This is a short story for the NIGHTGALE Blog Challenge from Glitterword.
Prompt:
January 12th – PROMPT Immortality comes to you, you do not go to Immortality
Shelley- “Why dost thou pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?… No voice from sublimer world hath ever, To sage or poet these responses given – Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour,”(Hymn To Intellectual Beauty)
Lynchpin
The ancient race had built the machine as an engine of punishment. An oubliette of immortality. The condemned sat nested in ancient snarls of cable older than Earth itself. When the contacts closed, consciousness looped into a single moment, seconds long — a re-enactment of the crime that had damned them, the final lynchpin on which their lives had turned. Their bodies nourished by the machine, they would relive their crime, over and over, forever.
Stearns wondered how a race that had come so far could create something so monstrous, so supremely cruel. Now it was the last hope his people had.
“The modifications should work,” Brent said, his voice trembling, his gaze fixed on the toolkit as he packed it. “It will hold the portal open long enough for us to get back. But once you engage it–”
“I can’t let go,” Stearns said. “I know.”
Brent’s cheek twitched. “And once it closes… it won’t…”
“I know that too.”
“If I had more time, maybe,” the tech shrugged helplessly.
“You did everything you could,” Stearns said, leaning back in the inhuman curves of the seat. “This is enough. It’ll have to be.”
Brent turned away, unable to meet his eyes. As the crew prepped for departure, Parris stepped up to the machine, her uniform smeared with the grease and detritus of the alien planetoid.
“You can’t do this to me,” she said. Her eyes were already raw, her hands bunched into fists.
“It’s for you,” Stearns said. His hands quivered with terror as he put them on the contacts. “It’s for the crew. One life for sixty.”
“Let someone else do it.”
Some ringing platitude about a captain’s duty trailed through his mind, but the words were empty, devoid of conviction. He let them go.
Because he couldn’t scream, he smiled with a confidence he didn’t feel. “You know I couldn’t live with that.”
“I can’t live with this,” she whispered, leaning toward him.
“You can. You have to.”
Parris cradled his cheeks with cold hands and pressed her forehead to his. She drew a ragged breath. “I never told you… how I–”
No, not now. Of all the times you could have picked, Parris… “Please get out of here before I lose my nerve,” he said. It took the last of his resolve just to keep his voice level.
Stearns heard Brent’s voice from five steps away — that other world, outside the machine, where people were still free. “We have to go.”
Parris stifled a sound that might have been a sob — but when she stepped back, her eyes were dry, and with one blink she composed herself. Always the professional.
Brent shouldered his pack and approached the infernal machine.
“Christ, Stearns, I don’t…” He shook his head. “It’s been an honor, sir.”
Stearns forced another smile. “Do me a favor, Brent.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell them I said something profound and moving, will you? At the end? Make it good. Something about how I always wanted to live forever, and this was my big chance.”
Brent swallowed and nodded, his face bleak. “Sure.”
The crew lined up near the dormant portal gate. A few tried to double back to thank him. Parris turned them away.
The machine began to power up. “We’re ready,” Brent said over the rising roar of alien energy.
Stearns curled his palms around the contacts. His heard thudded in his chest. His heart, which would soon begin beating until the sun burned out, or the ancient technology rotted away, or the universe folded in on itself. He wondered what the machine would show him. if some grand mistake from his past would rise to haunt him, or if somehow he could choose what single moment of his life he would bear into eternity.
If there was such a moment, Stearns could not imagine what it might be. Somehow, he felt like he should be prepared.
Just don’t give me something horrible, you crazy alien sadists, he thought. I think I’ve earned that much.
He took a deep breath. Nodded.
Brent flipped the switch on the portal. Green light cascaded into the room.
“Parris,” Stearns called over the din.
She looked back over her shoulder. Twin lines of cleanliness curved down her cheeks, alien grime washed away by tears.
That will do.
He closed the contacts. Green radiance swirled into darkness, a whirling tunnel across the black gulfs. The way home.
The light flared to swallow them. He saw Parris raise her hand in a wave. Then she was gone —
— and she was back, turning to look over her shoulder again, a sad smile touching the corner of her mouth. She waved. The light swallowed her again.
A span of seconds. All he would have, ever. His endless life, now one silent goodbye.
It was enough.
It would have to be.
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