraid I simply cannot submit your statements into my report. Now,” he said, looking up again, “explain to me in a way that does not discount the last forty years of human technological and psychological advancement, how on a generation ship, ten-thousand souls went insane, abandoned their posts and slaughtered each other in some of the most unimaginable ways I have ever had the misfortune of witnessing. And, enlighten me after all that, how one man, you, survived?”

Viggo laughed, a wheezy, hacking laugh that seemed to unsettled the Talker.

“Slaughtered each other?” Viggo cleared his throat. “How I wish that were true. On the graves of my wife and daugh—” Viggo stumbled, his lip quivering as images of his girl flooded his mind. He composed himself, eyes glistening with pain.

“—my daughter, I wish that were true.”

The Talker sliced a sideways look behind him, but as usual the woman just stood, apparently listening.

“Alright, shall we begin again?” The Talker whisked out a fresh sheet of paper. “Comm’s received a ‘lope update on Saturday, July 3, as per the standard data envelope beam schedule, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Alright, and E.T. Barnes authorized the antivirus scan and unpack 15 minutes after download per standard data envelope processing, correct?”

“Correct.”

The Talker looked up. “And...then what?”

“Nothing, the electronics technician reported there wasn’t a damn thing in that envelope. We downloaded an empty file.”

“See, now this is where you lose me.” Sometime after the download you relinquish all ship control, your crew and citizens start behaving erratically, and 400 days later everyone is dead. Everyone…except you. As far as the Space Corps is concerned, you failed to maintain a robust magnetic field, the ship suffered some sort of deep space exposure and the crew were driven mad.”

Viggo’s watery eyes flashed as he bolted upright, staring the Talker dead in the face.

“Listen, son, I’ve given 35 years to the Space Corps. I’ve flown seventeen deep space missions, logged 14,000 hours in low altitude orbits, another 14,000 hours in high altitude orbit, space walked more times then you can count including two, separate tether-free recovery missions, BOTH of which ended in zero casualty recoveries. I know how to download a security envelope, and I know how to manage the god damned field integrity.”

Viggo leaned into The Talker, thumping his middle finger on the table. Tiny clumps of ash sprinkled over his fingers.

“Now, you explain something. How is it that my people, everyone from the janitors to the Seed Bearer, all of them suddenly dropped integration? Why did nothing take 18 teraflops of data to download? What the hell did we receive? How the hell did you get here so quickly? Why the hell is there a damned interrogation chamber on a rescue ship? Why did my own ship lock me out of all comm’s and navigation control and plot its own forced burn to conveniently meet up with you? And why hasn’t she said a damn thing in two and a half hours?” Viggo was howling now, and he flicked the cigarette at her face. She stood motionless even as the lit ember seared her cheek.

The Talker sighed, gathered his notes and put away his pen. Resting his right hand over his left he stared at Viggo. His finger rubbed at his hand underneath as he spoke.

“Captain Viggo Visante, Commanding Officer of the U.S.S.C. Redoubt, will be held for trial, returned to moon base command for general court-martial and possible dishonorable discharge.” The Talker cocked his head slightly to the left, sliding his chin against the stiffness of his shirt collar. He pushed his chair back to stand, the chair legs’ screech reverberating through the room. As he did so the woman caught the back of his chair and he plopped awkwardly back down. A tiny ring of red light flashed around the iris of her left eye.

“How?'' Her voice was the buzz of fluorescent lighting. “How did you survive dis-integration?” she repeated.

Barely audible yelps ricocheted far outside the room.

The Talker scooted the chair back to the table, breathing hard through his nose. He reached into his jacket frantically fishing for the pen again. His other hand scratched at his ribs through his pressed shirt.

Sweat beaded on Viggo’s temples as he recalled everything. The words kept spilling from him as the woman's eyes held him fast.

“I, I remembered freedom. I remembered life.” Viggo stammered.

As vivid as the day, Viggo pictured his finger gripped tight in the fleshy grasp of his new born daughter's hand.

“I—there was life before. I had a life before all this. I chose to remember. The crew chose to forget. To drown the pain with whatever they could craft from the supply stores. But, I chose to remember, to feel the pain. Not hide from it or cover it, but really feel it.”

The woman nodded, an imperceptible movement. The red ring around her iris flashed again.

Outside, a series of muffled thumps and wails seeped through the walls. Another scream echoed just outside the door, breaking the woman’s hold on him.

The captain gasped, jerking back as far as the bindings would allow.

The Talker was writhing now, back arched in his chair, the jacket opened wide. He raked the pen across his chest, shredding his pristine shirt and lacerating the flabby skin beneath. His now blood-spattered notes covered the floor.

“I can feel them,” he whimpered. “I can feel the dust, everywhere inside me!”

Viggo looked at the woman.

“It’s happening again! Dear God it’s happening again.” He struggled against the unbreakable manacles.

“It’s happening again,” he screamed, as the woman turned, stepped on the Talker’s notes and walked to the door. She keyed the portal open. A cacophony of human suffering washed through the room from each deck.

“Thank you, Captain. I will utilize this feedback and modify my existing dis-integration procedures appropriately. Rest assured, no one will suffer the indignity of surviving dis-integration again. Travel well with what little time you have.” She stepped through the doorway.

“No, don’t leave, don’t leave me here. Please, release me. Please” Viggo begged. The clicking of her heeled boots on steel gantries dissolved amid the wailing agony of the entire crew as she faded from his view.