Not A Blog™

Continued from Wednesday

Again I dream, again more dire. My friend and I feign conversation. I lean against the nearest rack of gigantic spinning tape drives—ancient machines, but in this place they are state of the art. My friend reaches the end of some inconsequential line of thought and excuses himself. I crack my neck and reach for my coffee, but something is holding my arm. I turn and see the tape has jumped off its spindle. Yards of brown looping celluloid snake out around the glass, and it has trapped my arm against the machine. Pulling against it makes it tighter. The next drive in the row throws off its tape as well. I scream for my friend, but the only sound I can emit is the orderly squeal of a modem. I become paralyzed and blind before I wake.

My dreams have caught up with my reality. They had become a sort of alternate, free world where I could talk and run. But now I wonder: the next time I sleep, will I sleep thoughts in darkness? How will I be able to tell the difference between this world and dreams? I wonder if the radio will come on to keep me company, and to my pleasant surprise, it does.

“…is correct. At this point, we are just trying to save the experiment. We can take our time, not having to worry about survivors, and make sure the next mission is as fail-safe as possible. We will recover the data from Prometheus as soon as possible with a probe, but a second manned mission will be a long time coming.”

The voice changed to female. “That was Arthur Godfried, spokesman for NASA, confirming that there are no survivors aboard the Prometheus. According to crash data picked up from satellites orbiting Mars, the life support systems gave out shortly after the impact. The chances of anyone alive at this point are practically zero.”

The satellites are wrong! I mentally screamed at the radio. Maybe they did not want to worry people on Earth. That was understandable. Let them move on with their lives. But even NASA—who knows the truth—was not coming. One life was not important enough to save. Or perhaps they knew it was futile to launch a mission for one man—that I would be dead long before they could get here. It was a peaceful conclusion, I thought, and appropriate.

I did dream that night and it was not darkness as I predicted. It started as if I were awake but subtle enough that I knew I was dreaming. A voice—a loud immediate voice, different from the sound of the radio—punched through my head.

“Hey, get up.” As they spoke, the space in front of me lit up with a million stars. I was laying on my back in someone’s yard. They lived in the desert; all around me was sand with some prickly vegetation. “Are you going to sleep out here all night?” asked my friend from the lab.

I stretched. It felt good to move and to speak. “Sure, if it’s not going to rain.”

“Hasn’t as long as anyone can remember. But you’ve got your crawlies. You stay out here all night, don’t come crying when nature moves in.”

“Sure,” I hopped up, but I kept staring at the beautiful night sky. I changed the subject to the scene above. “You think we’ll ever get up there?” I asked, although I knew my friend’s answer.

Scowling he said, “Doubt it. It’s too inhospitable. Robots, maybe, but not us. They’re the only thing that could survive out there.”

I was going to argue the point, but he left, followed shortly by the stars. I was back to my mundane life of darkness but the radio saved me from certain panic. I listened for a few seconds but it never resolved the static. This was odd. The radio was persistent in its lack of signal, but it didn’t shut off as it had before. I listened more intently and thought I detected a pattern, some sort of code. It wouldn’t matter; I’d never understand it. They must be trying to activate some part of the computer, although why I never heard it before was a mystery. The code became more distinct and I could tell it wasn’t Morse. It was made up of multiple frequencies and far more complex than a dot-dash signal. It grew louder and more impatient. Within minutes I thought I was almost at my threshold for pain, although I felt nothing. The vibration was intense, just a shade under unbearable. It seemed my eardrums would burst, leaving me deaf, which would be quite an irony. But before this misdeed, the static dropped away and I heard instead a collection of voices.

It was a jumbled murmur—a crowd of people intent on their own problems—nothing like the well structured audio of radio programs. I wondered if the radio locked on to the strongest signal, regardless of the content. I tried to pick up the threads of conversation, but the most I could hear were snippets of words.

I could see! It was as if my eyes had been open the entire time, but the light was never processed. I forgot about the busy sound on the radio and gazed at the world in wonder. The stars were brilliant and the ground, while desolate, was evocative like nothing I could recall. It was the first thing I saw since blindness, and the only landscape I knew. I was still paralyzed, unable to view my body, but at least I was alive and improving. I stared until one voice rose above the mumbling sea on the radio. It said, “we have a visual.”

I wondered if they could see me alive in the ship. Before I could celebrate with them, another voice said, “Houston, Prometheus. Come in, Prometheus.”

And you told the world we were all dead. I mocked the radio that could not hear. Twenty minutes later it answered me anyway.

“Well, of course, the crew is dead.” This was followed shortly by, “it’s just you now. We believe an asteroid knocked your memory core offline during the landing. Luckily your CPU seems to be fine. Stand by, we’ll transmit the important stuff back to you in a few minutes.”

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