With Audio | In This Future Or The Next

Category – With Audio

The Monster In The Ship

April 15, 2014

I’ve been sitting at this dark window for hours, staring out into the black voids of the universe; I’ve been watching the stars twinkle from beyond our reach. It’s not that I find them particularly interesting, they aren’t, at least not from this distance; It’s that I dread the idea of going to my room in the upper deck of this solitary spaceship.

I’m alone. I know I have to keep watch, I know it’s my job; But after a thousand days suspended in the dark things begin to seem different. The lights speak to me in morse code. The symbols on the doors change and morph into messages from another place and the walls whisper at me when I’m not looking.

“How much longer are you gonna be here?” they ask.

“Why don’t you open the airlock and die?”

Laughter echoes through the hallways during the nights, or it could be the dripping of the coffee I set up. I’m not sure anymore, but the idea of me being alone seems less likely every day I spend in this silent outpost. This is why I spend my time staring at the stars outside, I don’t want to look behind me; I don’t want to find the monster that lurks around the corner, just out of sight.

I can sense it when I eat my lunch, crawling underneath my table. I can hear its footsteps outside my room when I’m taking a shower, and I know that one day it’s going to stab me in the back as I climb the stairwell towards my bed. One of these days it’s going to lose its coyness and it’s going to leap out from my shadow and end me… and I don’t want to end. I want to live, I want to go back home and see my wife, my children.

I’m not sure I can evade it. Last night I saw its face… it was me.

Recorded by Levenstein

Henrino and Fredino

March 11, 2014

Featured, Glimpses, With Audio

Image created by Jack Moik
http://jacklionheart.deviantart.com/

Inside the garbage storage room of the Harriette super-building two faulty androids sat together in the darkness. They waited for the crushers to come in, they waited for their end to come. And in their last instants of consciousness, the two struck up a conversation.

Henrino, the taller of the two sat in a corner with his head hanging from his neck with an embarrassing mess of wires holding it in place. He could move his eyes, but not his head, he could look around, but not walk.

“Please state your name.” Henrino had tried to ask the android next to him his name, but his wrecked vox module could only repeat the same dull phrase.

“Oh, hello… I’m Fredino. What is your name?” Fredino felt a slight tingling of fear in his diodes. Why would another soon-to-die android be so formal about the asking of a simple name?

Henrino listened to the answer of his neighbor. He looked in Fredino’s direction and saw the dim glow of his eyes, a sad yellow color, like two dying suns floating amidst dead space. Henrino was curious as to how Fredino had ended up in that dreadful place, in that living cemetery filled with half-corpses and discarded parts.

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In Space No One Can Hear You Squeak

March 6, 2014

Glimpses, With Audio

I was repairing a minor imperfection outside the passenger ship Onyx-4. I had been working as a technician on it for the past four years. It was a normal day on a flight from Mars to Titan. The ship had stopped on Jupiter’s orbit so the passengers could have a nice look at the planet’s storms.

I enjoyed the job. In space everything seems to be in peace. There’s no racket of vehicles, there’s no screaming of people, there’s no deafening noise coming from the engines. It is silent. A silence unlike any other you can find on any surface.

My eyes were fixed on the small crack on the ship’s outer hull, when I was suddenly pushed back by it with tremendous force. The only sound I heard was the ship’s exterior wall hit my helmet. I was immediately pulled back by the tether on my suite and I watched as the ship exploded into a million pieces. Its enormous elongated body had been split into five or six larger parts and people were spilling out from the inside.

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