Cosmosis

Every

“You think it’s weird whoever built this ship put bidets in?” Caleb asked.

“…Yes,” Daniel said tiredly, “but it makes sense. Water can be recycled, toilet paper can’t.”

“I guess. But what—”

Daniel held up a hand to cut him off. “C-can we just be quiet for a bit? I’m… exhausted.”

“You were unconscious for days.”

“And I haven’t slept since!” Daniel snapped.

Caleb winced. “Sorry.”

Daniel didn’t say anything back and just leaned back against the mess wall. Even ignoring his hallucinations, he felt like his mind was ready to turn into soup. He hadn’t slept in days, at least, he didn’t remember waking up any more than he did falling asleep.

He was getting worse, not better.

Whatever had shaken the rocket and made them black out like that had shown no signs of an encore, but the effects were lingering for both of them.

Caleb had confessed to hearing more unexplained sounds and voices. He thought he even caught a few actual words too. Did Daniel look like that when he talked about his hallucinations?

It was easy to sympathize with him, but Caleb seemed downright manic when he talked about the time Daniel had been under. Which made it all the more unsettling when he was steady in moments right now.

Daniel was worried it could be his imagination, but Caleb seemed right on the edge of bipolar.

Or he was…

Exhausted as he might have been thought, Daniel didn’t feel bipolar. Just a bit like what he imagined schizophrenia might be like. Or did he have the wrong disorder in mind?

It was pointless trying to go reaching for that kind of idea. There wasn’t anything wrong with him except stress, and the agony of not knowing enough.

“How long have we been on this fucking rocket?” He moaned aloud. “Quiero dispararme.”

Expecting Caleb to pounce on the opening for conversation, Daniel looked up to see that the other kid was gone. What?

How had he not noticed him get up? After a few seconds of poking around, he asked aloud “Caleb?”

Caleb poked his head down from the level above, “What’s up?”

“Just… wondered where you went.”

“I said I was going to walk around forever ago.”

Daniel rolled his eyes. He wasn’t in the mood for jokes.

Judging by how much food they’d gone through; they were coming up on 14 days. Where had the time gone? Almost two weeks on this rocket of the damned.

His company was wearing on him, which made him feel guilty, which made him even more irritable. Caleb had withdrawn since they started hallucinating. When he did talk with Daniel, he acted more concerned with Daniel seeing things than the voices in his head.

Daniel banged his head back against the mess wall for a few seconds in frustration. Everything was slipping. Just when they started to get a sense of where they stood, something new came along and knocked their feet out from beneath them, and for good measure cut their ankles just to make sure they couldn’t get up again.

He was pretty sure Caleb was noticing how badly Daniel was doing in the wake of the mysterious shrieking event.

Neither of them had any idea what it was, and they were painfully aware of how little they could do about it. It limited their responses to ‘panic’ or ‘ignore’. And since they were coming up on two weeks of chronic, internal, personal panic already, it seemed they weren’t talking about it.

Daniel dropped down onto the bunk pad that Caleb had torn away from one of the berths. In the days he’d been unconscious, it seemed Caleb hadn’t wanted to risk trying to carry Daniel up the ladder to the dormitory bunk levels.

His own reaction to the observation baffled him. All at once, he was irritable Caleb hadn’t gotten him up to his bunk, grateful that he’d bothered to find something to lie him down on anyway, and confused on why he hadn’t noticed sooner.

It had been days, and Daniel was still… thinking…

Had he noticed sooner? Sleeplessness did awful things to you. Could he have already gone through this in his head? As the thought occurred to him, he became more and more convinced that he must have.

But then when? Why hadn’t he remembered?

He slammed his fist into the wall in frustration. Every time he closed his eyes, the images came to him unbidden. Sleep was avoiding him at every turn. Time had been impossible to track even before, but now he couldn’t even go by ‘days’.

Exercise was his last respite. It made his bones cry to even think about activity when he was this tired, but apparently he wasn’t exhausted enough to pass out.

Calisthenics had become a regular fixture over the week or so that had already passed. The repetitive motions of each exercise were mind-numbing, but there wasn’t much room to do more. He found himself growing angrier with each push-up.

It wasn’t at anything in particular. Or it was everything. He wasn’t in the right state of mind to really understand or care why he was so mad.

He’d been asleep long enough that his limbs felt stiff. They’d tried to put off exercising as long as they could after they woke up. It was one of the only ways they could really fill time on the spaceship and sleeping was easier if they’d tired themselves out. Pouring all of his aggression into the exercises was one of the only things that managed to distract himself from the hallucinations. But even then, only just.

When his limbs were exhausted and he couldn’t go another second, he fell back onto the bunk mat and didn’t even have the strength to keep his eyes open.

But he still didn’t sleep.

The mysterious shrieking that had shook the rocket had affected both Caleb and Daniel in ways they could only imagine, and as if that wasn’t enough, they were still hurtling toward the destination their abductors had picked.

The uncertainty of it all was killing him, and not so slowly anymore. Questions without even the possibility of answers…they hung over him like a guillotine ready to drop.

Daniel couldn’t even be sure that receiving those answers wouldn’t be worse.

He always felt like he had a pretty sharp imagination, but here it was working against him. The possibilities that came to mind were disturbing. Aliens, getting body-snatched, twisted experiments…

Caleb.

The idea physically revolted him, and he bolted upright, ready to smash his fist into the wall. Every other abductee was dead. Suspecting Caleb felt awful . They were in this together and as frustrating as he’d seemed recently, Daniel was still self-possessed enough to remember that Caleb had effectively been alone on a spaceship for the days he’d been unconscious.

There were a million reasons to think Caleb wasn’t in on the abductions. Even with the possibility occurring to him, he didn’t think so, not really. But it was hard to ignore the asymmetry in the two of them.

Whatever the earlier event was, Caleb hadn’t been so affected. Daniel didn’t have any proof Caleb was affected at all. He only had Caleb’s word that he was even hallucinating. Caleb was the one who deduced the rocket was automated.

But the truth was, if there were other… people on board, they could only be behind the sealed sections. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bad idea to break apart things if it meant getting to them.

Daniel hated thinking like this. It made him feel like an awful person, finding the worst possibility in a shitty situation. But however much he struggled, he couldn’t deny that there was at least a chance, however slight.

·····

How many days had it been? This was the third time Daniel had tried to count the number of food blocks they’d gone through. They’d emptied one crate… six blocks a day between the two of them…

A tall spike shot up in front of his face, branching off like a Christmas tree. It distracted him and the numbers fell right out of his head.

He clenched his teeth in frustration and swiped at the hallucination, scattering it.

No answers for any of it. It felt impossible to speculate too. Assuming Caleb wasn’t putting up a sinister front, both of them could be hallucinating for entirely separate reasons. Both of them had started when the blinding light had engulfed the ship with a horrifying shriek, but why did the two have to be related?

Caleb and Daniel could be mentally deteriorating for no other reason than they’d been abducted. Or because they’d listened to the sounds of twenty-two others wither and die in metal boxes.

Or maybe it was split. Daniel could be suffering something related to the whitewash, while Caleb was just having ordinary hallucinations. Or the other way around.

Daniel let out an aggravated scream.

Caleb poked his head into the pantry a few seconds later. He was checking on him.

“You okay?”

Daniel glared at him. It was such a stupid question. What answer could anyone possibly expect in this scenario?

“Oh I’m just dandy— howthefuckdoyouthinkI’mdoing ?”

Caleb flinched. “I’m not having the easiest time either.”

“At least you get to sleep,” Daniel spat. “I get to lie awake and try to ignore the sight of the walls coming apart.”

Daniel didn’t follow Caleb when he stomped out muttering, “I’d take insomnia over nightmares.”

Caleb had mentioned that the voices persisted, even when he slept.

Daniel managed to envy that. The only sounds the ship made were a low and steady roar like a jet engine. But it was sealed behind who knows how much steel and ceramic. If you pressed your ear to the floor, you could hear it a bit more clearly, but normally the sound rumbling below them was little more than a faint whir .

He’d tried to focus on his hearing a few days ago. It had been an effort to simply try to ‘tune out’ anything he saw and just focus entirely on his senses that he wasn’t hallucinating with. He’d stopped when, for a split second, he’d begun to hear images.

Caleb might be suffering from incessant noises, but Daniel at least could attempt to savor the quiet.

But like all the other remotely positive things he’d managed to fix on since being abducted, this one wouldn’t last either.

Daniel wasn’t asleep this time, so it was more gradual. It started as no more than a faint clicking, just a barely different pitch from the steady whir of the rocket. But it grew loud enough for Daniel to notice in just a minute or two.

At first he thought he imagined it. He clapped his hands over his ears, testing what he heard. Sure enough, the escalating shriek that had preceded the blinding whitewash light had returned.

For a second, Daniel imagined some space animal coming to investigate their rocket for a meal.

But the clicks smoothed and intensified into the same screeching hum that had so violently awoken them before.

“Fuckfuckfuckfuck!” Daniel yelled, leaping up and running out of the mess pantry. The same hum as before was building, only this time it had a direction to it. Just like before, it came from anything solid. The floor, the walls, even his own bones.

But there was another sound audible this time, from below.

Daniel managed to look down the hatch in the mess leading down to the cargo bay. The ladders and hatches between levels were slightly offset, probably to prevent you from falling more than one floor. But the offset wasn’t so great that he couldn’t steal glimpse the hatch going below the cargo bay.

The same one that Caleb had pried open the slightest amount.

From that tiny crack, a sinister orange glow shone upward, screaming up at Daniel like a pinprick sized window into hell. Whatever was down there, below the hatch, it roared at him, just like the shriek that had preceded—

—the same pitch as before reached a peak and the interior of the rocket was washed in a blinding white light.

For a solid minute, nothing was visible.

The rocket shuddered as the shriek reverberated from their bones. Daniel tasted copper.

Daniel began to collect himself, only to be violently thrown into the ceiling as a blast rumbled from somewhere deep in the rocket.

The rocket creaked and for a moment he was dizzy from the room spinning around him. He’d slammed into the mess’ ceiling, but he hadn’t come down.

He reached out to grab something to steady himself, but he only wound up turning with the rocket, which was every bit as disorienting.

There wasn’t any gravity. He was just floating.

They’d stopped accelerating.

Had that second white flash done something to the rocket? Was this just part of the plan? Was it something else going wrong about to kill anyone unlucky enough to still be alive?

Daniel had stayed conscious this time, but he wished he hadn’t. The hallucinations he’d managed to ignore up until now surged up in activity with weightlessness. He could feel their intensity well up in him, overwhelming his sight.

The blinding white light filled every corner of the rocket rendering every single surface utterly indistinguishable. It was like being in a blizzard, only the heat on his corneas told him he shouldn’t look.

But he could still see.

From his… feet.

Not ‘from’, he realized. ‘Through’. He felt every detail of the grimy, month-old socks, and even the texture of his shoes beyond that. But it wasn’t just feeling like ordinary. He could see the inside of the threads that made up the socks.

What if…?

Without turning his head, he put his fingertips onto the wall and a whole lattice and structure illuminated itself in his mind. It washed outward from whatever he touched, letting him look at every part, from every side.

He could feel the inside of the walls. Where the water pipe ran. How deeply the wires were buried. Feeling one thing in contact with the next just poured the information into his mind.

His mind did somersaults because he didn’t stop hallucinating either. Everywhere he touched, it seemed like an infinite combination of spikes or stalagmites were eager to spring forth.

There was no putting it into words, but the possibilities felt real. Too real .

He felt like a stranger in his own body.

Things unfolded beyond his understanding, but not his awareness.

Daniel wasn’t even looking at the floor when the hatch he’d looked through let out a buzz and suddenly shut with a hydraulic hiss. What had Caleb done?

The same moment he felt his feet leave the floor and his stomach drifted an inch upward. Gravity no longer held him to the floor. They’d stopped accelerating.

Some of the loose pieces of the mess hall floated upward, losing contact with the ground and winked out of Daniel’s awareness.

He yelled something, and he couldn’t make out the words. Sounds seemed to wash away chaotically into the air. Was he deaf?

He could feel the gas on his skin, but whatever it was unfolding in his mind didn’t ‘catch’ onto the air the same way it seemed to sink and spread into the solid walls.

It was so hard to focus. He couldn’t even tell if the light was still blinding him. Something had shifted. He was too drawn into this new perspective. He couldn’t figure out how to get back.

Just thinking about it was exhausting. He couldn’t sleep, but he was so tired. He lost contact with the wall, and he found himself spinning around through the air. Without anything to touch, he couldn’t sense anything around him.

It was all too much. He felt his chest scream, but he didn’t feel the sound. Just a rush of air pushing out his throat.

Why couldn’t he see? Why was he deaf?

Why was any of this happening? Why couldn’t they just die and get it over with?

It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds. But while Daniel floated helplessly through the rocket, utterly blind, he remembered the feeling of being in the coffin.

Utterly trapped, cut off. Unable to see anything in front of him. Without a thought, Daniel’s arms and legs snapped close to him, tucking up like a ball. He was afraid of what he’d feel if he reached out.

He was afraid he might feel the interior of a cold steel box.

The last of Daniel snapped, and the possibilities in his mind were dragged forth.

Blades erupted from every single surface within ten meters of him. They were like improvised knives chipped out of rocks, but each one seemed to flow and melt out of the surface it grew from, like it was one fused piece.

Somewhere perceptible to Daniel’s broken senses, he felt the reverberations of Caleb’s scream as it sounded against the rocket’s structure.

It was all just too much.