Author’s Note:

❤ -Martha 🙂

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The Silence of Space

By Martha Kehr

It’s too quiet.

I was ready for the isolation. That was always part of the plan, a natural side effect of living light years away from another living being. But this retched silence is more than I can bear. Two years in deep space can get a little lonely, but I prepared for it. I trained for this day after day. In some ways I was even looking forward to it. Out here I’ve got my own stocked kitchen and there’s nobody to sneak into the fridge and eat the snacks I’ve been saving for myself. This is the ultimate privacy. It turns out that I like the solitude. But I didn’t train for this silence. Nobody told me how quiet it was going to be in space. None of the manuals they gave me covered how to stay sane in this infinite lack of sound.

My contract said three years. I’ve been taking care of these wormhole gates for two of those three years now. They can’t maintain themselves after all. Well, they can’t yet anyway. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. The damn corporations are always looking for ways to get around paying human beings a livable salary. They’d love to have a robot out here doing my job. The saddest past is I’m lucky to even have a job in this economy. After the capital fell I took whatever I could get. Even this insane, three years alone in space, gig sounded like a great idea. At least my family won’t starve.

I knew it would be quiet in space; the thought did cross my mind before I left on this job. I brought two A.F.S.U.s (Audio File Storage Units) packed full of all my favorite songs with me, over a petabyte of data, but hearing them was worse than suffering through the nothingness. All those familiar songs, the soundtrack of my old life, ceased to help me transcend this horrible quiet. After a while, hearing them made me feel like I’d see my home again. But I won’t. This is my life now; I thought as I smashed those little music players into ruined specks of plastic and parts. My life is here now, checking gauges, replacing bolts, and emailing reports. I realize now that I’ll never see the world that made those beautiful songs again. This is all I’ll ever know for the rest of my insignificant existence. This is where I’ll die, here in the deep, silence of space.

I envy people stranded on a remote islands. Robinson Crusoe didn’t know how good he had it. Sure it would be hard, but at least you’d have the ocean. Like another person, the waves would roll in, coming to play at high tide, waving goodbye at the low. Surely he had birds flying by, cawing, whistling, and chirping. And I can’t forget the wind! Oh the blessed sound of leaves rustling in the breeze! Imagining this cacophony of sound is the only reason I’m still alive.

I’m lying here on the floor, the fake gravity my only friend, trying to hear the wind and the waves. I’m straining my ears to their fullest. I can’t hear it. I can’t hear anything but my own breathing. There isn’t a planet close enough to even pretend to have loud oceans. There is nothing close enough, no fuel for my imagination. I used to hear whizzing and buzzing sounds emitting from the machines, dials, and switches of my work station but not anymore. They held no comfort for my agitated soul. Now, here on the floor surrounded by piles of broken pieces and sharp plastic edges, I can’t even tell which parts were my mp3 players and which parts belonged to the station. It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone now. Anything that might have once made a sound is broken, myself included. I want anything that reminds me of my old life destroyed.

I see a hundred ships fly by me every day. You’d think they would make some noise as they pass through the gateway, but they don’t. I used to think there would be a swooshing sound, or that some sounds from the active machinery would echo off the ships. But that’s not how sound waves work out here. In the vacuum of open space there’s no air to create sound vibrations. The ships are probably noise machines; I just can’t hear any evidence of it. I hear nothing. I only see them.

My workstation is in a gateway zone, anchored to nothing, but somehow always in the same spot. I have three wormholes to watch, three gates to maintain and repair, but there’s nowhere for any of the ships to stop. They couldn’t even if they tried. They’re set on completely automated courses. The pilots manage the docking processes; the navigation system does everything else in between. I know where two of the gates lead. The main gate takes you back to the home worlds. When it’s activated there’s a dull, lifeless green wormhole glowing in its center. People leaving the main cluster of planets are usually heading to the work zone of planets through the bright yellow wormhole. Both of those gates are about the same, gigantic, size. The green one is a little larger because the homeworld paid extra to make their wormhole gate look more impressive, but I can’t even imagine a ship large enough to have trouble fitting through a gate the size of the yellow wormhole, let alone the size of the green gate. Maybe a generation starship, I’ve seen some of those that are almost planetoid sized, so I guess if the generation starships start paying for access they won’t have to worry about fitting through, not that generation starships would ever take such a short cut, of course, that would defeat the purpose of the ships in the first place. It’s just another perfect example of the messed up capital government wasting money. I’m sure some bureaucrat somewhere got a pat on the back for making that call.

It’s the last gate that holds all the mystery. It’s farther off than the other two, the least used, and the smallest by far. Once a day, twice at the most, I see it activate by some unknown hands. The wormhole this gate creates is mostly white with a rainbow of thin, vivid streams of light that swirl madly around in a tight vortex. I had never seen a wormhole like it before I was stationed out here. It’s beautiful, mesmerizing, maybe the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen. And that’s saying a lot considering I’ve traveled to three of the Top Five ‘Must See’ Nebulae on the intergalactic list of ‘Must See’ Nebulae. The travel manuals hadn’t played them up either. The dictionary says a nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium, and other ionized gases. But that’s not what I see when I look at one close up. I see creation. I see the gods’ slow chess game in motion. I see life in progress, colors that should only exist in my dreams, and shapes more fascinating than clouds in the sky back on the home planet could ever hope to mimic.

I wonder what the nebulae on the other side of the rainbow wormhole looks like. Are they even more spectacular than the ones in my travel guide? Is that why those ships are heading through that small gate? There’s also something extra odd about the one or two ships a day that head through the third gate. They aren’t the city sized monstrosities that so regularly carry thousands of workers, prisoners, or passengers through the main two gates. No, the ships that veer off and activate the rainbow wormhole are always tiny in comparison. I would guess they couldn’t carry more than a dozen people. Why are so few going through this strange gate? Where does it lead? Who found the other end? How far away is it? Who paid to build the wormhole system? My mind boggles at the thought of it, and there’s nothing to distract me from my ceaseless wonderings, nothing other than endless silence.

Wherever the rainbow vortex leads it must be an important place. Funding the construction of a wormhole generator is a planet wide undertaking. And paying for one gate isn’t enough. It takes two gates to open a wormhole, one on each side. The main gate system cost more than the GPP (gross planetary product) of the capital planet itself! And I, alone, maintain this side of it. Trillions of dollars worth of equipment are my responsibility. As I look at the tattered remains of the interior of the unit spread around me, I think they should have picked somebody else. I guess I couldn’t be trusted after all.

I thought I just heard a bird call in the distance, but now I’m pretty sure it was just the synapses in my brain breaking from the stress. Snap, crackle, pop they go. If I’m out here any longer I’m not going to have any left. Something has to change and quick.

My family hasn’t taken my calls for months. I don’t blame them. I don’t have anything to say. ‘It’s too damn quiet out here’, ‘I checked on some hoses today’, ‘I saw a bunch of ships fly by’, or ‘I reorganized my tool area.’ They don’t want to hear about that. During my first year here they would stay up late, wake up early, or just wake up and go back to bed after talking to me on the communicator. For some godsforsaken reason the communicators only get through the nebulae and make contact at four o’clock in the morning back on the home planet. The human race has achieved so much, technological advances way beyond previous comprehension, but they still can’t figure out how to send signals through the nebulae! And signals can’t travel through the wormholes either. The gates must be communicating, so why can’t signals communicate like the gates? I’ve tried to ask ‘the higher ups’ about this subject a hundred times. They tell me I don’t have the security clearance to handle that information. I used to wonder what they meant by that but not anymore. They were right. I don’t have what it takes to handle the things they’re hiding from me. I already know too much.

I used to love hearing about what was going on with my family’s lives. I used to care about what was happening back on the planet where I was born and raised, but now I feel so far away. Hearing about my old friends causes me physical pain. Luckily they stopped telling me anything at all. It was after the last call with my wife that I discovered something I wish now I had never learned. She told me our daughter was getting married. I couldn’t believe it when the words came out of her mouth. Married? At her age? She was only twenty when I left and not dating anybody seriously. I never thought my wife, of all people, would allow our child to make such a rash decision. But she said the guy is great, and they’ve been together long enough to know it’s the right thing.

That’s when I dug up my contract. I wanted to see if there was a way to take a week or two off, so I could go back for the wedding. And there it was, in the tiniest of fine print, the clause I can’t believe I didn’t notice when I signed the damned piece of paper in the first place. The clause I can never forgive them for.

It’s called the Incongruent Time Clause. In font, way smaller than the human eye can see, I read it, and then I wept. What I didn’t know when I left was that time was going to be different for me than it has been for my family. I’ve heard about the space/time continuum, but I didn’t know what that meant. I had no idea the havoc those abstract concepts would, and already have, wreaked on my life. To me, I’ve been here for two years. To my family and friends back home, I’ve been here for eight years already! My daughter’s engagement wasn’t sudden; she’s been with the guy for years now! By the time I’m scheduled to return, my wife will have aged twelve years, while I’ll have only aged three! Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal to some people, but all of the sudden being unemployed back home doesn’t sound that bad. How could I not have noticed such a thing?! ‘The higher ups’ sure know how to hide the important details. And they’ve been hiding it from my family too. What they told me were weekly calls were always called monthly calls to them. I told my family I was only going to be gone for three years, but, according to the actual contact I signed, I agreed to let the company tell them there had been unforeseen complication that required my contract to be extended an extra nine years! How could they do this to me? How could I be caught in this lie?

I thought the money sounded too good to be true. Of course it was. They’re paying me for twelve years- not three. Now I realize I’m getting the shaft on this deal. There’s no way anybody would ever agree to this crappy job if they knew what they were really giving up. I bet most suckers go back home after their contracts never knowing about that minuscule clause. They return to their loving families and find out in those first moments how horribly mislead they had been.

The anger I feel has consumed me. I want to rip every wire from every nook and cranny of all three of those hateful gates. I want to find the guy who talked me into signing that contract and rip all his wires out too. Rage fills my blood, causing it to boil through my every vein. And there’s nothing to distract me from my madness! I sit here, alone, festering and rotting in this perfect silence, this utter lack of sound.

I have to get out of here.

My mind is set to the task. There’s no turning back now, not after what I’ve done. Maybe yesterday I could have logged onto the media center and found a way to play music without a player. Maybe I could have started a new soundtrack to a new life. I might have been able to get a hold of ‘the higher ups’ and maybe we could have talked through solutions to my discontent. Now it’s too late for that now. The rubble of what used to be my living quarters, the machines, the computers, and everything else are proof of that.

I need to be somewhere where there’s a chance for random noise to exist.

I’ve done the math, calculated the future. It should take them at least two days to figure out that something’s wrong out here, two days of not getting any responses from me. They’ll have to send a crew to investigate, which will take another two days at the least. I have four days in all. Four days, strangely enough, is the exact same amount of air left in my space suit’s tank. I have to make it look like an accident. Otherwise my family will get nothing. Dying on the job, however, leads to massive payouts. They’ll be set for life.

Now I wait for the final part of my plan to fall into place. My last act in the multiverse will be discovering where the third wormhole leads. I demand some answers to my endless questions. Every ship that exits the main gate elevates my hopes. I stare intently at the small gate, waiting to see some activity erupt. Twenty times my hopes have risen; twenty times the boring yellow wormhole has opened instead. I’m all dressed up with no place to go. My space suit is on, and I’m breathing part of my four day supply. One thing the scientists have managed to improve over the last four hundred years of space travel is the space suits. I’ve got to give them credit for that. Comparing the suit I’m wearing to a twentieth century space suit would be like comparing twentieth century Kevlar to a medieval suit of full plate armor. Those of us ‘in the business’ don’t even call them space suits anymore. We call them second skins. The tank is my second set of lungs. None of my movements are restricted. I have perfect peripheral vision too.

I know somebody will eventually travel through the rainbow wormhole today. They have to. And the moment a ship does comes through and activates the smallest gate I’ll push off from the side of my unit’s metal exterior. With nothing to slow me down between here and there, I’ll drift straight through, right into the chaotic rainbow streams of light. I must know. I imagine that traveling through the wormholes would sound like flying through a wind tunnel. I’m ready to find out whether or not that’s true. They say a lone human can’t survive traveling through a wake. They say it will tear my body into sub-particles. I’m anxious to find out if they’re right. I’ve heard other theories that say it’s the same for any matter traveling via gate system, and if a moon sized ship can safely pass through, so can any matter- no what the size. Nobody has ever tried. Nobody has been crazy enough to put themselves through such a trial, until now. Two years of loneliness, no future to look forward to, and one day of absolute, mind-numbing silence and I’m crazy enough to try anything. I just hope the wormhole makes a sound. I hope it sounds like wind or the ocean waves.

The green wormhole just activated. My heart begins to race. I crouch and put myself in the optimal position to push myself away from the workstation. The ship coming through the main gate is tiny, maybe the smallest one yet. I see my gate lighting up. This is my chance. I only get one shot. Like a skilled swimmer pushing off the edge of the pool, I take off, shooting myself in a forward motion. I’m flying through space toward my target, my workstation is getting smaller and smaller behind me, but I’m looking forward. The ship will travel through first, but I shouldn’t be far behind. I feel no resistance. I continue to hear nothing. I don’t know if I’ll survive traveling through the rainbow wormhole. I can’t even imagine what kind of worlds I will find on the other side. All I know is this: I have four days of air supply. What a glorious four days it will be.

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Kehr, Martha. The Silence of Space. (Rohnert Park, CA: Zaum Sonoma State’s Literary Magazine, 2016).