Dust and Echoes

On a certain Tuesday, Webb had a seizure right smack in the middle of the Hubble deep space field. He’d been going in and out of cryofreeze every century for about 313,420 years. Every time thawing out to be sure 21-Tarsis was still headed in the right direction and occasionally take a wizz.

After the thaw, he would pace around and stare out the windows and wonder if he would ever see another living thing. He wore a simple white one-piece and his captain’s hat that his brother had given him. The vast emptiness of space bored him. Sometimes he would play the harmonica or listen to a song that was included in a transmission and if he really had a lot of time, he would deep dive into the ship’s memory banks and pull out some Radiohead track from his childhood and listen to it at full volume.

When he stopped to think about his journey and the shaky grounds on which there “should” be life on this destination planet and it “should” have a similar atmosphere to the earth and “should” be in the same stages of planetary life and evolution that Earth had 500,000 years before humans appeared on it, Webb was not reassured. The voyage at first seemed a great adventure; Heading off to make contact with the first signs of life discovered outside of the solar system. When Webb was 2, he decided to walk to his Grandmother’s house who lived fourteen hours—by car—away. Space is like that. It’s spacious. Hence the name. Webb pictured himself always passing beautiful vistas and strange planets. But the pretty things were always pretty far away, kind of how space feels from earth when you can’t see the moon or the sun. Except he was just in this tiny ship and not surrounded by earth and life etc. Real space isn’t like Star Trek or E.T.. You don’t just zip around the universe from planet to planet, each one somehow having the exact same atmospheric makeup as our planet, meeting new and exciting alien races. It’s more like if you dropped a bunch of boats the size of pinheads into the middle of the pacific ocean and let them float around for billions of years and then headed across it, in a much smaller than a pinhead sized boat, in any direction and somehow passing close enough to one of the other boats to see it.

A week before each thaw, the ship would come out of hyper-speed and await the weekly communique from earth. When he woke up, he would watch the message. It would have been a week since they sent the last transmission, while he had only aged 10 minutes and ten more years had passed on earth. For any non-math-genius, it would be a complete mind cuss to try to keep it all straight. Webb had only aged a couple of hours by the time everyone he knew was dead. He kept receiving messages for about a thousand years after all his friends and family and the command center were dead and turned to dust. He had been in space around 700 years before he learned what had happened before he even passed Eris. At least he succeeded in escaping the past. He escaped the hell out of the past and now he longed for a piece of the past… and a drink.

On Earth, Webb didn’t dare even so much as breathe a whiff of alcohol, even bread dough gave him palpitations, ever since that homeless man stunk up his spare room. He had never felt so closed in with darkness and beset and overcome on all sides than on that black day in January when he passed out and the man died in the closet. Who wouldn’t wonder why me? The man knocked on his door when it was 255K out. Webb invited him to come in out of the cold and then passed out. When Webb came to, an indeterminable number of days later, the man was apparently gone. Two days later Webb noticed the smell. Why would a drunken act of benevolence result in that horrid smell coming from the closet in the room where he stored his three guitars that he didn’t ever play? When he was younger he would pluck around with them while his dad called him a wastoid. That was his word for anyone that wasn’t a contributing member of society: a quote unquote societal contributor. His father wanted to hear nothing of his faux-ass explorer nonsense and was not shy in voicing his disgust about Webb’s choice of theoretical mathematics as his area of study in college. Some sort of applied mathematics was a much more productive use of his talents.

He only ever told one soul besides the police about the incident. His best friend. Who dubbed the incident ‘The Dustification of Mr. Echoes’ even though the police let Webb know his name was something Philbin. After the incident, Webb moved back in with his parents. His father was firmly opposed to the prospect. Mom could see the severe assed-out distress on his detoxing, psychologically scrambled face. For three years he never spoke a word of the incident, and only after that apartment building burned down did he tell his best friend and immediately regretted telling him. It’s probably not Webb’s fault the man died and started decomposing into the closet carpet but it was Mr. Echoes’s slash Philbin’s fault slash influence that made Webb detox as fast and as fully as he did and without which, he never would have become an astronaut or a great explorer or so far as he knew, the only living thing in the universe. Before withdrawals set in proper, Webb spent the day setting up his old room in his parent’s basement to be a completely self contained living area with all the necessities of life other than alcohol. He had his digital music collection with Sigur Rós’s Takk… queued up and a few books; a The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and a set of scriptures and was ready to call upon his higher power as Copland, a dinosaur he met at the only AA meeting he had ever gone to and who had probably the most awesome handlebar mustache Webb had ever seen, told him was the only way to really kick the Old Bird.

He meticulously soundproofed the whole basement as a kid, including the en suite bathroom, which was occupado 23/7 for the first week he was locked in there. If not for this—soundproofing—his mother would probably have disobeyed his mandate that she was, under no circumstances, to open the door until 2 weeks later. She didn’t know what his deal was and had her own denial deal going on. It would have been helpful if she did know because his home brew, cold turkey style of detox is extremely dangerous and life-threatening given his constant state of drunkenness he had been in since declared his major in number theory.

The headache started before he even got home from the grocery store with his month’s supply of ramen, soda, t.p., and some benzodiazepines and carbamazepine he scored from Mike who worked in the pharmacy and owed him a favor for tutoring him in applied calculus during their sophomore year. After Webb was good and locked in and the alcohol began to leave his blood, the glutamates in his brain started to fire normally and the sweat started pouring down him and the world started shaking. It took a week before his body started making the gamma-Aminobutyric acid it was supposed to. In the meantime, the hallucinations began in earnest.

Transmission 163 his son asked him to come home. Sent 3 years after he left earth. Received 1630 years after he left Earth. Approximately 1500 years after his son was dead and gone.

All those years ago Webb had left her behind. He kissed her on the face, picked up his bag and walked out the door. He knows he tried to forgive her. She smelled like vanilla. He remembered that from the first time he saw her. It was one of those awkward moments when the passing takes place just as two people come to a doorway— Webb didn’t exactly want to walk past her going through the doorway but once a person sets their gait, slowing or changing it becomes the most difficult thing one can think of. There is something of the principle of entropy. One uses all one’s will and force to get moving and the prospect of being close enough to smell her as one passes through the doorway is not awkward enough to slow down an object in motion. And Webb did smell her as they passed through the door and she didn’t have a strong perfume smell like some girls which gave Webb a headache. She had a general air of cleanliness and vanilla about her; nothing overpowering or chemical, but a soft natural smell. Exactly what a girl should smell like in Webb’s eyes—err, nose.

He kissed her and she cried and she didn’t tell him she was pregnant because there was no way he would have gone. He regretted leaving but by the time he heard from her, it was so many years later that even thinking about saying sorry and even the desire to hold her seemed utterly pointless

Transmission 1507 his father told him he was proud of him even if the world had largely forgotten him and there would never be a statue raised in his honor. No recognition as a great explorer. There would be no Webb Day to replace the Columbus Day that no one really celebrated anyways or got off from work, which is complete crapspackle. Webb hoped that after it all there would be epic poems sung down through the ages and that his great deeds and works written in the history books and taught to the generations of children that came after him. In retrospect he should have brought some more humans with him.

Transmissions stopped around 26000 thaws ago. If there was a transmission this time it would have been 602 years after he left earth. But there wasn’t. Plus he stopped having the ship wait a week for him to come out of cryofreeze. There was really no point at this point. He sent a few messages back to earth but only the first few of them got there before what was probably the end of the world. In the last transmission he received, and would ever receive, world war had already started, the space program was shuttled so to speak, and Commander Huff let him know that if they made it through the war, he would be sure to let him know.

Webb let the ship stop a few thousand more times, hoping that maybe it just would take a few years before they could send him another transmission. But nothing. As long as the ship looked good, and the next ten years of travel had been mapped out, and there was no transmission he felt like reliving, he would take out his complete Shakespeare and read as much as he could in the remaining few minutes. Webb was pretty sure he was the only person who took a quarter of a million years to read it.

He had aged about 7 months.

After thaw 31,341, Webb lay in the cryotube much longer than was necessary to allow the hibernation sickness to pass. He was stuck thinking about his direction and the planet he was headed to and the blueshift of it’s sun and how fast it is traveling towards him. If the universe is accelerating and space is expanding, is he ever going to get where he was going? He thought of Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, which is not great fun or a particularly productive path to take your mind down, especially when you are coming out of a ten year cryofreeze and have some possibly weighty ship and non-linear equations issues that need to be taken care of in a relatively short period of time. Whatever. He decided to say nuts to his schedule and stay out of freeze as long as he wanted to this time. —Let 21-Tarsis float aimlessly for a while.

All those years ago, over 300,000, when he was sitting there in his fourth year at NOAA NEEMO, and Major Barnes was talking about the effects of multiple cryofreezes and a prolonged space mission on the human brain, Webb almost had a seizure. His tongue felt fat and he felt the room start to sway the way it had when he was detoxing in his parent’s basement. He sat down and forced the rushing sound back inside his head. He looked around. No one had noticed. There is no way he would have been allowed on this mission through deep space if he had succumbed to that seizure. Now he wished he had. He set course for the next ten years, lay down himself in his millennial bed, pressed close and sighed as the clear tube slid over his head.

When Webb came-to for thaw number thirty-three thousand six hundred twenty two, the ship was filled with a blinding light. His sensitive eyes smarted under the first natural light he had seen in a really long time. Webb blinked it away and emerged from his cryotube a little too eagerly. His legs hadn’t been given the time to recover and crumpled under his weight. His mind was also slow to recover and he felt disquieted and dull compared to whatever phenomenon made this light. It was the first time he found himself in an entirely new scene and it affected him greatly. He felt guilty for his thoughts of depression that have lasted at least a few millennia. Eventually, his fermented mind started to come around and he began making calculations.

He walked over to the navigation computer and deleted his flight plan and put the ship into orbit around the new light. Energy reading were off the chart. It was emitting its blinding light and smoke for thousands of miles into space. By his calculations the energy cloud surrounding it was about 82 AUs in diameter. Webb wanted to do a full sensor sweep of the entity but he remembered what happened to Epsilon IX when it tried to scan V’GER and decided against it. He hadn’t realized how much Star Trek informed his decisions.

The computer held pretty much all of the combined knowledge of human kind including all of the good music anyone has ever made. He found himself a little Sigur Rós, turned on Takk…, and let it spin.

He orbited the thing for three days and called it turbo huge in the ship’s log. Webb turned to his charts. Perhaps he took a wrong turn at the White Deneb. He looked at his nuclear clock and did a long calculation in his mind, relativity etc. It was Tuesday, the sixth of June, or would have been, back on earth.

When it finally descended—the seizure—his tongue rolled back in his head and everything went topsy-turvy. As he fell, his flailing arm switched off the gravity and things got turvier. Webb’s body began to swell and float haplessly through the small interior of T21. He watched his captain’s hat float away and his tumid limbs tear-ass around the interior of the space craft like unattended fire hoses on full blast. A cardiovascular rush boiled in his head and the pain came like a tsunami. All feeling pulled away from him and then came back with such force and speed that he could not escape it. He thought of a night crawler. Broken in half. No head. Impaled by a fish hook. The hook lifted him into the air and let him dangle there. His grandfather held the pole and extolled the virtues of a good nightcrawler for catching trout. ‘Numquam se minus solum, quam cum solus esset.’ His grandfather wore a light blue porkpie fisherman’s hat with flies on it. Not the swat at it kind, but the furry kind with feathers and a metal hook through the middle. Webb hung out over the side of ‘Ol 55,’ a boat that matched exactly the color of his grandfather’s hat. The pain from the hook coursed from one side of his worm body to the other. Grandpa plunged him down into the water and it swished as Webb convulsed through the cohesive forces of time. Time wasn’t so much as passing as it was swimming around him taking nibbles off his headless form. Then he was the fish and felt the meat of a fat juicy worm in the back of his throat and didn’t want to swallow it but swallowed it anyway, and regretted it as the hook yanked him out of his water and he gasped for water and all there was was this asphyxiating air. His grandfather put his fingers in his mouth and even though he didn’t want to bite down on the meaty, dirty worm-guts-covered fingers, he did. He bit down hard and Grandpa dropped him on the floor of the ship and Webb succumbed to the pain and everything went white.

Gravity is back on. Webb’s face pressed against the warm metal floor of the ships. Blood and drool pooled around his mouth. He heard a voice.

—Wherefore art thou headed Timothy?

He did not answer, but sat up and his cotton uniform creaked as the dried sweat salt broke loose. He did not look up but the light was even brighter now than it had been before. It was raw light and he was conscious of his failure and depression and black thoughts leaving him. He could feel the hat under his left foot but didn’t move it. Webb was half sure he was dead. His tongue was half bit off and when he talked it sounded like he had a marshmallow (campfire style) in his mouth.

—Are you God? —I am. —The God? —I am a God. Not the one who created this universe… Timothy?

No one had spoken his name in thousands of years. Webb was comforted. He looked up and saw what looked like a younger version of himself standing there. Not exactly like himself. A mix between Webb and Her. He thought this must be what his son would look like, if he hadn’t died when he was 3 & 1/2. To Webb’s left, each of the eight warning lights blinked incessantly. Webb tried to remember a time that had happened before but couldn’t. Usually it’s a one and two at a time kind of thing and he would easily assess the danger and solve the problem kind of thing.

• Energy levels: dangerous.
• Oxygen levels: dangerous.
• Gravitational pull: dangerous.
• Whatever that third yellow light means: dangerous?
• Radiation levels: dangerous.

A passage from Psalms came to mind. Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about. His lightnings enlightened the world: the earth saw, and trembled.

Oh yeah, third yellow light means an imminent meltdown. He did a quick calculation of the half life of the plutonium-238 in the ships core and realized that he should brace himself for radiation poisoning. He looked up. The desires of his heart for centuries rushing up and it was pounding with some serious anxiety.

—If you are a god, you can do anything right? —Oh I can’t do anything. I am bound by laws. Infinity, time, physics etc. —Did you just say etc.? —Sure. Why not? —I just thought gods spoke differently, like with thees and thous. —Have you spoken with many gods? —Not really. —I speak in the way you will best understand, yo.

Webb composed himself.

—I want to go back. I want to see my son. I want that seizure to happen. The one I fought off while at the academy. Can you do that?

The person in front of Webb reached out his hand and touched him on the forehead. Everything went white... Again.

Timothy Webb emerged from the light on the floor of his basement bathroom. His sensitive nature was not even repelled by the undivine and squalid way he was laying on the floor. And he was happy.