The Void's pull [ENG]

 There is something out there waiting for us. There must be. I have seen so much and understood so little, I have found the hidden and experienced the new, and yet I know nothing. Whatever or whoever is the architect of this nightmare, I have to find. Because there has to be one. I need to release the questions that plague my mind, doubts of time and space. Of reason. Who is there to grant me rest? Who will release the ideas that are festering on what little sanity I have left. Please. Please. There must be a reason for all of this. Any reason. I don’t care if it’s stupid or petty, maybe some mischievous just to entertain some higher being. Anything, please. 

Just not silence.

How do we fail to see that any kind of mission named Icarus is destined to fail? It’s not even ironic at this point. Aren’t there any better classical myths to call spacecrafts after? It’s not even the first Icarus mission, my ship was the Icarus IV. IV!. Does no one see how there’s something going on with that? And it’s not like the previous three Icarus missions were successful. Nor was mine. It was expected to fail, of course, but not like this. 

You see, me and the rest of the Icarus crew were assigned to investigate the fluctuations of the Moon’s gravitational pull along with its orbit around Earth. It sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is. Just picture a bunch of scientists sitting very close to each other, checking numbers and graphs that appear on a terribly small screen, while drifting around in space, impossibly far apart from any hint of civilization.  It happened so fast, it was a matter of days, really. I don’t think a week passed from signing the contract to boarding the Icarus. It's weird, right? Astronauts tend to be very public about it. Going to space, it’s quite a feat, an achievement of few! 

I didn’t tell anyone. 

Not even my mother. I felt compelled not to. It was not an imposition anyone made. Not even myself. I find it a little hard to put it into words honestly. I just felt like it didn’t have to be known? I don’t think any of the other members of the crew told anyone either. We just signed the contract and waited for a couple of days. We didn’t train. We didn’t prepare. It was shady, I’ll admit that, but all of the legal documents were in order, the pay was good, and most importantly, it was a unique experience. We were to get further from Earth than anyone had ever been. How could we say no to that? And honestly, right now, I’m starting to believe that we didn’t even have a choice.

To say I got along with the crew would be a bit of an overstatement. We talked to each other, sometimes. When we crossed each other in the narrow passageways of the Icarus, we would even laugh a little while one would move so the other could cross. We would “sit” and have lunch together, sometimes. We didn’t ever look at each other. That’s a little odd, I know, but in the same way we didn’t tell anyone else about the trip, we didn’t acknowledge each other. It felt like we were ashamed, like it was better not to remember any part of this trip aside from ourselves. I can assure you I don't remember any of their faces. I can barely recall their names. There was one Russian man, I assume he was Russian, Petrikov… Petrov maybe? I am not sure. Of course this applied to all of the other members, no image and a fading semblant of a name. All of them except one, of course. Evrart. No surname. Just Evrart.

While we behaved like shadows in the Icarus, Evrart moved around like a light. He would make an effort to talk with anyone he crossed paths with. He would attempt and chat with every single one of us, and honestly, I can’t say I didn’t find it nice to talk to another human being, considering the other conversation the others provided was a mix of mumbling numbers and odd grunts. Evrart was not a scientist. He would never check the numbers, no. While we were working, he would spend hours looking out the window. The sun would not blind him, and I’m pretty sure he could see through the pitch black void. It was a bit weird, yeah, but not much more than the situation already was. At the beginning I just saw him as a quirk, this six feet tall guy that just moved around the Icarus, trying to cheer up everyone. I even considered the idea that that was his purpose, making sure we wouldn’t lose the grip on sanity once the sun ceased to light us up, once we reached the pure void.

Ironically enough, he was the first to go mad.

He started mumbling too. Not numbers, no. He would speak to the void, looking out at the pure nothingness that was there. He would talk about the impossible beauty of it. He would loom over the passages of the Icarus, waiting for someone to pass through just to tell them about the expanding vacuum that embraced us. They wouldn’t even look at him, as usual, but he followed them, whispering words of shame and guilt, and the purity of the abyss. I didn’t want to listen to him, but it was a hard thing to do, considering that he was the only sound over the silent halls of the Icarus. The others started listening to him. They would whisper together sometimes, cramped next to the windows, looking outside with awe and expectation. They ended up being an echo, repeating incantations of numbers and void that crowded the ship. The dark shade of the moon was the only thing that anchored me there, that made me sure we weren’t just drifting away into desolation. 

The voices did fade out, eventually. So did they.

The ship felt lighter. There is no weight in space, no gravity, I know, but it felt lighter. It’s not easy to describe something that’s physically impossible, something that betrays the laws of everything that’s known. Maybe it was the absence of people that made it feel light. Empty. They disappeared, one by one. I would see them enter a room, and not come out. The passages seemed narrower, and longer, like they stretched out across the Icarus, distorting its shape. The rooms would switch places, or simply disappear. Sometimes with people in it. It wasn’t a long time before the only ones remaining were me and Evrart. Whenever I asked him about the others, or the state of the ship, he would simply smile and keep whispering. He would rarely stop. He even whispered when he talked to me, like the sounds came from deep within him and not from his mouth. I didn’t even attempt to contact Earth. Whatever Evrart had brought onto the ship, it blocked every single message from the outside. The numbers stopped appearing, and the moon was covered by a deep chasm of nothing.

Evrart crawled around the ship, his limbs distorting to reach the walls, he would look at me sometimes, but never stopped moving, nor speaking. No longer did he whisper of death and vacuum, but numbers. He would repeat sequences of numbers, quickly, over and over. A never ending stream of digits that slithered around the Icarus. I spent a week without seeing Evrart. At first I didn’t leave my room just so I could get away from him, but I could still hear his movement, the footsteps on the metal and the gripping of the skin. I could feel how he was changing with the ship. Contorting. Becoming. I didn’t leave my room because I was afraid of what I would find outside of my door if I did.

The lights went out. 

The red emergency lights lit the room with pale crimson tones. Then there was a knock on my door, and a shadow moving below it. I ignored it, expecting Evrart to go away. The voice that came across the metal was not Evrart’s, or not anymore, if it had ever been. A broken screech, followed by a string of numbers. Then knocking again. And again. And so many more times, endless knocking and numbers, until I gave up. I would have prefered to disappear rather than listening to that orchestra of the abyss for one more second. There was no one on the other side. Almost complete silence, just the flickering of the emergency light softly shining on the floor. There was only one passage. A single square shaped corridor that continued into the dark. I just pushed myself into it, for whatever there was in there, it could not be much worse than the hell that the room had become. 

I reached a door. One big, round door, surrounded by darkness. Was I supposed to trespass it? I doubted myself, for a second, until it spoke. No numbers. No fear. No shame. Just Evrart’s old, shining voice. I had to fix a problem, he said. There was something wrong outside of the ship, and I needed to check it out. I just looked in the direction the voice came from, where faint hints of Evrart’s face fused with the dull shades that covered everything. A long arm appeared next to him, stretching in impossible ways, reaching for the door.  I had no suit. No helmet. No protection. And as he opened the door I felt the vacuum of the void, pulling me into it.

There were no stars. The disappearance of the moon was something I had already assumed, but not the stars, no. He was right, Evrart. It was all void. There was nothing out there. Just a pure abyss of nothing. I looked back, and what was once the Icarus IV, was now a mix of deep black folds and geometric plates, changing shape and angles constantly, and Evrart’s face reflected on the glass door. Smiling, waving, or attempting to, shaking one of his monstrously long limbs around.

And I drifted away, into the void. The pure, black chasm of ever space.

I felt no pressure at the start. Even though my bare skin was unprotected to the violence of the vacuum, I was untouched. I just floated there. And then, a murmur. A soft, low pitched, continuous and repeating sound. And with it, gravity. Falling. Away from the ship and into the deep. My whole body being slowly pressured, stretched and contorted. I could feel the movement on my muscles, the tiredness of descending, and the pain. An unstoppable stream of signals through my every nerve. Twisting, breaking, and falling. I could feel how, within the dark, my bones pulled on themselves as they got thiner and thiner, and how my hands tried to separate from my fingers. How my eyes tried to look up while the only direction there was left, was down. The pressure crushed my ears and the blood reached the roof of my mouth, as I tried not to faint while the abyss swallowed me. I could hear the sound again. Gentle, at first, slow, calming. But at some point, it caught to the rhythm of the falling. Numbers, again. Surrounding me. Aggressive, fast, looped. Vile strings of sevens and threes, eights and fives, zeroes and ones. Invasive. It filled every spot in my body which wasn’t already too busy dealing with the pain of gravity. Pain. A lot of it. I could barely see my feet anymore, now a line that stretched out from my knees. My eyes felt like they were going to burst. Then, unconsciousness. 

I woke up. My bones broken and my mind shattered. Heat, fire, and metal melting. I remember the smell of burnt flesh. My flesh. The flashing lights and the terrible siren noises. I can barely recall fading images of people around me, multiple white rooms and a lot of talking. But no numbers, at least. A ridiculous amount of fractures. Some would heal. Some would not. An accident. How did it happen? I only remember drifting away from the Icarus, and then, nothing. The nothingness. The infinite deep. Death. And then I was back, amidst the ruins of another crashed ship, another failed mission. 

They didn’t report any other bodies. They told me that the Icarus was small enough for me, let alone more crew members. They dismissed all of my other questions. The trauma, they said, I got hit in the head too hard. I was already lucky enough I was still alive. The chances were less than none. But I was there. Among the debri. Impossible debri. How did I not smash my body against the ground, how did the fire not consume me. How did I survive? They didn’t recognise the ship. They didn’t ask either. They ignored it. Why? How could you ignore the fact that I crashed an unlabeled satellite into the ground and survive? They didn’t ask anything at all. They healed my wounds and let me off. It felt like they were in a rush. Like they had to get away from me as quickly as possible. 

And obviously, no record of Evrart. Absolutely none. Of course not. Just silence. A void I drowned in, that now lingers on my mind. Who can I ask? Who could answer me? What am I doing here? I feel my body without weight, but gravity still pulls me down. Why throw me into swallowing depths just to leave me grounded here again. Why the silence, why? I miss the numbers. The twos and eights. The sixes and nines. Ones and zeroes. Silence. The embrace of space. The exploding gravity on my skin. The echoes of the fall bouncing into my ears. The blinding darkness into my eyes. The flames that consumed everything. None.

Please answer.