I Seize Hope With Both Hands

Originally posted here June 30, 2022:

writing-prompt-s:

After a bad crash you’ve found yourself drifting through space, but your suit says you ran out of oxygen an hour ago.

The first thing is this: do not panic.

Do not panic.

Panic won’t help.

There’s two options here. There’s only two. Either the suit readout is incorrect, or I’m dead. Those are the only options, there’s no other possibility.

It would be foolish to assume I am dead. If I am, there’s not much I can do to change it, but if I’m not, I still have a chance.

So, until proven otherwise, I am not dead.

I am not panicking.

(I am panicking very slightly, but functioning.)

I am having the suit run a diagnostic.

I am trying to get my bearings and trying to remember what happened. I can do neither of these- I believe I may have taken a head injury in the process of whatever has occurred. Which is a significant medical emergency in it’s own right, really, but I don’t have time to deal with that right now, because I have a much more significant emergency in front of me.

The suit diagnostic is unhelpful.

In fact, it seems to jam the distress signal my suit was automatically sending out.

Fuck.

It is impossible to judge the speed at which I am moving through space. My suit readout is untrustworthy, and the only objects to judge by are the distant stars.

I do not move fast enough to use them as a point of reference.

I cannot remember what happened, only a bright flash and a sudden jerking.

My radio is down. I do not see the station, I do not know how long I’ve been here, my suit cannot be trusted, and wherever I am, I am moving farther from the station- from safety and rescue.

Oxygen and malfunctioning suit aside, there’s a good chance that I will very soon be dead.

It’s the risk, it’s the price, for doing this work. For coming up to be among the stars- that your last breath might be among them, far from gravity or fresh air or apples growing on trees in dappled sunlight.

Still, I haven’t taken it yet.

I run another suit diagnostic. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to have to do something a little bit dangerous.

While the diagnostic is running, I try once again to take stock of where I am.

I cannot find a point of familiarity, and I blame my personal disorientation. I’m probably emotionally compromised enough that placing myself in relation to where I had been is going to be difficult, if not impossible. Still, it’s… alarming, that I can’t recognize the stars.

I should know them.

I cannot be that far from the station, astronomically speaking. I should know them.

The suit diagnostic completes after another sixty seconds, but it hasn’t worked, and the suit readout is still fucked.

I’m going to have to do something a little bit dangerous.

The next step is to do a full shut down of the suit.

If the system is too fried to come back up, I will die. I will not have oxygen to breathe, whatever is left of that. I will not have a suit filtering my exhaled carbon dioxide away, and I will be without the heating in the suit to protect me from the cold of space. Any one of these could kill me very quickly, in combination they will kill me a little faster.

If this doesn’t fix the suit, I am about to die.

If it does fix the suit, it is still extraordinarily risky. I will still be without power, or oxygen flow, or CO2 filtering for a long enough period that this is a dangerous maneuver.

But without the distress signal, I cannot be found- space is too large, and I am too small. If I don’t do this, I will certainly die of the same problems- no oxygen, too much carbon dioxide, no heat. If I don’t do it, I will die. If I do, I might die.

Maybe even I will probably die. If not in the process of bringing the suit up, and even if the suit comes up fully, the chances that I live to write home about it are slim.

But slim odds versus zero odds… slim looks pretty good to me.

I seize hope with both hands, and power the suit down.

The process of bringing the suit back up is a pain in the ass when you’re on the station. There’s protocols to follow, you have to calibrate different bits. It is… daunting, and terrifying, when you feel the cold start seeping in through the protective layers. When you know with every exhale, you are dumping more poison into the air.

When you know that if the process fails, you’re just dead.

There really should be an emergency, streamlined reboot process for situations like this, and I will be sure to write a strongly-worded letter about that, if I get the chance. Strongly worded.

Waiting, now.

Just waiting.

Watching the HUD and moving my hands and feet when I’m told to, taking deep breaths as instructed and internally cursing the necessary waste of oxygen.

Waiting. It’s cold, and I’m starting to feel a bit- not good, but I’m waiting. I am waiting.

Finally, the suit is functional.

I didn’t die.

I do not feel… particularly great right now, and there’s a world of hurts that my body would like to register a complaint about, but I cannot deal with that right now, so I am not going to.

That is a problem to be dealt with later, or never, but not now.

I have oxygen left- not much. More than I hoped, but I didn’t hope for much.

Minutes, rather than hours. Hours would be nice, but minutes- minutes is okay. The shuttle travels fast, they might be looking for me.

It has been about 45 minutes since the event that caused this situation took place.

Which is an alarming amount of time, but there’s a possibility I’m still in range. Especially if they came after me right away. (If they’re still alive, if the whole station didn’t go up, if if if- I can do nothing about the ifs.)

I set the suit to put out a distress signal.

Maybe they’re on their way right now, and panicked when my suit blipped out.

Maybe they sighed with relief when they picked it back up.

They won’t be able to read my telemetry until they’re pretty close, so they wouldn’t know why my suit went down and came up, but it’s the kind of thing that would only happen if I was alive.

So if they’re looking for me, they would have been stressed, but relieved. If.

There’s not much power left, in the suit. More than there is oxygen- I’ll run out of air before the heater shuts off.

Nothing I can do about that. It is what it is.

There is something of a relief in that, oddly. My odds are not good, but I have done everything to ensure the best chance possible.

It may not be enough.

It probably isn’t, if I’m being honest. What happens next is beyond my power to effect.

All I can do now is wait. Wait, and hope.

I turn my eyes to the stars. And I wait. And I hope.

I am not trying to remember which is which, right now. It’s a futile exercise. I’m just looking at them. Taking them in.

Longer ago than I can really fathom, my distant ancestors first raised their eyes to the stars.

They’ve been a source of wonder, of fear, of possibility and imagination for a long time. Since maybe before we were homo sapiens, maybe further back still. I think of some distant, long ago ancestor, more ape-like than I am, raising their eyes to the stars above the hills.

The stars I float among, right now.

There’s worst places to take your last breath. There really are.

And I remind myself: I haven’t taken it yet. Maybe soon, but not yet.

Not yet.