The Short Story From Hell-Part III

Part III

Jacob pushed his way towards the front of the ship, permeating through numerous layers of archaic and forgotten sections, passing many areas of the ship that rung with the sounds of memories that still floated, reverberating through the empty corridors on quiet nights like this one. It was always night aboard the ship but Jacob had long ago realized that some nights were especially dark, even in the pitch black there were periods of time when there seemed to be nothing that existed except the ship gently floating through the lifeless and unforgiving medium. Jacob passed these sections quickly escaping the reach of the past for a little while at least. He reached the part of the ship that served as a command center. It held all the instruments and gauges that measured, through all of their intricate levels of preciseness and infallibility the true nature of the nothingness that the ship had imbedded itself in so many years ago. Settling himself into a worn seat Jacob ran his hand along the smooth surface of the table that sat in front of him. This low lying sheet of material curved gently into the walls of the room on either side and when Jacob ran his hand along it, it came to life glowing like a weak campfire illuminating controls and information that Jacob had long ago stopped caring about. Jacob turned on the sensors; a ritualized practice that he felt was carved, like a groove into his memory, worn smooth over time by repeated use until the action itself was almost instinctual.

The sensors swept for a large distance in all directions from the ship. The ship was currently located deep within the bowels of the remains of a dead star, the nebulous collection of gases had long ago been ripped violently to one side due to an imbalance in the magnetic forces and over the years had drifted until its present state. From afar it resembled a dead creature, disemboweled and flung across the sky. Inside, it was a cavernous, consuming cloud of ionized particles and fragments of metallic dust that shimmer and glinted against light that was coming from hundreds of years away. In galactic terms, this cloud was as isolated as it could get and Jacob reveled in the feeling of suffocating escape, putting as much distance between him and fate as possible. He had felt the same way when he had entered the cloud many years ago. Racing along the convoluted paths it offered reminded him of a maze on certain days. On other days he was overwhelmed with a feeling of déjà vu when he considered his situation. It felt like his attempts as a child to hide from the world underneath the encompassing folds of a large blanket, feeling that the warm insulating layer would protect him from everything and anything in the world. It was this same instinct that drove him to fly into the cloud in the first place so many years ago. Committing to a life of isolation and loneliness was small price to pay for the feeling of safety and security that he occasionally felt, feeling invulnerable among the nothingness.

(to be continued)