A Sketch on Human Nature

A Story by Elliot B.

This story is created with MarsOne and SpaceX in mind. Enjoy!

Calling for help would be useless. The nearest base was twelve light-years away, which would take even the fastest message two days to be received, and then even if the base had a ship ready, the journey was two weeks for the fastest vessel in the fleet. Time till help could arrive: seventeen days. Time till impact: four minutes.

It has always been man’s mission to explore and conquer the unknown. In the early days of man, this meant harnessing fire. Once fire was controlled, then water too also needed to be explored, which led to the discovery of more continents. Once water was vanquished, then air also must be defeated by man. Once all of these obstacles were cleared, man needed other barriers to break through. For some this meant the eradication of disease, for others, the banishing of poverty from this planet, but most of all, mankind turned their eyes upward, beyond the ceiling of clouds.

Man eventually conquered the Moon, Mars, Titan, Venus, Europa, Pluto, and all other worlds in the solar system, but after a while, this was still not enough. Man needed to go further. Much like the early space agencies who wanted to break out of the blue shell surrounding their planet, man anxiously wanted to break through the Oort cloud into interstellar space.

However, just as many men who had failed in their attempts to master the flame could testify, catastrophe always precedes progress. Years before the first landing on the Moon, a fiery explosion killed the first crew of what would become the successful Apollo program. When man proposed the first governmental solution to poverty, it instead enslaved many of the impoverished instead of freeing them. The first interplanetary engine exploded during a tourist space flight, killing twenty-three passengers and forty colonists. All endeavors fail before they succeed. I was a test pilot of a new engine that was designed to propel a ship at speeds previously unknown to man, and now my mission was ending in catastrophe.

I looked down at my instruments. Time till impact had fallen to about thirty seconds. My airspeed had long since reached terminal velocity, the engines were not putting out enough thrust to slow my fall, and the g-forces pinned me to my chair. There was no escape. Two seconds. One. The last second felt an eternity. I saw each hundredth of a second change to the next. I closed my eyes and waited for my death.

…

I woke with a start. I looked around me. I was not dead, and this was no afterlife. I was no longer in the space capsule, but I was surrounded by sand. I saw the remains of my ship around one hundred yards away. The emergency thrusters must have slowed the ship’s fall to a slow enough speed for the auto-eject to activate. I tried to move. One leg was broken and I couldn’t feel anything below waist. Blood stained the white sand where my left arm was. I had a nasty gash that had exposed a tendon, and I felt like it would have been better to have died in a crash than live in the desert of an abandoned world with blood pouring out of my arm like water out of a faucet. The air was stale, but as earlier probes had reported, it was breathable. I needed to get to the wreck of my ship to bandage my wounds and report the incident, even though rescue was impossible. It was almost nightfall by the time I managed to crawl to the wreck, where nothing but some of my personal hand-held equipment was still in working shape.

My situation is this: I am stranded on a desert planet, with no food or water, only a blood-soaked uniform as a temporary bandage for my arm, and my communication systems are out. It will be two weeks before the nearest base expect me back, and when I do not return, it will be another two weeks before a rescue mission arrives, and then at least another week while the planet is scanned for wreckage.

So here I am, dying of my injuries, writing this log entry, which I hope is discovered when a rescue mission arrives in more than a month. My consolation is that what is a catastrophe for me will lead to progress for others. Unfortunately, as history has shown over and over, man will not be content to settle for what they have, but will rather push for more, which will mean more failures and more catastrophes.

So concludes my philosophical report. I am feeling faint from loss of blood, the white sand beneath me is dyed a very deep red, and I have had to clean off the screen of my personal device many times during the last hour. The sky begins to turn a brilliant orange. The sun is rising, but I am setting.

© 2017 Elliot B.

Author's Note

I'm new to this, so be kind. ;)

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Reviews

Minerva

O really enjoyed reading this. Especially in the beginning when you were going through everything man has conquered. The ending line was delivered beautifully. Great job! :)