By Jack Mullen, Y11
“Chamber depressurizing: 70.25 kilopascals.”
A cold female voice, almost too lifelike.
“Beginning oxygen increase.”
Hisses and whistles, a gush of smooth clinical air invades the astronaut’s lungs. His head swims and he loses his grip on the side rail, his body hangs limp like a sock puppet with no hand to control it. An empty suit crowned with a bulbous black helmet. He finds his senses and grabs onto the bar.
“Pressurizing suit: 30.02 kilopascals.”
The astronaut’s suit inflates.
“Opening airlock…”
He hears a hissing.
“Five”
His chest constricts, the sound–now a high-pitched whining–coils around his body.
“Four”
He can’t breathe.
“Three”
He screams.
“Two”
The hissing surrounds him.
“One”
Drowns him.
A wall disappears and the little man floats out into the universe. Limp limbs feel the burning heat of suns and the cold–more searing than the heat–of darkness. From the inside out, the astronaut drowns; darkness seeps into his suit, snaking its way down his throat. Nothingness enters his lungs, his lips, his heart, his nails. His pleads and prayers are overcome by the cacophony; the hissing. Cold searing is felt over every inch of writhing skin. Knives and nails carve into flesh, cracking impertinent bones.
Silence; the hissing ceases. Pain floats away like a whipped creature, no match for death. Cold becomes lukewarm as the human swims out from his hollow suit leaving space behind. The arrow of time entangles and knots itself until seconds and centuries are indistinguishable from eons. He–the human?–swims parsecs with every stroke, glimpsing burning red, boiling yellow, green clouds swirling around blue stars and galaxies colliding in a clamor of colors unnamed. Electrons and planets orbit nuclei and stars, subatomic particles roll like sand in a tide, making and breaking branches of the multiverse. Gaping black mouths twist and swallow worlds whole while gravity whirls corpses of planets old across an ocean with no surface.
Dust begetting life begetting dust. Civilizations expand and die in the man’s eye, trying to own as many heaps of rock and gas as they can, sailing across fields of asteroids in metal boxes and building toys to squint at the ‘purpose’ of reality. The astronaut sees history and future as his mind spills; paint on the canvas of time.
He sees the big bang, the birthing of space and time. And the cold still expanse of oblivion that scientists and scholars call “The End”. He sees the flow of time streaming in all directions, entropy suffocating and flailing like a fish out of water.
He is one with the dust that birthed him and sees; he is a sack of stardust, one piece–a pawn–on the cosmic board of chaos; a puppet to the stars.
The universe cuts his strings, engulfs the astronaut, dissolves him like a drop of water in the namesake of vastness itself.
On the ship the other astronauts reel in a spacesuit. It looks obscenely oversized for a shriveled cadaver. The suit with a cracked helmet lies on the cold metal floor, the astronaut gone.
