A prophecy in space. One dead astronaut, one struggling to survive. Cosmic horror at its best. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who died on the space mission?
You can't walk away.
It's too good. Too many people watch the show. There's too much money in it at this point.
Give mama a kiss.
Come on. There's too many advertisers and there's too many employees tied to it. I can't get out.
I'm stuck here. Give me some sugar now.
What if I did it?
Well, you would have said a lot of, there'd be a pen of kittens very sad right now. I'd be free. I could be out of here. It would be over. You know what?
Then just go ahead and do it then, dude. If it's that bad, then do it. Okay. You'd like that, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
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Chapter 2: What happens to a body in space?
Okay, man.
Come on. You tell me you didn't... You don't think that the Mr... Also, we were young. Mr. Floppy. That boy, I don't know what was going on, but there were some noises being made. It was disturbing, right? So floppy. I saw him.
What are you even talking about? What do you mean? What am I talking about? I, I've, I've like, my ears are ringing right now. I'm so I'm starting to sweat.
I'm getting like, and I'd say what was the most disturbing part about it is that he had pistachio muffins in his cart.
No, he didn't. Who wants that? No, you know what? At this point, no, he didn't. I don't know what you're talking about.
So I said, there's no way. I said, Derek, it's nice to see you. He's like, oh, my God, it's been so long. And I knew that he was just packing some heat in his pants, so I didn't get too close. But I saw that he had four trays of pistachio muffins. To me, that was like a new thing and more lore. If you eat a lot of pistachios, maybe it makes you well endowed.
That motherfucker had pistachio muffins out the woo-ha. Yeah.
What do you think listeners response to things like this is? Do you think they hear this?
So they're like, wow, that's, that's so sorry that I'm just trying to tell you bits of my life of things that going on, which, you know, I thought that, you know, for what we had here absolutely should be to be fair.
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Chapter 3: How is cosmic horror portrayed in this story?
Microphones in station hall are reporting nothing of concern. Usual impact from debris. Nothing that corroborates reports of external tapping. Permission for spacewalk is denied.
I made no further responses, but instead closed the screen and wondered if they were being entirely truthful. The tapping sound coming and going over the last few days was unmistakable, even over all those whirring machines and monitors. All those whirring machines and motors. Space stations are loud. They even give us earplugs to handle it. But whatever was out there was somehow louder.
Or perhaps, given the circumstances, I was just sensitive to the thought of something, anything, out there. There's no denying it annoyed me. Just one of those sounds I found impossible to block out, like water dripping in a bathtub at 3 a.m. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. No sense of order, not even on the surface level. But something, maybe. Underneath. Some sense or reason.
Some kind of regularity that the brain detects and can't let go of. How could the microphones possibly miss it? Sleep was getting progressively difficult. At times I thought the station under some kind of hidden stress. Materials freezing and warming in irregular ways. No atmosphere, no conduction of heat. Things get hot in the sun's rays, objects warm and cool to both extremes.
This is routine stuff for anything up in space, of course. But it didn't stop me thinking about all the ways that the station was just a pile of metal that could come undone. It could break and tear, bend and stretch. Like watching the wing of your plane wobble during turbulence, it's an uncomfortable reminder that you're just a monkey in a fancy toy. And what if something had come loose?
Something. Oh, at first I stuck to this notion strictly, asking myself what if some antenna or strap or bit of metal had gotten loose and was banging against the hull. That would be bad. But of course, that wasn't really what I was thinking. It's what I wrote HQ about over and over and over. What was really on my mind was the thought that maybe, somehow, he had gotten loose.
And of course, that's not so silly, right? The specially designed bag he was in, the one that would vent any gases produced by decomposition while maintaining his body's integrity, was brand spanking new. Know how many times it had ever been tested? Never. Never ever. Ben was the first. So of course it might come loose. Just because it's space age technology doesn't mean it's sophisticated.
He was strapped to the outside like a Christmas tree to the family sedan. Maybe, I wondered, one of the straps had broken. Now he was thumping against the side every now and again. Never mind that there wasn't anything out there to prompt that kind of buffeting. No air, no wind. If he'd come loose, he'd just float a little farther away. Something was making that noise.
And I worried almost constantly that it was him. Man, this is so fun.
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Chapter 4: What unique challenges do astronauts face?
Yeah, instead of a weird furry goblin, it's an actual fucking disturbed, disgusting person.
I tightened my grip on the railing, my heart pounding. Finally, the door cycled open and I was ready to disregard all orders when the man speaking to me from HQ practically screamed in my ear. Don't enter Reynolds! Do not enter the station!
What we're seeing on the cameras...
Yes.
If something's out here, I'm getting to safety before it reaches me.
Tap, tap. Yes. I stopped. My brain processed. I'd heard that. I'd heard something in the vacuum of space. I looked around at my hands, my feet. That couldn't be possible. Not unless tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Without moving my head, I turned my eyes towards the very edge of my helmet's vision and watched as a single yellow fingernail tapped gently on the glass.
The man in HQ spoke in a terrifying whisper. He's on your suit. Yes! This goes stupid hard. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Okay. The terror that shot through me was electric, white fire coursing through my veins. Without even thinking, I reacted like I just found out there was a grenade strapped to my back. All instinct, no rationality.
I cried out and swung around, trying to knock Ben off my back, but all I accomplished was setting off some alarms as I damaged my suit. Get it off! Get it off me! I thrashed desperately and felt something shuffling around the exterior of the bulky suit. Finally, my eyes fell on something useful, the jet controls.
I fumbled my hands into place and immediately blasted myself into the open pressure chamber, turning at the last minute so that the back of the suit smashed into the thick secondary door. I only hoped that whatever was clinging to the back of me was destroyed by the impact, but when I looked up, Ben was still out there, gawping at me with a mouth full of frozen blood.
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