***"Rooster, I think I'm in a bit of trouble here." The medical technologist used to tell him he must have been born in space every time he took his readings in what passed for mid-morning aboard the Signet. Rick was the first one to call him Rooster when he asked for a plastic baggie for personal maintenance months before. "Would you come down here?" Down was relative. He usually had to remind Rick to give exact locations relative to the equipment rooms and gangways. Rick's stout face filled the communication's screen in the pilot's capsule. He asked him what the problem was. "I'm having some issues with Busky's tests and I need a second pair of eyes to make sure I'm reading these figures right." They were all heavily cross trained and the team, almost to a man, could swap positions at any time if the need arose. "I already asked Tolle. He's in the middle of a sequence and has to watch it closely. I couldn't raise Scudero either." He told him to hang on a moment while he ran the day's checklists for the attitude adjustments and promised to come to Busky's sleep rack when he finished. From the corner of his eye, as he toggled the communicator switch, he thought he saw Rick frown, but the screen winked out and the checklist touch screen was already in his hands.***
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was not the anthem of the program, but he recited the notes anyway each moment he knew he was awake to reassure himself that he was so. Not that the boundary between sleeping and waking was particularly tenuous. At the start of the cessation of the hibernation cycle the destruction of that boundary was the most amazing drug he and his team ever sampled. The largest threat to their safety required disciplined metering of sleep and light electroshock therapy administered by their sleep racks once their schedule required them to sleep no more than eight hours at a dive. Their bodies relearned the difference within months. His own synaptic readings dutifully logged by the metric management software, his body clock, adjusted itself within weeks. Part of what allowed him the greatest number of votes during ground training, and election to mission captain, was his ability to do so and his physical and mental resilience. Humming the notes of the sonata to himself as the small sandwich bag rustled in the glow of half lit LCD screens and LEDs, his captain's rating felt like a fantastically elaborate inside joke.
Rooster, with his free hand, ignored the pressure of the sharp edged nylon lap bands around his thighs as he masturbated furiously with eyes closed tight. He hummed the sonata loud enough to cover the rustling of the clear baggie and the muted buzz of the air scrubbers drawing in the loose beads of body moisture and focused his mind on the nerves in his groin attempting to hum with a like fervor. After what felt like an hour he finally fouled the small plastic bag with a few hard grunts and left it in place. One of the dehumidifiers built into the scrubber panel overhead clicked to work and settled into a gray noise as it tasked. The time readout unblinkingly read to him the entire episode's length ate up scarcely 20 minutes. He closed his eyes again, partly to battle the rising green paste he sucked down only 40 minutes before and partly to battle the vertigo of weightlessness. Weightlessness was nothing he was unaccustomed to, but the sensation no longer gave him the womb like rest it once did.
"Rooster, I think I'm in a bit of trouble here." The medical technologist used to tell him he must have been born in space every time he took his readings in what passed for mid-morning aboard the Signet. Rick was the first one to call him Rooster when he asked for a plastic baggie for personal maintenance months before. "Would you come down here?" Down was relative. He usually had to remind Rick to give exact locations relative to the equipment rooms and gangways. Rick's stout face filled the communication's screen in the pilot's capsule. He asked him what the problem was. "I'm having some issues with Busky's tests and I need a second pair of eyes to make sure I'm reading these figures right." They were all heavily cross trained and the team, almost to a man, could swap positions at any time if the need arose. "I already asked Tolle. He's in the middle of a sequence and has to watch it closely. I couldn't raise Scudero either." He told him to hang on a moment while he ran the day's checklists for the attitude adjustments and promised to come to Busky's sleep rack when he finished. From the corner of his eye, as he toggled the communicator switch, he thought he saw Rick frown, but the screen winked out and the checklist touch screen was already in his hands.
He slid the clear plastic from his limp penis, careful to seal in his ejaculate, and closed it. He clipped its jellyfish formlessness to one of the many padded tool clips bathed in the pacific glow of blue and green lights on the otherwise darkened escape capsules control board. The whisper of the air scrubbers wound down and were not replaced by the distant drum of the motors that rotated the gymnasium and one of the three science compartments dozens of unlit fit aft of the capsules door. Crossing his bare arms across his withered, but still strong, chest he began the sonata again to fill the silence. The hushed ping of the grade 4 alarms still managed to worm into the base of his consciousness through the multi inch and windowless air tight lock of the door. Quietly he timed the sonata out to the slow rise of the alarm. The thing touched his ear drum like dropped clothes pin that struck a pane of glass once against its point, but instead of dieing out the sound rose to a nearly audible and high frequency note as the capacitors inside the alarm light housing charged and then fell with all of the grace of a jazz trombonist punched in his gut mid tune. Through the aluminum and heat proofing of the door it touched him as a feather touches the sole of a foot belonging to a man in traction.
"Scudero." He rubbed his eyes hard that day hard enough to turn the darkness behind his eyelids to orbs of flickering white and yellow. "We need to talk about Scudero." Rick hovered at his elbow. Busky laid comfortably against the white padding and strap work beneath him. Tolle drifted, arms working a bright orange elastic resistance chord, a note pad and pressurized pen idly beside his head, at a point that completed a geometric tetrahedron in the empty, broadly lit, space at the center of the rotating gymnasium capsule. Scudero was tied, wrists and ankles together in third capsule. Rooster explained that Tolle did the right thing and that, as captain, he would log his opinions so. Scudero cracked. It was to be expected. Stacks of manuals and studies and profiles they each ran through during ground training asserted that simple truth and they accepted it. He assigned watches and relief duties indefinitely until a time when they could reach a consensus that he was a mission first member of the team. Between them they had enough psychoanalytical case work to start an unaccredited university in the space between inner and outer solar systems. "Fair's fair."
Unfastening the thick black lap bands he drifted free and allowed the collision of his cowlicked head with the soft plastic surface of the wall to stop his progress. He curled his sparsely bearded chin to his chest as the plastic touched his skull and offered passive resistance. His clammy skin contacted the wall down his naked spine as his feet came to rest against the door. He closed his eyes and released a short breath and opened them again, just like he practiced in the orientation simulators. The chair was on the wall above and in front of him, the cascading throb of the LEDs on the cieling, the door on the floor, and the emergency equipment rack directly in front of him. It was all relative. With an easy buck of his hips he pushed off of the wall and drifted and twisted into the unseen fingers of the thin and rough hook and loop straps where his white pressure suit should have been hanging. Closing his eyes again he nodded his heavy head to the rising muted ping of the black boxed grade fours carrying their warning with the metronomic precession of the great composer himself.
"Rooster," Rick's stolid voice broke into his daily checklist for the second time in a five minute span. "I'm gonna need you down here again." The piloting deck's time readout shrugged. The checklist would run itself if he did not finish it in the next 54 minutes. He did not feel comfortable leaving the diagnostics of systems undone. There was more to running a ship than automatic subroutines. That's why he was the captain. "Just need another pair of eyes." What about Tolle. "He's sequencing again with some of the ice samples we tracked in yesterday." He reminded him about the use of relative terms with respect to time. "I don't trust Busky's dive figures, and I think you might have some good input." Read them to me. "The sheet's a mile long, Rooster." Rick closed the connection and Rooster was nearly certain he frowned again.
Absently he taped the hooked velcro into the soft loop mats at the ends of the opposing strips. Affixing the strips against the pressure points usually occupied by rubber ring seals inside his pressure suit he immobilized his legs above the knees, torso and neck tightly enough to feel his pulse beating against the underside of his skin. Eyes half lidded he let his head fall to the left and then to the right against the abrupt edge of the woven nylon, counting seconds as they deigned to pass. Resetting his focus he turned his lightly glazed brown eyes upward through the filmy and weak electric light and read the upside down timescale. 90 minutes since he first stirred from dreaming. Bringing his legs toward his chest he began to churn an invisible bicycle, careful no to turn too few or too many revolutions per minute. He ticked his pulse off on his body clock and crunched the data as it came, just as he had done every day for 34 days.
Rooster came down the main gangway feet first, the speed of his progress precluding head first movement. He could remember the accident tapes on the orbiting stations as though he watched them yesterday. No one was ever injured beyond a broken nose and chipped tooth, but he planned on returning home in 6 years in better shape, and with better looks, than everyone he left standing on the shores of the big blue sky. The sleep racks were amid ships. Part of the design philosophy was that each and every team member should be allowed and able to function without disturbing the experiments and duties of other team members. He hadn't seen Tolle since he exchanged watch shifts with him 48 hours before. When he was due up again for relief he would make sure he caught up with him. The narrow bright orange plastic sleeve of a syringe tip glanced against his clean shaven chin, bringing his attention sharply toward the open space of the sleep rack entrance. "Rick, you've got to make sure the medical waste doesn't get loose." He apologized, as Rooster placed a flat palm against the seamed egg white plastic fabric of the gangway's narrow wall. Flecks of moisture touched his cheek as he slowed. Shortening his focus and blurring the nearing doorway he saw that all around him were pinpoint globules of pink liquid. "This is unacceptable, Rick."
Unfastening the velcro straps, Rooster floated free momentarily before reaching his hands upward to the seat back above his head. Dehumidifiers clicked into action as the air scrubbers went to work on his exhalations. If he listened hard enough he could hear the blood pumping through the veins at his throat almost as clearly as the burbling of the siphons refilling pouches of water that terminated in a long thin drinking hose at the deadened control panel before him. He secured his lap bands again and took his penis once again into his palm and swallowed the short bout of vertigo that briefly skewered his empty stomach.
"Busky was catatonic. What was I supposed to do?" Several exhausted syringes drifted like flotsam in the white light between Rick's gray jumper and Rooster's captain's blues. The needle of an intravenous feed jutted from the crook of Busky's muscular forearm. The clear tubing of adjoining thread was wrapped around Rick's closed and sweating fist. "His number's look alright now." Rooster snatched one of the drifting syringes from before his eyes. It was the most concentrated anesthetic available to the medical technician. Bright red globes of blood collected like soap bubbles at the end of the IV before coming loose and collapsing against the sleep rack above Busky's white skinned form. Busky's eyes were completely rolled backward. How much did you shoot him with. "Once. Twice when I couldn't get him to stop struggling." Brown and black bruises colored the skin where the rack straps locked against his dead skin. The signet could be crewed by two if the need arose. The bio metrics pad gripped in Ricks other hand was an upended well of red ink on white parchment. "You've got to take a look at these numbers." The empty wrist of a periwinkle disposable glove hung in the air over Busky's gaping mouth, the body of the glove firmly planted deep in his throat. "We should probably put him under a full time watch." He did not remember drifting backward out of the sleep rack capsule. Neither did he remember the quiet smack of his on the emergency air loss lock panel. Rick pressed the pad to the single window at the center of the white door. They simply had to put their heads together.
The plastic baggie rustled against his raw nerves as his throat attempted to carry the sonata with a like fervor. With a few hard grunts he failed to foul the thing before carefully drawing it away and clipping it to the padded universal tool receiver. The jellyfish was a pinkish purple. Rooster was awake again. He hadn't slept since yesterday. The qualing ping of the grade 4 alarm system was dieing down. The batteries would likely discharge within another month. Crunching the data in the maze of learned astrophysics and mechanics of heavenly bodies he could almost see the great prow of the Signet seven tenths of the way to it's destination amongst the Greek maidens and burlesque belts of Jupiter. Too much distance for the emergency capsule to cover on its own, even by the wildest mathematics he could bring his dieing imaginative capacities to envision. The air scrubbers spun down. The readout explained to him the episode only took 20 minutes.
Roosters back thumped against the padded gangway wall and with the suddenness of a glass of water giving up its contents in a scattering of shards against a mosaic tiled bathroom floor he vomited. His hands tore at the thick white zippers of his jump suit, his eyes growing wider as his bare hands and wrists grazed the deep purple speckles and stains of Busky's blood. In a fear that swallowed him faster than the broken mouth of a frozen lake swallows a ewe separated from its mother he tore at the fabric of the thing until he drifted naked and panting in the empty space of the gangway. The fluorescent square lamps dimmed as he sucked in breath after breath of dry 75 degree Fahrenheit air and returned to their natural state. He swiped at his face until the thin hairs on the backs of his hands came away dry. The lights dimmed again. He cast his eyes along the path to the pilots station. The door was closed. The lights dimmed once more and then ceased. The thrum of automotive engine sized servos driving the rotating capsules came to a long winded halt. "Tolle, I need you down here pronto." The volume of his voice was like nothing he was accustomed to. He shouted again, flecks of saliva leaving his lips and sucked into his flaring nostrils. The door remained closed. The grade 1 alarms began to strobe an electric arcing ice blue. He shouted again, his hands walking him in the direction opposite the closed door. The grade 2 alarms began to strobe their daffodil yellow. All along the walls before him soft voices began to speak the depressurization safety protocols in a tone that failed to soothe. The grade 3 alarms began to sound their capacitor ping. His tail bone slammed against the closed door of the emergency capsule. The pilot's capsule door snapped open. Scudero's vacant blue eyes met his. The grade 4 alarms began to pulse their imminent red. Rooster fumbled the numeric sequence to the door's outer release twice over.
Resting the crook of his hand over the bridge of his nose he fingered his cheek bones. His fingers ran down the hollows of his face on either side of his dehydrated lips. The battery indicator LEDs were not their familiar blue. Yellow was okay with him. It was easier on his eyes. But red would be unacceptable. He fingered the plastic baggie for four minutes before unclipping it from the deadened control panel. A quiet thud echoed against the outer door of the capsule above the whisper of the grade 4's song. The attitude adjustments still ran on their own subroutine, animating corpses like the invisible strings of a master marionette. He slipped his penis inside the plastic bag and wondered if he'd be able to drink it if the need arose.
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata was not the anthem of the program, but he recited the notes anyway each moment he knew he was awake to reassure himself that he was so. Not that the boundary between sleeping and waking was particularly tenuous. At the start of the cessation of the hibernation cycle the destruction of that boundary was the most amazing drug he and his team ever sampled. The largest threat to their safety required disciplined metering of sleep and light electroshock therapy administered by their sleep racks once their schedule required them to sleep no more than eight hours at a dive. Their bodies relearned the difference within months. His own synaptic readings dutifully logged by the metric management software, his body clock, adjusted itself within weeks. Part of what allowed him the greatest number of votes during ground training, and election to mission captain, was his ability to do so and his physical and mental resilience. Humming the notes of the sonata to himself as the small sandwich bag rustled in the glow of half lit LCD screens and LEDs, his captain's rating felt like a fantastically elaborate inside joke.
Rooster, with his free hand, ignored the pressure of the sharp edged nylon lap bands around his thighs as he masturbated furiously with eyes closed tight. He hummed the sonata loud enough to cover the rustling of the clear baggie and the muted buzz of the air scrubbers drawing in the loose beads of body moisture and focused his mind on the nerves in his groin attempting to hum with a like fervor. After what felt like an hour he finally fouled the small plastic bag with a few hard grunts and left it in place. One of the dehumidifiers built into the scrubber panel overhead clicked to work and settled into a gray noise as it tasked. The time readout unblinkingly read to him the entire episode's length ate up scarcely 20 minutes. He closed his eyes again, partly to battle the rising green paste he sucked down only 40 minutes before and partly to battle the vertigo of weightlessness. Weightlessness was nothing he was unaccustomed to, but the sensation no longer gave him the womb like rest it once did.
"Rooster, I think I'm in a bit of trouble here." The medical technologist used to tell him he must have been born in space every time he took his readings in what passed for mid-morning aboard the Signet. Rick was the first one to call him Rooster when he asked for a plastic baggie for personal maintenance months before. "Would you come down here?" Down was relative. He usually had to remind Rick to give exact locations relative to the equipment rooms and gangways. Rick's stout face filled the communication's screen in the pilot's capsule. He asked him what the problem was. "I'm having some issues with Busky's tests and I need a second pair of eyes to make sure I'm reading these figures right." They were all heavily cross trained and the team, almost to a man, could swap positions at any time if the need arose. "I already asked Tolle. He's in the middle of a sequence and has to watch it closely. I couldn't raise Scudero either." He told him to hang on a moment while he ran the day's checklists for the attitude adjustments and promised to come to Busky's sleep rack when he finished. From the corner of his eye, as he toggled the communicator switch, he thought he saw Rick frown, but the screen winked out and the checklist touch screen was already in his hands.
He slid the clear plastic from his limp penis, careful to seal in his ejaculate, and closed it. He clipped its jellyfish formlessness to one of the many padded tool clips bathed in the pacific glow of blue and green lights on the otherwise darkened escape capsules control board. The whisper of the air scrubbers wound down and were not replaced by the distant drum of the motors that rotated the gymnasium and one of the three science compartments dozens of unlit fit aft of the capsules door. Crossing his bare arms across his withered, but still strong, chest he began the sonata again to fill the silence. The hushed ping of the grade 4 alarms still managed to worm into the base of his consciousness through the multi inch and windowless air tight lock of the door. Quietly he timed the sonata out to the slow rise of the alarm. The thing touched his ear drum like dropped clothes pin that struck a pane of glass once against its point, but instead of dieing out the sound rose to a nearly audible and high frequency note as the capacitors inside the alarm light housing charged and then fell with all of the grace of a jazz trombonist punched in his gut mid tune. Through the aluminum and heat proofing of the door it touched him as a feather touches the sole of a foot belonging to a man in traction.
"Scudero." He rubbed his eyes hard that day hard enough to turn the darkness behind his eyelids to orbs of flickering white and yellow. "We need to talk about Scudero." Rick hovered at his elbow. Busky laid comfortably against the white padding and strap work beneath him. Tolle drifted, arms working a bright orange elastic resistance chord, a note pad and pressurized pen idly beside his head, at a point that completed a geometric tetrahedron in the empty, broadly lit, space at the center of the rotating gymnasium capsule. Scudero was tied, wrists and ankles together in third capsule. Rooster explained that Tolle did the right thing and that, as captain, he would log his opinions so. Scudero cracked. It was to be expected. Stacks of manuals and studies and profiles they each ran through during ground training asserted that simple truth and they accepted it. He assigned watches and relief duties indefinitely until a time when they could reach a consensus that he was a mission first member of the team. Between them they had enough psychoanalytical case work to start an unaccredited university in the space between inner and outer solar systems. "Fair's fair."
Unfastening the thick black lap bands he drifted free and allowed the collision of his cowlicked head with the soft plastic surface of the wall to stop his progress. He curled his sparsely bearded chin to his chest as the plastic touched his skull and offered passive resistance. His clammy skin contacted the wall down his naked spine as his feet came to rest against the door. He closed his eyes and released a short breath and opened them again, just like he practiced in the orientation simulators. The chair was on the wall above and in front of him, the cascading throb of the LEDs on the cieling, the door on the floor, and the emergency equipment rack directly in front of him. It was all relative. With an easy buck of his hips he pushed off of the wall and drifted and twisted into the unseen fingers of the thin and rough hook and loop straps where his white pressure suit should have been hanging. Closing his eyes again he nodded his heavy head to the rising muted ping of the black boxed grade fours carrying their warning with the metronomic precession of the great composer himself.
"Rooster," Rick's stolid voice broke into his daily checklist for the second time in a five minute span. "I'm gonna need you down here again." The piloting deck's time readout shrugged. The checklist would run itself if he did not finish it in the next 54 minutes. He did not feel comfortable leaving the diagnostics of systems undone. There was more to running a ship than automatic subroutines. That's why he was the captain. "Just need another pair of eyes." What about Tolle. "He's sequencing again with some of the ice samples we tracked in yesterday." He reminded him about the use of relative terms with respect to time. "I don't trust Busky's dive figures, and I think you might have some good input." Read them to me. "The sheet's a mile long, Rooster." Rick closed the connection and Rooster was nearly certain he frowned again.
Absently he taped the hooked velcro into the soft loop mats at the ends of the opposing strips. Affixing the strips against the pressure points usually occupied by rubber ring seals inside his pressure suit he immobilized his legs above the knees, torso and neck tightly enough to feel his pulse beating against the underside of his skin. Eyes half lidded he let his head fall to the left and then to the right against the abrupt edge of the woven nylon, counting seconds as they deigned to pass. Resetting his focus he turned his lightly glazed brown eyes upward through the filmy and weak electric light and read the upside down timescale. 90 minutes since he first stirred from dreaming. Bringing his legs toward his chest he began to churn an invisible bicycle, careful no to turn too few or too many revolutions per minute. He ticked his pulse off on his body clock and crunched the data as it came, just as he had done every day for 34 days.
Rooster came down the main gangway feet first, the speed of his progress precluding head first movement. He could remember the accident tapes on the orbiting stations as though he watched them yesterday. No one was ever injured beyond a broken nose and chipped tooth, but he planned on returning home in 6 years in better shape, and with better looks, than everyone he left standing on the shores of the big blue sky. The sleep racks were amid ships. Part of the design philosophy was that each and every team member should be allowed and able to function without disturbing the experiments and duties of other team members. He hadn't seen Tolle since he exchanged watch shifts with him 48 hours before. When he was due up again for relief he would make sure he caught up with him. The narrow bright orange plastic sleeve of a syringe tip glanced against his clean shaven chin, bringing his attention sharply toward the open space of the sleep rack entrance. "Rick, you've got to make sure the medical waste doesn't get loose." He apologized, as Rooster placed a flat palm against the seamed egg white plastic fabric of the gangway's narrow wall. Flecks of moisture touched his cheek as he slowed. Shortening his focus and blurring the nearing doorway he saw that all around him were pinpoint globules of pink liquid. "This is unacceptable, Rick."
Unfastening the velcro straps, Rooster floated free momentarily before reaching his hands upward to the seat back above his head. Dehumidifiers clicked into action as the air scrubbers went to work on his exhalations. If he listened hard enough he could hear the blood pumping through the veins at his throat almost as clearly as the burbling of the siphons refilling pouches of water that terminated in a long thin drinking hose at the deadened control panel before him. He secured his lap bands again and took his penis once again into his palm and swallowed the short bout of vertigo that briefly skewered his empty stomach.
"Busky was catatonic. What was I supposed to do?" Several exhausted syringes drifted like flotsam in the white light between Rick's gray jumper and Rooster's captain's blues. The needle of an intravenous feed jutted from the crook of Busky's muscular forearm. The clear tubing of adjoining thread was wrapped around Rick's closed and sweating fist. "His number's look alright now." Rooster snatched one of the drifting syringes from before his eyes. It was the most concentrated anesthetic available to the medical technician. Bright red globes of blood collected like soap bubbles at the end of the IV before coming loose and collapsing against the sleep rack above Busky's white skinned form. Busky's eyes were completely rolled backward. How much did you shoot him with. "Once. Twice when I couldn't get him to stop struggling." Brown and black bruises colored the skin where the rack straps locked against his dead skin. The signet could be crewed by two if the need arose. The bio metrics pad gripped in Ricks other hand was an upended well of red ink on white parchment. "You've got to take a look at these numbers." The empty wrist of a periwinkle disposable glove hung in the air over Busky's gaping mouth, the body of the glove firmly planted deep in his throat. "We should probably put him under a full time watch." He did not remember drifting backward out of the sleep rack capsule. Neither did he remember the quiet smack of his on the emergency air loss lock panel. Rick pressed the pad to the single window at the center of the white door. They simply had to put their heads together.
The plastic baggie rustled against his raw nerves as his throat attempted to carry the sonata with a like fervor. With a few hard grunts he failed to foul the thing before carefully drawing it away and clipping it to the padded universal tool receiver. The jellyfish was a pinkish purple. Rooster was awake again. He hadn't slept since yesterday. The qualing ping of the grade 4 alarm system was dieing down. The batteries would likely discharge within another month. Crunching the data in the maze of learned astrophysics and mechanics of heavenly bodies he could almost see the great prow of the Signet seven tenths of the way to it's destination amongst the Greek maidens and burlesque belts of Jupiter. Too much distance for the emergency capsule to cover on its own, even by the wildest mathematics he could bring his dieing imaginative capacities to envision. The air scrubbers spun down. The readout explained to him the episode only took 20 minutes.
Roosters back thumped against the padded gangway wall and with the suddenness of a glass of water giving up its contents in a scattering of shards against a mosaic tiled bathroom floor he vomited. His hands tore at the thick white zippers of his jump suit, his eyes growing wider as his bare hands and wrists grazed the deep purple speckles and stains of Busky's blood. In a fear that swallowed him faster than the broken mouth of a frozen lake swallows a ewe separated from its mother he tore at the fabric of the thing until he drifted naked and panting in the empty space of the gangway. The fluorescent square lamps dimmed as he sucked in breath after breath of dry 75 degree Fahrenheit air and returned to their natural state. He swiped at his face until the thin hairs on the backs of his hands came away dry. The lights dimmed again. He cast his eyes along the path to the pilots station. The door was closed. The lights dimmed once more and then ceased. The thrum of automotive engine sized servos driving the rotating capsules came to a long winded halt. "Tolle, I need you down here pronto." The volume of his voice was like nothing he was accustomed to. He shouted again, flecks of saliva leaving his lips and sucked into his flaring nostrils. The door remained closed. The grade 1 alarms began to strobe an electric arcing ice blue. He shouted again, his hands walking him in the direction opposite the closed door. The grade 2 alarms began to strobe their daffodil yellow. All along the walls before him soft voices began to speak the depressurization safety protocols in a tone that failed to soothe. The grade 3 alarms began to sound their capacitor ping. His tail bone slammed against the closed door of the emergency capsule. The pilot's capsule door snapped open. Scudero's vacant blue eyes met his. The grade 4 alarms began to pulse their imminent red. Rooster fumbled the numeric sequence to the door's outer release twice over.
Resting the crook of his hand over the bridge of his nose he fingered his cheek bones. His fingers ran down the hollows of his face on either side of his dehydrated lips. The battery indicator LEDs were not their familiar blue. Yellow was okay with him. It was easier on his eyes. But red would be unacceptable. He fingered the plastic baggie for four minutes before unclipping it from the deadened control panel. A quiet thud echoed against the outer door of the capsule above the whisper of the grade 4's song. The attitude adjustments still ran on their own subroutine, animating corpses like the invisible strings of a master marionette. He slipped his penis inside the plastic bag and wondered if he'd be able to drink it if the need arose.
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