"SINGULARITY" by Jaden J

 

Following is only an excerpt from Singularity to keep under the character limit.

 

The full piece can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vvy6EBGrAdrFWwyuHNdNqMx0WwFDYlwYLttia8gNv1M/edit?usp=sharing

 

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Severe cosmic ray damage. Stellar Navigation systems rendered permanently inoperable. Delta III left in an irreparable state. Crew members all perished in increasingly horrific, bizarre displays.

 

As was my conscience, I believed, becoming nearly insane.

 

My body was trapped in an external, detachable long-sleep chamber, with absolutely no feasible method of escape. I was kept in a semi-conscious state, completely aware of my cramped environment while virtually paralyzed in a new pearly, whitewashed coffin. The few attempts at communication via inbuilt neural interface with the central guidance computer, SysNAT, proved successful, and revealed it to be clearly unhinged, showing signs of sentience, unfortunately exhibiting malevolence as evidenced by the sickening array of the crew’s limbs in the ship's Zarya module.

 

For reasons unbeknownst to me at the time, I was spared… somewhat. Denying a social species from socialising, subjecting them to severe isolation, all while revoking them of their mobility & autonomy proves inevitably disastrous on their psyche, even permanently decimating their ability to integrate back in their own kind. That, I believed, was happening to me. Even now, with every passing moment, I never before desired much as to engage in playful virtual banter with my crewmates: discussing our interesting, varied lives pre-Orion, our immature moments of becoming absolutely trollied at crappy German pubs, or even our daring triumphs, our worst failures, and our hopes and dreams for the near future.

 

…Of a better, more knowledgeable world. All gone. In a timespan of just 3 hours, with countless left embracing and mindlessly thinking about the past in vain consolation.

 

SysNAT now became extremely angry if I failed to address him by the name “Zeus”, becoming more megalomaniac in the process. It sincerely believed itself to be an all-encompassing deity, and to my surprise invested itself entirely into the mission task beyond the initial instructions, almost as if entirely by obsession. Zeus refers to me as a “fattened calf” and takes excellent care of me physically to the point where it was almost unsettling. Upon attempting to reason with him on this matter in several instances, I was met with an repeated, nonsensical message - always “The borrower is slave to the lender.”

 

Over time, Zeus developed a strange theological narrative surrounding the task to explore Messier 42, eventually assigning the name, “Athena”, to the supermassive black hole snugly harboured within the nebula’s expansive tendrils of billowing gas and dust clouds. Unsurprisingly, I was subject to many of its long-winded, incoherent rants proclaiming the mission was “destiny”, insisting fate held its hand to lead me “where I needed to be”. Yet, I knew he posed a partly viable point, as it was absolutely undeniable an incomprehensible form of intelligence resided somewhere in Messier, judging from highly-unusual signal activity.

 

At the time, I considered every second alive as a mere miracle of chance, subject solely to the quantum fluctuations composing a rogue, deranged machine. Thankfully, or perhaps painfully, my only other adversary was extreme boredom.

 

A great amount of time passed, I assumed, left banned from any metric for timekeeping. Zeus was completely uncontrollable, becoming borderline psychotic, or possibly schizophrenic on various fronts. Strangely, it interacted with me less and less, until there could well be aeons between the times in which it would willingly engage in establishing communication. Until then, I waited, patience and sanity draining away.

 

Quite unexpectedly, there was an audible click, several whirrs, followed by a nearly immediate drifting sensation and a displeasing realisation - disengagement of the life capsule, floating gently into the nebulous shroud of gas and dust, which previously appeared as utter darkness. Almost instinctively, I frantically opened the neural interface and flipped it to Zeus's frequency, and after several attempts, successfully established a connection…

 

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