Murder between the Stars

I am nothing but a flea to this behemoth of a starship, less, but I shall be its downfall.

I am invisible as I walk these hollow corridors; these rusted echoing hallways where no one knows to look for me. I am an acceptable fluctuation of resources; I exist within the boundaries of expected levels.

The crew are astronauts, explorers, heroes. And villains.

They ride this monstrous machine-beast through lower dimensions not meant for our kind of thought, let alone our kind of physicality; layers of the universe meant for smaller, low-energy creatures. They rupture delicate boundaries for the sake of speed and distance. And they do so uncaring of the consequences.

They are no longer even human. To tolerate awareness of this howling existence they must be engineered, made different, made more and made less. They must be aware of what it is they navigate, and they must not shy from the pain they cause, the pain they could not help but feel if they were any kind of human anymore.

And I made them this way.

By now my superiors will know I can’t be found. They will know the reasons. And they will be demanding to know why they can do nothing about it. Cowering technicians will be trying to explain to military men why there is no way of communicating with a ship that, relative to our universe, is travelling so much faster than the speed of light that were it to re-enter without drastic deceleration it would have so much mass it would instantly consume itself and everything around it in the ravenous hunger of a newborn black hole.

There is no danger of that, though. When it does re-enter the native universe deceleration is assured as the ship rips forcibly through dimensional membranes – it was designed that way. Unfortunately it is an act as violent and harmful as it sounds, and these alien dimensions are richer in life than our ocean ever was, even before we polluted it sterile. The turmoil and damage will be horrendous.

I secretly suspect that is why this craft was abandoned by whatever race built it, millennia before we stumbled across it. Whether their morals got the better of them before they used it, or whether guilt drove them to cease, I couldn’t say. Maybe I am wrong and there is some other reason. Maybe they were uncaring too. I would say inhuman, but that would seem to be a misnomer, in the face of current evidence.

I can feel this foreign dimension pressing on me, even though I have no contact with it. My mind feels disparate, affected, particulate. My mutiny has already been staged though, the virus already roams these sepulchrous passages. Soon my life’s work will be undone, the crew will be undone. This mighty thing will never re-enter the home dimension, it will remain here, where no other race of my dimension can stumble upon it and make the wrong decision again, the decision we made: to use it.



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Recommended Reading:

Banshee Lullabies by Chazley Dotson.
Simply outstanding writing. Does one of my favourite things... makes the unreal, real. And does it with such feeling.

and My Space Plane by John Wiswell.
Very funny and uses an interesting and clever structure. A great example of just what is possible in the flash form.