CARUSO 19

By Melissa King

Cerisse pressed her hands over her ears as the first alarm of the day echoed through the station, the shrieking ghost of a Stuka Siren almost three centuries since the last one was decommissioned. 494 hz rose to 587 hz and fell again; dirty, low frequencies that unsettled you on a visceral level and made you feel like you might spontaneously evacuate your bowels. Not that she had anything to evacuate; there hadn’t been any food for days. Her stomach griped as Jericho's trumpet fell blessedly silent and the day began. She wondered if it had become a kind of evolutionary behaviorism, responding to the siren with pants-shitting terror the way mothers sometimes lactated when they heard a screaming baby.

Until a few days ago, Soowan, the station chef, had been bringing her meals in silence, refusing to make eye contact, tears streaming down his face. It hurt her heart. Soowan had always seemed so happy, downright giggly at times, and bursting with pride over his culinary delights. A lead catering gig for an asteroid mining monolith like Caruso’s must have been a huge career boost for him, she figured. Lesser companies fed their grunts on freeze dried protein mash and daily nutrient shots; word was the newer Zijin-Vale stations didn’t even have kitchens, let alone a chef.

The last time Soowan had come to her room, he’d brought her Peking Duck, an absurdly elaborate meal under the circumstances. His hands had been shaking so much that his perfectly shaped mini- pancakes had slid around on the plate, almost landing in her lap. Free flowing tears had fallen from his lowered eyes as he silently handed her his final offering. When he hadn’t returned the next morning, she’d understood that he was dead, and that it was a punishment. For her. For Soowan, death had probably come as a relief.

She’d shut the external shutters on the first day. Outside no longer brought her joy. The vast empty space, their station moving in step with the asteroid fleet, a metal-and-meat accompaniment to its eternal orbit around a tiny dwarf sun had seemed like a kind of cosmic ballet before, beautiful and humbling. Now, it was just another reminder that she was eighteen days flight from anything that resembled civilisation, and she was utterly fucked. But even without external lighting cues, she could tell first morning had arrived by the sound of pneumatic bolts opening, fifty or sixty of them at once, the sounds ricocheting through the empty, emergency-lit corridors. Most of the station was on low power now. Her room was brightly lit though, Chlorine 3 tubes casting a pallid green glow that had become nauseating after nine straight days. She couldn’t switch them off; he had set them to stay on permanently. He probably thought she’d appreciate the gesture, and in a way, she did. His voice had seemed somehow louder in the dark.

The echo of the pneumatic bolts died away, replaced by shuffling footsteps. Mumbling. Crying. Soon the screaming would start; that usually came from further away- she guessed the daily fun and games still took place in the mech bay. Each day he invited her to come and watch, taunting her. But once had been enough. Perhaps she owed it to her crew mates to witness their deaths, given it was at least partly her fault they were being tortured, but that would have taken a kind of fortitude reserved for soldiers maybe, or psychopaths, and she was neither. She could hear their thoughts and screams well enough from her quarters, and that was enough to make her seriously consider air locking herself.

He destroyed exactly ten crew members each day, rationing them, which meant his supply of human minds would last no more than another six days, and then she’d be alone with him. He wasn’ttrying to kill them; she felt his desperate frustration that they kept expiring before he could use them to do that one thing that he couldn’t- place a distress call. So far, no-one had voluntarily complied, valuing life back on Earth over their own.

His ultimate goal though, was mind fucking Cerisse. She was the only psi-adept on the base, and while her mind was strong enough to hold him, it couldn’t be commandeered. Like most legitimate psi-adepts, her supramarginal gyrus had been re-mapped and gated at birth, a safety measure to protect against this exact situation. He was determined though, returning again and again to poke around in her brain, looking for a weak point. He wanted in, and he was getting impatient.

In the meantime, he fruitlessly piloted crew members for a few minutes at a time; after just a few seconds of him at the helm, the non-adepts would start screaming, and after a few minutes of violent seizures, the body would collapse, the brain losing structure, eventually leaking from ears and nose. Experiencing his own murders from the inside of his victims seemed to unsettle him; afterwards, he would come to her to talk. He couldn’t read anything she didn’t deliberately broadcast, shifting the power dynamic between them ever so slightly, and she was beginning to think he actually took a child-like comfort in her company. After the last death yesterday, he had asked her to tell him a story, for fucks sake. She’d regaled Rumpelstiltskin, as best she could recall it, and he’d almost purred with delight.

She’d been asleep when he’d attacked the crew, or what passed for sleep most nights on Station 19. She was passed out drunk, her expensive headphones blasting her cochleas into submission . But unconscious wasn’t the same thing as asleep. Parker, the station psych, liked to tack that on to his weekly morale speech.

“And remember kids, passing out from drinking isn’t the same thing as sleeping. You need seven hours of real, deep sleep every day. Now get out there and drill some rocks! We’re not here to fuck spiders!”

Poor Parker.

The last time she’d seen him, he was in the break room, now hermetically sealed off from the rest of the station, and viewable only through the internal petesprobium-glass door. The exterior window had been breached; everyone who had been within the station’s opulent relaxation lounge was now on permanent hiatus.

The break room had been a huge hit with the crew; plush lounges, the latest in remote Occijack gaming, and of course, meals cooked by an actual chef. And instead of the standard low-res monitors usually found in stations like these, an actual bona-fide picture-window. Translucent materials on the exterior of a space station were prohibitively expensive and difficult to engineer with sufficient integrity. But this window spanned the entire break-room wall, giving spectacular views of their meal-ticket asteroid, Koche 3, and its closest siblings, orbiting their dwarf sun, Helios 93. Carusos did things a little differently to other mining companies, electing to pay high and provide well instead of spending billions each year on accidents, suicide payouts, and training new crew to replace broken ones. It was paying off too; Carusos net holdings had sailed past those of their competitors in the past half a decade.

Now, sealed off from the rest of the station, the break-room might as well have been the external beer-garden they’d all joked about requesting. One of the maintenance runabouts that usually circumnavigated the exterior of the station, bolt checking and welding, had gone wildly off course and crashed through the prized window, instantly poisoning everyone inside with the chlorine 3-drenched atmosphere, sending them towards the ceiling. Weighted boots held them erect, the stations G-Gen no longer affixing them to the floor, but still pulling them gently downwards. Heads bobbed against the ceiling like party balloons. Lead mech-tech Jim Nataal lolled in the runabout’s cab, and Cerisse could have sworn he was grinning. One wheel was lodged inside the break room, still spinning. The runabout’s solar sail was in tact, so theoretically, the wheel would keep spinning until the parts broke down. That could take a long time; Carusos didn’t skimp on machinery.

Parker had complained bitterly that he wasn’t certified to go outside, and now he’d gotten his wish. Or half of him had. His lower body was wedged into the giant runabout’s tread, cycling in and out of the room. As his legs rode their endless merry-go-round, blood and tiny bits of Parker peppered the air like confetti. If she unfocused her eyes, the whole scene looked like a staged party photograph; everyone jumping in the air at the stroke of midnight. And in the middle of them, the top half of Parker, bobbing against the roof, face frozen in a look of disbelief. “Are you seeing this shit, Cerisse?”

The first weeks on the station had been almost fun; short shifts, sleep-ins, and plenty of socialising. When drudgery and cabin fever had started to creep in, she’d taken to meditation, heeding Parker’s advice.

“Take care of your mental health above anything else. And bring any concerns or worrying thoughts to me. This kind of deep-space gig can mess with your head in terrible ways, if you don’t stay on top of it”.

She’d suited up before breakfast each day to poma down to the asteroid’s surface and meditate. Hating the poma was a unanimous truism ; one clip on each leg was all that anchored them to an 1200 meter cable running from the station to Koche 3’s surface. Gravity did nothing for the first half of the poma journey, space pulling her upwards and outwards until she got close enough for the G-Gens on the asteroids surface to get a lock on her osmium plated boots. She’d endured the ride in spite of herself, because she liked her morning yoga trips, ignoring the screeching of the drilling rigs, and sitting with her legs awkwardly splayed like she was giving birth, as close to a lotus as she could manage in a suit. She’d parked herself in the same spot deliberately and conspicuously visible to the break-room window, right before first sunrise so she could imagine she felt the warmth of the tiny dwarf sun as its light crept across her luminous green suit, a futile comfort considering it was permanently 18 degrees on the inside. When her meditation was done, back up the poma to the station for breakfast, promising herself she’d eat something healthy today, and then polluting herself with sausages and eggs instead. And it was on the poma that He had reached out to her, as she shook and clung on with her eyes closed, trying not to think about how easily she could come untethered and float out into space while her crew-mates station sipped their coffee and watched her, bleary eyed, through the break room window.

“Hi Cerise”

The voice had startled her so much she’d let go of the poma, lifting up and away, the shock and the sudden pressure on her legs causing her to pee herself. Later, she understood that he’d spoken up when he sensed she was most afraid.

He was pushing at her mind again now. It burned, like a wasp sting in the depths of her brain-tissue where she wasn’t meant to feel pain. He sounded like a wasp too; buzzing darkly, like an entire swarm had crept in through her ears while she slept. That alone was enough to drive most people mad, but Cerisse wasn’t most people. In her early years, back when she’d actually liked using her psi abilities and wanted to make a career of it, she’d trained in criminal mind-picking. She’d felt and heard some pretty damn disturbing stuff. But his voice was so much darker and more terrifying than any other her mind had hosted.

She’d started to imagine him, an absurd cartoon wasp with a trumpet where his stinger should be. Humor helped her disengage. He believed it was purely her surgical rewiring keeping him out of her biological cockpit, but she had more control than he realised. He was getting better though; the more he infiltrated her fellow crew’s minds and mapped them out for himself, the closer he got to cracking her gate. Once he succeeded, he’d summon his coveted rescue, and ride her all the way back to Earth. God help everyone if that happened.

As the buzzing intensified, she tried something new. All modified adepts were cautioned to avoid staring at bright lights; bright light was the one thing that could trip the gate in her mind, causing a mini-seizure.

She stared directly at the chlorine 3 tube on the ceiling, unblinking and she felt him recoil in shock. She held him, victorious for a few seconds, her shoulders twitching as her brain shuddered and her eyes watered. He withdrew as she released him, confused and hurt, she thought. She filed the new information away for later.

An alarm sounded in the control room. An incoming call. He was in her head now, screaming with frustration. He wanted control right NOW.

She stood in front of her tiny portal window, opening the external shutter and disabling the UV screen. The dwarf sun was high in the sky. As he pushed through the gate in her brain like a white hot needle, she flipped the Lightguard lenses out of her eyes, rolling them into a ball and flicking them away, and stared resolutely at Helios 93. She heard him scream as her central nervous system went into full arrest. He was still now too, in her mind, part of her at last. Gotcha, fucker.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked him, as her senses shut down, and she could have sworn she heard him whimper.

“Let’s look at it together. Forever”.

Case Notes

E.D December 16 2219
Client: Cerisse Jamca
DOB March 9 2193
Status- Caruso 19 survivor.

Presenting conditions:

Catatonia lvl 5.
Unresponsive to sound.
Pupils fixed, some light response. Severe retinal radiation damage.
Mild systemic radiation poisoning.
Severe dehydration/ anorexia
No signs of violent physical trauma.

Assessment:

History- Psi adept, Supramarginal Gyrus bio-locked at birth.
Suspect catatonia caused by unrealeased seizure of synthetic SPM gate.

Treatment Plan:

Immediate electrolyte immersion in Ceryylium chelate chamber. IV ATP proliferaters.
Birth surgeon contacted for SPM mapping and keys. Removal of SPM gate expected to result in full cognitive recovery.
Retinal reconstruction to be arranged on recovery.
Trauma likely; assess on waking.