You’re insane!
Are our lives nothing more than twigs to be cast in the belly of some ravenous wood chipper? Just another way for your crooked scientists to see what shapes they can churn the mulch into? We are men god damn you! Not ants to torture and burn with a magnifying glass!
You tried to conceal it but I only had to break three fingers before the answers came spilling out of the man next to the lead engineer, Such milk livers you’ve entrusted this mission to! The theologians protested against my strategy, pitiful prognostications for a healthier way. We haven’t the time for that, in less than two weeks we’ll be in Martian orbit and their constant pleas for caution are becoming a nuisance. Insufferable fools! They aren’t leading, they don’t know the toll it takes and if they continue to obstruct the investigation I’ll have them punished. But back to your pitiful attempt at mystery.
As the engineer spoke his compatriots struggled and screamed for his silence, they probably would’ve killed him had we not had pressed their faces to the floor. When we finally subdued them what he spoke of shook me to my very core and if a word of it is true then we are damned men in a doomed ship rotting underneath the weight of lies from millions of miles away. At first I didn’t understand, at first I cursed and rebuffed his words with sore knuckles. After all, he was my enemy, he whose flock hung over us just out of sight like some kind of acidic cloud, choking and blinding with only the chance of a clean breath keeping everyone from keeling over.
Of course if there’s anyone that knows of hanging threats its you. To keep them intentionally quarantined under the threat of their wages being forfeit, of their suffering families receiving nothing? He said he was told if the engineers interfered in any way with “the experiment” the mission’s cost would be leveraged against their families, they were to observe and report only. To survive in this universe you have to be heartless sometimes, but you’ve a knack for malicious decrees.
Yes I know about your ruse, does that shock you? Perhaps we would’ve torn each other apart from the hunger like you wanted or from the wretched black silence outside that’s always a stray fragment of space rock away, or maybe we’d have slit our own throats from the strain but you blundered! You thought me a brash simpleton, just another test subject, a lunkhead who’d never piece it all together but ah, you made a mistake.
You corrupted your own work by leaving the complete manifest on our side of the ship. I’m sure your scientists would’ve salivated over the data, no doubt vomiting the findings into some faux-scientific journal for tainted accolades and haughty praises but after I knew we weren’t alone your study was destined to fail. It was a farce of control from the start and I’m still ashamed it took me so long to realize you’d convinced these caricatures of spacemen that they weren’t just playing house. I hope the expense of creating a false command console so true to life was worth it. If there’s a jury prize for smashing men’s hearts you’ve surely earned it. What pawns we’ve been, believing we’d been piloting this ship the whole time!
If you haven’t already cashed out your stock and sold the company then mark my words, you bastards will pay. I’m radioing this missive on every possible frequency I can think of. You won’t get away with this! Your plan will fail, you’ll be arrested and tried as the criminal scum you are, your names briefly referenced in infamy, with tones of disgust and embarrassment before history consumes you. I wish I could blame everything on you but we both know it isn’t that simple.
I asked the lead engineer that if this experiment was true then why did they hate us so? He uttered simply, “you don’t need me to hate you,” and pointed at the film near the bank of monitors. Now I know why you chose me, now I know what I am.
A jackal that thought himself a hound. A wolf bleating like a sheep. A slave to the scent of hellfire.
The military was right to banish me; they saw plain as day during the trial as I suspect you did too from the moment I walked into your offices. Back then I brushed it off but now I remember. Kleptomania I think they called it? It wasn’t until I watched that man taking all our rations and stashing them in my cabin that the shudder started. At first I thought some sort of shape shifting doppelganger on the loose but the way he stacked and glided with them into my quarters betrayed the kind of determined action by which I have acted since day one on board. I’ve been putting everyone in danger without even knowing, the missing ingredient for a stew of chaos.
I thought you’d given me a second chance, a path towards clearing my name and making everything they said I’d done just a whisper in the past. But that was all part of the joke! As much as I’d like nothing more than to wrap my hands around each of your supple necks and squeeze until your eyes bulged I’m clapping right now, can you hear? Ha! I’ve rewound the film more than a dozen times now and each time I watch I’m more entertained, more impressed, more taken by the wit and grandeur of your sensational prank.
Its…its brilliant.
Its hilarious!
I’ve just tried to explain the humor to one of the theologians, thinking that with his upbringing he’d surely be able to appreciate such otherworldly irony but your joke was much too refined for his feeble mind. He even tried to get me to stop, the gall! What good are you if you can’t take a joke? But its fine, I was able to help him! Right before he expired something in his eye told me he got it.
There’s no time for this mission nonsense now, it’d be criminal to keep this joke from the rest of the men! I must share it with them!
Elias
A Printed Mind 