Logs from TeMC-672-23
A disturbing short story, the logs of the last caretaker of an abandoned asteroid mining colony.
This occurs probably some hundred years later than a game I conducted for Hungarian friends on this same place, to expand its history a bit, also relating to recent events.
Represents my feelings to be honest to some degree. Not sure if I would be able to relate much to stories where inspiring real life interaction took place, eh, guess that about covers most of them.
Rated Mature due to the potentially very disturbing theme.
23rd April, 2021: I thought this was a rather far-fetched fiction, however turns out it isn't. This guy was stranded on a container ship for four years by legal obligations.
Year 2, day 89
Oh well. I have no idea how to even begin.
So.
This arrived three days ago by the shuttle. Notebook. The docs from Central suggested me to do this. Pencil and paper. Not the computers. Detachment. Focus. Organize thoughts.
Since Jeff left it is very lonely here.
He has a family on Central, Laura was diagnosed with cancer, stage four, in nanoimmunotherapy even to this day. Got permission to leave earlier, I surrendered the escape shuttle to him. Who was supposed to replace him should have departed some forty days later.
I still don't know even the name. It is now 116 days since he had left. There is no escape shuttle either. The Corporation can screw it.
This place is so fucking dead.
Fifty cubic meters. It doesn't feel that much. Cramped everywhere with the crap. It was more cramped when Jeff was here, but I wish he was here. It is useless.
Year 2, day 92
Second survey alone.
Survey every sixty days. I can't even imagine what they are thinking. The colony is humongous. Empty, no pressurization, nothing. Eight districts, each a complete small city on its own deep under the surface.
Nothing changes here ever.
The darkness, the silence is frightening out there.
The nearest live person is a more than fifteen minutes round trip. Kev, but as good as if he wasn't there at all. Even that's only where the colony comms still work.
Travel the main routes.
Check for damages.
The whole colony is a wreck, dilapidated, severe disrepair. No chance anyone would really notice anything short of an impact crater.
Check for black material.
This... There is a description of this black amorphous substance. Something to report if found. Classified shit, guess something to do with mining. Maybe better that I don't have any idea what shit who lived here were exposed to.
It was fun with Jeff to explore.
Alone it is creepy.
People lived here and nobody is here any more.
Year 2, day 102
Painting for Geoff.
These ancient domes.
District five with those harrowing old fragments of decorations suggesting it was built to house families with young children. Wrecks of playground toys.
Us as those tall lizard people.
We call them Lizardfolk, they don't have spoken language using their strange signs and optics. They always fascinated me, and so glad I found Geoff with a similar interest.
Never seen one for real.
Wish if at least Geoff was actually one, but he isn't.
Doesn't matter.
Wish we could meet some day. Helps in this place, to imagine. Some day.
Not wholly content, the digital pen isn't very good either. Struggling with shapes.
Year 2, day 117
I don't much like supply day.
Too much work, takes away a whole day to sort out everything and fill the transport shuttle for the journey back.
Wish I fit in that shuttle. If I did, I would leave. Abbot can get fucked.
This is just not a good way to get that money I need to live. To live. Where? When? I have a load of it yet nowhere near enough for owning any apartment in Central even. If I stayed, that would take some ten more years.
This whole shit is fucked.
Year 2, day 121
Missing Jeff.
They say Laura should be able to make it. To heal. I can totally understand he had to leave to be with her.
The corporation can go fuck itself.
I hate it. Everyone is so wonderfully supportive by messaging. Working on it. Sure. Tossing a few nice words is easy and cheap.
No escape shuttle and no partner since more than half a year.
Year 2, day 153
Out alone again for the survey. The third.
The whole place feels like a screwed up haunted virtual reality.
You don't feel anything really expect yourself. How your own body presses against things as you move in the suit.
There is no sound from outside. It is vacuum, so there can't be.
Contours are sharp, the only dust to smooth it is what my own movements stir.
Withered remnants of plants. Hydroponic pots. To make an impression of a park, central square. Signs, all dark. Black hollows of windows. Furniture with that fine dust all over them. Footprints.
My footprints. Jeff's. Then of those who were stationed here before. There, forever, until the times end.
Wish Geoff was here. Or really anyone.
Year 2, day 160
Fantasies.
Geoff likes it. He told he didn't see those lizards either in life. But can imagine them so well.
Sexual sort of things.
It is odd. To imagine it all in silence. Signs and touch. Mostly touch.
Loving these ideas.
Painting, something serene in the ruins of the old colony. With the artistic freedom of giving it air so we can be outside for real.
Hoping one day this will end and I could maybe meet him.
Year 2, day 177
It is all the same.
Had to order some clothes, hating it, but I needed them. The stuff is falling apart with barely any use, barely any gravity. It is a nuisance that they wouldn't use better materials.
Go through the chore of finding shit of the proper sizes and design, order those, get them understand that they need to deliver for shuttle pickup. And then get used to those new shirts and pants.
Alone, I have a temptation to screw it. Why care? And forget to shut off the camera as well.
Though I can imagine them cutting my salary as well. Need to keep doing my job.
Most of which is keeping this shithole operational.
Year 2, day 185
Alone since a year today.
It is 222 days since Jeff had left.
His Laura is doing well. Released from care, scheduled check-ups to monitor any resurgence. He won't come back which I can understand.
I would like if he did. But it isn't really the problem. The corporation should have hired somebody already and sent to me as partner as well as the escape shuttle.
They are keeping me here alone without means for escape since a year.
It is a mess. Can't find anyone for my case in Central. Each mining colony had their own systems. They operated this by convicts, and even after shut down, its status wasn't changed. How I could have figured this back then?!
What I get is that being the only person here, it is myself who I can turn to for help resolving my case.
They send me away. I don't belong to them, they can't help.
Seek for mental health support to cope with loneliness until the situation resolves.
Just wish I could leave. To meet Geoff. Or anyone.
Year 2, day 213
This is disturbing.
Pushing myself forth in those silent, haunted corridors. I know I am alone but I am still anxious.
The place is humongous. We never saw all of it. Never saw half of it, or even a quarter of it.
It is all empty and devoid of air. Cold and dead. Yet I still feel being watched. As if something alive and horrible was lurking in it, irrational, the deprivation of senses playing tricks on me. The fact that it would be impossible to hear it even if there was.
I got lost for an hour. Somewhere near District 6. That area I know is particularly bad, the comms system gone, no help from the computer. Those are the most wretched part of the colony, neglect and disrepair, warped panelling, cables and steel framework hanging, broken, bent and distorted, old trash from the days when the colony was still alive tangled up in it.
We never got far into that district even together. We are supposed to, but it is in such state that we were glad we could get out of it. Regain comms link. Know where we were. Get back. Report it done.
Why I am even still doing it?
I suppose they could check by the comms system.
They could trace where I was, where I had been.
At least those parts where it still works.
I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it alone.
I dream of the place being lit, being pressurized, an idyllic fiction of post-apocalypse. With us, two lizardmen, together. I paint it, but it is so intangibly distant.
Year 3, day 1
So my third year in this wretched place starts.
I talk with Geoff a lot. Love him.
How much I would like to leave, how the corporation screwed me.
He can't help. I understand. He probably couldn't even if he had a ship. In fact he is probably even worse off than me, having a shit job, the salary barely sufficient after the rent. Miserable little place, some ten cubic meters, where he lives.
I still get paid well. Just what for?
To sit here alone and pray for this mess to not fall apart on me?
To dream, that's all what's left.
We are working on it. Of course you are.
Year 3, day 55
Preparing for the upcoming survey.
I don't want to go out.
So far. So far down there.
The doctors recommend me more outdoors activity. To go and explore. The spacesuits are there, systems are operational, I could do it. I am doing it. But it is disturbing alone.
I have this thought. To keep going. To keep on and just don't return.
I feel I am alienating Geoff from me.
At times he doesn't respond for a day or two. It is painful enough with the almost 30 seconds turnaround to Central.
I want to feel him for real. To be able to touch him.
It is difficult to paint. I can't believe it much any more.
Outside I walk. Alone in the dark, eerie shadows dancing in the light, shadows of a past when this place still had sound, when there are still people living here.
They are around. Welcoming me to join them.
Year 3, day 66
(Page is heavily worn by repeated erases)
This.
What I had seen.
Still don't know. Don't know what it was.
I wanted to die.
Was going. The survey.
Those endless dilapidated corridors.
The hospital and the cemetery, those urns in the walls, rows and rows of urns with no end. Knew it. Gone there, that I consciously remember, between District four and one.
Kept wandering. The seven and then towards the six where the comms is completely dead.
I wanted to get lost and die in the six.
Gone into narrow corridors, such we never cared about even together. Kept on. I remember the fear. Someone watching. As if something could attack. But there was nothing. And I wanted to die. To imagine. Geoff. Embrace of lizarfolks.
I fucking don't know if I had seen that or imagined.
There was that place.
Cells.
Things.
There were things in those cells.
Bodies.
I don't know what sort of bodies.
And then in the middle of the corridor was it.
The light drifted on it, the green shimmer. Scales. Still intact.
They were laying there dead, embracing.
Year 3, day 67
Fucking hell.
I knew well I wake up to the suit's alarm later. And somehow I found my way out of the six. But when I woke up I wasn't there.
I wouldn't be able to recall where I was. As soon as I somehow reached a working comms unit's range, I asked for guidance from the computer. Wouldn't have been able to get back on my own. I was barely aware of myself.
Year 3, day 70
In my report I only stated I got lost.
That I am getting severely disoriented, hallucinating and need to be taken away from here.
They are doing what they can. As fucking always.
In contact with mental health independently. I told them the same, only adding that I intended to end my life. I am too freaked out to tell about what I had seen or to reveal the details of my relationship with Geoff.
They found me by him. I had left him a departure message before going to the survey.
I probably shouldn't have.
But.
You can not leave completely alone.
You just can't.
Exchanging messages with mental health.
They don't seem to understand this shit. They don't seem to understand that there is no-one here. That I am stranded on a fucking abandoned mining colony fifteen light minutes from the nearest inhabited place.
Everything they say and I have access to I tried at this point.
A year ago they worked. Now they don't. They no longer do.
I need to leave.
Year 3, day 87
Why?
I am losing contact with Geoff.
Hating it. Can't write coherent messages any more. I just want to get out of here. To meet him.
But he doesn't seem to be interested any more.
The fantasies are tainted.
The lizardfolk are dead.
Year 3, day 93
I wasn't supposed to do this.
There was a ship on a nearby course.
The contract with the corporation prohibits conducting any business with any privately owned third-party vessel. I don't fucking care.
Contacted them.
Pleaded to them to come, to land, to take me away wherever they go and anything they want.
Detailed them the situation. Alone. Mining colony 23 owned by Abbot Fission Corporation. That they left me here.
I got to know they weren't from here. Traders who don't care, and were already on the way to set course towards a jump away from this system.
They broke contact.
Geoff told me they might have seen this shit as an ambush.
I just fucking want to leave, anywhere.
Year 3, day 102
Sent messages.
Again, again in this wretched mess.
Mental health. Get medication.
Don't die.
Why? Fucking why? For the fucking Corporation? Or it is just too fucking uncomfortable to live with?
Nice words, there are always nice words. Those are so cheap, and so easy to send off from dozens of light minutes away.
Year 3, day 104
Fuck the Corporation.
Fuck the doctors.
Fuck Geoff.
Whoever finds this. If anyone, ever.
I am sorry.
Epilogue
The Garkatorra had landed on the giant asteroid almost spherical in shape in search after anything salvageable. They had the coarse details, even that this system had the label TeMC-672 during the millenia of Terran occupation, that an asteroid of roughly this shape and location had the 23rd mining colony on it.
The ship wasn't commanded by humans.
A small group of lanky Shiriats had emerged in their spacesuits to examine the area around what must have been the former port, descending into the deeper regions of the former colony, where they soon discovered the small base where the last caretakers had lived.
They could easily pry open its lock only to find a horrible disarray despite the exteriors being still intact.
As if somebody had deliberately tore the place apart.
No trace of that person could be found. The only really notable clue of his possible whereabouts was a missing spacesuit, at least if all three lockers were supposed to contain one in the base's last days.
They decided to spend a few days here, to investigate the deeper reaches for anything valuable possibly have been left behind.
Xikata, having a fluent, solid knowledge of English was leafing through a harrowing small diary she had picked up on the first day investigating that base.
Suddenly the comms unit sprang alive, Tiero logging in, his raspy Akror calling her attention.
"I think I had just found the third suit."
His camera swung forth towards the lights.
Halfway out of his suit, a long dead human embraced frozen almost as if caressing the distorted forms of a pair of lizardfolk.