[AU] Unraveled

Posted on Mon Jun 22nd, 2020 @ 11:24pm by Lieutenant Kalin Brennan-Griffin PhD
Edited on on Fri Jul 10th, 2020 @ 5:10pm

Mission: Divided We Fall

A Mission Post by Lieutenant Kalin 'Shae' Brennan-Griffin PhD
Mission: Divided We Fall
Location:
Timeline:
Wed Sep 12th, 2018 @ 11:57pm

Everyone turned to the view screen once more as the escape pod seemed to correct it's course and headed towards the centre of the bubble. The boosters fired, giving a clear flash of blue energy before the pod zoomed up towards the ceiling of the bubble. As Rochester and Takada's craft broke through the wall of their little galaxy, it gave off a bright white burst of light. Sasha looked to the Ops console and waited to see a signal from the escape pod, any kind of comms or readings. But there was nothing. Just the bright glimmering light where Rochester and Takada had been.

Sasha slumped down onto the floor again, closed her eyes and sobbed. "It didn't work."

Of course it didn’t work; Shae knew this would doom them all, she just couldn’t quite contemplate how. She’d only been recently awakened from her fugue, so she was not quite comprehending at her full capacity, so when their universe didn’t immediately implode, she began to doubt her assertions for a moment. Nothing was happening! But the universe should have collapsed, they should be dead!

Then there was a rumble that shook the Bridge. The Bubble was collapsing, it was just happening in a way they couldn’t immediately see. Shae fought her way through the thrall in the observation lounge to get back to the door, and the guards gave her little trouble about letting her out to get on the sensors; time was buckling, splintering dangerously all across the decks.

Any semblance of a safe existence within the Bubble was gone. Collapse was inevitable, it could be a day, a week... of course with the time dilation, it could feel considerably longer to those trapped within, or it could happen spontaneously at any second! It was a dangerous waiting game. A riot broke out against the mutineers who had engineered this turn of events, and sadly several people died on both sides, but when it was all done the mutineers were locked away, including Sasha.

Shae, Krysia, and James tried to hold the community together in the coming days, but it was becoming impossible to keep the peace, people were terrified to leave their quarters as time warped around them. Try as she might, Shae couldn’t find a way to fix this problem. She studied the calculations she had carved into the walls to try to better understand what was happening to them and she eventually came to the conclusion that the equation was incomplete, that she had willingly stopped when she got the answer her sick mind was looking for, and as she was now Shae didn’t know if she could finish the formula. She would try, but with their limited resources it was a hard task; even still, she never gave up trying to understand what was happening to them…

Days melted into one another, nothing made any sense anymore. Walking from one’s quarters to Bridge could mean aging a year, or arriving to learn that they had missed out on a year. And then there were the shockwaves that radiated from the growing tear in the Bubble, with each one that passed, they would find themselves aged, sometimes in different areas of the ship with no recollection of how they ended up there. During one of these incidents several years in, Aurora had gone from being 3 months pregnant to suddenly being in the throes of a full-term labor; that day had been utter chaos, but at least something beautiful had come from it…

And then it started happening, as Shae had predicted in the very beginning: people started dying. Sometimes their time came too soon because of these temporal distortions, but one by one age was claiming them all in the end. Except for Shae. She was showing her age in more subtle ways, but her appearance remained as youthful as ever, and it became her responsibly to make sure that everyone went comfortably, and that they were never alone. By this point, her calculations had taken a back seat to tending to the aging crew, and it was such a depressingly heavy burden to watch them all go. She had help from Aurora’s daughter, but there was only so much the two of them could do with everyone succumbing to the years so rapidly.

But then, even Samantha would leave her…

The pair were living in the garden now for simplicity’s sake, a pair of cots settled in the room where the seedlings were cared for. Shae sat on the edge of Samantha’s bed, dabbing at her face with a cool wet cloth as she listened to the woman’s ragged breathing, with pain in Shae’s eyes as she recalled the day Samantha had been born; stars above, she could still remember when Aurora had arrived, and that made the ache within her even heavier as she watched her friend slowly slip away.

Samantha, for her part, didn’t know what was killing her, as disease was now merely a mysterious force that could only be endured. She was only middle-aged, surely too young to die of old age, although the shredding of time in the Bubble meant that her actual age was impossible to know. Samantha didn’t even know what time was, not in the way that everybody else explained it. She’d been born in that Hell, raised on stories of an idyllic paradise where a person could be certain that their next step wouldn’t mean an eternity.

“Auntie,” Samantha whispered, before coughing wheezily. “Tell me again of the old time. Tell me of the Pandora. I always liked that story.”

Shae bit the inside of her cheek to stop her eyes from tearing up; this was too much for one person to bear, but it wasn’t like either of them had any choice in the matter!

“Well, little one, the Pandora was a mighty Luna-class vessel,” Shae started softly. She dipped the rag into a bowl of water, then squeezed the excess water out before returning it to her companion’s forehead. “On this ship, we sailed through the stars, the shimmering little specks of light dotting the blackness of space. We didn’t have to fear going out our door, because each moment in time was followed by another, and another, all in sequence like it should, no waking to suddenly find everything around you changed. And there were so many people, more names than anyone could ever remember, with races from all over, it was so wonderful… and together we saw some amazing, beautiful things...”

Even hurting as she was, wheezing as she was, Samantha smiled as she stared up at the metal ceiling. “Grandpa talked about home. A big place called Earth. You were there too, Auntie, right? With Grandpa, when you were kids?”

“I didn’t know him then, but yes,” Shae replied with a sad smile; how long had it been since she had thought back to Earth and the endless rolling green of her Irish fields. “Many of us came from Earth. It was so big, bigger than you could ever imagine, so big that it did not need walls or machines to keep an atmosphere, the very gravity of it held the air in. And it was so beautiful, I so wish you and your mother could have seen where I was from…”

“Mommy always liked...liked…” Samantha trailed off coughing heavily into her hand, and this time, the hand was flecked with red as it moved away. She took a few seconds to control her breathing, forcing the breaths in and out, before looking to Shae. “Sorry, Auntie, I don’t want to leave you alone. I’m really sorry. Grandma always said you were sad, but I don’t really…” Again she broke off into another coughing fit, this one more violent, but she battled through it, determined to ask her question. “Auntie Shae, I’ve never seen you really, really happy, not like everyone else. I tried to make you happy, to be your friend, but you were always so sad and Grandma and Mommy never told me why. Were you happy before time broke?”

“Oh little one, sometimes you were just too smart for your own good…” With a sigh, Shae used another rag to clean up the blood, then offered Samantha a sip of a brew to help soothe her throat from all this coughing. “There was a time I was happy… I loved a man who died before you were born; his name was Cailus, he was my husband and mate, and together we were raising my daughter. But then we came here and my little Aoife wasn’t with us, and it made us both very sad. We tried to have another baby, but it wasn’t meant to be, and then one day he was gone too, and soon after that time broke. Since then I’ve had moments of contentment, even a measure of peace, but I have not been happy in a very long time, dear one.”

Samantha stayed silent for a moment, her eyes growing wet as tears formed. “Do you...do you think that you will...see him...again? I miss Jay so much, and we weren’t together long before he got old, but I loved him...I want to see him again. So bad. I want to have kids. Lots and lots of kids, like they had before. People talked about seeing their loved ones again after they die, but I never knew if I could believe them.”

“These are impossible questions, ones I wish I could answer,” Shae replied, blinking back her own tears. “I wish, I hope… that I will see my mate again… No one knows what happens after we die, but I want to believe so badly that we’ll all be reunited, and for me that is enough.”

“I think it’s...it’s enough for me too…” Samantha wheezed, still smiling as tears ran down her cheek. Her breathing was growing shorter, her lungs burning horribly, but there was still light in her eyes, warmth in her dying smile. “Tell me...tell me another story...Auntie...one I haven’t heard before...before I go. Tell me about...tell me about your mommy and daddy…”

Resisting the urge to cry was growing increasingly impossible, but Shae managed to keep her voice steady long enough to tell Samantha what little she remembered of her biological parents, and then the human couple who adopted her. She told the dying woman about her brothers who used to look out for her as she grew up, finally stopping when Samantha had another coughing fit, a bad one; even without needing to put an ear to Samantha’s chest, Shae could hear her lungs filling with fluid, slowly drowning Samantha from the inside.

A rumble shook the ship as another temporal distortion ripped through the scar in space. Shae could feel it coming, so she expected to find Samantha at rest, finally at peace, when the wave hit them, but instead she felt something entirely different. Most of the time these waves sped things up, or simply jumped them forward, but there were rare occurrences when things would slow down, and somehow they were aware of all the space in between the seconds that ticked by, but never in her wildest imaginings could Shae have predicted that one of those waves would come now. Shae watched in horror as Samantha continued to choke for each breath in slow motion, and both were painfully aware of what was happening. An eternity of a second ticked by, then another small eternity, and another, and it was too much for Shae to watch.

“Forgive me,” Shae said slowly, her words drawn out by the distortion. Then she reached out with one hand, grasping Samantha’s jaw. She could see the understanding in Samantha’s eyes, even the gratitude, but that didn’t make it any easier for Shae. With tears streaming down her face, Shae squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she didn’t have to do this, but she couldn’t let Samantha suffer! Then with an anguished sob and a quick snap!, it was all over.

Shae let herself sob throughout the rest of the wave; she had no way of knowing how much time had passed, either in real time or her perceptions, either way it was such a painfully long time, and her head ached terribly from all the tears. Collapsing against the bed and resting her head on Samantha’s shoulder, Shae passed out, too exhausted both emotionally and physically to even try moving Samantha’s body now. But it was a task she would need to see to sooner rather than later, but for now she just needed a moment, just a moment to recollect herself.

When Shae finally woke, she tended to her friend’s body, sending Samantha out into the void as had been done with every other inhabitant of the void before her. And finally, Shae was completely alone. Shae braved the risks and wandered the corridors, making her way to the Observation Lounge where she had a clear view of the tear in space; it had started so small, but now it was enormous, very nearly swallowing up this little piece of the Pandora. For a while she just sat and gazed out the window, watching the tear tempt her to join everyone else in death. She had waited long enough, it was time…

Even still, it took Shae a while to work up the courage; her instinct for self preservation was so strong, but simply existing here completely alone was no life she wanted to be a part of. An hour passed, then another, and finally she rose to her paws and went out to the Bridge. One by one, she began to disable the safety protocols, then finally she shut down the reactor that Krysia had built, leaving just enough residual power trickling out to keep the shields active. Immediately, everything went dark and a chill began to creep in. But that was okay, this was what she wanted.

It was becoming so cold as she made her way back to the garden and lay down on her cot in the seedling room; it wouldn’t be much longer and she would be able to see Cailus again; hoping against hope that there was an afterlife where they could reunite. She lay shivering as she watched her breath create a fog in front of her. Ice was already forming on the plants around her, forming web-like lace across broad leaves, and it was actually kind of pretty. Her vision began to blur and she could barely feel her ears or her fingers anymore, the shivering was becoming uncontrollable.

Not much longer, my love.

But then she didn’t notice the cold so much anymore. In fact, it was actually starting to get rather warm. Shae smiled as she closed her eyes.

Not much longer…

And with her passing, the Bubble finally ended.

It was all over.