Baked Scribe Flashback : Flight Of One
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Joseph entered the navigational data into the computer and sat back, bracing himself for the cautionary alert.
“Captain,” the voice chimed in, on cue. “The system you have selected has been flagged as unsafe for outside traffic.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“The astrological constants of the Dooridium system differs in one respect to—”
“Stop.” He kept having to remind himself that the computer always did what was asked of it. There was no room for nuance. “Just execute the course.”
He settled back in his chair as he felt the thrum of the engines engaging, keying in the panel next to him for a cup of tea. The star-field swirled around him on the view screen and he closed his eyes.
The scream of the others at the substation was still the sound he heard whenever he closed his eyes. The entire planet had been reduced to rubble, his escape to the ship being the only successful attempt off planet. No one left but him. He had piloted the ship away from the system, desperate to report the incident to the nearest station, to get his report onto the network.
As of yet he had found no other signs of life. Nothing.
The ships digital charts showed all of the outposts along with their neighboring planets and systems. All he had found was death, as if a malevolent force had made its way from planet to planet, consuming all life. Joseph never saw the entity, whatever it was but rather always seemed to appear, right in its wake.
“Captain, our present course will take us within unsafe proximity to a Celestial—”
“Change to correct.” Joseph snapped. The computer still insisted on calling him Captain, despite knowing full well his actual status. He was nothing more than a part time technician. Maybe it was just programming to call person controlling the ship, “captain.”
Every day left him feeling like he was wasting his time. At first he had been relieved that the level of automation on the ship had given him the ability to get away alone, now the only thing he wanted was company, another voice other than this damn little dry personality that the computer had been programmed with.
It didn’t make any sense that every planet in every system could have been struck. There was no way that some kind of simultaneous ecological event could’ve stricken all these worlds and there was no militaristic force capable of leveling such an attack. There was not even sign of other alien civilizations. It was as if the experiment of life itself had been abruptly stopped across the board.
He had come across another ship the week before, drifting through space. It didn’t respond to any hails, and despite his reluctance, he took the shuttle over to investigate. The ship was dead. There was no sign of violence or disturbance inside but there was no crew to be found. He found no evidence of the ship being evacuated. He found trays of food, half eaten and books sitting out on desks, computers running programs and requesting input. It was as if every living being on the ship had just vanished at the same time.
The computer had offered no hypothesis, any idea of anything that could’ve caused this. And to contemplate the amount of power needed and on such a scale to accomplish something like this terrified him.
He wondered how long before this wandering swath of destruction would find him. Was this no different than a rat running endlessly around in the treadmill, to the amusement and enlightenment of beings unseen and unknown?
The clock on the adjacent chimed, indicating that he needed to take his scheduled time to sleep. As hard as it was, he had to force himself to take that step towards relaxation. At least the ships had been designed with the notion of the Captain being readily available, as a lavish office off the bridge contained a cot which pulled out from the wall.
Time was hard to track in this place, as he passed through systems on different temoporal alignments, he could only hold to the arbitrary schedule on the ship. The concept of night and day had long since fallen to the wayside, and he now had to force himself to simply live by the clock.
A shadow seemed to have fallen across his world as the time allowed for all species had come, and that this mysterious force was simply the harbinger of this doom, bringing death and destruction in its wake.
Joseph pulled up the star charts on one of the computers, taking note of all the blackened out sectors he had indicated as being lifeless, vacant cavities of ghosts and silence.
He knew it was only a matter of time before the planet killer came upon him as well, absurd to think that he was somehow special or that he would continue to go unnoticed. He would meet his demise as had so many others before him.
He didn’t want to accept the idea that there was no one left. Still, he found himself preparing on the inside. He winced at the thought of that transitional moment when he knew that his this breath would likely be the last. The ship would only last so long and even though he knew that he could settle down on a planet somewhere, recently vacated, he knew where he would end up. He could only go so long, treading over the remains of the dead, alone until insanity would settle in. Better to let nature take it’s course.
Joseph settled back and prepared to carry on with this hopeless search. He would continue to try and find life, knowing in his heart that by his own hand or otherwise, this was all simply a direct path to the inevitability of his own death.
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