It took three steps. The door was passed and he was out – out into the deep friction-free blackness of it all. It didn’t matter how regularly he donned his suit and did the maintenance check, this bit was always the best, the scariest, the most rewarding. It’s why he took the job.
Even on holiday he would dream of this moment, just before the work began when he released the attach-line and free-floated in zero. The deepness and eternity of the fierce stars all around: above, below, left, right, quiet. Absolute quiet. In the second or so before he allowed the control unit to start (and he would sometimes make this moment linger for a few seconds more than was necessary) he was just another element in the void, an insignificant speck of squidgy organic-ness in the vast, still and decidedly inorganic magnitude between the stars.
And there before him was the massive hull covered in dozens of little maintenance units, rushing speedily from one job to another. He was there to check they finished the job, didn’t leave anything attached, and didn’t get confused by bad or conflicting direction. Millions of light years in travel and achievement beyond all imaginings, there was still room for error.
The units were a fascinating spectacle as they sparked and rolled along the surface. Most of the regular work was done under the skin, but each day something had to be checked or replaced along the hull. And that was his job. It still had a certain ‘something’ to it and one or two of the younger Russian bar girls ooh’d and aah’d when he embellished some of his more tricky situations out in zero. There were a few who, perhaps with a little snobbish disdain, dismissed his stories as being of the tall kind, and worse still others saw him as a mere high-tech janitor, but he didn’t really care. The job carried a frissance of danger, a thrilling and effortless machismo that nearly always carried sufficient impact on the alcohol- and drug-opened ears that listened to the third or even fourth telling. At that point a smile would always break on his face.
But what he would never relate were the visions. Sometimes, just sometimes, before he started up the control unit he felt sure he could see something staring back at him from the stars. He never saw eyes or a face as such, but a spine-tingling feeling of an intense observation. He freaked the first time he took notice of this: he was truly scared – scared shitless! Then he tried to ignore it, assuming it was part of the whole fear of spacewalking thing, evidence of space kookiness that some got from working in zero too long. It didn’t take him long to pull himself together, quickly overcoming this stupid fear well enough to get on with the job in as near a mundane manner as possible, but each time, somewhere behind the bravado, the feeling stayed – sometimes a low-level recognition, at other times a concentration-spoiling focus near-impossible to block out. But of course, block it out he had to. He was a professional. He was a lifer, not some rooky kid spooked by weird thoughts of being watched.
The feeling was one thing, but his thoughts were another. These occurred in an undercurrent between his proper focus on the job and the very monotonous checking of code when work was slowing up. If he allowed these ramblings to take over then he began to see flashes and lights and even sounds out beyond the hull of the vessel. Only work snapped him out if it. But even when snapping out of the daydreams and anchored back in the nuts and bolts of the real world he would be momentarily shaken: was he going crazy?
He had allowed this to continue for nearly two years. He did his job, week-in and week-out, and saved his salary. He made his payments and booked his regular calls home. He allowed himself an alcohol stipend, a ‘girls and rec’ stipend and the rest he put away. All of this worked when not alone, when occupied with thoughts of his daughter, when contemplating life at the end of another contract or occupied with entertainment, but just before sleep he would feel it again, as real as ever, and his heart would momentarily race and his breathing quicken. It was then he realised what he knew, what he saw and what he felt were in conflict and the tension of this experience was growing – daily, nightly, hourly. He could keep the lid on it all for now, but deep down realised it just couldn't last that much longer: whatever he did, one day soon it would uncontrollably burst out and wreck everything.
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