My name is Robert Kinderman and I have been dead for three days.
The last thing I can remember—before I died—was a bright burning bolt of light catching me in the chest and cauterizing a deep hole that went nearly all the way through.
The blast killed me but, somehow, I had the ability to see, hear and touch. My living mind was trapped. Whether or not I was in or around by body I couldn’t tell. At times, my perspective was above the ruined slab of meat that was my body, other times I was inside of it and—seemingly—looking out of my own eyes, though I knew them to be closed or, perhaps, destroyed.
Time passed intimately for me. My mind somehow linked with its flow; the pulsing seconds churned like blood in my consciousness. I felt it as I passed from one second into the next as if I were transcending some infinite barrier that kept reality from existing in too many seconds at once.
We lived on the space station Arcadia. She was a DeVille class station, one of the largest ever produced. Some fifteen hundred civilian and five hundred military personnel called her home. I was one of the military crew.
Arcadia was a research facility stationed near the Oort cloud, which lies near the gravitational boundary of our solar system. The Oort cloud was hypothetical, spherical cloud of comets surrounding our solar system. It remained hypothetical for nearly three-hundred years after it was suggested. In 2010, scientists proposed that the basic elements of life sustaining ‘earth-like’ planets could exist there. In 2285, our technology finally caught up to our ambitions. Even with our fastest ships, it still took nearly two months to travel the fifty thousand AU (nearly a light-year) to Arcadia’s construction site. In 2325, construction was complete and in 2326 she was completely populated. For ten years, we conducted research desperately searching for some glimmer of hope-fostering fact that would, at the very least, provide an alternate supply of resources to our rapidly depleting stores.
Just over two days ago, we experienced the biggest scare we’ve had since Arcadia went into service. Problems with the power systems caused rolling brown-outs throughout the station. The crew worked quickly to trace and repair the cause. While they were successful, a general feeling of unease settled on the men and women of Arcadia. We no longer had the luxury of taking our environment for granted.
It was at station mid-night when the first attacks came. Arcadia sustained heavy damage to her infrastructure, leaving only emergency power. We were caught unaware. Arcadia’s sensors had not detected anything in the proximity. At first, it was assumed to be bits of comet or other stellar debris thrown off by the tidal forces of the Oort cloud, but in order to evade detection (so it was theorized) they would have to be traveling at or faster than light. Later, however, we learned the truth.
The crew suffered terribly. For nearly six hours, life support failed completely. Arcadia’s hull ruptured under the assaults and entire decks—people and equipment—was blown into the cold expanse of space. Survivors of the first attacks were moved to hydroponics, where there would be plenty of oxygen and emergency power could be used to produce heat. The military personnel donned environmental suits and began the desperate search for more survivors. Hundreds of dead floated around the station. I took a blaster shot from a malfunctioning point’s defense system and found myself with the dead… trapped, somehow, in this charred, lifeless body as I floated in zero gravity, along the ceiling of a corridor I used to walk down everyday.
The bluish-white beam of a searchlight wobbled in the darkness and illuminated us in the quiet corridor. The magnetic boots of an environment suit echoed from behind the light. The sound, I knew, was in my mind. The lack of atmosphere would have made sound impossible to hear, of course so would a lack of living ears.
I saw her, then. An angel surrounded in a bright halo of reflected light from the stark white of her environmental suit. A thin strip of digital cloth flashed the name: Doctor Cathy Day. She served as the chief medical officer for Arcadia. She and her staff looked after us when we were sick or injured and even now, in death, we were her grim responsibility. She tugged my hand and pulled me down from the ceiling. I felt warmth from her. It wasn’t like a warm hand on cold skin, but it was more like the warmth of her living energy mingling with the cold of my ‘dead’ energy.
She passed a whirring medical scanner over my body. The angel eyed its readings with a critical brow.
“This one as well…” The regret on her otherwise happy face saddened me. Doctor Day removed a scuffed, black boot from my right foot and placed a plastic identification tag on my big toe. I was sent on my way with the others she'd collected.
"Goodbye, Robert." I thought I heard her say, as the burial detail tethered my body to a repulser cart.
The dead were transported to cargo bay forty; our bodies were laid among the crates and boxes of that narrow, enclosed strip of metal serving as a makeshift morgue. Long rows of us were lying there with our still, dead faces turned up to the ceiling. Some of us were not so fortunate to have a quick death. The slow torture of asphyxiation took many lives as the atmosphere gradually bled away. Others, like me, were here to protect them from harm and to keep them alive during this most terrible of times. We failed. I failed.
’I'm so sorry.’ I wondered about my wife and daughter. Were they dead too? Did they lay here cold and scared like me? I wanted to cry as my imagination filled with images of them calling my name with their last suffocating breaths. Perhaps this was my punishment for letting them suffer so.
"Over eight-hundred dead," I heard someone living say, their voice distant and muffled like someone yelling in a wind storm.
Two of the living took my body by the shoulders and feet and hoisted me onto a gravity repulser gurney. It wobbled slightly on its cushion of force as my dead weight settled heavily on it. I remembered asking a tech how gravity repulsers worked once. After a few moments of very impressive theory and me looking like I hadn't used anything more technologically advanced than a shovel, he simply said to me, 'It’s complicated.' The orderlies pushed the gurney passed the rows of dead into a small cleared portion of the cargo bay. Bright lights were set up in a semicircle in the middle of the clearing. Various medical devices decorated a shiny, metal table that stood near a doctor in sterile, green scrubs. A thick plastic shield covered his face giving him a dispassionate, clinical look. The orderlies brought me to a stop at the doctor's waist.
’What was he doing?’
"Begin recording," He said to an automated recording device on the horribly stocked table. Slowly, it began to dawn on me.
"The decedent is a well developed, well nourished white male weighing two-hundred five pounds and measuring seventy-two inches in length," he said in his cold, clinical manner.
My mind reeled in panic. I screamed. I screamed as loud as I have ever screamed in my life. I wanted someone…anyone to hear me.
’I'm not dead!’ I lay there watching and listening as he continued the grisly task.
"Wound cavity and burns to the chest consistent with high-energy pulsed laser blast. Heart destroyed. Wound appears to be primary cause of death..." The doctor removed my clothes and began going over the rest of my body.
“The body exhibits a similar energy signature to the others. The anomaly is as yet unexplained.” The doctor said. “I am beginning the procedure to retrieve harvestable organs and the box.”
The ‘box’ was an identification marker of sorts. It was attached to the brain near the visual center, or so I was told once. It stored all of your experience and knowledge. One box stored a life. All of your experiences and learning could be passed on to your children or loved ones. When the military developed it and the government ‘required’ them to be installed in its citizens, it was presented as a sentimental way of preserving yourself for your family in the event of your death. And since graveyards were abolished due to limited space on the planet, the box became a living keepsake for families. At least, that’s what everyone thought. The reality was that it was an easy way for the government to ensure a skilled workforce and a simple way to track its civilians. The experiences stored in the box were used on several occasions to convict or prove innocence in criminal trials. I heard once that a hacker devised a way to plant false memories through visual cues flashed on a computer or television screen.
The doctor picked up a small laser scalpel and activated it. He placed the point where my left shoulder joined my body and with slow practiced precision pulled it slowly down in a diagonal motion to the solar plexus. I prayed for unconsciousness. He started a new incision on my right side. He began a third and final cut from the solar plexus to the pelvis, completing a 'Y' shaped opening to my insides. Helplessly, I watched as the flaps of skin were peeled back revealing my sticky, dark colored organs. The doctor reached in and scooped them out. Most of them went into a silver pan with a wet smack. Some, presumably the good organs, were passed to his assistant and placed in a refrigerated container. The doctor stepped around me. I felt a tugging at my head. Then the loose wrinkled skin of my forehead folded down over my eyes. He removed the box from its thirty-four year home in my brain. He passed the box to his assistant.
After he had taken samples from my body, he put everything loosely back into the cavities he got them from and sutured me back together. The orderlies moved me back to the mass of dead and chose another candidate for the table.
On the edge of thought, I became aware of the minds of the other dead. Their voices blended into a low droning hum as they waited their turn with the doctor.
"Is this the afterlife? Is this... hell?" I asked of no one in particular, my quivering words falling into theirs.
"No," said one, "our souls are trapped."
"How can that be?" I asked.
"I don't know," He said.
"They trapped us here," said another. "They trapped us because they want our souls."
"They…?" I asked.
"I don't know who they are, but they want our souls. They trap us here in our corpse and take our living soul; our life energy."
"How do you know this?" I asked.
"I have seen them," he said, "and heard them speak. They come in the night with their terrible devices and rip out our souls, robbing us of any chance to be free of this world."
"If we're only trapped, then we can live again." I said, my hope searching for basis. "If we could figure out how they trapped us, we could be free again."
"No," was the answer. "Our bodies are dead. The living never notices we are trapped here. We are doomed to wait until we're taken." I remembered the crisp black-stained hole in my chest and the savage violation of the autopsy. I would never live again.
The living was led from the cargo bay by the medical staff. An orderly paused to adjust the climate control. Ice crystals began forming as the heat of the room bled off into space. The orderly turned off the lights and in a huff of cold breath, he closed the doors, leaving the cargo bay as cold and dead as we were. In the darkness, our bodies glowed dimly from some internal luminescence that I presumed to be our trapped souls. For some time I just lay there in the darkness watching the shimmering glow and listening to the dead. A great majority had gone quite insane, ranting on about anything, nothing. The mind is a fragile thing. True, some are stronger willed than others but, really, it doesn't take much to break it. Then in the cold silence, I noticed a young dead woman stand. Her thin and ethereal gown rippled and blew in the still air of the cargo bay. Her glowing yet semitransparent body pushed through the darkness to a nearby portal where she stopped and looked out at the stars.
"Hello," I said to her. Somehow, she was free from her body. Surely, she must hear me, "Hello!"
"She can't hear you friend," came the voice from earlier. I think his name was Daniel. It was hard to tell. The thoughts of the dead mingled. I could experience his memories and he mine, if we allowed each other.
"She has passed beyond intellect and is nothing more than purpose." said Daniel.
"The stars are so beautiful," She said.
"Purpose…? What purpose?" I was confused.
"So beautiful," Her voice became a sorrowful moaning wail.
"Her last thought before she passed into this state has become her driving purpose for existence. She was thinking of home or the stars, maybe. It's different for each of us. The part of her mind that was human is gone; all that's left is purpose."
"Why does this happen?" I asked, my voice shaking.
"I think it happens when we are trapped here for too long." He explained. "Our dead bodies can only contain the energies for a little while."
"Who are they?" I asked a second time.
"Machines," said a new voice, a female voice.
"Machines," I said, puzzled. "What do you mean machines?"
"I mean the machine people, they take us. They're the reason we're all dead. It was them that infected Arcadia’s computers with the nano-virus."
"How do you know it was these... machine people?"
"I," she said opening her thoughts to me, "was in the main computer core when it happened. He appeared out of nowhere, our scanners never even caught a glimpse of him. But I did. His body was enveloped in a strange energy, which apparently cloaked him from our sensors." As she described what she had seen, I could see her memories as our minds linked. The clean black surfaces of main computing appeared in my mind. The humanoid appeared in a flash of light. It walked to the smooth interface console, ignoring the protests of the alarmed crewmembers. She/I moved to the communications panel and began hailing security, when a white pulse of energy from its open palm struck me/her in the midsection, causing the now dead body to slump unceremoniously to the floor. The being turned back to the interface and the envelope of energy that surrounded its body faded away. The machine man's physique was a sculpture of quintessence. Shiny, metal flesh covered its humanlike body. It moved with precise, cybernetic grace, as it continued with its task. The machine man leaned forward, examining the computer interface that had to be no less than primitive to him. A small ripple appeared on the man's temple, as if the surface of him was liquid, or rather, could become liquid. From it, a cable flowed out and plugged itself into the computer interface. Monitors displayed streams of data, as the machine man loaded the terrible nano-virus that would turn Arcadia against her crew and kill over eight hundred people. His task completed, the energy field popped back into place and he disappeared in a bluish-white flash, just as a heavily armored security team rushed in.
As my perception returned to normal I lay stunned. Silence hung in the air like dust particles in a beam of sunlight through a window, as the minds of the others went quiet also.
"Maybe it’s our fault they’re here in the first place." I said, finally breaking the silence.
"How do you mean?" Daniel asked.
"I’m no scientist but do you think it’s possible they could have sensed Arcadia’s communications and interpreted them as some kind of distress call?"
"I guess it could be possible." He said.
"There was a power failure in the core a couple days ago." The woman said. "Maybe the AI’s actions to correct the problem were interpreted as panic."
"You think maybe they see Arcadia as a sentient life form?" Daniel asked.
"I think they are clearly too advanced to be that naive. More likely, they see it as a fledgling life in captivity… or maybe even infected." I said.
"Infected? With what?"
"Us."
In the distance, we could see the blue flashes of the machine people’s arrival. We could hear the panicked pleas of the dead as their energies drained away.
"What if," the woman said, "they take our life energy and harness it somehow, to keep their race alive?"
"How? Energy is not perpetual," Daniel said.
"But here we are," the woman said. "We have not faded away. Perhaps living energy is perpetual."
"It would suggest that an afterlife exists." I said. "But what if there’s not. What if all through the timeline of our world they have engineered catastrophes… generating energy?"
"It would explain the legends of haunting. Ghosts would be the people they left behind."
"If they don't get to us all before our energy is corrupted, we will be..." Daniel started.
"...Doomed to walk between life and death forever," she finished.
"I believe that very thing," I said, "And it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I don't know what to want less: for them to take me or leave me behind."
I waited patiently through the mind-numbingly-slow passage of time as fate worked out her plans for me. I mused that these machine people were benevolent. That perhaps, they were the next stage in the whole life-death cycle. Perhaps they held the key to heaven and planned to take us there. But, I didn't know. I had passed into the great unknown, only to find that greater unknowns waited still. I feared not knowing now as much as ever. I tried to think of pleasant things, but only the horrible images of my death and the pain and guilt of failure haunted my mind. All those people I was supposed to protect had their lives so violently taken from them. I reached out with my mind, hoping not to find my wife and daughter scattered among the dead. I didn't sense them but, maybe it was just too late and the machine people had taken them already or their spirits now roamed these halls forever. Maybe, I failed them too.
’I'm so sorry, Maggie.’
Something bright caught my attention from the corner of my sight. The seconds pulsed away faster through my consciousness. Fear rose in me. Several bright, vaguely humanoid shaped lights appeared from nowhere and the roar of voices was suddenly silent.
As I lay there, trapped in my cold prison, I did something I'm not prone to do. I prayed. I prayed to the God of my parents to take me now and not let my energies be used for some sinister purpose of these machine people. To keep my mindless soul from haunting the corridors of this cold space station forever.
Then, one of the machine people was upon me, its arm extended. It held a device which was small, white and bright emitting a low hum. A shiny, expressionless face showed through the glowing veil of energy that surrounded him. The machine man eyed the humming device critically for a moment and made a few adjustments with a slender finger. This was the end and I was afraid. Had my life been so empty that I feared its being over? Perhaps I wanted to believe there was more to death than this cold metal man sent here to collect my essence. The tone of the humming device changed slightly. In a stir of perceived motion, I felt myself begin to rise and float towards the light through a tunnel of energy.
’Forgive me. I tried.’
Energy they say is never destroyed; only changed. I wondered what it was that I would become. Maybe I’d wake behind the eyes of one of these machine people. Maybe they didn’t use the part of me that cared and I would cease to exist. Panic took hold of me as I feared that these were the last thoughts I would ever have. I called out for someone to save me from the hell I was in and from the hell that waited. There was no time to think, no way to stop what was going to happen. The bright light drew nearer and I closed my eyes, unable to look at it anymore.
The End.