DEF CON 30 Short Story Writing Contest
https://media.defcon.org/

Title: The Curse Of Immortality
Author: Matt Thomas


I don’t know what is driving me the most insane. There is currently a tie between the blinking dials and lights that I don’t understand and the constant noise coming from what I assume is the engine, but NASA checking in for the 4th time today is creeping up. I miss Wayne. He would always include a fun fact about something on Earth at the end of check in. His little updates helped remind me that I’m still a human being. But like just about everyone on the original team, Wayne retired years ago. He died, starvation they say. And the current scientists on the project are so sterile with conversation that I’m reminded that I am nothing more than a lab rat to these people.

As much as I complain, this setup is definitely better than my prior circumstances. When the Navy expedition submarine the Angler found me I was still stuck under the whale skull at the bottom of the Atlantic. They thought I was a fresh corpse dump, but according to the scientists who scooped me up the algae found on the bones and my body had been there for over a year. They were dumbfounded to find a living human at that depth. I was staggeringly unhelpful in answering their questions like “who are you” and “what are you” and “how did you get down there”. I don’t remember anything before that blinding searchlight on the submarine ruining the peaceful darkness that makes up the ocean.
It took them all of 2 weeks to determine I am resilient. The term they liked using was “unkillable”, which I guess is accurate since they tried their damndest. They ran every ethical test they could think of, but the majority would probably be considered unethical. Last I checked the Hippocratic Oath says “do no harm”, but I guess since I wasn’t actually affected physically by the poison or the flames or the starvation or the drownings they were still above board. I just found it strange that after they ran tests they viewed as morally justified they repeatedly apologized.

Once the lab determined I was less dead than the average person who spends years under the ocean, they got excited. Said I was the perfect candidate for a project they had been working on called LDE or “Last Delving Exploration”. It is a deep space mission to search for the closest colonizable planet. I have the right stuff because I could stay out longer than any other pilot. Not that I have to do any piloting. They gave me astronaut training over the course of a year, along with running experiments to determine everything I was “capable of”. That meant seeing if I needed food (nope), water (nope), oxygen (nope, duh), sleep (nope, but it helped keep me chipper).

By the end of the year they had designed and built a deep space shuttle capable of moving slowly, but for long periods of time using solar panels. My lack of needs meant they could pour all the weight of the spaceship into redundancies instead of pesky creature comforts.
One hard drive. They give me one damn hard drive to fill with any entertainment I want, 4 measly terabytes. I know that those NASA guys are picky about how much weight can be on this shuttle, but since we could cut out the food and water and didn't need a waste disposal system, I figure I could get a few more hard drives to keep me from going insane. You can only watch Friends so many times before you start seeing Ross and Rachel arguing next to you… Among the shows I picked the title “Hackers” kept my attention. Between the silliness and overacting there was the resilience and creativity that these young hackers had that resonated with me.

I think Saturn was the biggest let down of stupid space. "Oh the rings will be beautiful up close!" Bullshit, it might look cool from a distance, but after watching it and taking detailed photos of it for 2 Earth years, it gets boring. Mars gives Saturn a run for its money though, nothing but red sand for thousands of miles. I fucking hated Mars, with all the hype about how we'll colonize it, make it into a new Earth, it was not nearly as exciting as they thought it would be.

I have decided the NASA guys are idiots. They plan for every contingency, a system crash, a targeting computer crash, if there is a fire on any square inch of this ship, there is a code and a solution. They even took into account what would happen if my immortality stopped keeping me immortal, by the way, the ship would pilot itself back to Earth with all the data, including what happened to me. There was one thing those "geniuses" at NASA didn't think of, what if I stopped wanting to help them.

It started about 2 months before the mission, I had the thought "what if they want to leave me up there longer than they say, what if they never let me come home". 2 weeks later they gave me the hard drive to fill with whatever I wanted. They didn't care what it was, as long as it kept me quiet. So I filled it with around 3 terabytes of tv shows and movies, and 1 terabyte of all the information I could find on that shuttle type, how the communications work, and how they would remotely control the shuttle. And I've spent the last 5 years memorizing that precious terabyte of information. It's been 33 years since I was sent to space, and I successfully cut their connection to the controls. The red warning light came on, and I hear NASA desperately trying to guide me through diagnosing the problem, and all I can do is smile as I switch their coms off. I'm coming home.

After using the control panel to set my course back for Earth, I took a day to celebrate before turning NASA back on. They started threatening to shut off my lights until I relinquished control back to them. They didn’t have a lot to threaten me, it’s hard to take something away from someone you have given nothing. After about a week the threats stopped, moving to trying to reason with me. Something to the effect of “you will doom all mankind” and “humanity needs your sacrifice”. I am beyond caring about humanity. There isn’t a ton of evidence that I am even human, so why should I eternally suffer for them?
I worked out a system to keep myself from going crazy on the trip back. Every week I would turn on the communications to Earth to talk to them. I think that gave them hope that I would change my mind. It took 6 months for one of them to let slip that the name of the mission LDE wasn’t “Last Delving Exploration”, it was “Last Ditch Effort”. They knew the whole time that this mission was a long shot, but they felt it was worth sending the only person on the planet who isn’t able to die into space. I turned off the communications.

Look back home was always going to take several miracles, but I really thought I was doing a good job. Around year 3 (I stopped counting because it was bumming me out) the controls stopped responding instantaneously. The time between me hitting a button and the shuttle responding was getting sluggish, it took 4-5 seconds before the command went through. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but if your car didn’t turn until 4-5 seconds after you turned the steering wheel you would be concerned. Now scale up the problem to a billion dollar spaceship hurtling through the vacuum of space.

I had to break the radio silence I had going with mission control. I had kept them turned off for…. A month? A year? I had no idea at this point. One man answered (I was used to 5-7). Slurring his words, he sounded shocked that I had opened communications. “What the hell do you want?” he asked angrily. “My shuttle is having some response time issues, I need help figuring out what’s wrong.” I replied. I noted that the man is slurring his words slightly. “Why the hell should I help you?” the man asked. “Because that’s your job!” I yelled, “Your entire career is supposed to be supporting me, so support me.”. The man stayed silent for a moment, pondering this. “You selfish prick. How dare you make demands after what you did. Do you have any idea why your mission was so important?” the man asked. Wait, did he say ‘was’? “Your team never got around to mentioning it before strapping me to a seat and blasting me off of the face of the Earth.” I said. “You were the only one who could go, we needed someone who could stay out for long enough to find a new home. But you are too selfish to care. You could have been a hero.” The man’s volume decreased as he went through his rant. He takes a minute, the communications are open so I hear him typing but he isn’t speaking to me.

“Any ideas on my control problem?” I ask, trying to get his attention. After another minute or so of typing, the man starts laughing. It’s building and building, to the point that I imagine he is snotting on his shirt. He finally replies, “Well it looks like the controls are having some issues with the magnetic radiation, but that’s not your biggest worry.”. He starts laughing again. “Calm the hell down and tell me what my problem is!” I demand. I try not to give away my emotions in my voice when dealing with the scientists, it gives the psychologists they normally have on hand too much ammo to attempt to emotionally manipulate me into doing what they want. But in this case the man is pissing me off, how can he find this so funny?

“I don’t know if you have realized this, but a month ago you hit the Kuiper Belt. The section of the solar system that is filled with asteroids made of icy rock and metal. Now normally this wouldn’t be a problem, when astronomers say objects in space are close they mean relatively. Like how the Earth and the Moon are close, it’s still in the hundreds of thousands of miles. That being said, you are about 10 minutes from hitting a rock the size of Alaska.” He said, stumbling through his sentences. The man started laughing hysterically again. Then it hit me.

“I don’t have time to change my course, do I?” I asked softly. “You would have had to change course 2 days ago to even get close. I would say I am sorry, but you deserve what’s coming. If you had played your part you could have been a part of whatever new settlement humankind built on a whole new planet, but you couldn’t stand being bored. Humanity doomed because you were petty. This is NASA, signing off for the last time.” The line went dead. I tried to get him back, but it was futile.
The crash didn’t hurt, there was no big explosion like in the movies. The shuttle just crumpled like an aluminum soda can, and I was ripped into the inky blackness of space. Science says humans can stay conscious for up to 15 seconds, and survive for 90 seconds. That feels about right, I remember looking at the brightest light I could see. The sun is brilliant when exposed to it without the filter of an atmosphere. It is the last thing I wanted to see before slipping into unconsciousness. I stopped fighting, and allowed the inky blackness to envelope me and drifted into a peaceful sleep.