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What little remains of the world is filtered through a six-inch pane of tempered glass and slow, swelling waves of agony.
The electricity had failed some hours ago, leaving Curly a wheezing corpse in a casket just his size. Frost crawled along his skin like a damning shroud, and the world bled back into color, dead and soft.
Darkness and the glow of the cryogen bathed the room in dying, artificial light. There was the anoxic taste of sterile air, thin and cold on what remained of his tongue. His mouth tasted like both blood and nothing; all his nerve endings have long since been burnt to ash.
Long since.
Anya. Swansea. Daisuke. They were all far more than just memories – but the wailing shriek of the cryopod failing out of lockdown reduced their existence down to little more than a single, white-hot point of pain in his chest. His ruined chest, with the flesh charred to nothing, the ribs splayed and wrong, the bandages all that’s keeping his body, his red-wet meat, together.
Death – a good death, a quick death, an easy death – would have been a blessing.
Pain curled into the recesses of his mind. He’s been on ice too long – left behind, left alone, forgotten. Jimmy’s corpse was a twisted, broken slump far beyond his field of view.
Or maybe Jimmy’s corpse was nothing, too. Twenty years could do so much more than turn a man to dust. The gunshot rang in the silence, rang still in Curly’s ears. In the holes that remained.
In the medbay: there was never a mirror.
Anya would weep at the sight of him. Swansea would usher Daisuke away. The only glimpse of himself – his new self – that Curly could find was in the black depths of Jimmy’s gaze; warped, gauze-wrapped, beyond all repair.
In the cryopod: the chill crept out of the air. Agony, only inches out of reach. The simmer of the heat forever etched into his skin; the stunning lack of all extremities; the total, cutting helplessness of being nothing more than a hobbled man, a crippled man, a body so far gone that the mind can do nothing but wait to die.
His thoughts were sluggish, but slowly, steadily, quickening. Plodding along. Anya. Daisuke. Swansea. Jimmy, and the hysterical concept of the last man standing taking up the gun.
A light flickered. Somewhere far off – near, but distant in his muddled periphery.
Twenty years was a long time. Not so long as thirty, not so short as ten. Long enough to bring children to middle-age, short enough to let the middle-aged stay there.
Anya could’ve finished her degree thrice over. Daisuke could’ve grown to be a good working man. Swansea could’ve finished what he started in the kindest sense – seen his shipman’s life through to the very end.
They could’ve fixed things.
A wail. A hiss. Curly shuddered at the rush of agonizing heat as the pod depressurized – the external air frigid, the A/C long dead, but every touch of that chilled faux-breeze felt like a brand against his what remained of his skin and his muscles, raw and exposed. A legacy of agony, all his own.
Quiet as a tomb and twice as deadly; the Tulpa’s thinning air carried no sound but the rasping, drawn-out labor of his own stilted breath. He flexed fingers he no longer had. He tried to steady the lungs he could no longer control.
Then, there, the lightest brush of recognition against his periphery. Voices.
The world swam. Colors blurred, bled, died to the sudden sound of a shot. The heavy thunk of industrial boots against the catwalks. He listened, but the sounds came and went; distorted and ephemeral. Anya’s crying. Swansea’s drunken bellows.
They were good people. Once, if not always. Perfection’s the enemy of improvement – but Curly had liked to think he was a good man. A kind man – the kind of man who tried, even if all things were fruitless, pointless, meaningless in the great expanse of space.
The stars cared for no one. They never did.
Voices – still. He’d hallucinated in the cryopod, eye frozen wide, mind churning overtime in a haphazard dream-state. Cake and cheap beer and the taste of spiced mouthwash that still, somehow, lingered. This was the death-dream, then. The final cry out, the final scream, all neurons frying, before a certain death.
At last. Oh, God – at last.
He was dying in the cryopod.
Curly couldn’t close his eyes, but there were hardly any eyes left to close. Only his left, bloodshot and aching and drying out, nothing more than a runny film of pus and dead cells. The eyelid, burned away. He stared into the maw of darkness, and the sharp teeth of the end could only gnash.
Footsteps. Gunshots. Colors and light. There was next to no blood left to bleed.
He could laugh, if there was enough oxygen or a break in the pain. The gun was funny. The medication, too – until Jimmy had beat him bloodier and the gauze had starting cutting into the burns, and the absurdity had melted down into the crushing weight of reality. Reality, actuality – any way Curly spun it, this was all so sickeningly real, and he was dying, silent and so utterly alone, in the black void of space; the last of his kind for light years, for miles upon miles upon miles.
Light scraped the broken foam; the last-breath flicker of the electrical system before the true end. Curly blinked – nothing happened – and licked the sinewy remnants of his inner cheek. The tendons were thick, stringy.
Anya had patched him up as best she could, but there was so little left.
Footsteps.
The suicide could’ve been a ploy. Could’ve been real. Maybe Jimmy got his way out. Made himself the hero he always wanted to be; the sole survivor, absolved of all sin. He’d fixed everything the best way he knew how – by destroying it.
You didn’t have to fix a problem if you scrubbed out everyone, everything affected.
Funny. Comical – absurd, but the lights were still flickering and Curly stared blankly into an abyss that was slowly, slowly growing less abyssal.
Footsteps. The nearly visceral brush of cold burning air against his flesh; his face; his drool-slicked teeth. Slurping the spit back was pointless. He let it fall in stringy rivulets from the gaps in his lips, jaw, skin.
He’d like to die a good man, too. He’d failed them all, in one way or another. Failed Jimmy. Failed Anya. Failed Daisuke, failed Swansea – and those names, those people – his people – were worth so much more than the costs of their tombstones.
Tombstones they’d never see.
He couldn’t apologize, now. Not without lips. The words would get stuck in his throat regardless, somewhere along his shredded vocal chords – and, God damn him, the thought of Jimmy made him want to abandon all words.
He hoped the others knew. Hoped they’d forgive him.
The ship groaned – a low, mourning sound, like all the metal being rent apart. An ax could do the work well enough, in time. Break apart the foam, break apart the damaged hull.
A small blessing and a larger curse: the cryopod was designed as a last-ditch emergency exit. The casket would hardly survive a rough jettison into space, but the oxygen circulation was completely independent of the ship’s main recyclers.
He couldn’t plead.
Couldn’t cry.
Lodged way down deep against his still-beating heart, there was a litany of unspoken words. He knows what he’d say to each of them. He’s had time – such time – to consider. He knows, in replay, exactly what he’d change. Who he’d soothe, who he’d bolster up.
Jimmy had held him without any care. Like he was a savior, a martyr, a scapegoat, yes, so reverently – but his callused fingers had pressed against all the wrong wounds. Even at his most apologetic, Jimmy lacked – something.
Something vital. Something critical.
He’d been so low, that boy. Human — so very human, so very fallible. At the very end, he’d put Curly on the highest pedestal – painted Curly as the self-sacrificing lamb, the man above them all, so pure and honest and forgiving that he’d find a way to absolve even Jimmy himself.
Jimmy was a sick thing. He’d always been – and care and love, no matter how true, how simply sincere, were never enough to save him. Or did they just run out of time?
The ship, though. The ship?
Creaking metal and the low, hollowed wail of split metal. Jimmy’s corpse was never in Curly’s line of sight – but the lights flickered. Colors, near and far, slid into and out of view. There was the distant sound of footsteps and a high, shrill voice like Anya’s when she’d confessed – but agony dragged, hot and cold and wretched, all along his body.
The hot scald of the flames. The shrapnel lodged, high and tight, a few degrees from his most precious organs. Everything was a fine pain that blended together into pure, untenable misery; the hottest brand, the coldest, most distant star, all his skin flayed away and his muscles exposed, his body hacked down into little more than constituent parts.
He had tasted his own flesh. The charred, rancid meat of his leg. Jimmy had given him that particular torture; taken a long knife and carved Curly up like an imitation turkey – but the lights, the ship, the sound.
Curly dragged his attention to the far wall again. He couldn’t focus. His vision was slipping, grains of visual sand through his phantom fingertips.
Death would be a blessing. He’d dreamt of them all for so long.
His breathing lagged. His heart stuttered. There was a natural need of every animal to survive – but alone in the dark, uncaring void of space? No, there was no need, nor reason, nor cause.
Death could be a good friend, on the right terms.
The lights swung again over the far wall and the containment foam. There was a closer sound – a heavy step, or the metal shearing apart against the forces of the inevitable. He couldn’t close his eye, but he could dream and, in the same moment his world, the small six-by-eight panel of tempered glass, went so blindingly white – Curly knew nothing at all.