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The Long Road Home · Original Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
Show rules for this event
Proverbs 22:6
Five thousand and one bodies lie motionless, dead-eyed and vacant in the thick plexiglass domes built on Mare Crisium by prison labour, a perfect little spot to the far North of the moon's surface.

Five thousand bodies only technically alive, suspended in a deep cryogenic state that is only not death for governmental purposes. One body was warm, but that's about where the differences ended. That one was watching the crackle of static on his 96 inch television, three hundred and eight four thousand kilometers away from any signal that would reach it.

Jon had an external hard-drive he could plug into it at any time. He'd been told though that, outside the Earth's magnetosphere, static like this was the background noise of the universe. He let the crackling wash over him, thinking of it like the stars singing.

Solitude, friend of the friendless. When he listened to the stars, he didn't feel quite so lonely.

He still felt pretty god damned lonely though.

Jon peeled himself from the NASA-tech Laz-E-Boy chair and stretched, cracking his joints. Six years ago he was standing in line for a soup kitchen. Today he was an astronaut, attending doctor and plugging a USB cable into a television on the moon.

It was just as miserable as it sounded.

The end of the six month rotation was always the hardest, even harder than the beginning, he thought as the device connected, scanned. The static went quiet as the television adjusted to the new signal. The room, for just a moment, felt a little bit lonelier before the music kicked in.

There's some strange law of the universe that is, when you plug a large playlist into a device and hit random because you want music to help soothe your soul, it'll always pick the song that'll hit you the hardest, hurt you the most. You could shuffle a deck of cards and never get the same order twice so long as you lived, but shuffle an iPod and get pain every single time.

So this time Jon got to hear a song he'd sang into a Panasonic boombox some years ago as he looked out over the white silicate sands.

You came down from heaven to the branch outside my window
Your feathers were the color of snow
The dice were loaded against us ever seeing each other
But one of us had nowhere else to go

He almost expected to see the damn bird outside his plexiglass dome, but of course it never came.

How did anyone know for sure there weren't owls up here, on the moon? Snow owls, arctic owls, those things were hard enough to see on Earth, well lit and close. Up here, who'd see it? Maybe they were just too small for telescopes, and had been too good at hiding from the slow, scary astronauts that had come. He'd have been the first to see one, made human contact, and maybe offer it some of his reserves. What would it eat? There'd have to be moon mice, and for them there'd have to be moon… whatever mice ate… and there wasn't any of that. So that's probably why there weren't moon owls.

Was God even watching over him, up here, when the heavens themselves were so far below?

It was the kind of train of thought that, had anyone asked him what he'd been thinking, he'd have said “Nothing”. But there wasn't anyone around, so instead he said nothing.

That was why the simple lyrics hurt the most, Jon thought, staring out at a bleached, windless landscape that would never have changed but for prison labour in the 70's. Because there wasn't even that simple creature to break his loneliness.

The rest of the song played out on the surround sound, and again Jon was left alone with his thoughts.

He'd been here five months, twenty three days, sixteen hours, in which time he had fallen into a twenty six hour sleep cycle, eaten one hundred and seventy five rehydrated LRP rations – saved twelve of the chocolate bars for when he got really sad – and overseen five thousand living corpses continually being harvested for their organs.

His replacement was being sent right now for the next six month shift. He'd be back to the housing blocks in Colorado soon enough. Internet that was monitored and restricted, sure, but more contact than he was allowed here.

Jon was feeling self conscious about his monologuing. But five months, twenty eight days, four hours of isolation will do that. He factored in the journey here, even though at least then he was in regular radio contact with a human being during that time, it still… wasn't.

So it was that he flopped into his Ikea-brand office chair, spun around in it twice, and shook his head of the dizziness. He scooted it closer to his monitoring terminal to check on the patients, Something raw and gentle started playing, a song he knew well from another lifetime.

This time, to help with the isolation and the sanity, he sang along.

On the morning that I woke up without you
For the first time
I felt free
And I felt lonely
And I felt scared

And I began to talk to myself
Almost immediately
Not being used
To being
The only person there
Mmmmm.

There was something raw and comforting in… empathy through music. Freeze dried emotions, for the soul what the Ranger rations did for the body. He couldn't hold a conversation with the vocalist, probably never meet, but here in the song were words and thoughts that he understood so intrinsically… it was wasn't a conversation, it was consolation, and that was good enough.

The song paused automatically as communications signals overrode it, static crackled, and Jon closed his eyes and breathed the filtered air deep. When the voice cut through it, it almost felt like an interrupted ceremony. Like he'd knelt down for an evening prayer and someone shoved him over.

“Jon? Jon, pick up. We know you're awake.”

He'd tried pretending to be asleep before. He didn't know how they knew, but they knew. He d ragged himself away from his monitoring terminal and his watching of the sleeping not-dead, gripping the edge of the desk and pulling himself along it and towards the radio's microphone.

“Receiving, Mission Control. Over.”

The “Overs” were because there was a second of delay for speed-of-light. Not much, but it made it too easy to speak over each other if he didn't. He could tell when Mission Control stopped because of the fresh bursts of static.

“How are you feeling, Jon?”

“I don't know.” He answered honestly. He hadn't said over yet, so they let him think about it. “I'm not sure if I'm crazy or not. But if I were crazy, I wouldn't feel this damn lonely, so I guess that's how I feel, instead… over.”

“We're sorry to hear that, Jon. We regret to inform you that you will not be relieved at the end of the week, as expected. Because of the very surprising and last-minute nature of the delay-”

Jon had started cutting him off at surprising. “What happened? Put Nick on, if he's pussying out again I wanna yell at him a bit.”

Eugh. Jon cringed as his brain caught up to his mouth. He was too long out of practice talking. People tend to be a lot more critical in their monologues, and the mental barriers had fallen from disuse, just like they did his last two tours of duty.

“No he's – he's dead. We have reasonable suspicion he took his own life. We're prepping David, he agreed to pushing his six months forward, but it's going to take at least another week, because we had to scrub the launch.”

Then--

“Nick's dead?”

“We're afraid so, Jon. You'll still be home in time to pay your respects, you have our word on that. The more pressing issue is supplies. You're going to have to stretch yourself to last another week.”

“Stretch- These are already under daily calorie intake! I get light headed if I stand up too quick, over.”

“Nothing we can do, Jon. Doctors say you're safe – not comfortable but safe – for another two weeks with rations you have, and you'll only be waiting one. Situation's new to us. We had other stand ins prepped, but we never expected… day before launch, Jon. We're sorry.”

“Just… let me think it over, over.”

“Roger that. We'll send back in 24 hours, next time you're in a good position to get signal. On behalf of all of us at Mission Control--”

He let the hollow reassurances play through while he pulled his chair along the edge of the desk, towards his monitoring terminal.

The moon was a perfectly sterile environment, cold enough that the cryogenics operated at scarily efficient levels… and any organs harvested had almost precisely four days travel to any hospital on Earth as needed.

The moon's gravity was a fifth that of Earth's, which made it far easier to launch the deliveries in less conventional means. Pneumatic cannons and the moon's vast reserves of radioactive isotopes went hand in hand to create a long-term, self-sustaining launch availability for the packages to be sent back to Earth.

Unfortunately it was designed to send packages of meat, and not a whole Jon, so riding them out wasn't an option. No life pods, no escape. Intentional, otherwise a lot more custodians would have gone AWOL over the decades.

That's why they were all picked from the crack dens, the mental wards, the soup kitchens and the piss-soaked alleyways. The most critical job requirement was that you had to think this is better, the second most critical being that no one would miss you when you disappeared. The documentation – for the staff and the patients and the construction alike -- wasn't suppressed per se, but camouflaged by needless technical jargon that runs into the thousands of pages. The files available to the public, but they sit in file cabinets somewhere near Orlando, gathering dust and serving their purpose thereby.

Anybody could read them, if they knew where to look. Which is why they made so damned sure none of the handlers could get much human contact.

So he had a week, no food, and suddenly he was home-sick for Colorado.

Jon got up and pulled on his environmental hazard suit, switched on the breathing apparatus, and sang sadly to himself as he waited for the airlock.

And I wandered through the house, like a little boy, lost at the mall. And an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space… mmm.”




Jon drove home through the Colorado dust, focused on the alcohol inside of him hum. He was picturing the look on his handlers face, right now, when they got the bad news he'd run.

Upshifted as he pulled onto the highway, the motor screaming out, stuck in second gear. The whole thing was going to end badly, when he imagined it. He didn't know what he was doing here.

He'd started off toward the long 24, towards the city for supplies. Technically out of bounds for the attendants, but they had some freedoms in the off season. The radio blasted the thought away that maybe, just maybe, he was ruining everything for the rest of them, but no matter how loud he played the music, it didn't quite drown out the ankle monitor buzzing against his leg.

So, his privileges would definitely be revoked, but if he thought up a lie good enough maybe Nick, David, Michael and Shannon wouldn't have their rights restricted. After five years tour of duty with them – three with Michael – he didn't want to mess up their good thing.

David had come in off meth. Shannon was doing… nasty stuff on the cheap when they scouted her. Michael hadn't slept in a bed more than twenty or thirty times in the last decade. Nick didn't talk about his past at all, why they singled him out, which was probably the worst sign of all. Just flinched like a jack-in-the-box if you ever came up behind him too quiet.

Behind him was the only real home they'd ever known, and the right to leave every now and again if you signed it off with your handler was a tenuous permission, a show of faith that nobody knew to abuse. Jon had just pulled out his stash, rented a car and was now way outside where he was meant to be. The ankle tag screamed at them as much as it screamed at him right now.

He tuned the radio to static, but it didn't do anything for him down here, under the atmosphere. He couldn't hear the stars sing, just the discordant hiss of a thousands of man-made signals missing their mark. Switched it to something else.

It ended up being Frankie Lymon, Seabreeze. Jon was drinking in the highway sounds by the time he remembered this song. Classic jukebox rocker, sang “Why do Fools Fall in Love” when he was 14 with The Teenagers before he went solo. Tracked Seabreeze in 1968, then died February 27th of the same year of a heroin overdose, found face down on the tiled floor. He was twenty five.

Heroin was one hell of a drug. Starts off making things easier, then it's just too damn hard without it, then you need more and more just to feel anything anymore. Then one day you wake up and you find you have to fake cumming for your girlfriend because you don't want to let on just how fucked up your life is, and she leaves when she works it out – because the alternative is heading down the twisting alleyways with you.

He was trying to quit using an aerosol mister, just a low shot of it whenever the withdrawals got too bad, when Mission Control found him. He'd been twenty four, and Feb 27 ended up being the same day Leonard Nimoy died, because fuck that date, why not?

They pull you into the program because it's better than wherever you came from, but it'd been six years now. He was clean as he was ever going to get, and no chance of going back to the same place. Mission Control paid well, considering, but they'd be looking for him in his old haunts now. All the cash he'd saved up from little ATM visits over the last six years, then hiding all the excess in his sock, the rest in a hole in the wall hidden by a poster, just so they couldn't freeze his fucking assets because he knew they would he just--

He needed to get this fucking ankle monitor off his leg before they caught him.

He needed to get caught so he didn't fuck this up for the others, because they still needed this.

He needed to run, or he'd end up sent back to the goddamn moon of all places.

The needed to catch him, or he'd never hear the star song again. Not to speak of his other guilty pleasures.

If he made it to Kansas he'd be free, free at fucking last.

Head down towards Kansas, he would get there when he got there, and until then he'd try not to worry. He felt bad about the things he'd done, along the way but -- he quietly admitted to himself – not really that bad. Rolled the wind down and inhaled the frozen air along the long 24.

“Lord send me a mechanic if I'm not beyond repair.”

Then God answered his prayers when the black sedan passing him in the other lane pulled a handbrake u-turn, tires screaming on the winter asphalt, and the detective's lights on the dashboard flashed red-and-blue.

Jon was secretly relieved when he got pulled over, but the fury he didn't even try to hide.

He'd be moon-bound again in a fortnight.




Jon walked through the connected domes of the moon, environmental suit on. His quarters were habitable – comfortable even – but the other residents were meant to be kept cold, in a vacuum. Undid the whole point of the exercise to make this area habitable.

The Earth blocked the sun again. It was dark, so he had the headlamp on full bore. Still, though, the North American continent was facing him, and there he could see the Colorado mountains. In his mind and memory he knew them to be mountains, huge, but from here, looking up at it through the dome, the whole surface still looked flawless as a marble. He’d read somewhere, once, that if you took all the water off the planet and sat it next to a billiards ball of the same size the Earth would be smoother.

Looking up at it, he used to think about it, how weird it was to know you lived there. Now, now when he looked at it he thought something else, something as small and cold and distant as the moon.

“It’s a straight walk home...” he whispered to himself, breath fogging the inside of his visor.

He'd slept off his anger at mission control, got a good ten hours of sleep from it, but now he had fourteen hours before the next message. Be a long day to stay up for it. Nap might do him good.

Everyone around him was asleep as the robots went about their work.

Like someone stuck a paid of Roombas under a vending machine for dentists, and they had a bunch of widgets to force free samples on you. In you. Again, the whole point of this place was the cold and sterile nature of it. It was also an absolute logistics nightmare to rotate staff. Robots could survive in an autoclave, if you built them right, didn't need food or habitation, didn't make mistakes, and didn't need an airlock to load the little care packages, which saved a lot of structural wear-and-tear over time. You just needed a single human operator to watch over the robots and you were good.

So here was Jon, in his space suit, watching over the robots and he deemed them… not good but probably necessary.

Patient #011246 – only 5,000 people, but the serial numbers being as big as they were helped with the documentation padding and obfuscation back in Orlando, and the robots didn't particularly care as long as it was a valid GoTo line – had his lungs ripped out even when he was still growing the kidney back, and a good chunk of his liver. The machines kept him from being dead.

Here he was #011246, lying reclined in a vertical pod, covered in open wounds because scars just make the next incision harder. No, the surgical wounds were rarely closed, just practically zip-locked.

Just for the briefest of moments, Jon envied him. Numbers here wasn't aware of his own loneliness, or his pain, or anything. He was functionally immortal, he had nothing to fear from death, nothing to fear at all. The worst things on Earth hadn't happened to him, but they exported even worse stuff off planet and he got that instead, and it didn't phase him at all.

Everything grew back and he never noticed. He never woke up. Instead he got to dream.

When the envy went away, Jon had never panged harder for a dose in his whole life. Even when the physical addiction left, the crying and the shaking and the cold and the shitting yourself and vomiting, it was the mental that kept you coming back.

Jon was as clean as he was ever going to be, but some stains don't wash out.


He checked the terminal for Numbers here.

#012856 had a skin donation scheduled. Numbers could take that, no skin off his back. No, that would be taken on behalf of #008684. Manual override. #010257 was donating another kidney? Numbers could take that one. Manual override. Confirm. Heart? Absolutely. And what's he going to be using the rest of his liver for? Bones could stay, but the marrow was needed elsewhere. All this blood was just superfluous at that point.

The surgical bots swarmed from the facility every time he hit 'Confirm'.

It'd take a few hours, but all that'd be left of Numbers would fit in a bucket.

In that time, well… this suit wasn't suited for long journeys outside the domes, but he had a shovel in case he wanted to take soil samples with him on the return trip.

How hard could it possibly be to dig a grave in one fifth gravity?

Maybe that would earn him the nap after.




Jon was a scumbag. The people he was with? Good people, better people, that deserved better than him.

Twenty three and here he was sitting waiting for an AIDs test, back in the days where it took a week to get the results back. He'd sat for it a week ago today, when he got home he'd gotten the results in a little envelope from the clinic, the one run by the Catholic Church who were totally fine hiring a junkie until he was honest about the weekend he spent in jail.

The letter lay unopened on the bed. He was here in case it was positive, he was here in case it was negative, because either way he was a coward. If it was positive… other people he heard, he knew, did the rounds and the phonecalls. The apologies.

“Hey, sorry, so it turns out I accidentally got us killed. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, slow and painful. No, no dignity just… awful, awful shit. Yeah. Okay, yeah, bye.”

Jon couldn't bring himself to do that.

He was in a hotel called… no, not a hotel, that was elevating this place above its station, a place called The Royal Hawaiian motor lodge. A Polaroid picture of a naked lady in the reception window advertised “Sexy Movie!” for $5, that's the kind of class you could come to expect from this place.

He'd gotten his supplies, the brown bag spilled across the sink edged with black mold. He didn't look at them for a moment, he was too busy staring at himself in the bathroom mirror.

Sometimes when you look yourself hard in the eye you stop seeing the vessel that contains you, or you start seeing it just as the vessel. There's a spot dead center of your pupils that, you look into hard enough, you fall into yourself. You realize that everything you are, everything you have been and everything you will be lives in this space, this weak and fragile prison of meat. And so you think about what, exactly, that means.

What that meant for him was a brown bag with Saint Joseph's baby aspirin and some Bartles & Jaymes.

And the letter.

He started writing his own note in big handwriting, pen clutched in a fist to mitigate the trembling in his hand, as he said his goodbyes, and his sorries, in big looping letters. He wasn't sure he'd be able to after he knew.

He didn't write a Last Will and Testament on the back of it because at this point all he had left were things the better people in his life didn't deserve.

With that, the letter was open with the gentle peeling of the glue because he didn't want to tear it open, didn't want to piss off the news like somehow that might make it change his mind on whether he was going to die or not.

He stood over the sink covered in wine and pills and read.




Numbers wouldn’t fit in a bucket.

Jon hadn't factored in all the muscle tissue that didn't serve much of a purpose when you took all the blood and skin off it. Butchered with surgical precision, a pile of meet in a hollowed corpse.

Reminded him of a turkey ready to be stuffed more than anything else.

The body bags the attendants had on-site – in case a body gave out of natural courses, which is sure as hell how he planned on filing this one – would be enough to fit it, and the grave outside wouldn't be deep enough as he dug it, but it'd be a steady juggle. He'd paused operations, discontinued others, but it was fit for purpose as soon as Numbers was out of it as long as he didn't reset it. After that, if he wasn't careful, it'd figure out what was going on and the whole thing would have been for nothing.

He'd have to try again, and there was only so many he could write off on incident reports.

The meat, what was left of the vessel that had contained whoever Numbers had been long ago, was folded into the sack mostly intact. Idly, Jon wondered if the meat was kosher or halal. He didn't know much about it, but he knew it was all about getting the blood out of it, and between the exposure to vacuum and the five liter donation he just gave, it seemed a good bet.

The bag was rested next to the now-empty cylindrical container. He'd take it out to the little grave-site when he was done with his rest.

Not just nap, for a little while, Jon was going to cease to be. Defile himself in the most blessed way he knew how. He programmed some inputs he'd learned over the years, what he could beg borrow and steal from Mission Control, precious pieces of information that, on their own, were completely harmless, but were very much like a jigsaw when you put them together, and even without being shown the box you only needed to see a few corner pieces to know what the picture ended up being.




Donations set off while life support was kept on on, something he learned when patients were suspected of cancer but not confirmed. He also flicked a boolean trigger, prepping himself for surgery, while not interfering with the cancer routine. He figured out he could do this when they needed to take grafts. Something he hadn't seen, but read the procedure for, was spinal taps. They'd run the painkillers but keep the patient lucid. That's the surgery he was prepping himself for. Next, he lowered the opiate dosage just a little, because he wasn't the strung out junkie he'd been when he was seventeen.

Finally, he set the spinal tap portion of it run after the cancer scare protocol was disengaged, which would cancel everything in the routine not yet performed, notably the lumbar puncture part.

He took a moment to admire his hack-job. He'd just turned a space-tech immortality machine into his own personal dilaudid drip.

Jon looked upon his work and deemed it good.

Four hours he'd be hooked in. He had his .mp3 player, a topped up environmental suit for when he got out…

He stepped into the apparatus, which sealed tight and flooded with a hiss of nitrogen to stabilize the pressure. Only when there was silence did he dare take the helmet off, being careful to hold his breath. Tubes, some tipped with needles some without, hung around him, waiting for insertion. There were two he needed... his eyes screwed shut and watering as he forced the breathing tube into his mouth. Then he kept pressing it, suppressing his gag reflex as well as he could, as the tube went deeper and deep still until he felt it settle into his lungs.

Something clicked, and his lungs began to inflate and deflate on their own, his heart hammering.

The IV was easier. He'd had a lot more practice doing this. As soon as it was in, mana from heaven flowed into his veins.

He let the world spin and drift away from him as he listened to dance music in his own little dream chamber.




The lion was asleep. There was no way to live safely with it, not even within its pride -- what little pride it had -- and Jon was careful not to kick the empty bottles of scotch.

Even the door opening had caused it to stir in its sleep, the white foam bubbles around his lips burbling for an instant. The only way to be safe from the lion was to escape his notice -- not hide from him, hiding drew his attention, but to be there and do nothing to draw his interest.

Waking him up, then, was a mistake.

He’d just seen Marcie Dean, though, and everything was alright for now. He’d gotten his ass kicked by the other kids all day, because he was a scrawny and they could smell the blood already on him most days, and the time he’d smiled, actually smiled, because it’d take those kids years before they got to anywhere close to how he got to feel with Marcie.

That thought got him home to the lion, but it wouldn’t pick up the pieces after.

She was chief of the makeup stage crew, and she could cover up a black eye like nobody’s business, but he didn’t want to have to talk to her about that again, drag her through that. She couldn’t bring him up if he was dragging her down, and he needed that ledge to pull himself up.

So he snuck through the lion’s den to his room, closed the door, and reached under the bed for his record player. Plugged the headphones in as he pulled out his spiral ring notebook and started jotting down lyrics for his own band, of which there was one member.

He hadn’t made a mistake yet, but he’d sewn the seeds of one.

Jon wrote down good reasons to freeze to death, setting them in his mind to the same four chords he always used when something was on his mind and he wanted to capture the thought. He turned his music up, dance music, some jukebox classics. Some Bobby Day at the moment.

While he listened to Rockin’ Robin it started messing up the chord progression in his head, the idea of how this should sound. So he started humming them, just loud enough he could hear himself. Forgot to factor in how loud he had to go to hear himself properly over the headphones, forgot how thin the walls were.

On the couch, the lion stirred, bloodshot eyes opening.

Jon had written the most compelling argument for his own suicide ever set to music. He doesn’t hear the lion roar, charging down the hallway, another mistake but it’s too late to do anything now. The door slams open and that’s when Jon gets ripped from his thought, the notebook being kicked under the bed where the beast can’t read them, see another weakness to exploit.

His hands are above his face as the lion’s calloused hands strike out, and everything rings black for a moment, then it’s back and the only thing he thinks to do as he falls is

Don’t break my stereo, I can’t live without my stereo, everything else you can take from me but leave me my headphones and stereo.

And, as the next blow pushed his arms away from his head and struck true, strong and thick veined hands batting his defenses like wheat bends to the wind, he had just enough presence of mind to think about why he thought that, and why it was true.

He was fourteen.





He was already making plans for the return journey when the timer hit and his capsule started the countdown to unsealing. Find some way to hook the IV up to an empty drip bag when he wasn’t using it directly, just so he had something for the ride back. Turn the dosage up high to fill it quick, he wouldn’t need nearly as much for the long trek back.

Detoxing in a space capsule was probably the secret innermost circle of hell, one he hoped to avoid.

That’s when he started thinking about how much more the high would hit him after seven days without rations.

NASA always packed redundancies just in case of something like this. Mission Control? Said even though the rations were low calorie by Earth standards, working in one fifth gravity made them almost overkill if you didn’t do the recommended exercise amounts, which were heinous.

If they sent more out, then the attendants would be too tempted to comfort eat some days, they thought, and they probably weren’t going to do the exercise either. The amount of excess calories in a reasonable backup, combined with the effects of six months lack of exercise in low gravity conditions, would have been a catastrophic combination on return to Earth.

So why tempt the people hired primarily for their catastrophic life choices?

Everything they needed came in the same shipment as the shift rotation, in theory. Only five days to send emergency rations, a week at the most if they need to send the next attending with it. Hard to kill someone of hunger in a week, like the doctors said.

Then there were the circumstances for his extra week.

Now that he was high, he could start to deal with the problems, start to handle Nick being dead. Start to process it.

Realize what he’d done to deal with it.

Start to cry.

Cry.

The Mare Crisium had its long, black nights, but this one especially.

The dilaudid helped him feel numb, distant but in a good way, a euphoric way. Helped him tell the parts of himself that were too distant to cry and let it all out while he couldn’t feel it. Let him focus on the problems ahead better.

So long as he covered his tracks here, he could just keep using that setup whenever he came back. He had a permanent fix now.

He looked at the bag containing Numbers, now, and had a thought. He couldn’t be with Nick right now, couldn’t say his last goodbyes. Wondered if he’d written a note, wonder if he’d told anyone before like Jon hadn’t been brave enough to do himself all those years ago, stomped the thoughts down into a small part at the back of his brain and buried them with opiate haze.

He pulled the air hose out of his throat first, holding his breath. Wanted to reseal the helmet quick, but he had to unhook the dilaudid drip first or he’d cut the hose, and he might as well have been cutting his own wrist. Careful, careful, wouldn’t do to bleed in the suit, he unhooked it from his arm and fed it out back through the neckline before the helmet sealed in the nitrogen.

Seconds later, maybe thirty had passed since his last mechanically assisted breath, oxygen levels had returned to the suit enough for him to take a long, deep breath of clean air, no pathogens but the ones he brought with him.

He got out, covered his tracks, wiped his digital thumbprint as best he could: Someone at Mission Control had taught him how to do it on their behalf one time they’d fucked up real bad during Shannon’s shift and Jon was going to be the next rotation, asked to collect evidence. He’d gotten car access out of the deal.

He hoisted the bag of Numbers over his shoulder, shifting the body in the bag so it was a proper fireman’s carry, and the fifth-gravity and lightness of “Nick” made it almost distressingly easy.

No airlock to the outside, only the donors’ capsules were pressurized. Made walking out a lot easier again. Couldn’t stay out here too long because he wasn’t shielded from solar radiation, his suit wasn’t designed to handle just how awful moondust was, but long enough to bury his friend.

The grave was big enough.

Jon’s microphone was on, broadcasting clear for everybody in range who could hear him.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” He said, as he shoveled the first load of moon dirt, which was like strangely light gravel and glass powder.

The silence grew longer.

He decided to tune his receiver up. He wasn’t protected from the radiation out here... he could listen to the star song directly, and tonight, they sung a mourning hymnal.

“You know, the prayer traditionally goes -- “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust;” Another big shovel load fell on the body bag, “In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.” But right now I don’t care for that. Because our bodies weren’t his temple. And the vile stuff we got in it? The Host doesn’t want it in his veins. Don’t think I never saw the track marks, Nick. Under the fingernails. The other scars. Why didn’t you talk to me, Nick?” Another shovel load, it was strange shovelling when he couldn’t hear it, just feel the reverberations travelling up the spade.

Now he was getting angry, and his thick tread boot stomped the spade down. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you have to be such a coward? Did you even leave a note? Did you leave one for me?”

Another three spadefuls of dirt, sloppy, Jon was just stabbing the ground now. “And thou shalt eat your bread? What about my bread you selfish--” He threw the spade into the ground, screamed wordlessly into his helmet and the stars bore witness.

“So we’ve heard from the good book, what about some Bowie for you?! Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom's a junkie! Is that why you went Space Oddity on me?!”

Now the still-exposed corner of the bag was dragged out of the grave, and Jon tore it open in a blind rage.

“Well, beyotch, if we’re all dust here, and none of us are making it to the other side of this,” he gestured at the heavens below them, infinitely far below, “then you will make me whole again.”

The bag opened, a little bit, and he unrolled it like a cutting board. No dust kicked up in no air. The spade hacked and jabbed and thrust and chiselled at Nick’s left thigh in a fury. He couldn’t hear the stars through the throbbing of blood rushing past his ears, the dull roar of his heart.

And he stood there in that white and soundless place, wondering what drove him to it.




Jon was a nurse in the high security wing of a children’s hospital when they found him.





The thigh was jerky when he got it back into the common room, but there was definitely enough here to last him the week. Skinned and prepared, vacuum treated.

He had his chocolate bars set aside to get the taste out of his mouth in case this turned out bad.

Jon cut a strip off, because it just looked like meat now didn’t look like Nick at all, and popped it in his mouth. His eyes widened.

One of the ways he used to get high when he’d burned out on dillies, when his resistance caught up to him hard, was he’d take 100mg fentanyl oral strip, cut them into four strips and line his gums with them.

It was like if that had tasted of sweet dried pork.

The dilaudid high bumped up again, the buzz and the numbness returned as he kept gnawing. He was famished after six months of terrible rations, and six years of sobriety. Both washed away in an instant as he fed himself double-fisted, holding it by the knee and hacked thighbone like a withered mutton shank, and feasted.

He looked up at the Earth far above, at Orlando was about to be, where he knew Mission Control was waiting for him. Was going to catch him at any moment. He still had the radio tuned to the station.

As soon as they crested the ridge, they would have to watch him feed.

But when he listened to the station, he heard the roar of starsong louder than ever before, and his eyes watered in grateful tears. On rare occasions, often enough though for him to recognize what it was, a solar wind would tear through and rip all means of communication to him, so that he could bear witness only to the glory of Sol Invictus.

Jon gazed up at the unconquered sun herself as her light him full in the face, and he whispered a short prayer of thanks and gratitude, that kept him safe with his new secret knowledge of the sweet things hidden inside sleeping bodies.




Dave Cliners watched Jon closely as they unpacked the supplies with the loading bots. Not because Jon was in any rush to take the lander back, but because it was the right thing to do for a friend.

They were the optimists of the group, most days. Shannon called them The Comedians with big capital letters every time, to emphasize the heavy irony she put on it, because it was a very twisted kind of optimism they brought to the table.

Twisted kind of optimism like the LRP rations he’d brought with him for the common table. Turns out not even a starving man wanted them after so long with. He’d offered Jon some, but he’d said Dave shouldn’t go hungry on his behalf. He’d saved enough chocolate for a rainy day, so much that he’d made it through the storm, not unscathed but alive. And after seeing the pile of twelve wrappers and dark stains on the common room table, he’d believed him.

They’d talked about the last six months, all the news he’d missed out on, the world turning to shit as it always did, the usual. Jon made a joke about how you could practically see the ice caps melting from up here some days. They compared notes on lyrics they’d written since they’d been apart, not even having to pretend to be annoyed that it’d be another six months before they could get their band back together.

Then some tangent or another brought Nick up, and they both flinched. Jon had gotten... distant, almost immediately. Kept helping, but when Dave had threatened to call him the band roadie he’d just chuckled and said “Yeah, guess I am.”

That wasn’t a good sign. Especially when he’d gone six months without a friend, something as simple as shutting a conversation down...

He let the silence grow, even as he felt the distance growing between them. Why’d he feel it was already there when he landed?

Finally, after hoisting down another palette of rations and some spare parts, Jon asked. “How’d he do it?”

“Slit his femorals in a motel bathtub.”

“Leave a note?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good. That’s good.” Jon nodded, and he meant it. “Anything for me?”

“Some people phrase it differently.”

“Some people have seen it too many times not to kick themselves when they miss the warning signs. You’ve had a week to process it, Dave, but I’ve been radio silent going classic slasher movie on some chocolate bars. I need to know if I missed anything.”

Jon sounded furious, but seemed to be biting his cheek the whole time he said it. Gnawing the words out. Meant the only one Jon was angry at was Jon.

“Yeah. He said... fuck, I don’t know I should tell you-”

“You do. You should.”

“Yeah. Said “Some people don’t leave the hotel.””

There was a tense silence, and Jon spun and lashed like... like Dave hadn't seen him do since he first showed up at Colorado. Not for a very long time.

"What'd he have on him? Aspirin? Wine coolers?"

"... Yeah."

Dave had heard Jon talk about it before. They all had. He'd said it not as something miserable or a regret but as a... pheremone for damaged people. Like a scent to say hey, I'm like you, you're like me, we're all in this together. Laughed about the photo and the five dollar ad in the window. Lots of little details he remembered too well.

Truth is, Jon had been the most broken of any of them, somehow, and he found strength in that, a warmth that not even isolation usually dimmed. Like it was okay if he went through it so long as he could help someone, anyone, go through the same thing.

And after Nick, maybe he thought he failed.

"Go home, Jon. Ship's waiting for you, everyone's waiting for you. And we'll end up with someone new to fix up and join our merry band of space faring organ harvesters"

Jon shifted something under his suit as he nodded, and even through the visor of his suit Dave could see the rictus grimace.

"You're never going to give up on trying to save us, are you?"

"Never."

"You're going to make it through this."

Jon agreed immediately, vehemently. "If it kills me."

Dave nodded, or as much as he could in the restrictive suit, mostly ending up tapping his head against the inside of the helmet's visor.

"Then this is it. If you're not around in six months, Jon, I'll-"

"I'll be there." Jon said firmly. "And we'll get the band back together."

There wasn't much said between them after that. Things just felt so... tense.

It'd be another half a year before he saw him again, and he knew it, hated to leave him like this, but they needed to part ways if he was getting out of here. And as Jon watched him leave, he couldn't help but feel the man was gone, but some deeper part of him was left here when the boosters ignited again.




On a spaceship sailing home again, Jon fiddled with the dilaudid drip making sure it hadn't slipped. He'd managed to get the dose right to a comfortable minimum.

He kept it concealed. His friends could never know. He hurt better people before, and he couldn't again, because he had left the hotel. Keep making mistakes, so long as you make them better than your former self.

He'd left the rest of the body left in a poorly dug grave on the moon would still be there for next time, still fresh, if the chemicals hadn't burned out their half-lives. Otherwise he'd just have to kick open another one.

Jon left this place, this time, the same way he had arrived; As clean as he was ever going to get.
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#1 ·
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The story starts off a bit too telly, and I feel some of the infodumps and worldbuilding could have been better weaved into the narrative. Overall, though, it was an engaging read. For all his flaws, I can say I got to care about Jon.

However, I have to wonder what will be his fate. He's relapsed and is probably going to keep the habit for a while. How is he going to conceal that from his handlers in the long run? Just keep working his rounds and adding more Numbers to his stash?

I really wished there had been a clearer, stronger resolution. Nonetheless, I still enjoyed the story very much.
#2 ·
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Zzzzzzzzzzzz! Zzzzzzzzz! Zzzzz-Mh?! What! I wasn't sleeping!

Oh boy I'm actually rubbing my eyes after reading this one. I'm definitely not a fan of space. Be it movies or in writing. Not much to say for this. This story is intricate. Boy is it complex. What it did in effort to win my heart actually became probably it's biggest problem.

NEGATIVES
Entertainment-The value of most stories lay in the essence of how well it does to induce a person into thought. Books, poems, or simple phrases of wisdom have a purpose of getting a person to think about many things. Now this is where different genres come into play and different writing styles as well. The vanilla futuristic humanity space thing is one of the fewer tags that seem to not really get its own hype per say. Unlike other tags this one can suffer a lot from just what it's trying to be. A scientific means to medical science and a man abusing this technology to j"cope" with his current situations. Not gonna lie. The entertainment value for this story is all but squashed for me. What it does get me at for entertainment is in the amount of detail put into story in terms of medical use, narcotics, and astro science(or whatever Astronaut studies are.). I could care less for the psychological stuff since um....I really didn't come to understand why Jon needed to dip into the "water" just for a chemically induced acceptance of the things around him.

Detailing-Holy mother of codfish. TMI! TMI! Too much info. My brain is fried already on the astronaut terminology and even more so trying to understand Jon's life. Convict/scientist/junkie/astronaut? What is he?! Because a cannibal he is not. Well not so much entirely. Survivalist? Oh God, it's getting worse! The details is just too much. Several of the events this story could do without entirely. It would be fine and it wouldn't hurt um....Jon's agenda. It's like the more I got to know about him the more disgusted I was with the main character. Not to sound harsh but every little dirty secret Jon had. Was just forced upon me. And I feel dirty. It got so dark in many parts of the story that it just was depressing. I really see no reason for a person to get this so deeply darkened. aside from the gothic parts your detail in explaining circumstances and emotion was great but wow. I did not need to know that his father beats on him.

POSITIVES
Introduction-I loved the premise of the intro where we meet a character come to understand him and slowly develop a relationship in coordination with his upcoming events. eventually we learn that there is a problem and that poor Jon has to deal with it. It was a great hook. At first I didn't understand space and the many bodies laying about until it was explained that Jon was more of a warden and caretaker. Which was interesting as medical science is trying to manufacture live organs. They've already completely artificial tissues and even a some vein work. So this isn't too far out of the picture. It was an honest start to a good story. A simple man with a purpose in his life. Not things went south as Jon isn't too happy with the events back at home. He becomes upset and ends up doing several inhumane things. Weed is one thing but theft, heavy narcotic usage, and murder?(Numbers is still considered a live being. Political or religious views applied or not applied. He was alive.) Why did this take such a bad turn?

Scientific Exploration-I'm sure many of your readers will agree that a lot of the material you provided for us is actual science. A lot of it actually is facts that astronauts and NASA scientists have to take into consideration. Event he medical aspects were amazing as this could literally be a future breaking point in medicine we as humanity have yet to even achieve! This is wonder work and you've done your research on it extensively. So I commend you for the efforts. Now some of these bigger words can throw off your readers. You're probably reaching out to a more mature audience, but it doesn't really have a hook to it when you call out such a phrase as "insert the epidermic needle for intravenous injection to cause prolonged administered euphoric discharge while in cryogenic slumber to justify the means for survival rectification all because of one little mishap." See how bland that got so quickly. You give use awe inspiring things to look up and study but also give us more of a reason to put down the story we're reading.

Not bad. Great stuff decent read. Not really a kick to it or something memorable for me to go by. But this is still some top tier stuff. It's shocking that Jon had such a low tolerance. Which is why it's bothering me too. Knowing the extend of what a person will go through to really survive and adapt is something not easily projected well. What was really well done was the space station, or base, and how it operated. Probably if you focused more on the tech then I would actually come to appreciate what Jon may be going through. Maybe some more of his history as it's told in riddles rather than clear explanations to his actions.
#3 ·
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Your flashbacks were unnecessarily confusing, I think.

Overall, this struck me as very... form over function, aesthetic before effect, diffuse and lacking in direction somewhat.

Like many dystopic-ish stories, I feel like this world has twisted reality a bit too far in service of its plot. I'd be shocked if the costs of shipping stuff to space didn't outweigh whatever benefits running this operation in space is supposed to bring. They're still using rockets! It would seem like return shipping would be cheap, but... don't forget you've got to pony the shipping containers up there in the first place. Not to mention they're apparently capable of regrowing organs anyways, and keeping people in cold-sleep indefinitely, and the risk of having however much money you've sunk into an operation like this ruined on the off chance someone goes crazy might not be worth whatever benefits you gain from recruiting people with nothing to lose? Especially since there are people who really wouldn't mind spending six months alone. It probably wouldn't even be hard to find them.

Suffice to say, you really didn't sell me on this. It came off more as a chamber of horrors or something, and I'm really not a fan of grotesquery for its own sake.
#4 ·
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Proverbs 22:6 — B — Man on moonbase story. Ah, with a twist. And a time-jump. And another. Ok, I got lost. A couple of times back and forth and I’m still lost about some spots in the middle. Wonderful concept and terrific writing inside the sections, though.
#5 ·
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Dark, introspective sci fi. The pacing is a bit wonky, especially with jumping in and out of flashbacks, but I was able to follow what was what without too much difficulty. A strong look at the bottom of the barrel, rising a little above it, only to fall back down.
#6 · 2
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Okay, I'm going to be honest here. I got about halfway through this, and then devolved to merely skimming the other half. Because very little about this makes one whit of sense.

A moonbase full of cryogenically cooled corpses/people... Who need to be kept cold to be fresh.. As they somehow regrow organs.. which are being shipped back to Earth... And all of this is a big government secret.. which is being overseen by a whacked out druggie because, of course those make the best astronauts!

Oh, and despite the incredible complexity and expense of those whole asinine operation... We're only sending enough food for the exactly six months.. and if we're a wee late, the poor bastard left alone up there starts to starve to death.

There is no set of circumstances whereupon this makes any sense. At all.

Given that I am unmotivated to give the rest a proper read through, I'm simply going to abstain on this one.
#7 ·
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This story was based on the album Moon Colony Bloodbath which you can listen to in its entirety here.

The character, his past and his history? Those are all biographical accounts of the life of the singer, John Darnielle. This story references the songs -- honestly, just look at the Sunset Tree, Life of the World to Come and All Eternals Deck albums for a good place to start. Then throw in Transcendental Youth because why not, eh?

This story was written in the style of Darnielle's book, Wolf In White Van, possibly my favourite book of all time. Easily a contender. So to those saying it's a confusing style; Bug report noted, fic working as intended. Could tweak a lot of it, but since it didn't even make finals, I'm just going to hack it up into my favourite segments and never come back this way again.