It’s bath day.
My wrist itched from where my voidwatch had been part of my flesh. I rubbed it, missing the tech beneath my skin. Once a transtemporal connection to my voidship, now only flaking skin remained.
I don’t remember the last time we had a bath. I refuse to even attempt the mad rush. Eighty inmates in this section alone, six sinks, we get herded in, naked, filthy and play russian roulette with sinks, each sink may distribute water, this time, maybe not.
Just another psychological ploy, like keeping us dirty, introducing lice into the facility, food just shy of being spoiled and completely unedible.
The real goal is to break us.
To anchor us in time. To make us atone for our sins. To remind us we were not God.
Here away from voidships, away from temporal loci, we were just men subject to the irreversible hands of causality. I remember so many lives being at the center of a temporal locus, so many experiences, cheating the rules of reality.
Sitting on the event horizon of a black hole, I have just this one timestream. Crushing. Heavy. Inescapable.
I know where the nooks and crannies are and I hide when the gulag’s guards come around for bath day.
My guard came and left. I climbed back into the window and waited. Waited for the trail. Waited for the sign the Venture had come for me. She always came for me. But she didn’t come today. Or tomorrow. Or for many days after.
Years passed. I looked less and less. I did what I could to stay physically fit. But conditions in the gulag meant I spent more time sick and more than once I nearly died. But I never stopped looking. Then I realized, without my voidwatch, they would never find me. They needed a sign.
After a decade as a model prisoner, which meant selling out others, killing bastards who tried to kill me first, and providing favors to people I couldn’t kill outright, I became the head of the ship fueling detail. Today, thirty years after arriving in this gulag, I would leave here or die.
No one asked what I was doing onboard the warden’s yacht. It was my job. No one knew what I did before I came here, so reprogramming its navigation was child’s play. I waited until the fuel depot was completely full before enacting my scheme. The fuel was stored beneath the prison.
I watched the warden take off, he and most of his administrative detail were taking a vacation to someplace warm and beautiful. I had forgotten warmth and eschewed beauty. I had forgotten having been the master of my fate and the captain of my voidship.
I had become mean and petty. The truth was I had given up on rescue. This was now, just revenge. I watched the yacht arch into the heavens, its drive supplementing its antigrav, then I imagined their inability to control it as it dived toward the fuel depot.
I laughed maniacally as I saw them plunging into the atmosphere, heating up, knowing they would survive until impact.
I thrilled to the fuel explosions as they spread across the prison faster than they could be suppressed. I tossed the fire suppression module out the window of my cell.
My vanity fell away. We weren’t gods. We hadn’t the right to change reality to our whims. I made peace with my end.
As the fireball consumed the prison below me, I saw the arc of the voidship Venture as it fell from the heavens. Not in time enough for me. Fire became my world.
At this distance, I could hear her in my mind, again. That familiar song as she bent time and space. “You came.”
“I will always be there for you.” Her voice soothing, filled my consciousness, became all consuming, my death fell away.
“You’re late.”
“A timeship is never late, my love. Regulations notwithstanding, I will rescue you.”
“I know.”
I fall away into the darkness, away from her light, and I died. Again.
But not alone this time.
It’s bath day. Its been a month since I’ve been clean, but I know she will come for me.
She would move a universe.
Never Late © Thaddeus Howze 2014, All Rights Reserved
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