Vera and the Escape to the Infinity Pod

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. And Vera had tried. Her trajectory had begun two months prior, surreptitiously, with the casual flirtations of a group therapist named Loy. Loy was a member of the Serapis’s maintenance crew, and in an effort to move into the ranks of medical staff he mediated the after dinner therapy sessions for the eleventh ward three times a week, which often dragged on for more than two and a half hours of excruciatingly boring revelations from the more outgoing patients. Vera kept quiet on most nights, but a particularly egregious account of physical transformation into a mosquito by a inmate named Marigold had caused her to erupt with laughter. Marigold occupied the cell next to Vera’s in the eleventh ward domicile and had been interned for stealing and consuming nearly a gallon of precious Ob positive blood from the bank at the medical agency where she was employed on earth. During her sarcastic uproar Vera had noticed Loy suppressing a smile in her direction, before narrowing his eyes and commanding, “Vera, enough!” But the glimpse of his subtly curved lip and his use of her birth name had captivated her, because she had considered all guards to be inhuman conduits of the coping agency, deftly proselytizing the ten principles of recovery.

At the end of the session, instead of being the first patient to leave as usual she circled the room, guiding her wall fastened umbilicus along its track like a leash until she was in the back of the line. Annie, the eleventh ward Mother, appeared in the window of the group therapy door to collect the group, and Loy pressed his finger against the door’s needle prick apparatus to authorize the door to open. Untethered by an umbilicus, as his employment status upon the ship dictated, he freely took his position in the back of the line behind Vera. “Number one, you’re out of order!” Annie barked at Vera and sighed, “Oh, forget it.” The group of a dozen eleventh ward occupants began to march left, careful to stay in step and not to snag each other’s umbilici. “Always getting into trouble,” Loy remarked coyly in Vera’s direction. His breath was warm on her neck and she felt exposed. The collective made its way down the therapy wing until it reached the communal atrium, which they entered to meet the hustle of ward inhabitants and house mothers coming and going from dinner, recreation and therapy activities. They walked left to come to the eleventh ward entrance, past ward twelve and paused briefly to allow the Mother Joan, of the tenth ward, to detach the umbilicus of a new patient who had inadvertently walked past the tenth ward entrance and was now blocking the eleventh ward from entering their domicile. Joan struggled to cap the rogue patient’s umbilicus through the extraction slat, and soon gave up while muttering that the inmate would “have to learn the hard way” while leading the poor girl backwards to the tenth ward entrance. Vera looked on as the uninitiated’s saucer eyes faded and the two women vanished into the doorway of their destination. Vera’s block moved forward, until this time Annie lifted her finger to be pricked for entry to the eleventh ward. “Number two!” Annie called once they were inside the ward, while scowling at Vera. Ward inhabitant number two, Marigold, moved forward and pricked her finger on her cell door keypad, causing it to open. “Number three!” Each inmate took their turn pricking their finger and entering their chamber, until all had retired except for Vera. “And finally, number one” Annie snickered. Vera volunteered her finger and disappeared into her room. She stood on the other side of her doorway and watched through the window, and as Loy walked past to leave the ward his eyes met hers for a second too long.

At breakfast the next morning Annie capped all twelve of the eleventh ward inhabitants’ umbilici with one way nutrition valves, and seated them at their feeding table, watching closely as each patient attached their valve to the food dispensing port in the center of the table. Annie went away, and as Vera felt the familiar uncomfortable sensation of rendered, lab grown meat matter entering her stomach through the tube, Marigold addressed her, “I saw the way Loy looked at you during group last night.” Number three, Abigail, giggled nervously. “Is that so?” Vera said with disinterest. “I wish he would look at me that way,” Marigold murmured, “what I wouldn’t give for a taste of that sweet scented blood of his,” Vera raised an eyebrow.

In the following weeks, Loy spent more time gazing distractedly at Vera during therapy sessions, allowing the group to devolve into verbal chaos between the somewhat rationally minded patients and the outright insane. Marigold in particular was prone to fantastical outbursts, reliving her blood theft escapade in precise detail, and regularly becoming agitated to the point of arousal. It was on a Friday night two months later, while waiting for Annie to retrieve the group and lead them to the weekend film activity, that when it was time for Marigold to get in line, she instead sunk to the floor like a disgruntled toddler and refused to get up. When Annie arrived she was livid, and ordered Loy to restrain Marigold while she detached her umbilici, so that they could call medical crew staff to deliver her to the infirmary, where she would certainly be drugged into a comatose like state and whisked away to the solitary confinement block. Marigold capped the cord too early, and when Loy crouched down to apply the vacuum cuffs to Marigold’s wrists she bucked forward and head butted him. As he swayed in agony, Marigold tackled him to the ground and plunged her teeth into his neck. Loy cried out in agony as Marigold wrapped her limbs around his torso and sucked. Annie wasted no time, pressing the alarm button on her wrist pad and drawing her tasing spear from her belt. Annie pressed the taser tip against Marigold’s buttocks, per protocol, and she collapsed onto the floor, jerking uncontrollably and frothing spittle. Annie bent over Marigold’s seizing frame and drew her own cuffs, expertly applying them to Marigold’s wrists whereupon they released a puff of air and began to shrink in place. “Number one!” Annie beckoned “apply pressure to Loy’s wound!” Vera kneeled and put her hands over the crude holes in Loy’s throat. Blood sputtered out, and his eyelids fluttered irregularly. “Help me,” Loy croaked. Annie tore a swatch of cloth from her uniform and tossed it at Vera. Vera bunched it up and pressed it to Loy. The therapy door opened and two medics appeared to collect Loy, followed by two guards. The medics pushed Vera aside and applied a vacuum tourniquet to Loy’s throat. As the medics lifted him onto a stretcher, the guards yanked Marigold to her feet. The parties left the room, Loy and his attendants first, followed by Marigold and her captors, and finally, Annie. “Wait here!” Annie commanded to her constituents as the grim procession made its way down the hall. The automatic door closed tightly. Vera, still clutching the blood soaked rag, stood up in shock. She peered through the door’s window as Annie rounded the therapy wing and the party moved out of sight. Vera looked down at the rag, and a radical idea struck her. She balled the rag in her fist and held it to the needle prick on the door’s keypad. The door shot open. “Vera, no!” Abigail whispered, but Vera ignored her misgivings and moved through the doorway into the hallway. The door shot closed and she turned to see the ten remaining inmates through the window, as they looked back wearily. In the corridor, Vera moved right instead of left for the first time. The eleventh ward therapy room was at the end of the hallway, across from the twelfth ward’s. Group was still in session behind that door, and Vera ducked down as she crept along the wall. She reached the exit at the end of the wing. She again pressed the still wet rag against the terminal door, and it opened. Vera found herself in an airlock. The room felt like a womb, heated and pulsing with bright orange lights. She led her umbilicus around the circumference of the chamber to the opposite wall and looked out through the exit door window. She felt that she could see into infinity, with a million glittering stars all around her. And something else, home. It looked nothing like the photographs distributed by the historical agency, that showcased crystal clear oceans and dense emerald forests. Instead it was a bleak grey thing, with hazily lit rings of smog radiating all around it, like a halo of failure. Vera heard a commotion in the therapy hallway and turned her head to see Annie and the two guards who had subdued Marigold through the airlock door. “Seize her!” Annie ordered the guards. Vera’s nameless hunter lifted his hand to the airlock door pin prick, and attempted to open the door. “Unauthorized” said the speaker on the door pad. The other guard stepped up to try his finger. Vera realized that Loy’s maintenance designation granted him security clearance to the airlock, which the three would be detainers lacked. Vera made a rash decision. Faced with the certainty of solitary confinement and the infinite loop of nutrient transfusions, mediated group sessions and the day in day out monotony of navigating the endless corridors of the Serapis, she felt that she would rather die. She lifted the rag onto the airlock door needle point. Immediately the chamber began to depressurize and the computer speaker broadcasted, “ten, nine, eight” Vera reached down and encircled her umbilicus with her hand. The tube had been removed once before, during a cavity search after an unknown patient in her ward had managed to connect their umbilicus to a tranquilizer tube in the medication dispensary, and stolen enough of the time release capsules to overdose an entire cell block. The skin around the tube’s entry point had been cauterized and lacked sensation, so she felt no pain during the procedure, albeit an extreme chill descended upon her and the feeling as if she had unwittingly released her bowels. She braced herself for the discomfort as she unlocked the tube with the combination of her ward and cell number, first eleven clicks to the right, and then one click to the left as she remembered the doctor had configured during her exam. The computer spoke “one” as she pulled the umbilicus out, and the airlock exit door slowly opened behind her. She allowed herself to fall backwards and begin to float into space. Vera opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. The spent breath was probably what kept her alive, as the scream left her body the air was released from her column and saved her from instant compression and death. The saliva on her tongue began to freeze, and tears bubbled out of the corners of her eyes. Her insides began to slowly erupt from the hole in her stomach, and she watched the contents curiously. She felt calm and autonomous for the first time since she had been interned in on the Serapis six years prior, after a suicide attempt on earth had caused her to be flagged as an unstable person by the coping agency, and she was sentenced to live out the rest of her life on the psychiatric space vessel, in order to preserve the mental cleanliness of the fragile population of Earth, while providing valuable research insight into the effects of medication and therapy in a celestial setting. Her independent crusade towards death was short lived however, as a galactic delivery vessel silently approached her. It’s octagonal door opened in a spiral, like a flower blooming, and a suited figure glided outwardly in her direction. The unknown entity encapsulated Vera in its arms, and used the tether attached to its suit to pull back inside the pod as the door closed in an endless fractal, and Vera blacked out.