In the blackness of space, he sat very still, looking at the two planets spin around the sun. His throne was a nebula, the sun his candle, and the two planets, Earth and Mars, his home. He took a deep breath, letting the cold space air drive through his lungs and blood. He softly grasped Earth in his right hand and Mars in his left, pulling them in close to his lap. He opened his hands and let them float inches above his palms. Then the warm touch of the sun hit his forehead, then his eyes, tearing through his eyelids.
He nearly looked directly into it when he woke up, but it was still creeping over the face of Mars. 6:38 am, Agyre Standard Time. He always woke with the sun. It was five decades since the onboard computer had to squeal its alarm at him.
“Good morning sir,” said the computer, sensing his eyelids move. It had a dull-sounding woman’s voice, primitive, like everything else around him, but appropriate. It was the only thing in the universe that couldn’t care less about anything he did, and it kept him grounded.
“The time is now 6:38 am Ar–” it continued.
“I know, I know,” he said. He stretched out, hovering a perfect three feet above the sterile white floor. The whole room was sterile, save for the walls, etched in his dried blood with the text of the Upanishads, the result of four years of absolute boredom.
His body creaked as each fiber unfurled itself and each bone slid back in its place. He was in as good a shape as he could be, except for his slightly hunched back.
“What’s new today?” he asked the computer.
“Nothing of interest. But today you have another interview with a school.”
“Right, right,” he muttered. “I hate this time of year.”
The sun was still rising over Mars, and he could see its reddish clouds and bright yellow continents below. The putrid blue waters weren’t visible yet. He liked seeing Mars this way, but it would only be this way for 10 more minutes.
“You are hungry, sir,” said the computer, performing its cursory scan of his vital functions.
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “I want to read now.”
He glanced around and saw his electronic reader floating near the rear, spinning slowly on its axis. He grabbed the ladder on the floor above him and pulled himself over to it. It automatically turned to “War and Peace” when he came near. He turned to chapter six, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm this time. “War and Peace” was turning out to be far more boring than he bargained for.
He drifted back towards the front, his eyes so close to the reader they were practically brushing against it. His eyes ate each word, memorizing as much as he could before the kids would subject him to more inane questions. In the meantime, he ate slabs of Martian beef dispensed courteously by the computer. Occasionally he would bounce off one of the walls and gently push himself back towards the middle. Not that he really noticed.
With 10 minutes to go before his obligatory interview with the next generation of Mars’ workers, the ship extended a pair of tubes, each tipped with a slight needle, in his direction.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered as he grabbed the tubes and stuck them in two tattooed regions of his abdomen, where they safely evacuated his bowels.
“Sir, it is time for the class interview,” the computer droned.
He pulled the tubes out, not feeling any lighter, and swam to the front. He perched on the back of cockpit seat. “I am ready to transmit now,” the computer said.
The face of mars faded to black, then was replaced by the bright, pale face of a woman in her late 20s, with brown hair and brown eyes. His brain could barely comprehend how plain she was.
“Oh, good morning! Is this Captain Staples?” she said, stepping back from the camera. He could see a room with a placid brown floor and turqoise walls behind her.
“There’s nobody else it could be,” he said.
“Haha, right,” she said, looking around her room. “We’re almost ready for class. So, you know what to do, right?”
“I think I just have to sit here and reflexively answer whatever is asked of me,” he said.
“Perfect!” she responded. This was her first time doing this, but the charm wore out 60 years ago. “But, uh, you are ready for this lesson?”
Her eyes were at his chest, which was bare, veiny, and sporting a few patches of white hair like a cancer-stricken dog.
“I am as ready as I can possibly be,” he said.
Her class began filing in at that point. It was indeed, as she put it, perfect: None of them could be older than eight. His brain shut down its higher functions, giving them a rest until they were needed.
“Class! Do not go to your stations yet. Remember, we have a special lesson today,” she said, physically herding the kids towards the back.
After all 12 of them were ready, standing single-file against the wall, she stood in front of the camera, remembering to occasionally glance at him.
“Class, this is Captain Michael Staples. He’s the oldest living and active astronaut in the history of mankind, and we’re really lucky to speak to him!”
They were saying that since 20 years ago. They were no closer to being correct now than they were then.
“Unfortunately for Captain Staples, he cannot leave the spaceship he’s on. But he is still living comfortably in it, and he is floating high above us in space right now. So please remember that for today’s lesson.” She then turned and smiled at him, but he was already distracted by the turqoise wall. He hadn’t seen that color in years, and he wanted to take it in as much as he could. He wanted to crack open his skull and paint it on the back of his eyes.
“So, class, who will go first?” she said.
The kids’ attention collars slowly glowed green. She picked the first kid to respond, a perfectly proportioned boy with, unbelievably enough, brown hair.
“Um, hi Mr. Staples,” he said, trying and failing to make eye contact.
“Captain Staples, please,” she said.
“Yes, Captain Staples. Um… how long have you been in sp-space?” His eyes scrolled back and forth as he read whatever they were transposing over his face. Also, this was the 1,565th time he was asked this.
“Sixty-three years, four months,” he said. He could’ve gone down to the second but there was no point in showing off.
“Wow,” the kid said.
Another was picked, a girl with darker skin and lighter hair, neither significantly so. “What do you do up there?” One thousand forty-five.
“Many things. I read, I sleep, I eat. I learn more in a day than you will in your entire school year,” he said. He felt a little like showing off.
Another kid. He didn’t bother even looking at him. “Where are you from?” One thousand two hundred and twenty.
“Earth,” said Staples.
“Any place in particular?” asked the teacher.
“You’re not from Earth, are you,” he asked.
“No, actually.”
“Then as far as anyone here is concerned, I might as well have been born on Saturn. Next?”
“Why did you want to go to space?” Good one. Five hundred and ninety.
“To go to Mars. And here I am,” he said.
“But… why stay on your ship?” Two hundred and six. He rewarded the kid’s spontaneity by looking at him, a short one with an already long nose. His hair was actually black.
“I want to leave the ship, but I can’t. I’m not allowed to,” he said.
“Who’s keeping you there?” asked another girl. Forty.
“Children, when I was picked to go on this mission,” he said, “I was very enthusiastic. But when I reached this planet, they decided I could not leave. They said it was for my health, but they were wrong. As the years went by, and maybe one day you’ll understand this, I found that I could not die. I cannot get sick. I cannot get injured or threatened up here. Then it came to me. I am a god. I am the god of this universe. I am the only man capable of ruling Earth, actually. So they sent me to Mars.”
There was, of course, silence. Happened every time. The truth is always unbearable.
“Well, haha,” said the teacher. “He’s of course being facetious.”
The kids’ collars dimmed, predictably. He pounced.
“Children, don’t worry about me up here. I am watching over all of you. I can see every corner of the universe, and I will soon know everything because I cannot die. Ask your teacher.”
“Well, kids! I think that’s all for now, you hit… most of the required questions,” said the teacher.
Their collars remained dim. She ushered them to their stations, and they trudged behind the camera, out of sight. At last the teacher faced him.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Captain. The children… just wanted to ask you some things…” she said.
“I know what the lesson’s about. And I was not being facetious,” he said. She stared blankly at him. She must know the truth, because apparently he was never that good a liar.
“Fine, well, I’m actually not watching over them. I keep to myself up here. I’m not a benevolent god,” he said.
“Okay…” she said. “Very well. Thank you Captain Staples. Bye.”
Her face melted back into darkness, then Mars was visible again.
“What else do you call someone who won’t die?” he muttered. Back on Mars, she would be telling them lies. Captain Staples was the first man to be permanently in the vicinity of Mars. This was back in 2031, long before colonization began. But his ship became contaminated in space, and he caught a disease. The government found that as long as he stayed on the ship, he would stay alive, and he helped future pioneers to Mars settle the planet for us.
None of it was true. It was true once, but never really so. Captain Mikey Staples had no disease. He had no reason to leave the Ishmael because it was his throne. Why would a god leave his throne? He was alive for over a century now, and with his guidance, Peter Beckwith became the first man to land on Mars, five years after Staples was “marooned.” But Beckwith’s first footsteps were accidentally paved over by a terraformer, and Beckwith himself was buried somewhere in Mars. He was no god. He was merely a hero.
And now he was agitated. Staples never thought about the past. It was so far behind him, it was practically looping around to the future. He shoved himself away from the chair and grabbed the reader again. Back to “War and Peace.” Its tedium would always be dwarfed by what he just experienced, over and over again.
“Why do they talk to a god and ask me the most mundane things that anyone could tell them?” he asked. His eyes weren’t hungry anymore, so they just glided over the words like they were grass underfoot. Well, he no longer could remember what it was like to walk on grass. Or walk. But the analogy made sense to him once before.
And so he floated, trying to return to the quiet that was most of his days. But he could not dive into “War and Peace.” It mocked him with its irrelevance. But it would not win. He would memorize every wo–
Then there was a low-pitched beeping. Actually, time had degraded the alarm down to being a lowly honking noise sputtering out of the cockpit console.
“Sir, there is an issue that requires your attention,” the computer said, too primitive to fix it itself.
He looked up and tossed the reader away. He grabbed the rungs and launched himself to the front. Typing at the console was considered the most primitive technique of all, but it was the only way to ensure precise control over what the computer would do. He never trusted it from the beginning.
There was a red warning light flashing on the screen. It took him less than a second to type in a query.
“There is a hemorrhage detected in the storage bay, sir,” said the computer.
“A hemorrhage? In what?” he asked, holding onto the armrests of the pilot’s seat.
“There is a hemorrhage in power system in the storage bay, sir.”
Eroded wires in an inert environment, a strict impossibility.
“You’re mistaken,” he said.
“No sir, already there are slight interruptions in its vicinity.”
He audibly scoffed. His hands, all six of them, went over the keyboard, moving in a blur. The screen changed to a crude schematic of the storage bay. A red arror was pointing at one of the walls.
“The wiring is being corroded, sir,” it said.
“By what? A leak?”
“Unlikely, sir. There are no chemicals or liquids stored in that section.”
He typed in an order for a deep scan of the area. After a few seconds, a red smudge showed up near the site of the breach.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Difficult to say, sir. Whatever it is, it is warm, though not hot enough to affect the wiring.”
For the first time in decades, he scratched his head, his nail nearly digging up a chunk of his scalp. He kept forgetting to trim his nails.
The blob then slid a bit up the wall.
“So it is a liquid?” he asked.
“No, sir. Liquids do not move like that in zero-gravity,” it said. His face flushed. Rarely did the computer ever need to correct him.
“Well fine, but what is it?”
There was no response. The deep scan was going over the area again and again. The blob only shifted a few centimeters.
He watched in silence as the scan proceeded. The computer was learning nothing new. Then the honking began again, and more red arrows near the blob.
“Dammit, what is that?” he yelled.
“Sir, the hemorrhage is continuing in that section of insulation. If this continues, I will experience difficulty in maintaining power.”
A few seconds passed in silence. “Well?” he asked.
“I do not–” But he didn’t wait for the rest of it. He typed in his precise query. Another schematic popped up. The ship’s power supply was indeed draining in a few areas, most notably Life Support.
“Yes sir, your life support systems are losing power at the present time because of the damage to the wires,” said the computer.
The ship had survived micrometeors, radiation and an errant satellite, now only to be undone by a blob. A stupid blob. What was it? He typed some more as his brain unearthed an ancient command for the computer.
The deep scan changed over to a thermal scan. The storage bay was, of course, ice cold, with the nearby wiring bearly registering through the insulation. But there was the blog, nestled near the wiring inside the wall.
It was a blob with four legs. And a tail. And a head. A head digging into the wires.
“What is that?” he asked. It looked familiar, but only in the vaguest sense.
“It appears to be a rodent, sir,” said the computer.
“A… a rodent…” he said. “Like… a mouse?” He remembered that word from one of Aesop’s fables.
“It’s irrelevant precisely what kind of rodent it is, sir. It appears to be chewing through the wiring.”
“Of course it is!” he yelled. “I have to get it out of there.”
“You cannot enter the cargo bay, sir. It is far too cold, and I cannot warm it.”
“That mouse is using the wiring for warmth, isn’t it?”
“Be that as it may, sir, I cannot change the temperature because your food is stored there. Also, the area is partially contaminated. You could die.”
“Shut up!” he yelled. Arguing with it was useless. He pushed himself off the chair and swam to the hatch. He pulled himself through a small circular tube, part of its walls lined with verses from the Bhagavad Gita traced in his blood. He quit when he found it to pretentious to write. He eventually came down to the storage bay, sealed off for his safety.
“Computer! The mouse is in there, isn’t it?” he yelled as he put his face against the freezing door, nearly numbing it on contact.
“Yes, sir.”
There was no way inside. He looked around the doorway for a crack. His eyes settled on some grating next to it, each slit thinner than his fingernail. A faint trace of warm air was blowing out from it.
“Computer, open this grating!” he said.
“You cannot fit inside that vent, sir.”
He scowled at the vent and put his eyes up against it. He beared the irritation against his eyes as he tried to peer into it, but from what he could see, it was completely dark.
But the mouse was in there, insolent and tiny, trying to destroy his throne.
He pushed himself away from the vent. He would get in there. He remembered another fable about a snake eating a mouse. He remembered what a snake looked like, seeing its scales and its tongue and its fangs and its bulging yellow eyes in his mind. He would become the snake. The mouse couldn’t stop him.
“I will eat you! I will drink your blood!” he yelled as he flung himself at the grating. He felt his body collapse and shrink, becoming as cold as the surroundings. His tongue darted forward in anticipation as the grate rushed at his face. He aimed his nose at one of the slits. Soon he would be inside, hunting the mouse down, feasting on its–
The floor shocked him back into consciousness. He sat up, but that only caused an intense, wrenching pain to overtake his lower back. He flopped back onto the floor. There was something warm on his lips and cheek. He looked over. There was blood stuck to the floor.
“Sir, I had to wake you,” said the computer. “You were unconscious for more than three seconds.”
“What?” he asked. “Where am I?”
“You are in the fifth junction, just outside the storage bay.”
“But wh– oh.” There was a red mark on the vent before him, and his nose was bleeding. His transformation failed. How could that be?
He rolled onto his belly. His penis was hurting, apparently from a scrape on the floor. No matter, he didn’t need it anyway. But his nose was still stuffed.
The computer activated its maintenance program. A small robotic vacuum rolled down a nearby hallway and started sucking up the blood.
“When it’s done, turn the gravity off,” he said. His breathing was becoming hard as his bones began leaning harder and harder into his lungs.
“You must stop bleeding first, sir.”
He started crawling on the floor, his legs not working at all. Every pull felt like it was gutting him. The cleaner trailed behind him, sucking up whatever blood and sweat he left behind.
“Sir, you must not exert yourself. I am bringing you a stanch.”
He collapsed, his cheek banging against the floor, causing more blood to squirt from his nose. This was not happening. The cleaner rolled over to his face and started lapping up the blood like a bewildered dog tending to its dying master. At this rate, it would be sucking him up next.
Another robot ambled up, a small sphere held in its pincers. His hand reached out and plucked the sphere. He slid it up his nose. A hot sensation took over, and the pain began to recede. He rolled onto his back, helping it cauterize the wound. His chest sank deeper into his lungs.
The two machines stayed nearby, staring at him. He wanted to tell them to go away, but he couldn’t speak. His scowl wasn’t enough to drive them off either.
“Sir, you must calm yourself.”
He closed his eyes. Do not focus on your lungs. Do not focus on your lungs. He could still see some light pushing through his eyelids, a red, murky, fuzzy light, like Mars when he was drifting off to sleep. He was looking at Mars again, holding it in his hands. A consolation prize for the Earth god, cast out into space.
Soon enough, his chest lifted off his lungs. He was weightless again. He took a deep breath from his unclogged mouth.
“Sir, the insulation is still deteriorating. I cannot drive the mouse from the area.”
“Then… what…” he started. But there was no end to that question.
He pushed himself off the floor and grabbed a rung. He haphazardly climbed back towards the Control Bay while his two attendant robots, glued to the floor through the power of magnetism, trundled back to wherever they came from.
He reappeared back in his home, but he was no closer to finding an answer.
“Sir, at this rate, life support systems will fail in approximately 10 minutes,” the computer said.
“Where… is the answer…” he said, little globlets of spittle coming out from his mouth. They floated harmlessly into an air purification vent.
“How did it… how did it… get in here?” he asked.
“It is probable that it stowed away on last week’s food transport,” said the computer. “But that information is irrelevant.”
“No it’s not you stupid thing,” he said.
His mind was becoming blank, overcome with nothingness. And not the desirable kind of nothinginess, the nothingness invited in after a long day’s work. This void barged in and swallowed up all his knowledge, leaving him stranded on a dying ship. He needed something unaffected by this. But the computer was an imbecile. The only answer left…
He pushed himself towards the back. He erected it decades ago, but what was behind it was as old as the mission itself.
“Forgive the intrusion,” he said as he pulled the curtain away. Before him was a flat glass container containing nothing but granules of sand and ants. An ant farm in space to test the effect of zero-gravity on them. The test was abandoned a long time ago, but the ants persisted, their lives preserved by the ship.
“Namaste,” he said, bowing before the ants. “I beseech you, we are in danger from an intruder. A demon is trying to destroy our home, and I cannot reach him. My powers have failed!”
One of the ants clambered through some of the free-floating granules to poke at another ant.
“I must know what to do. How can I get at that mouse? Show me your wisdom!”
The ants poked at each other before the granules they were clinging to drifted apart.
“You have lived here as long as I have. Our wisdom will come up with something. Give me a sign!”
He bowed low, but his mind was still blank. He glanced up. The ants were still milling around as best as they could, and now were congregating around a small dispenser tossing out bits of sugar. It flinged one out to a far corner of the case near an ant that was attempting to bury an egg. Its antennae pricked up when the sugar landed nearby. It scampered over and collected it in its mandibles, then scurried off to find the queen.
That was it.
“Computer, what do mice like to eat?” he asked.
“Records indicate that they eat grain, cheese, fruits and vegetables, sir.”
“Give me one of those things!”
A panel slid open near him, and out floated a slab of stale yellow cheese. He could smell it as he plucked it out of the air.
“Thank you, my brothers!” he yelled at the ant farm as he pushed himself back out into the connecting corridor.
He was back in front of the Storage Bay. The vent was no longer bloodied, but it was partially dented. No matter. He drifted over to it.
“Computer, this vent is blowing air out. Can you make it suck in air instead?” he asked.
“I will do that, sir,” it said.
He held the cheese in front of the vent, but it was difficult to keep still. There was nothing nearby to grab onto.
“Dammit,” he muttered. He pushed himself onto the floor near the vent, but when he found himself drifting away again, he realized what he needed to do.
“Computer, turn on the gravity,” he said.
He could hear the ship begin to spin once more, a sliding, grinding noise. A few seconds later, he lowered to the ground, assuming the Lotus position once more.
“This must work,” he said as his chest once more pressed onto his lungs. “This must work,” he repeated. He cupped his hands in front of the vent, the cheese sitting on it like an offering on an altar.
His lungs hadn’t fully recovered from the earlier shock, though, and already his breathing was labored. His heart was becoming smothered. The pain was radiating throughout his body. This was impossible. He closed his eyes.
“This must work,” he said again. It was dark behind his eyelids, save for the sparkling floaters of his mind’s eye. A starry field of floaters, and once again he was in zero gravity, floating not above Mars, but deep space. Lonely space. Thankfully he didn’t volunteer to go out that far.
But he could barely remember what it was like to volunteer in the first place. He had no memory of his parents or his wife. He knew he had one because they still told stories about him having one. Or maybe he didn’t have one at all. Those were just stories, like the disease he had. Radiation sickness, contained only on the ship, a tomb that preserved his life. But this would only be his tomb if the mouse got his way. The mouse wouldn’t get his way. He was going to find it and hunt it down. Vishnu had revealed to him the secret of the hunt. Vishnu was never wrong, a deity even higher than himself. How could he be? They were both sitting in this throne, safely above Mars, the only place in the universe that could contain their power. Ironically, of course. If only the Earthlings knew how powerful he was. They would–
Something crawled onto his hands. He clapped and squeezed them together, feeling softness and fur and the cold cheese now becoming warm with flesh and blood. His eyes opened. There was red all over, on his skin and pubic hair and under his nails. And the intruder was dead in his hands, its leg and tail still twitching. He held its crushed neck in his fingers.
“At last,” he gasped before gravity reasserted itself on his chest. He fell over onto his side, letting the mouse roll onto the floor. The cleaner came out once more and left the floor spotless after a minute of cleaning.
Once more his chest was freed. He slowly worked his way back to the Control Bay.
“Thankfully, sir, the mouse did not do permanent damage. A repair can be ordered,” the computer said.
“That’s fine,” he said. He wasn’t strong enough yet to laugh. But he was also no longer hungry, and his mind was still too blank.
Back to the Lotus position. He had enough for one day, so he rested. And once again he held both Earth and Mars in his hands.
Farts from the back of my brain 