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“Hull breach.”
Inhale, it’s probably nothing.
“Hull breach.”
This is the test.
“Hull breach.”
Stop. Stop, please. Just make it be okay.
“Hull breach.”
“Hull breach.”
“Hull brea-”
Silence. Dead nothingness seasoned with the drawing breaths of a dead man. Blisters are forming and bursting underneath the bandages wrapped tight on his arms, not dissimilar to the hull of the sub his feet are pressing into. The radio’s light no longer blinks, no longer flashes with audio that someone, anyone, could hear him. There is no rescue, and there is no salvation here; the stars have died along with the gods, leaving their creations to die out and destroy themselves. Destroy. It is all that flits within the mind of the Convict, to break and rip and destroy. He does not. Strikes the radio only once with the butt end of a fire extinguisher, and does nothing more. The weapon hits the ground with a clank of offended abandonment, and the Butcher is left with only his hands to break. Over and over, knuckles click and bend in ways that they shouldn’t, and yet he does not notice the overextension. Doesn’t nothing the pain shooting through his nerves. But maybe that’s not wholly true.
The truth he would give you is just that, that he doesn’t notice the malformations along his form, the bubbling sores and the pulsing heartbeat for a creature ensnared in his chest. You and I both know that isn’t true. He notices well enough, gods, he knows it all too well. The flexing of each finger in the ways they should not go, the hummingbird drone of adrenaline in his ears. Weakness, he might’ve called it. The willingness to acknowledge that something is wrong. Reality is what we know it to be. Yet you and I, all we can do is watch him destroy himself, to push the button over and over because the light has short circuited. Even then, that’s not true either. It is what he believes to be true, that the radio is broken, the lights are out, and that he is not a rabid animal, gnawing off its own leg to free itself from the bear trap.
Reality. How easy it is to lose it, to get lost in it. Loosen your grip on reality, they say, lose it forever. Yet that is not what this is. This is not a man loosening the knot tied around his hand, not a man letting reality go. This is a man gripping white-knuckled to the reality that should be, not the one that is. What is.. Is. I suppose. What should be does not matter to you and I, fellow observer. We can see what is, and what always will be. What will be is that this man does not survive. This is not a tale of rescue, or of hope. But even that is not wholly true, hope comes in the form of a lifevest carrying a device which he’d never seen, held together with the hope of salvation for a civilisation better than the once which is. There is only so much you or I can do, knowing what we do. Perhaps that is enough to change what will be.
“Simon?”
“Who’s..” He utters, glaring at the unresponsive radio. “Who’s there?”
“This is the research lead for the SM-8, do you copy?”
“SM-8..” This is a risk, you know it as well as I, to use things that we should not know against him, but if the hull gives way, if he suffocates.. At least he can do so knowing he was known.
“Yeah, I copy. How are you down here, I know I’m not the only one, but they’ve just.. What, left you here?”
“They’re still sending subs? They know we’re here?” The voice crackles. In reality, this is not the SM-8 research lead. There never was a research lead on the SM-8, they weren’t running tests, it was for scans only. Prep to send the convicts down. Prep that ended catastrophically, in flying sparks and melding consciousnesses, I dread to think of what happened to them. I knew their end, too, a certainty I could do nothing to prevent. My heart still aches for them, but there was nothing to be done.. I was too young. But today, at least there is some persuasion to try.
“They dropped me here too.. A while ago.” he says, attempting to comfort the visage of someone that never was. “We could just be out of range.. Where are you?”
Breath rattles through the radio, though he does not hear it, because it does not translate. The breath is mine, reader, and there is nothing we can do past this point. All we can do is point him in the right direction.
“X - 116, Y - 520.”
The signal drops as he goes, and all there is to do is wait. We are the salvation that awaits us all, the wisdom and the light that eviscerates the universes imperfections. All there is to do is wait for him. One more, one more.
Perhaps it is blind hope that drives him, for while I know what will be, I cannot tell you why. Why is all up to him, the hanged man and the fool that follows instructions with the hope for a better tomorrow. There are no tomorrows here, no todays, no laters. All there is is the now, and what is to come. He may believe there to be, and yet there is nothing that separates today from tomorrow, and that from yesterday, and that from infinity. What is infinity? Is it the space between life and death, the day and the night? Those twinkling twilight moments we can never escape? It’s strange, isn’t it, infinity? How can we, being what we are, even begin to think of it? It is because we are. We are infinity, it is what he shall become.
Infinity lurks in the shadows, in the hidden corners of the caverns that no one can check. It is where life goes to die, where death goes to live. Both and neither simultaneously. The convict is none the wiser, traversing the unsettled floor, relying on a radio that he has forgotten he caved in. it is not until he shifts the sub forwards, pressing against the edge of the light; that he realises just what is happening. Deletion, abstraction. Total and utter annihilation. For once, the Convict wishes that this were not reality, that what is and what is not wouldn’t be so similar; so that he didn’t feel his consciousness ripped from his mind, pulled through his pores and stripping his life of anything worth living. For how do you live with nothing behind your eyes, nothing except the draining determination a visage of you once held.
I did not want this. Not for him.
This man has seen enough. While it will not be pretty, and will end all the same, for once, the light loosens it’s grip.
Streaming tendrils of bloody sunlight pull away, it is not easy, and it is not calm. Frankly, their howling despair will ring through my mind forever. But it is enough. And I can do nothing but watch the SM-13 as it departs, before spotting miniscule bubbles leaking from the hull. All there is to do is warn him, now.
Hull breach.
Hull breach.
Hull breach.