Free The Vigil by Chris W. Martinez Page B

spectacle. The music behind the woman’s voice rose to an anguished crescendo as the purple beacon flashed over and over, urging him to act.
    With every shred of his will, he fought against the invisible walls that hemmed his vision. He tried to scream, but he could muster only the dreamlike idea of a scream, echoing from deep within the vault of his mind.
    All at once, the boundaries gave way. But instead of his perspective moving left or right, it jumped to another place entirely.
    A dark, cylindrical chamber. White, concave walls, ghostly gray in the half-light.
    An object floated in the dead space. He strained to make out its shape. It was a corpse, shriveled in an astronaut jumpsuit, its face a grim mosaic of skull-shadows.
    He forced the image away and his view snapped to another room. He looked down on two pilot chairs, a motionless figure seated in one of them, barely visible in the dim glow of the holographic control panels.
    A sliver of sunlight peeked through the window and crept across the figure’s sunken, lifeless eyes. Something seemed vaguely familiar about the face, but still he remembered nothing. No name, no date, no cause or reason. Just a yawning chasm.
    He noticed the tiny lettering on the left breast of the man’s jumpsuit. When he focused on it, the image instantly magnified. “PETERSON.”
    Strange the way his vision had zoomed in on the name, like a camera. A tingle of surreal epiphany descended on him. He willed his sight elsewhere.
    Blink . An internal view of another room, two more bodies floating in the shadowy space.
    Blink . Previous view of Earth, South America creeping toward the horizon.
    Blink . External view of the craft, looking from one end down to the other. He studied it closely. Space station. Again the haunting swell of déjà vu.
    He switched back to the cockpit, the cadaver forever seated at the helm. A thought spontaneously entered his mind.
    “Access final log.”
    A new image popped into his sight: video of a man from the torso up, looking straight at him. The fat was gone from the man’s cheeks and dark circles ringed his hollow eyes. On the left breast of his jumpsuit, the same name as the corpse in the pilot chair: “PETERSON.”
    “December 18, 2069,” the man said in a frail near-whisper. “We’re out of food, the oxygen and water recycling systems are failing, and we still can’t make contact with the surface. We saw the devastation from up here and know there’s probably no hope of rescue or resupply. We can’t even count on other spacecraft. It’s everyone for themselves now.”
    The man’s thin chest heaved in a sigh. “We won’t last another week. As an astronaut, I thought I had learned not to fear death. But now that the time has come, I’m ashamed to admit, I’m terrified. I’m not prepared to go.”
    A glint appeared in his eye. “But it turns out I may not have to go—at least not completely. As the captain, I have a direct neural link to this station’s artificial intelligence system. The computer is powerful enough that, if I reconfigure it just right, I may be able to upload part of my consciousness to it. I can achieve a form of immortality.”
    The video switched to the planet below. “From up here,” the captain said, “I’ll forever have the perfect view of the world I once called home. No suffering or misery or violence. Just pure beauty and tranquility, the way it was meant to be.”
    The man’s voice went quiet for a moment as the oceans and continents slowly rolled by. “I don’t know if there’s an afterlife,” he said, “but if it turns out there isn’t, this right here is close enough to heaven for me.”
    The video went back to the captain’s face, looking somehow even more haggard than before. “Still, there are serious risks. Being trapped forever in an orbiting computer, with the awareness that the human race may very well be extinct, could easily drive me to madness. So I need to come up with a way to prevent