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The Only Other Astronaut On This Mission Died Six Weeks Ago · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to creep Cast.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Today, we are diving into another cosmic horror uh phenomenon
• 0:18
  known as the only Other. The only other astronaut on
• 0:20
  the on this mock. The only other astronaut on this
• 0:23
  mission died six weeks ago, but the computer insists there's life.
• 0:27
  Oh my god, but the computer insists their life still.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: Fuck.
• 0:33
  Speaker 4: The only one.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago,
• 0:38
  but the computer insists their life signs are still stable.
• 0:41
  Speaker 4: Got it first try? And this is an often we've
• 0:43
  read before.
• 0:44
  Speaker 5: What's funny is, uh, people are going to start thinking
• 0:47
  you're doing that on purpose.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: I am I cannot read. I'm dumb. I am a
• 0:52
  fucking moron. Okay, that's why do you think I only
• 0:54
  do the voices? Okay if I had to read this,
• 0:56
  can you imagine if I had to read the whole thing?
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: It would not work, would not work. Now, this is
• 1:03
  Christian wall That's why you need me.
• 1:05
  Speaker 4: Don't forget that. That's true. Away.
• 1:06
  Speaker 5: So yes, the story is by Christian Wallace. So we
• 1:08
  actually we have a list in like our discord of
• 1:11
  like stories. You all recommend that we just kind of
• 1:13
  keep tally of and then before we record an episode,
• 1:15
  we just go through and like say, like, this is
• 1:17
  a good one. So this title sounded interesting and it
• 1:20
  was highly rated, and then after we go to check
• 1:22
  it out. Sure enough, Christian Wallace is the author of
• 1:26
  the My Wife has taken Our Roleplay too Far and
• 1:29
  my husband has taken our role Play too Far, which
• 1:31
  were some pretty good stories a fan of that we
• 1:34
  read on the channel. Yeah, they're pretty cool, very unique,
• 1:37
  very creative, interesting body horror. So now coincidentally we've come
• 1:41
  across another one of this guy's work. So Christian Wallace
• 1:44
  is a fantastic author. You can check out a bunch
• 1:48
  of his stories. He gus is on website Christian Wallace.
• 1:51
  Speaker 4: It's c. H. Wallace dot co dot uk. He's British,
• 1:55
  but don't hold that against him.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: Guy seems like a complete sweetheart. His bio on his
• 2:00
  Reddit is pretty much him just basically being like, yeah,
• 2:03
  feel free to narrate my stuff, just be sure to
• 2:06
  get permission, and you know, if you want writing advice
• 2:09
  or writing help, just hit me up. He seems like
• 2:12
  a complete and total sweetheart. So I'm excited to and
• 2:15
  so I'm excited to read this one too, because we
• 2:16
  do not dive into cosmic horror enough, not enough, we
• 2:20
  do not, I agree, especially with stuff that's like I'm
• 2:23
  obviously guessing that this is centered in space. So you know,
• 2:26
  we've had we've had stuff that's like landed on Earth
• 2:28
  or you know, cosmic things that have come down to Earth.
• 2:31
  But to have it actually be about a spaceman is
• 2:34
  pretty is a lot of fun.
• 2:35
  Speaker 4: I agree. I agree.
• 2:37
  Speaker 5: I'm trying to see if he has any published works
• 2:40
  right now. I know he has some like audio readings
• 2:42
  and stuff like that.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of his work here is a
• 2:45
  lot of the short stories here are published.
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: It seems that way. Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 2:50
  Speaker 5: He has some horror stories published through Relics Books. One
• 2:54
  of them that it looks like came out last month
• 2:56
  or a couple of months ago, is a story or
• 3:00
  is a book called with Teeth, which seems to be
• 3:04
  about a temple under the Arctic eyes like that. Oh, oh,
• 3:08
  that's one of the short stories in there. Oh, it's
• 3:09
  a publication of short stories. I see, because if you
• 3:12
  go to his website and look through a lot of
• 3:15
  his stories, he has a ton of stuff that has
• 3:17
  to do with like Arctic expeditions and stuff like that.
• 3:20
  Speaker 4: He's posted to no sleep.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Arctic expeditions, Arctic expeditions. How fun? Just for like ale,
• 3:26
  I set up a horror thing.
• 3:28
  Speaker 4: Also, who actually is.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Who would want to do that in their real life?
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: Why I do that?
• 3:32
  Speaker 5: Absolutely not? You know, I mean, like I get it
• 3:34
  when it was old. It was pretty cool when it
• 3:36
  was old, but.
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: Stood now I'll pass exactly, yeah, exactly.
• 3:42
  Speaker 5: But with Teeth looks pretty cool and it looks like
• 3:45
  it has four and a half stars on Amazon, which
• 3:48
  is pretty solid. So you can get a kindle version,
• 3:51
  get hardcover paperback, all that stuff. So if you like
• 3:54
  the role play story and like this one, be sure
• 3:56
  to check out his work with Teeth on Amazon. Show
• 3:59
  him some love.
• 4:00
  Speaker 6: Oh.
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  Speaker 2: Also, I want to start this off too by saying,
• 4:03
  just to get a general consensus of what people think about.
• 4:06
  Speaker 4: I sent Isaiah this message before to do that.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: I said Isaiah this message and he said, hey, you're
• 4:12
  a good record now or what are you going to record?
• 4:15
  And I said, I said I'm golden right now, which
• 4:18
  I thought was really cute because instead of now, I
• 4:20
  put me out And now he's been giving me shit
• 4:22
  because I sent him a voice memo kind of explaining
• 4:24
  that joke. And I was just said, do you want
• 4:28
  to play it over your phone? Isaiah? Instead of right now?
• 4:32
  I put right now like a cat.
• 4:35
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 4:37
  Speaker 7: Well wow, I'm purring because I'm happy.
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: Oh my good little pussie. I thought that.
• 5:07
  Speaker 2: Uh, I just thought that that was a fine. I
• 5:11
  don't know, I just I guess. You know, when you
• 5:13
  send your friend something it's met with such an abrasive reaction.
• 5:18
  I just thought it was you know, I don't know,
• 5:21
  you know, I guess, am I the bad guy for
• 5:23
  send that message? I guess is why I want to
• 5:25
  know out of our audience here, But without further ado,
• 5:29
  I'm ready to dive in and hear about this spooky astronaut.
• 5:35
  Speaker 5: Be sure to keep liking and supporting us on Spotify.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: Oh true, true, See now you're now you're being a
• 5:44
  cute little kiddie. Now you're being a good little kitty
• 5:45
  by saying that.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Because Also, be sure to check us out on Spotify.
• 5:51
  Speaker 4: Give us a rating there helps us out. Also check
• 5:54
  us out on Apple Podcasts. Check us out there. Audio listeners,
• 5:57
  you know what, if this is.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: Your first time listening to us, or if you've listened
• 5:59
  to us for.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Maybe maybe take this one solo and go listen to
• 6:03
  it in the audio in your car right on Spotify,
• 6:05
  and Ran gets there because it helps us.
• 6:07
  Speaker 4: Thank you guys so much.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: All right, my cute little, my cute little whiskers, go
• 6:12
  ahead and start us off.
• 6:14
  Speaker 5: The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago,
• 6:18
  but the computer insists their life signs are still stable.
• 6:24
  When Ben died, he made very little.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Noise when when been drowned.
• 6:31
  Speaker 4: I can't even do the gold Bluten thing right? Why
• 6:36
  what's wrong?
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: A story can't A story can't start with when Ben
• 6:42
  died without It's just everything.
• 6:45
  Speaker 4: It's just so much at once. It's it's you, It's
• 6:50
  I was.
• 6:51
  Speaker 5: I was on the phone earlier talking about entertainment lawyers
• 6:55
  for like a copyright strike thing on the channel, and
• 6:57
  then I like, oh my, my good pal and busy
• 7:00
  this partner Hunter responded, let me hear what he has
• 7:03
  to say. And then it's just it is. It is
• 7:07
  that it is something that I'm not built for. It's
• 7:12
  just it's a lot at once.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hunting, it's hunting an eerie How similar that
• 7:19
  sounds to the conversation my mom had before she left
• 7:22
  my father.
• 7:22
  Speaker 5: Go ahead, if I if I could divorce you, I
• 7:30
  would have done so. But I'm stuck here. It's too good.
• 7:38
  Too many people watch the show. There's too much money.
• 7:44
  Come on, there's too much. There's too many advertisers, and
• 7:47
  there's too many employees to it.
• 7:49
  Speaker 4: I can't get out. I'm stuck.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: Give me.
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: What if I did it? What well?
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: You you had a lot of there'd be you know,
• 8:02
  there'd be a pin of kittens, very sad right now.
• 8:05
  Speaker 4: I'd be I'd be free, I could be out of here.
• 8:09
  It would be over. Then just go ahead and do it, then, dud,
• 8:13
  if it's that bad to do it, you'd like that
• 8:16
  one into Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, the
• 8:22
  astronauts are dead.
• 8:23
  Speaker 5: An astronaut is dead now, okay, the only other astronauts dead.
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  Six weeks ago, when Ben died, he made very little noise.
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  It was the computers that alerted me, shrill alarms and
• 8:35
  flashing lights. I hadn't even got it out of my
• 8:38
  sleeping bag before my smart watch had lit up with
• 8:40
  half a dozen messages about system failures.
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  Speaker 8: O Great monitor failure, skin Conductance monitor failure, the zero
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  two monitor failure.
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  Speaker 5: The situation didn't sink in until I was shaking an
• 8:56
  unresponsive Ben, white eyes rolling back to his skull, blood
• 9:01
  pooling in his ears like red jelly, viscosity, mass, no gravity.
• 9:07
  It made me nauseous to look at. HQ would later say,
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  Ben died from ananderism. What in a million, a freak
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  death that just happened to occur in low Earth orbit?
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  Speaker 4: So what now, I asked her.
• 9:20
  Speaker 5: After all the panic had died down to the reality
• 9:22
  of my situation finally settled in, HQ sent me a
• 9:26
  rarely used or disgust document that outline what I'd have
• 9:30
  to do. Bodies pose a unique threat in microgravity, it explained,
• 9:35
  all that order becomes disordered what his solid turns to liquid,
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  but his liquid turns to gas. First thing I needed
• 9:43
  to do was to put Ben's body somewhere that had
• 9:45
  no oxygen and was freezing cold, somewhere he would pose
• 9:49
  no danger to himself or me, isolated but easily retrievable.
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  The conclusion was obvious. I knew what they'd suggest before
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  I even reached that part of the booklet. It happened
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  so fast that Ben was still warm when I put
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  him in the special bag designed to endure the vacuum
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  of space. I kept expecting him to protest as I
• 10:11
  pulled it, stiffening limbs and manipulated swelling joints. Every step
• 10:16
  of the process, every zip, every bit of elcrow. I
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  had to remind myself he wasn't going to complain. It
• 10:23
  felt intimate, but it wasn't. Intimacy requires two people. By
• 10:28
  that point, Ben was just me.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if I agree with that last line.
• 10:33
  Speaker 5: By the way, this author, wait, what line don't you
• 10:37
  agree with?
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: In suocross? Two people have been very in.
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  Speaker 4: That's what I was.
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  Speaker 5: That's the part I was afraid you were going to
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  agree with. Come on, man, don't say that on the podcast.
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: You know what's actually fight to tie that in intimate
• 10:51
  with yourself?
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  Speaker 3: Right?
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  Speaker 5: You say the craziest things and just diverge into go
• 10:55
  ahead whatever.
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  Speaker 1: I just want to say that I saw my everybody
• 10:58
  in their life as a human crypt It's true and mine.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: His name was mister Floppy Way. The reason that is
• 11:05
  because I know very well that a man can be
• 11:07
  intimate with himself is because I remember one time a sleepover.
• 11:12
  We sat there and uh, a kid, excuse me, I
• 11:16
  feel sick of one goes sleep, like, all right, who
• 11:18
  gives a shit? We're playing MLB the show on PS two,
• 11:21
  great game, go upstairs, and before we know we hear
• 11:25
  him like giggling in the room and we hear like
• 11:26
  a We're like, that's disgusting. We know what he's doing.
• 11:31
  But when we heard we he was talking to himself
• 11:33
  in the room Isaiah, and he was saying, it's so floppy,
• 11:37
  so floppy, like he was flopping it back and forth.
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  Speaker 4: And we never said.
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  Speaker 2: Anything about it, but we made an inside joke and
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  we called him mister Floppy for the rest of our lives.
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  And I ran into him at the grocery store the
• 11:46
  other day.
• 11:53
  Speaker 4: If I do it, I'm killing you first. Why what
• 11:57
  do you know? Have your own cryptid kind of character
• 11:59
  in your life. It would be cruel to push this
• 12:02
  on to someone else.
• 12:03
  Speaker 9: I've decided, Okay, come on, you tell me you didn't.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: You don't think that the mister Also we were young,
• 12:12
  mister Foppy, that boy, I don't know what was going on,
• 12:14
  but there were some noises being made. It was disturbing, right,
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  so Floppy, I saw him.
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  Speaker 4: What are you even talking about?
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  Speaker 3: What do you mean?
• 12:27
  Speaker 4: What am I talking about.
• 12:28
  Speaker 5: I I've like my ears are ringing right now, so
• 12:32
  I'm starting to sweat.
• 12:33
  Speaker 4: I'm getting it.
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  Speaker 1: Like I'd tell you, what was the most disturbing part
• 12:36
  about it is that he had pistachio muffins in his cart.
• 12:40
  Speaker 4: We no, no, he wants that. No, you know what.
• 12:42
  Speaker 5: At this point, no, he did it. I don't know
• 12:44
  what you're talking about. So I said, there's no way.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: I said, Derek, it's nice to see it. He's like,
• 12:49
  oh my god, it's been so long.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: And I knew that he was just packing some heat
• 12:51
  in his pants, so I didn't get too close, but
• 12:53
  I saw they had get four trays of pistachio muffins,
• 12:56
  and to me, that was like a new thing and
• 12:58
  more lore you a lot of pistafe. Maybe it makes
• 13:00
  you well in doubt that mofucker had pistachio muffins out
• 13:03
  the wuha.
• 13:04
  Speaker 5: What do you think listener's response to things like this
• 13:07
  is do you think they hear this and they're like, Wow, that's.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: That's so yeah, man, sorry that I'm just trying to
• 13:13
  tell you bits of my life. Things are going on with,
• 13:15
  you know, I thought that, you know.
• 13:17
  Speaker 5: For what we had absolutely should be. To be fair,
• 13:20
  How does this pertain to what we're talking about?
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: How does anyway he requires two people? Intimacy requires two people?
• 13:27
  I said, I disagree. I know that people can be
• 13:29
  talking about a guy.
• 13:30
  Speaker 5: In a store with the pistachio muffets.
• 13:32
  Speaker 4: What mister flopp what what? What does that have to
• 13:36
  do with an astronaut?
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: Has nothing to do with the astronaut, but it has
• 13:39
  to do with the two people. Mister mister Floppy was
• 13:43
  very intimate with himself. That's all I had to say.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: And I was going to I was going to say
• 13:48
  that the rest of it was very well written, and
• 13:51
  that's it too. I love the visual of the swollen
• 13:53
  joints and having to put somebody basically into a giant,
• 13:55
  goddamn ziplock bag.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: But then I couldn't get past the miss mister Floppy.
• 14:00
  I thought it pertaining. I'm sorry if it didn't, I
• 14:02
  apologize If it doesn't.
• 14:08
  Speaker 5: Maybe I can say like the right combination of words
• 14:11
  to get the podcast taken off of YouTube, and then
• 14:14
  maybe that would be enough to get me out of
• 14:16
  the obligations for it.
• 14:19
  Speaker 4: I bet you know what was the colorful ones? Right now?
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: You know I I I'm surprised.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: I actually thought that you would be somewhat intrigued by
• 14:27
  what I had to say. But I I'll keep it
• 14:30
  to myself.
• 14:31
  Speaker 4: I'm gonna drop words you haven't heard of for I fit.
• 14:35
  It gets me out of this. Every dialect of some.
• 14:42
  Speaker 5: Every every language, every pronunciation.
• 14:47
  Speaker 4: Consumer said, hate speech. That's what it would sound like.
• 14:50
  Speaker 5: They're They're gonna have to make a new word for
• 14:52
  what I'm gonna do.
• 14:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll hit everyone. I won't take any prisons.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: All right.
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: Well, wait, gets across the board.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: What do you think of the idea of having to
• 15:04
  pack somebody up and put him out in space?
• 15:06
  Speaker 5: I think what I was going to say about that
• 15:08
  paragraph is I love the way that Christian because he
• 15:12
  did the same thing with the like descriptors in the
• 15:16
  role play stories right where he takes these like these
• 15:20
  like concepts no one can relate to, like an adult
• 15:23
  man reverting to a baby's form, or here talking about
• 15:26
  like someone dying in space how the blood congeals. But
• 15:30
  he describes it so well and so thoroughly, it feels
• 15:32
  like you're there, like I was imagining, like the the
• 15:35
  stiffening joints being shoved into a ziplock bag of like
• 15:38
  the space suit and stuff like it. He he does
• 15:42
  so well at relating these impossible scenarios.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Well, it's funny that you say that too, because I
• 15:49
  thought to myself, you know, what the bag made me
• 15:51
  think of was on like a canoe, you know, like
• 15:53
  whenever you're going into like you're floating with your buddies, whatever,
• 15:56
  and you have a trash bag, and the usual will
• 15:58
  happen is you you have like a like a net
• 16:00
  trash bag you put your cans in or whatever, and
• 16:02
  it kind of floats with you the side. I was like, God,
• 16:04
  he's describing it the same way like a float trip
• 16:07
  almost like like it felt it felt that relatable to
• 16:12
  like a float trip, even though it's in the vacuums
• 16:14
  of space. I kind of immediately am now picturing this
• 16:17
  body just floating on a spacecraft idly, the same way
• 16:20
  that like this trash net would float water.
• 16:23
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 16:24
  Speaker 5: Yeah, And I imagine what they're gonna do, unless he's
• 16:27
  just pushing him out into space, is they're kind of
• 16:28
  gonna in a similar way like toe.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: The what I thought it was going to be, yeah,
• 16:33
  is toe it because then you don't want to just
• 16:35
  you obviously want to Yeah, exactly.
• 16:38
  Speaker 5: Yeah, so it's like they have to pull it behind
• 16:41
  kind of like a trash bag, like you said.
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Also the way that he's kind of disassociating him, Like
• 16:45
  at the end he says Ben was just meat. I
• 16:48
  think that he's doing that just from the act, but
• 16:50
  I think that there's still obviously emotional tie in with
• 16:53
  their relationship, you.
• 16:54
  Speaker 5: Know, so yeah, kind of way he phrases, you know,
• 16:57
  it felt intimate, but it wasn't right. So it's kind
• 17:00
  of like him justifying, like, I can't assign more weight
• 17:03
  to this situation than it is because he's just meat now,
• 17:08
  like a cope with it. Almost the spacewalk itself was
• 17:11
  something else. The bag that's surrounded Ben's body inflated in
• 17:14
  the vacuum, and I instinctively felt the urge to undo
• 17:17
  what I'd done. There's a body in there, and bodies
• 17:20
  aren't meant to have so little between them and outer space.
• 17:24
  When I touched the bag, I could still feel him
• 17:26
  beneath the paper thin material, the crease of an elbow,
• 17:30
  the bump on his nose. By the time I reached
• 17:33
  my destination, his body already felt brittle, attaching him to
• 17:38
  the station was easy enough on a technical level, leaving
• 17:41
  him there when against every instinct I had After that,
• 17:45
  there was no pretending he was coming back. A day
• 17:48
  later and I began to pack his things away. There
• 17:51
  was a Catharsis in it that I found calm. I
• 17:54
  cataloged his belongings with thin detachment. Most of his things
• 17:58
  were dry and uninteresting. Photos of him with a dog,
• 18:02
  a copy of Michael shaybook, a certificate of excellence from
• 18:06
  NASA that he received when he was ten. He discovered
• 18:10
  a comment he told me during our first meeting backyard
• 18:13
  with the telescope. NASA let him name it and everything.
• 18:17
  That was how he knew he wanted to be an astronaut.
• 18:20
  Described it as a calling. Ben was like that, a
• 18:24
  real life boy scout in life. He'd had no edges.
• 18:30
  You'd think given our history we'd be close. Two men
• 18:33
  selected based on extensive psychological profiling.
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: Together, we had simulated multiple.
• 18:38
  Speaker 5: Missions to Mars, two on the ground, one in space,
• 18:42
  all of them highly secretive.
• 18:45
  Speaker 4: An official mission of.
• 18:46
  Speaker 5: Mars was meant to be next, at which point the
• 18:48
  whole project would be made public.
• 18:50
  Speaker 4: But the key to.
• 18:51
  Speaker 5: Having two people work together alone for nearly an entire year.
• 18:55
  Isn't to find two guys who are best friends forever.
• 18:58
  It's finding people who won't on one another, neither hate
• 19:02
  nor love, two men who enjoyed their own company but
• 19:05
  don't mind one another. Ben and I had become acquainted
• 19:09
  over all that time together, but it wasn't like we
• 19:12
  were brothers in arms.
• 19:13
  Speaker 4: Oh so sorry, I have to go get my package.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: One second, man, Isaiah's gone. Now I get to finally
• 19:19
  say my true piece. What if Ben's in the bag
• 19:23
  right now flopping it around? Would have been sitting there
• 19:30
  and he's saying, it's so floppy in.
• 19:33
  Speaker 6: The bag, And our hero here has to look out
• 19:37
  the cockpit window and see what he thought was his
• 19:41
  rigormortius friend flopping it around in a bag in the
• 19:45
  vacuums of space. Would you go out?
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: Would you go out?
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: And would you would you help this man?
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Or is it his own fault? Would he just be
• 19:58
  flopping it forever by himself?
• 20:01
  Speaker 4: Apologies for killing the vibe, no problem. Ben and I had.
• 20:05
  Speaker 5: Become acquainted over all that time together, but it wasn't
• 20:09
  like we were brothers in arms. We worked so well,
• 20:12
  precisely because there was no meat to the friendship, no stakes,
• 20:16
  nothing to argue over.
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: To me, Ben was a nice guy, but that was
• 20:21
  all I figured.
• 20:23
  Speaker 5: He was plain and simple all the way down, no
• 20:26
  dark secrets, no real problems to speak of.
• 20:30
  Speaker 4: The journal changed that.
• 20:32
  Speaker 5: So this I'm like the way he's describing everything with Ben,
• 20:37
  and like the stuff about when he was a kid
• 20:39
  he discovered a comment like humanizing him and now like
• 20:42
  there was a dissonance between them and stuff.
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: But I just like the way the author sets up
• 20:46
  his characters.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's really good about making you give a
• 20:49
  fuck about him.
• 20:50
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: They immediately have personalities that you can like attach yourself to.
• 20:55
  And a lot of times the stories that we do,
• 20:57
  everything's so vague, you know, and it's nice to it's
• 21:00
  nice to have a change of place where there's actual,
• 21:03
  I don't know, relationships building. You cannot give an idea
• 21:05
  even who this who are storyteller is here with somebody
• 21:10
  who maybe you know, gave us a mission kind of
• 21:14
  like obviously gave a fuck about this guy that was
• 21:16
  next to him, even if maybe he didn't reciprocate it
• 21:18
  as much.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 21:19
  Speaker 5: Yeah, there's like a real feel to the people involved,
• 21:23
  right can I tell.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: You a secret.
• 21:26
  Speaker 4: I'm in desperate need of medical attention and care.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: I'm so old, fat.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: And I'm falling apart at the scenes.
• 21:33
  Speaker 4: But I don't know what doctor to use.
• 21:35
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• 21:37
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• 21:39
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• 21:57
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• 22:02
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• 22:03
  filter it for doctors that take your insurance.
• 22:05
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• 22:13
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• 22:44
  Speaker 5: It was taped to the inside of a panel of
• 22:46
  a computer at its workstation. He must have hidden it
• 22:49
  close to his things, somewhere out of sight but easily retrievable,
• 22:54
  frayed leaves and yellow pages like some ancient artifact.
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: Last thing.
• 22:59
  Speaker 5: I expected to find it the space station almost mistook
• 23:02
  its leather cover for some sort of personal Bible, sort
• 23:06
  of well worn tone held up by preacher making exclamations
• 23:10
  about the devil. But its insides were handwritten, hardly in
• 23:14
  keeping with a Bible. Scribbles, shapes, phrases, repeated and dissected.
• 23:21
  Some of it was even in binary. It seemed like
• 23:24
  the ravings of a child or a lunatic. I thought
• 23:27
  it was maybe a mindfulness exercise, empty headed doodling to
• 23:31
  help him get his head straight during stressful moments. That
• 23:35
  didn't explain why he'd hidden it. Why the numbers and
• 23:38
  pages seemed strangely organized. I don't know how to describe
• 23:43
  it exactly, except to say that there was the vague
• 23:47
  impression that it meant something to the person.
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: Who'd made it.
• 23:51
  Speaker 5: Every last gram on a shuttle is accounted for what
• 23:54
  you bring up with. You can't be some random crap
• 23:57
  you want last minute. Ben would have had to clear
• 24:00
  the journal. I'm assuming he kept the content secret. One
• 24:05
  look at what he'd been writing, and NASA would have
• 24:07
  had him in psyche valve before the end of the day,
• 24:10
  But the book size and weight would have to be.
• 24:12
  Speaker 4: Logged and accounted for.
• 24:15
  Speaker 5: It could not have gotten on the station by accident,
• 24:17
  so I knew immediately that Ben had wanted it for something.
• 24:22
  I studied it for over an hour, trying to figure
• 24:24
  out what that was, flicking from one page to the next,
• 24:28
  glaring at rows of numbers, strange fractals, something that looked
• 24:32
  like a cross between an eye and a textbook drawing
• 24:34
  of an atom.
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: Given the way his writing an art skills developed throughout
• 24:39
  the book, I began to suspect he'd been adding to
• 24:41
  it since his childhood, which was just another layer to
• 24:44
  the growing mystery. Love that that's great, that's so cool.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Little Cosmic Boys is a like writing a cosmic horror, like, well,
• 24:55
  you know what makes you think of is that potentially
• 24:57
  the comed he saw interlinked with that some like almost
• 25:00
  as soon as he saw that, he started getting signs
• 25:02
  or visions or something.
• 25:04
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what my mind went to as well, that
• 25:06
  when he was a kid he found something, saw something
• 25:08
  in the stars that like started to speak to him.
• 25:11
  That's why now he's in this place.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: I love those setups. I love the setup of like
• 25:15
  a passing object or a fleet, Like a fleeting moment
• 25:19
  leads to like a lifetime of like visions or seeing
• 25:22
  something I love.
• 25:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, Like he was inducted into an order or religion
• 25:26
  at a young age.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, enlightened in some kind of way. It's always kind
• 25:30
  of fund like a lot of fun flavor with that.
• 25:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm I'm in. He's got He's got me hooked.
• 25:35
  Speaker 5: So far, I thought I was never going to get
• 25:38
  any insight in the book until about three quarters of
• 25:42
  the way through I came across yet another page filled
• 25:44
  with rows and rows of numbers. Only this time one
• 25:48
  of the strings was underlined and a single word had
• 25:51
  been scratched ragged and angry next to it. The only
• 25:56
  bit of English or any human language, and all those
• 25:58
  pages the only thing written in a way that could
• 26:02
  make sense to a living human. The word itself made
• 26:05
  me stop dead in my tracks, made my blood run cold.
• 26:10
  One seven zero three one eight zero four two six
• 26:13
  three six aneurysm.
• 26:20
  Speaker 4: Oh, that's sick.
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: Do you think that?
• 26:22
  Speaker 4: Do you think it's supposed to be like coordinates or something.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: It almost seems like it's like it's a part of
• 26:26
  this plan, this divine plan that he's running.
• 26:28
  Speaker 5: It's either coordinates or there is some kind of like
• 26:33
  long form writing that was delivered to him, or sorry,
• 26:38
  there was some kind of long form writing that was
• 26:42
  a code to say he would be he would dive
• 26:44
  in aneurism. It's almost like it was like his cause
• 26:47
  of death was predetermined by himself.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's like he's he's had
• 26:51
  like this orchestrated basically, like a journal of like what's
• 26:57
  supposed to happen, you know, like star dating, shit and everything,
• 27:00
  an astrological plan.
• 27:01
  Speaker 4: Almost, man, that's so cool.
• 27:06
  Speaker 5: The suspicion that came over me felt like a kind
• 27:09
  of madness. I told myself I had to be nuts.
• 27:11
  When I checked the data from Ben's bio monitor that
• 27:14
  I had to be crazy to even entertain the notion,
• 27:17
  but the information recorded by several different machines confirmed it.
• 27:20
  Ben's exact time of death was the seventeenth of March
• 27:23
  twenty for twenty six hours and thirty six seconds.
• 27:27
  Speaker 10: Oh oh man, I don't think I moved for a
• 27:32
  good fifteen minutes after that, stared at the data as
• 27:35
  my mind worked its way around a giant, impossible realization.
• 27:39
  Speaker 4: Ben knew he was going to die.
• 27:44
  Speaker 5: Oh, that's fine, okay, So down to the second he
• 27:48
  had his death known?
• 27:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, but cause what would happen all of that?
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: Which the creepy thing here obviously leads to me, is
• 27:54
  that he knew, instead of being in the comfort of
• 27:56
  his bed at home, he knew that he was supposed
• 27:59
  to be on a space shuttle heading towards Mars.
• 28:02
  Speaker 5: He was supposed to be there for some reason. Right,
• 28:06
  of course. I tried to rationalize this, anyone would. I
• 28:10
  came up with half a dozen reasons he'd written what
• 28:12
  he'd written. None of them were comforting, although they at
• 28:15
  least fit in with a more rational worldview. Take, for example,
• 28:19
  the idea that Ben had killed himself at that exact
• 28:21
  moment in time to meet some sort of prophecy he
• 28:24
  scrawled days or even hours before.
• 28:26
  Speaker 4: Was that a good thing? What did it mean for me?
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: Ignore the logistical issues of like what that poison can
• 28:33
  be timed to the second, Let's just say that's what
• 28:36
  he did. That left the hair raising question of why.
• 28:41
  There's no comfortable answer that I could see. Of course,
• 28:44
  I went through that book with a fine tooth comb
• 28:46
  looking for any more clues I wish I hadn't. Eventually
• 28:50
  found another word, this one closer to the very end
• 28:52
  of the journal, another date and timestamp, one that lay
• 28:56
  six weeks in the future, and another word scratched painfully
• 28:59
  into the paper by a clumsy fist immolation. Yeah, bro,
• 29:09
  that would be terrify terrifying.
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: Two space station shit always scares me because just because
• 29:15
  one you cannot go anywhere, You can't even go outside
• 29:19
  to take a fucking breather. You know, you're just stuck
• 29:22
  with your thoughts. And I love the idea that like,
• 29:25
  like astronauts and spacemen and women whatever would go mad.
• 29:29
  Is so believable that you would just go fucking crazy.
• 29:31
  You're like, I have no other option. I'm going to
• 29:33
  go insane.
• 29:34
  Speaker 5: I like the idea too, of like, yeah, you've seen
• 29:38
  an interstellar, right, Yeah, you remember that scene where Matt
• 29:42
  Damon gets like sucked out of the ship and just
• 29:44
  like dies with like not it literally goes quiet because
• 29:48
  space doesn't carry sound.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, is that Mad Damon? Is Matt Damon an Interstellar?
• 29:53
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that's Matt Damon, the guy who stole the ship
• 29:55
  from him and then like did the docking process wrong
• 29:58
  so it got ripped out of the ship. Oh yeah, yeah,
• 30:03
  I think about that with space all the time.
• 30:04
  Speaker 4: It's like everything that happens.
• 30:06
  Speaker 5: Up there is completely unforgiving and like you just die
• 30:09
  without a sound, right. Everything with space terrifies me in
• 30:13
  that way. So immolation it's like, yeah, there'll be a
• 30:15
  fire on board the ship and you can do absolutely
• 30:17
  nothing because it's not like you can.
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: Leave the ship, right, Have fine luck? Yeah, have fun dying? Yeah,
• 30:23
  been out.
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: Permission to died.
• 30:27
  Speaker 5: I bit my lip and took a deep breath. What
• 30:30
  about the station's integrity, I asked, No sign.
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: Of any issue from external cameras.
• 30:35
  Speaker 5: They replied, I can hear something banging on the whole.
• 30:39
  I told them, nothing is visible on the cameras.
• 30:44
  Speaker 4: That's why I need to go take a look.
• 30:46
  Speaker 5: It's hard to argue with the computer. You can't shoot
• 30:49
  at a death glayer. H FU could have easily arranged
• 30:52
  video calls, but really they wanted the distance made it
• 30:55
  easier to say no.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: So the space walk is incredibly dangerous. They quickly microphones
• 31:01
  and station holl are reporting nothing of concern, usual impact
• 31:04
  from debris. Doesn't that corroborates reports of external tapping. Permission
• 31:09
  for spacewalk is denied.
• 31:11
  Speaker 5: I made no further responses, but instead close the screen
• 31:13
  and wondered if they were being entirely truthful. The tapping
• 31:17
  sound comeing and going over the last few days some mistakable,
• 31:21
  even over all those worrying machines and monitor all those
• 31:24
  worrying machines and motors. Space stations are loud. They even
• 31:29
  give us earplugs to handle it. But whatever was out
• 31:32
  there was somehow louder, or perhaps given the circumstances, I
• 31:36
  was just sensitive to the thought of something anything out there.
• 31:41
  Speaker 4: There's no denying it annoyed me. Just one of those
• 31:44
  sounds I found.
• 31:45
  Speaker 5: Impossible to block out, like water dripping in a bathtub.
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: At three am.
• 31:50
  Speaker 5: Tap tap tap, tap, tap, tap tap, no sense of order,
• 31:56
  not even on the surface level, but something maybe underneath,
• 32:01
  some sense or reason, some kind of regularity that the
• 32:05
  brain detects and can't let go of. How could the
• 32:09
  microphones possibly miss it? Sleep was getting progressively difficult At times,
• 32:15
  I thought the station under some kind of hidden stress.
• 32:19
  Materials freeze in and warming in irregular ways. No atmosphere,
• 32:23
  no conduction of heat. Things get hot in the sun's rays,
• 32:27
  objects warm and cool to both extremes. This is routine
• 32:30
  stuff or anything up in space, of course, But it
• 32:34
  didn't stop me thinking about all the ways that the
• 32:36
  station was just a pile of metal that could come
• 32:38
  Undone could break and tear, bend and stretch, Like watching
• 32:43
  the wing of your plane wobble during turbulence. It's an
• 32:46
  uncomfortable reminder that you're just a monkey and a fancy toy.
• 32:52
  And what if something had come loose? Something? Oh? At
• 32:57
  first I stuck to this notion, strictly, asking myself, what
• 33:01
  if some antenna or strap or a bit of metal
• 33:03
  had gotten loose and was banging against the hole. That
• 33:06
  would be bad. But of course that wasn't really what
• 33:10
  I was thinking. That's what I wrote HQ about over
• 33:13
  and over and over. But was really on my mind
• 33:17
  was the thought that maybe somehow he had gotten loose.
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: And of course that's not so silly, right.
• 33:25
  Speaker 5: The specially designed bag he was in, the one that
• 33:28
  would vent any gases produced by decomposition while maintaining his
• 33:31
  body's integrity, was brand spaking new. No how many times
• 33:35
  had it ever been tested, never, never, ever, Ben was
• 33:40
  the first, so of course it might come loose. Just
• 33:43
  because it's space ah, technology doesn't mean it's sophisticated. He
• 33:48
  was strapped to the outside like a Christmas tree to
• 33:50
  the family sedan. Maybe I wondered one of the straps
• 33:54
  had broken. Now he was thumping against the side every
• 33:57
  now and again. Never mind that there wasn't any thing
• 34:00
  out there to prompt that kind of buffeting.
• 34:02
  Speaker 4: No air, no wind.
• 34:04
  Speaker 5: If he becomes loose, he just float a little farther away.
• 34:08
  Something was making that noise, you know.
• 34:10
  Speaker 4: Worried almost constantly that it was him. Man, this is
• 34:16
  so fun.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love the idea of a guy kind of
• 34:20
  slipping into insanity and thinking that this dead person outside
• 34:24
  is like banging to come back inside.
• 34:27
  Speaker 4: Tap tap, let me in. It's so fun.
• 34:30
  Speaker 5: It's like the there's a story that reminds me. Oh
• 34:34
  you remember, like at the end of the Monkeys Paw,
• 34:37
  how their son who died in the factory.
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: Oh yeah, comes to the door and he's like, that's
• 34:41
  what it reminds me of.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
• 34:43
  Speaker 5: Because they won't look. They never look outside in the story.
• 34:46
  They just beg for it to be over. But you
• 34:48
  can hear the knocking. You can hear him calling yeah. Yeah,
• 34:51
  they know that it's him.
• 34:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 34:54
  Speaker 5: Only problem was I had cameras, lots at all of them,
• 34:58
  every single time showed the same thing. The bag barely
• 35:02
  changed from when I last saw it in person, strapped
• 35:05
  firmly and securely to the station's hull. Should have reassured me,
• 35:10
  should have, But it didn't. Something was out there, tapping
• 35:14
  on the hole on and off. No pattern, no reason,
• 35:19
  no correlation. It came and it went, seemingly choosing its
• 35:23
  moments to bother me the most. Sleep was difficult for
• 35:26
  multiple reasons. The tapping was bad enough, but lately my
• 35:29
  nightmares had taken a strange turn black cold. In them,
• 35:35
  I was trapped in a suffocating film, freezing cold, NonStop agony,
• 35:40
  fighting furiously to free myself was this black void of
• 35:44
  a nightmare.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: I love the imagery. I love the imagery of him
• 35:48
  feeling trapped inside of the same bag he put benin,
• 35:52
  but this time it's like a center film and it's
• 35:55
  just like this disgustingly cold, freezing.
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: I just love that the same way the body's like
• 36:01
  right freezing.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's a thin paper material, he said, which
• 36:04
  I'm guessing it's like that weird. I'm guessing it's like
• 36:06
  that space material. It looks like aluminum foil is what
• 36:09
  I have pictured, right.
• 36:10
  Speaker 4: Yeah, the space blanket. But yeah, but then.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: When he says I was trapped in a suffocating film,
• 36:15
  it makes me think almost of a fire in the
• 36:18
  sky whenever he gets abducted by the alien and it's
• 36:20
  like stretched.
• 36:21
  Speaker 5: Oh yeah, kind of makes you think he's inside like
• 36:23
  the skin, skin sheath or whatever, exactly, like all deeply
• 36:28
  terrible dreams. It colored my thoughts for the rest of
• 36:30
  the day, and each time I had it got harder
• 36:33
  to shake. I tried to endure, apartmentalize, take my mental turmoil,
• 36:39
  put it in a box right unhinged across the lid,
• 36:42
  and set rocking back and forth, waiting for my rescue,
• 36:45
  and that was option a good one. There's one little
• 36:50
  word that stopped me going the route of hungering down
• 36:52
  and ignoring my own madness immolation. When h Q told
• 36:57
  me the day that the shuttle would reach me, I
• 37:00
  spent quite a bit of time wondering if this wasn't
• 37:02
  just some big experiment. The sheer coincidence of it, all
• 37:06
  the magnitude of it. They sent me the message and
• 37:09
  the subject line had three exclamation points, like the communications
• 37:13
  officer on the other side couldn't wait to deliver good
• 37:15
  news for once let their professionalism slip. It finally arranged
• 37:20
  to shuttles retrieved me after it was done, dropping some
• 37:22
  guys off at the iss. It was lucky it had
• 37:25
  come so soon. Stroke of logistical genius allowed me to
• 37:28
  sneak Ben and me back without it being too conspicuous.
• 37:33
  I should be very thankful, they told me, But I
• 37:35
  was just stunned. The date matched the one Ben had
• 37:38
  written out. Factoring in travel time, I'd be entering Earth's
• 37:43
  atmosphere at the exact time the prophesied moment would come
• 37:46
  and go. Ripe for an error, a misplaced heat pad,
• 37:50
  a mistime thruster, something anything, to go wrong and leave
• 37:54
  me plunging to my death in a burning metal tube,
• 37:58
  ripe for immolation. It wasn't been out there tap in
• 38:01
  a way I wanted to know. I needed to know.
• 38:05
  I was a rational man, a skeptic. I did not
• 38:07
  believe the natural world would produce a man that could
• 38:10
  predict his death down to the minute or the second.
• 38:13
  Nor did I believe he could predict mine. But I'm
• 38:17
  only an animal. I am made of meat, vulnerable, a
• 38:21
  raw nerve in a world of jagged rocks, and I
• 38:24
  am risk averse. That word immolation, not random, not chance.
• 38:31
  Up in the void, surrounded by pure oxygen, fire was
• 38:34
  a constant risk. Ben's little numbers loomed large in my mind.
• 38:39
  I had to make sure everything was in place, had
• 38:41
  to make sure there were no errors. If it was
• 38:44
  a prediction which I refused to accept a face value,
• 38:48
  then maybe I could take heart from it. What could
• 38:51
  Ben do in the face of an aneurism? Nothing but immolation, fire,
• 38:57
  an accident. That sort of thing could be avoided, just
• 39:01
  so long as everything was in worket order, just so
• 39:03
  long as everything was where it was meant to be.
• 39:07
  What did HQ know Cameras are remote operators not enough.
• 39:12
  No one else was in that tin can, except to me.
• 39:16
  Why even have humans in space if you wouldn't trust
• 39:19
  their instincts and judgments. I needed to know what was
• 39:22
  making that noise. I needed to get out there. HQ
• 39:26
  caught on too late. I was inside the suit, the
• 39:29
  airlock cycling by the time they realized. I chose my
• 39:33
  time in well halfway through my maintenance shift. Told them
• 39:36
  I was taking a look at the suit make sure
• 39:38
  everything was in order met. They were slow to catch
• 39:40
  on to what I was doing. Technically, they could stop
• 39:44
  the process at any stage. They could do anything from
• 39:47
  their side, but I threatened to force a manual override
• 39:50
  that would shut them out from that part of the system.
• 39:53
  They told me they court martial on return, but that
• 39:56
  was a piss weeek threat for me. The stakes were
• 39:59
  higher than a court martial. In the end, they backed down. Now,
• 40:03
  how hard it is to build a space station in secret?
• 40:06
  It came first, So the space walk went wrong and
• 40:09
  I died, the station would still be there, billion dollar
• 40:12
  asset awaiting the next top secret mission. It was my
• 40:16
  neck on the line, not THEIRS. I accepted it under
• 40:20
  time pressure. HQ accepted it too. By the time the
• 40:23
  door finally opened and I was able to gently guide
• 40:25
  myself out and around the rim, so that I was
• 40:27
  clinging onto the station's exterior that already tapped into the
• 40:30
  cameras and were guiding me along to my destination. But
• 40:33
  it was background noise to me at that point. Their
• 40:36
  voices and little pings, constant readouts of soup temperatures in
• 40:40
  the distance to the station hull, meaningless, all of it.
• 40:44
  Speaker 4: What mattered was the sound tap tap tap.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: How much of this do you think it is in
• 40:51
  his head? Do you think that the tatta tap is real?
• 40:54
  Or do you think that it's kind of So I
• 40:56
  had that thought.
• 40:58
  Speaker 5: I have a prediction for where the stories go, and
• 41:00
  I don't necessarily want to call it out, but if
• 41:03
  I had to guess, his own actions may cause his death.
• 41:08
  So I think there is some supernatural element happening, because
• 41:11
  he did call out his own aneurism down to the minute, right.
• 41:15
  But I feel like the paranoia that this thing is
• 41:17
  ensuing in him.
• 41:20
  Speaker 4: Might be what causes an immolation.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: I mean, the beats of this story are so reminiscent
• 41:26
  of the raven. You know you have never Yeah, the
• 41:30
  tapping on the chamber door kind of thing like that,
• 41:33
  the raven being that thing, but now it'stead of a raven.
• 41:37
  It's this body floating out in space.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: The similarities are just pretty cool if.
• 41:44
  Speaker 5: It makes it feel like there's an inevitable represented by
• 41:46
  Ben's body a little bit. But I feel like that
• 41:52
  inevitable is going to be like self fulfilling, like he's
• 41:55
  going to walk himself into it. That's where I see
• 41:56
  this going.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think so too.
• 41:59
  Speaker 4: I don't.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: I'm not fully bought in that Ben is alive and tapping.
• 42:03
  I think that it's, uh, we're kind of getting into
• 42:06
  a space of this man who's going to drive himself crazy.
• 42:08
  But the prophecy is still true, like this the supernatural
• 42:11
  element of this guy dying at a certain time. Immolation
• 42:13
  is immolation brought on by himself.
• 42:16
  Speaker 4: Mm hmm. I think that's where this is going. Yeah,
• 42:18
  I agree.
• 42:19
  Speaker 5: I was anxious by this point, or perhaps, if I'm honest, scared.
• 42:24
  Space is all extremes, not just heat but light. Two
• 42:28
  shadows cast are vast and strange. You move in and
• 42:32
  out of the Earth's shadow like it's a hand in
• 42:34
  front of a projector, and the ones cast by yourself
• 42:37
  and your surroundings are a special kind of black. Station's
• 42:41
  myriad of pipes and cables was covered in an abyssal shadows, long,
• 42:47
  warped things with ambiguous origins. Sometimes I looked at the
• 42:50
  darkness and wondered if there was anything there at all,
• 42:53
  or if the station was simply pi sected by some
• 42:55
  kind of strange cosmic force, like I might fall into
• 42:59
  it somehow, well, forever lost. Normally, I think it was
• 43:04
  beautiful space walks had for me in the past, but
• 43:07
  an almost religious experience scarried the same sense of weight,
• 43:11
  but for very different reasons.
• 43:14
  Speaker 4: I felt watched.
• 43:15
  Speaker 5: Something I tried to ignore, but it got harder and harder,
• 43:18
  kept looking over my shoulder, kept overthinking every little bump
• 43:21
  and vibration I felt on the station's hull. By the
• 43:24
  time I reached the place where I had strapped Ben's body,
• 43:27
  I was close to having a panic attack. That whole
• 43:30
  part of the station was covered in darkness, the kind
• 43:33
  where I couldn't see a damn thing. It was only
• 43:36
  HQ's voice telling me I'd reached my destination that let
• 43:39
  me know Ben was lying just a few feet from
• 43:41
  me under their direction. I found him, and when my
• 43:44
  light fell upon the bag itself, I saw the metallic
• 43:47
  fabric glitter. With eyes touching it felt Ben's frozen body
• 43:52
  inside hard as a rock. Gave him a nudge and
• 43:56
  he didn't move an inch. The straps holding him in
• 43:58
  place were still there. As ever, what else.
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: Could be causing the sound? There is one option.
• 44:07
  Speaker 5: The nameless voice on the other end sounded reticent, but
• 44:10
  that had been the default since been died. Hu always
• 44:14
  sounded like they were holding something back.
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: What's that? We're not one hundred percent certain how corpses
• 44:20
  would respond to the changing temperatures and vacuum. Obviously, parts
• 44:24
  of the body will freeze and expand and fluids. In particular,
• 44:28
  right now, the bag has a lot of surface contact
• 44:31
  with metallic hole. One theory is that the blood may
• 44:33
  be freezing and sublimating as the surface beneath the changes temperature.
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: I looked at the bag and grimaced.
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: How much blood exactly? We cannot possibly say for certain
• 44:45
  how much would have left the body, and only that
• 44:47
  the bags job is to contain it until return. We're
• 44:50
  able to confirm, using to instruments in the station that
• 44:53
  the panel you are standing on is well below as freezing.
• 44:56
  Everything should be in manageable stage, so to speak, solid
• 45:01
  likely one large.
• 45:02
  Speaker 5: Clumping they're applied, and then after a moment they added,
• 45:05
  you wanted.
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: This, it would be a waste of resources now that
• 45:08
  you're out here, not to investigate further. You need to
• 45:12
  look inside.
• 45:13
  Speaker 9: So he can look in the bag, and blood just
• 45:15
  seem to be I think what I think I think
• 45:18
  they're saying is like all the blood and like decomposition
• 45:21
  fluids and stuff are just there, and that they like
• 45:25
  freeze and melt like at random as the whole changes
• 45:28
  with the sun.
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: Like so since they're in the darkness, it freezes back up,
• 45:31
  but then once in the sun, it heats up and
• 45:33
  it liquefies again.
• 45:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so he's like a blob. Yeah, I mean just
• 45:38
  a blob of gunk. Yeah, Like that's I wouldn't want
• 45:43
  to look in there either.
• 45:46
  Speaker 5: Hold on one second, another packages here in fact, I'll
• 45:48
  right back.
• 45:48
  Speaker 4: I apologizes. You're all good.
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: Then again, maybe Ben's flopping it.
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: Space station never said that was our question, right, What
• 45:55
  if Ben's in there right now flopping around?
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: He likes it when the narrator touches.
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: Him flop flop flop flop can easily translate to tap
• 46:04
  tap tap tap.
• 46:06
  Speaker 2: How do we know that bin's not in there?
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: Right now?
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: A massive bone and dunk, grabbing his big old dick
• 46:13
  and flopping it around inside of a space blank a cocoon.
• 46:20
  Would there be a better place to flop it? He
• 46:23
  told me. I'm still fully believing the bin is flopping
• 46:28
  it around right now, grabbing it at the base, flopping
• 46:33
  the top, top the top. A well endowed man taking
• 46:37
  too soon prophecy knew that it would happen, Yet still
• 46:41
  here he lays, flopping it from side to side, grabbing
• 46:46
  the base.
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: Prob we one peaky around the.
• 46:49
  Speaker 4: Ball flop flop flop flop flop.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: Flop, or as a story would suggest, tap tap tap.
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: Okay, sorry about that, No problem, of course.
• 47:05
  Speaker 5: I'd wanted this, had and I to satisfy my morbid
• 47:08
  curiosity to address the rabbit thoughts of my mind. That
• 47:11
  it kept me awake, feeling what little sleep I had
• 47:13
  with nightmares. Now that I was at the threshold, I
• 47:17
  found myself so afraid that even moving my hand took
• 47:20
  a kind of effort. Yet I had no choice. I
• 47:22
  had to see this through. The bag opened with a
• 47:26
  specially designed sipper. No sound, but I could feel the click, click,
• 47:31
  click of the specialized teeth opening up. It's stupid, but
• 47:35
  as I unfurled the flap, I could have sworn a
• 47:37
  terrible stench passed over me. Lessed to know more than
• 47:41
  a few seconds, but so vivid. I turned and snapped
• 47:43
  my eyes shut as they watered. Power of suggestion, I
• 47:47
  told myself as I reopened them, that was all nothing more.
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: No air, no sound, no smell.
• 47:54
  Speaker 5: Took a few deep breaths, tried not to let the
• 47:57
  incident unsettle me further. Looked inside the back. Multiple people
• 48:02
  watching my video feed gasped when I made a fairly
• 48:05
  unflattering noise somewhere between a moan and a cry. I'd
• 48:10
  expected something, got it worse. I'd expected something ghoulish, blue skin,
• 48:16
  icicles collecting around the eyelashes, like a body found in
• 48:20
  the Arctic. But ben Ben had transformed. Great jagged shards
• 48:27
  of frozen blood had erupted from the eyes and ears
• 48:30
  and mouth. His jaw dislocated to an unnatural angle as
• 48:34
  eicicles the size of my forearm forced its way out.
• 48:38
  His neck was broken, his torso shredded with strips of
• 48:41
  flesh hanging off in ribbons, and his hands were clined
• 48:44
  at his face with bizarre yellow nails and even left
• 48:48
  grooves in his skin.
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: Fuck.
• 48:53
  Speaker 5: I had no one in particular, only to realize that
• 48:55
  a shu had been talking amongst themselves the whole time.
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: My back and unexpected pressure. Do what you changes? I
• 49:03
  don't know. This isn't normal. Let's not pretend this is.
• 49:06
  Speaker 5: Normal, guys, I shouted, splitting the chatter and leaving silence.
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: Where's arms like that? Muscle spasms possibly cosp well, whatever
• 49:17
  cause the unusual reaction to his circuitary system. Maybe that
• 49:21
  caused his arms to curl up towards his face. There
• 49:24
  are scratch marks on his cheeks, skin, under his nails.
• 49:29
  Are we sure he was dead when I brought him
• 49:31
  out here?
• 49:32
  Speaker 4: A does an urgent alarm?
• 49:34
  Speaker 5: Voices, all desperate to avoid even the slightest hint of responsibility,
• 49:37
  told me no, that was not possible. Looking down at
• 49:41
  Ben's tortured face, I couldn't help but feel a bit
• 49:44
  of doubt.
• 49:46
  Speaker 4: I was about to ask what I ought to do next.
• 49:48
  Speaker 5: When the sun rose across the station. Unlike Earth, this
• 49:52
  wasn't a gentle warning. It flipped like a light switch. Thankfully,
• 49:56
  the suit reacted before I had a chance to blind me,
• 50:00
  but the temperature began to rapidly climb. I watched something
• 50:04
  beneath Bin's skin began to writhe in the new warmth.
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: That's definitely not normal. We can offer no further insight
• 50:12
  to the situation as of this moment. The footage you're
• 50:15
  sending us is under a view by a panel of experts.
• 50:19
  Speaker 5: Ashque told me somewhat urgently and robotically, like the person
• 50:22
  on the other end was stifling panic.
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: Current orders are to take samples, we seal the bag
• 50:29
  and return to the station. You sure should be taking
• 50:32
  the stuff inside.
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: There was some mumbling before the same operator replied.
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: For good samples, seal the bag, return to the station.
• 50:42
  Speaker 5: Gladly, I replied, before pulling the zipper shut. I was
• 50:47
  keen to leave and made the journey back faster than
• 50:49
  I should have. That crawling sensation you feel when being
• 50:53
  watched it was all over me, made me clumsy, and
• 50:56
  I knocked myself more than once on the way back.
• 50:59
  Like I was suddenly unused to the suit's controls. I
• 51:03
  just couldn't escape the notion that everywhere I looked, someone
• 51:06
  or something had darted back just out of you. Of
• 51:09
  course that was impossible, so I told myself what could
• 51:13
  survive out of space? But I only made that much
• 51:17
  worse to imagine something slinking under the shadows, tapping on
• 51:21
  the hole, stalk at me every step of the way back.
• 51:24
  When I finally reached the door, the tension inside me rose.
• 51:28
  If something was going to happen, it would happen now,
• 51:31
  with my back turned on infinity.
• 51:33
  Speaker 4: I never felt so vulnerable, Ugh Reynolds. The sound made
• 51:39
  me jump.
• 51:40
  Speaker 5: I've been so focused on my surroundings I'd forgotten I
• 51:43
  was being supervised by a room full of people one
• 51:45
  thousand miles away.
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: What is it, Reynolds were, we're seeing something here we're
• 51:53
  not sure of being told you should hold off on returning.
• 52:00
  Speaker 5: Oh I love this, Oh my god, this is Can
• 52:04
  you give him in a suit like frozen in an
• 52:08
  explosion in the body bag.
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: Like guy face.
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: It reminds me of that those drugs. You see it
• 52:15
  a lot in Uh, you see it a lot in
• 52:17
  like voodoo stuff whatever, where it's like people get buried
• 52:20
  and they're they're on a drug and then they are
• 52:23
  clawing at the door as they unseal it, and the
• 52:25
  guys like the people's nails are like ripped up because
• 52:27
  they've been clawing at the coffin door. It reminds me
• 52:31
  of that and like just this insane way of thinking
• 52:34
  that a guy out in space is like, you know,
• 52:37
  suffocating and you have like.
• 52:38
  Speaker 5: Blood exploding out of his face.
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: The visual is so good.
• 52:44
  Speaker 5: It reminds me of a in the thing in the
• 52:46
  original movie when they pulled that guy out of the ice.
• 52:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they zip.
• 52:50
  Speaker 5: Him out of the bag and it's like it's when
• 52:52
  it's the two faces like melded into each other.
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, man, this is so cool.
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: This is this is like have ground control be like, hey, uh,
• 53:03
  we're seeing something weird. You probably shouldn't go back inside.
• 53:05
  Yet it's like, what the fuck is that?
• 53:07
  Speaker 5: Like, what do you mean I should have go inside? Yeah? Okay, man,
• 53:10
  this is great. Something about the voice on the other
• 53:13
  end made my stomach sink. I didn't just sound confused
• 53:17
  and make no mistake, when you're clinging to the side
• 53:19
  of a station all on your own, confused would have
• 53:23
  been bad enough, but no, there was something else.
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: Fear there's anomaly or no one down here knows how
• 53:33
  to proceed. We're currently seeking input from higher ups. This
• 53:39
  is unprecedented. What's going on to begin with, well, signals
• 53:46
  from some bio monitors and specifically.
• 53:49
  Speaker 4: Bends sick the last word hit like a truck.
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: What Yes, and the cameras are At first we thought
• 54:00
  that they were malfunctioning, but it appears as if Bin's
• 54:03
  bag was empty. And then Reynolds, we noticed something something
• 54:11
  else nice. What's going on here? I'm being told I
• 54:17
  can't say more, just just wait.
• 54:21
  Speaker 4: Yes, I love that.
• 54:24
  Speaker 5: Oh my god, this is getting out of his backs
• 54:28
  and blood spike.
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: Person's crawling around on the blood.
• 54:32
  Speaker 9: Like Ben falling around on the fucking side of the
• 54:35
  cries like flying out of his face, panic on his
• 54:38
  face and he's crawling around.
• 54:40
  Speaker 4: Oh, oh my heart.
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: It almost even has little remnants of that Twilight Zone episode,
• 54:46
  the one where it's like there's something on the plane, Yeah,
• 54:50
  like on the wing of the plane.
• 54:51
  Speaker 4: Kind of I'm getting that kind of vibe too, Only
• 54:53
  it's not Bigfoot. It's an exploded person. Yeah.
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: Instead of a weird furry goblin, it's an actual, disturbed, disgusting.
• 55:01
  Speaker 5: I tied in my grip on the railing, my heart pounding. Finally,
• 55:04
  the door cycled open, and I was ready to disregard
• 55:06
  all orders when the man speaking to me from h
• 55:08
  Q practically screamed in my ear.
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: Don't you do not get to the station what we're
• 55:16
  seeing on the cameras. You can't let that thing in. Yes,
• 55:24
  if something's out here, I'm getting to safety before it
• 55:26
  reaches me.
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: Tap tap yes.
• 55:34
  Speaker 5: I stopped. My brain processed I'd heard that I'd heard
• 55:39
  something in the vacuum of space. Looked around in my hands,
• 55:42
  my feet. That couldn't be possible, not unless tap tap tap,
• 55:47
  tap tap tap. Without moving my head, I turned my
• 55:52
  eyes towards the very edge of my helmet's vision and
• 55:54
  watched as a single yellow fingernail tapped gently on the
• 55:58
  glass and an HQ spoke in a terrifying whisper, he's
• 56:05
  on your suit.
• 56:10
  Speaker 4: Yes, this goes stupid hard.
• 56:14
  Speaker 5: Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.
• 56:17
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 56:19
  Speaker 5: The terror that shot through me was electric white fire
• 56:23
  coursing through my veins. Without even thinking, I reacted like
• 56:26
  I just found out there was a grenade strap to
• 56:28
  my back.
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: All instinct, no rationality.
• 56:31
  Speaker 5: I cried out and swung around trying to knock bit
• 56:34
  off my back, but all I accomplished was setting off
• 56:36
  some alarms.
• 56:37
  Speaker 4: Is I damaged my suit?
• 56:40
  Speaker 3: Go?
• 56:43
  Speaker 5: I thrashed desperately and felt something shuffling around the exterior
• 56:47
  of the bulky suit. Finally my eyes fell on something useful,
• 56:51
  the jet controls. I fumbled my hands into place and
• 56:54
  immediately blasted myself into the open pressure chamber, turning at
• 56:58
  the last minute so that the back of the suit
• 57:00
  smashed into the thick secondary door. I only hope that
• 57:03
  whatever was clinging to the back of me was destroyed
• 57:06
  by the impact. But when I looked up, Ben was
• 57:08
  still out there, gopping at me with a mouth full
• 57:11
  of frozen blood. Slowly, his movement packed with the eerie
• 57:16
  confidence of a predator, he prepared to enter the station.
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: Renald, to get away from the door. We're initiating an
• 57:23
  emergency shutdown.
• 57:25
  Speaker 5: Bitted one hand inside when the door slam shut and
• 57:27
  cut it off. Even in space with the bulkhead between us,
• 57:31
  I could have sworn I heard him scream, Oh my gosh, dude,
• 57:40
  how hard does ah?
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: Okay?
• 57:45
  Speaker 5: There's no ignoring Ben or the sounds he made, not
• 57:48
  anymore terrible thumps that battered the station, their location changing
• 57:53
  seemingly at random. This drove the people on the ground insane. Oh,
• 57:58
  I'd heard my fair share of rash over the last
• 58:01
  few hours. Ben sent books worth of written material from
• 58:04
  every type of expert you can imagine. Ever since my
• 58:07
  colleague's death, I've been wrestling with all sorts of bizarre thoughts.
• 58:10
  But after the spacewalk, it was like they'd spilled out
• 58:13
  of my head and were now terrorizing other like minded skeptics.
• 58:17
  Try as they might, no one in HQU can make
• 58:19
  any sense of it, but they didn't have the journal.
• 58:23
  After what happened during my spacewalk, it became a priority
• 58:26
  for me to figure out what was going on. Those
• 58:29
  numbers been and recorded weren't gibberish. I've sort of known
• 58:32
  that from the start. To read them was to feel
• 58:35
  like you were reading another language, something secret and hidden.
• 58:40
  And while I never cracked the code, not even now,
• 58:43
  after all this time, I did figure out where Ben
• 58:45
  had found it. Liked the trick to dig deeper into
• 58:50
  Ben's research, specifically a pet project of his. He'd spent
• 58:54
  nearly his entire life chasing a little comment ball of
• 58:57
  ice way out in the Kepler bell, close to where
• 59:00
  the solar system abates and the great cosmic void begins.
• 59:04
  Speaker 4: Something small and.
• 59:05
  Speaker 5: Insignificant that rotated and shifted and occasionally caught the sun
• 59:08
  bouncing photons right back at us, a glittering snowball, so
• 59:12
  faint as to be invisible unless you happen to look
• 59:15
  at the right place at the right time, like Ben
• 59:18
  did when he was just tend and playing with hobbyist
• 59:21
  dad's backyard telescope, a light in the darkness, a light
• 59:26
  that spoke to a few instruments. Ben had adjusted to
• 59:29
  record each little emission, flash on, flash off, flash on,
• 59:33
  flash off, flash on, tap tap tap, binary to hexadecimal,
• 59:40
  and from their god, something else, something that spoke to him,
• 59:44
  something out there had spoken to him.
• 59:46
  Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, this is so cool. This is so cool.
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: Oh, this is so cool.
• 59:52
  Speaker 4: When he was a kid.
• 59:53
  Speaker 5: Then he was a kid, he ski got his dad's
• 59:55
  telescope and discovered a comment. And then after studying that
• 59:58
  comment his whole life, it was speaking to him in binary,
• 1:00:01
  and he translated that it became a part of some
• 1:00:03
  forgotten religion and language. And now when he's dead, he
• 1:00:07
  becomes this like this necromorph abomination for it.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, that is now also tapping, and I'm guessing I'm
• 1:00:14
  assuming trying to talk to him as well.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 5: Right, the tap, it's tapping the code. It's like it's morse.
• 1:00:19
  It's the binary.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love it.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 4: I love it. It's so cool. Oh, it's so cool.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 5: Oh how do I buy stock in Christian Wallace as
• 1:00:29
  an author?
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 3: Oh?
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 5: I don't know what scared me more the sound of
• 1:00:37
  a reanimated bin pounding away at the station, an imminent,
• 1:00:40
  all too near threat. Or the thought of something in
• 1:00:43
  the void whispering unknown secrets to a man for the
• 1:00:46
  last two decades, an idea that occasionally rose over me,
• 1:00:49
  like the tide swallow me whole if I dwelt on
• 1:00:52
  it more than a few moments. I never did figure
• 1:00:55
  out what the transmission was saying. But I was transfixed, nonetheless,
• 1:00:59
  not just by Ben's little journal that countain hundreds thousands
• 1:01:02
  of handwritten records, but the live transmission he had set
• 1:01:05
  up on his computer, the one he converted into his sound.
• 1:01:09
  It was like an earthworm on steroids, like white noise
• 1:01:13
  made of acid, a flood of alien ideas that left
• 1:01:16
  me confused and drooling if I listened for too long.
• 1:01:19
  All told, I spent more than a few days with
• 1:01:22
  access to that transmission, and by the end I felt
• 1:01:24
  like I was on the verge of melting away.
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 4: Ben.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 5: Ben had been exposed to that thing since its childhood,
• 1:01:31
  spent years and years listening and recording and waiting, working
• 1:01:34
  towards something none of us could really hope to understand.
• 1:01:37
  I had to assume that transmission was responsible for his death,
• 1:01:40
  and even worse, what had happened to him afterwards? Had
• 1:01:44
  it always been the reason for his coming to space?
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 4: Had been?
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 5: I known just been a sham. The sound, the light
• 1:01:54
  coming from out there. It felt wrong. It wasn't a
• 1:01:57
  gentle lull or a siren's pull. It was dark and overpowering.
• 1:02:02
  Why had he given in to it? Why had he
• 1:02:04
  done everything it wanted? How much of his life had
• 1:02:07
  been lived because of its needs and wants? One thing
• 1:02:11
  I could be sure of is I spent days listening
• 1:02:13
  to Ben's furious rampage on the exterior of the station.
• 1:02:16
  Whatever it's spoken to him, it was hostile, and it
• 1:02:20
  couldn't be allowed to come back with me.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: Reynolds, I'm being told this is going to be a
• 1:02:26
  bit of an unconventional.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 5: Pickup, I scoffed as I finished suiting up. That was
• 1:02:31
  an understatement. What do they tell you, I asked as
• 1:02:35
  I pulled the helmet down and initiated the doors opening sequence.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: There are concerns about contamination. Not sure what that means,
• 1:02:44
  and didn't say if it was biological or chemical. All
• 1:02:47
  sounds a little weird if you asked me. But we're
• 1:02:50
  meant to pick you up mid spacewalk, is that right? Yep?
• 1:02:57
  H you hope for that. We're told we can come
• 1:03:01
  in about two hundred meters away, but you'll have to
• 1:03:04
  close the rest the suit's thrusters. It's gonna be something
• 1:03:07
  else for you on tether journey from one vehicle to
• 1:03:09
  the next. It's never been done before. I'm well aware
• 1:03:13
  of the wrists. Just keep your eyes peeled.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 4: This time, it was his turn to scoff.
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: For what He'll know it when you see it.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 4: So cool, It so cool. He's so cool.
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: Now he's gonna have to jump from his space station
• 1:03:32
  through space untethered and get like, like the impossibility of
• 1:03:36
  that is so sick.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: But god damn, do I want to see that in
• 1:03:39
  like a movie or something cool would that be, dude?
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 5: Ah, It's like it's that that picture the only man
• 1:03:48
  to ever fully be disconnected from the Earth. It was
• 1:03:50
  that that picture of him floating out away from the
• 1:03:52
  space station.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 4: Horrifying. Oh man.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 5: I made the journey with my back to the shuttle,
• 1:03:59
  floating in the door wrong direction at a slow but
• 1:04:01
  consistent speed. My eyes glued to the station looking for
• 1:04:05
  some signs of ben. There's the occasional flash of something red,
• 1:04:10
  a slight shimmer of movement, often obscured by some of
• 1:04:12
  the station's panels and antenna, that let me know he
• 1:04:15
  was still on the exterior, skulking around somewhere. So long
• 1:04:20
  as he stayed there, I knew I'd be okay. The
• 1:04:23
  entire time, I kept waiting for the other foot to drop,
• 1:04:26
  for the tension to finally explode into that life threatening
• 1:04:29
  danger I knew was waiting for me. CAM was a
• 1:04:32
  surprise when I finally approached the shuttle without incident. Pilot
• 1:04:35
  told me I was a few meters away. There's time
• 1:04:38
  to turn around. So I did, drifting around as gently
• 1:04:41
  as a diver returning to the surface. Had my back
• 1:04:45
  to the station no more than a few seconds when
• 1:04:48
  the pilot grunted, humph, that's odd. He sounded nonchalant, but
• 1:04:54
  the object that hit me was anything but minor. Ben
• 1:04:58
  uninterested in making the journey safely, had launched himself off
• 1:05:01
  the station as fast as he could, and with no
• 1:05:05
  way of slowing down, he hit me at full spot,
• 1:05:09
  slamming me up against part of the doorframe and sending
• 1:05:12
  us both tumbling into the void before anyone had even
• 1:05:15
  the time to register his attack. This time, he was
• 1:05:19
  not letting me get a door between us. He scrambled
• 1:05:22
  over my suit like a deranged insect, one that I
• 1:05:24
  desperately tried to swat away. As the great voids spun
• 1:05:27
  around us, both stars turned to lines, the shuttle swooping
• 1:05:31
  past my helmets field of view in almost random directions.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 4: It was sickening and terrifying, and I.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 5: Hope to God I'd be able to correct the spin
• 1:05:39
  before I got out of control. But all of that
• 1:05:42
  came second to the monster who was clinging to my suit.
• 1:05:46
  At some point he crawled around in such a way
• 1:05:47
  that I got a good look at him first. In
• 1:05:49
  a few days. It was up close personal. Even with
• 1:05:53
  the helmets glass between us, I could make out such
• 1:05:56
  stark and startling detail that I momentarily frozen terror, aware
• 1:05:59
  only vaguely of the pilot's panic transmissions.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 3: Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that thing? Rod? You
• 1:06:06
  need to get yourself stablished much further and we won't
• 1:06:10
  be able to help. And whatever you do, you need
• 1:06:13
  to know the fucking thing is it coming aboard the shuttle?
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 5: I wanted to reply, but I was busy trying to
• 1:06:19
  get an arm between me and Ben, who was now
• 1:06:22
  a profusion of jagged red crystals of burying sizes, some
• 1:06:26
  as big as kitchen knives, others like sewing needles.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 4: A spacesuit's worst nightmare.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 5: A puncture wouldn't lead to the immediate decopression you're probably
• 1:06:36
  thinking of.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: Instead, I'd have a few moments at most.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 5: Before the air enveloping the suit dissipated, and after that
• 1:06:41
  my lungs would collapse, my blood would start to boil,
• 1:06:44
  and the water inside my eyes, those ears, and other
• 1:06:47
  soft tissues would vaporize and try to escape like frostbite
• 1:06:51
  on Fast Forward. The punctures weren't my sole concern. I
• 1:06:55
  knew I had to stop Ben's hands getting a grip
• 1:06:57
  on the helmet. I don't know if whatever animated him
• 1:07:01
  had access to all his memories, but Ben sure shit
• 1:07:04
  knew how to remove a helmet from the exterior, so
• 1:07:06
  all my focus went on keeping his nasty little fingers
• 1:07:09
  away from my neck. A puncture would still leave me
• 1:07:12
  enough time to return to the shuttle, but with no helmet,
• 1:07:15
  I'd be doomed to a very painful death. So I
• 1:07:18
  thought the best I could, knowing everything hinged on me
• 1:07:21
  pushing him away. But Ben was lithe and sectile, constantly
• 1:07:25
  slipping out of reach whenever I got close to giving
• 1:07:27
  him a good shove. His fingers could easily find purchase
• 1:07:30
  on the suit and its many little gribbles, while I
• 1:07:33
  was basically wielding oven gloves that offered no dexterity. I
• 1:07:37
  had no hope of shaking him off the usual way.
• 1:07:40
  But I did have something on my side inertia. The
• 1:07:44
  whole time we'd been spinning furiously, and that rotational force
• 1:07:47
  was just about the only thing trying to peel the
• 1:07:49
  two of us apart.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 4: So far, I'd been fighting.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 5: It, but why, I realized at the last moment I
• 1:07:55
  had one option left. So I jammed half thrusters on
• 1:07:58
  and decided to make the new out of control spin
• 1:08:01
  much worse. Normally, an uncontrolled spin is one of those
• 1:08:06
  nightmare scenarios.
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 4: Any astronaut dreads.
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 5: Humans are irregularly shaped, and once you start rotating along
• 1:08:12
  more than one axis, applying more forces likely just to
• 1:08:16
  make it worse. Correcting takes a huge amount of experience
• 1:08:19
  and insight, and even then there's no guarantee you can
• 1:08:21
  stop it. More likely is that by the time you
• 1:08:24
  figure out what you need to do, the rotational forces
• 1:08:27
  will have you on the brink of unconsciousness, and from
• 1:08:30
  their death it's just stones throw away. For me, it
• 1:08:32
  was the only chance I had, so I accelerated the
• 1:08:36
  spin and kept accelerating, holding the button down to The
• 1:08:39
  forces at play pulled Bin further and further towards the
• 1:08:41
  front of the suit. That's where inertia wanted us, two
• 1:08:45
  objects in near symmetry, ready to break off in opposite
• 1:08:47
  directions at any moment.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 4: Ben held on for longer than I did.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 5: At some point, my limbs went weak, my vision dark,
• 1:08:53
  and my arms fell to my side, no longer able
• 1:08:56
  to fight the monster off. But by then it took
• 1:08:59
  everything Ben had to cling on to me, and he
• 1:09:01
  could no longer attack or fumble up my helmet. Eventually,
• 1:09:05
  even he had to give in as the spin grew
• 1:09:07
  faster and faster and the forces trying to separate us
• 1:09:09
  grew too strong. It was like every roller coaster I'd
• 1:09:12
  been on merged into one and ramped up to eleven.
• 1:09:16
  The last thing I remembered before I lost consciousness was
• 1:09:18
  the sight of Bin's monstrous face being flung off into
• 1:09:21
  the void.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 2: God damn, I'm like sweating.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 4: Shot at any one to talking about.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 11: Bro.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 5: I went like I made the joke about Interstellar earlier,
• 1:09:33
  that scene where he's trying to like get the ship
• 1:09:35
  docked correctly. Like, Oh, I was there, Oh that was
• 1:09:38
  so good. I came to aboard the shuttle. Several men
• 1:09:42
  and women crowded around me.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: Jesus Christy Lucky set off a bitch.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 5: I groaned and made eyes towards the person who had
• 1:09:51
  spoken sounded like the pilot.
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 4: I used to put a face to the voice.
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 11: I don't feel lucky. You spun right towards us. We
• 1:10:01
  were already suited up and on our way. Timed of well,
• 1:10:05
  this suit was riddled with holes. Any later we wouldn't
• 1:10:07
  have been around to catch you and get you into safety.
• 1:10:11
  As it is, Pal, You're going home. Medical check shows
• 1:10:15
  no real issue.
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 4: I think you're gonna be okay.
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: Where's been?
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 4: People around me shared a funny look before one of
• 1:10:24
  them realized Benjamin Whatley the other restronut on board, that
• 1:10:31
  is that who was attacking you.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 8: I nodded, Well, he's gone. If that really was your
• 1:10:38
  colleague where, Oh we're sorry. I feel like there's a
• 1:10:41
  story we're missing. I'll catch you up when I'm feeling better.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: Well, whatever happened to him, he'll be re entering your's
• 1:10:50
  atmosphere in the next two hours.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 4: What what then the pilot thought, for a second.
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 8: Human body on re entry, he'll go up and flames.
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, wow. Oh that is the fun. That
• 1:11:10
  is the end of The.
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 2: Only restronaut on this mission died six weeks ago, with
• 1:11:14
  the computer insists that their life signs are still stable.
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 3: That was.
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 4: Good for you, man. That was that guy. We have
• 1:11:22
  read two of his stories and they have both bangs. Yeah.
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 2: The first one is giant baby and then the second
• 1:11:27
  one is insane.
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 4: First off, I just want to say I love the.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: Visual of the monster of like ben contorted, reanimated but
• 1:11:35
  then also like red, like his blood crystals being read
• 1:11:38
  and like shiny.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 5: He exploded but then froze right after the explosion.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 4: Do you think that he was.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 2: So do you think he died when he got reanimated,
• 1:11:46
  he was like clawing at himself in a state like
• 1:11:48
  how much of the he was Do you think it's
• 1:11:50
  Do you think it was something not necessarily I don't
• 1:11:53
  want to say possession, but I want to say, like
• 1:11:55
  almost that the thing that was talking to them.
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 4: Or like some space plague or something like exact.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: So it was like him irrational and it was like
• 1:12:02
  a space demon kind of thing. Yeah, you know what
• 1:12:04
  I mean, whatever it was talking with him. I made
• 1:12:06
  the joke.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 5: About necromorph, but it feels very dead space very it does.
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 4: I mean it does like the.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 5: Mark or the alien presence that like comes over you. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:12:15
  very necromorph, very necro morph.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: The part of him getting tackled and spinning, I mean,
• 1:12:21
  my god.
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 5: Oh gosh, I love just yeah, oh I forgot. I
• 1:12:25
  didn't feel like I was reading. I was just like
• 1:12:27
  I was in the scene. It felt so I was
• 1:12:30
  gripped that whole time.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 2: I don't know if this story was for this because,
• 1:12:33
  like you said, the Reddit it has like the awards
• 1:12:35
  it gives, it just puts them all the stories. But
• 1:12:37
  I will say that was one of the most immersive
• 1:12:39
  stories we've read by far.
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 4: That killed That was so so good, Oh my gosh,
• 1:12:45
  so fun. It was one of those stories too.
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 2: You know, we read a lot of stories that are like, god,
• 1:12:50
  I mean like four to seven hours long. You know,
• 1:12:53
  this is one of those stories that I would have
• 1:12:55
  loved to build more of that relationship up with Explore
• 1:12:59
  the Ernal more. But the way it's written, now, what
• 1:13:03
  it just awesome, Just like punch to the gut, just.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 4: It killed man.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 5: That hole, the part where it jumps across the space
• 1:13:11
  ship on him and it's like they're spinning so fast
• 1:13:14
  that everything's going to blur and he's about to pass
• 1:13:16
  out and it's being ripped off of him into the
• 1:13:18
  void of space. It's going to burn up on re entry,
• 1:13:20
  which means that all of this was per Day literally
• 1:13:24
  told in the stars right that he would dive in
• 1:13:26
  anders and to die a second time of immolation. And
• 1:13:29
  like this possession that's come over and what that means
• 1:13:31
  is it on Earth now? Is it going to spread?
• 1:13:34
  Like oh, there's so many fun angles you could take.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: I mean it's crystal crystallized into melting, and some bits
• 1:13:40
  of it whatever will survive and land into the earth,
• 1:13:43
  you know.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: What I mean.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 2: It's almost it's a doomsday prediction.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 5: And he's spoken to this plague for thirty you know,
• 1:13:49
  twenty thirty years, for decades of his life, and then
• 1:13:52
  he goes up here into space and it like, uh
• 1:13:54
  takes him.
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: Oh gosh, that was great translating a child like wonder
• 1:13:58
  as well leading a child like wonder. If like it
• 1:14:01
  felt like it felt like it was a you know,
• 1:14:04
  I saw the comment and it felt like it was
• 1:14:06
  a calling, like I was supposed to do this? What
• 1:14:09
  Really it was a calling, and it was somebody manipulating
• 1:14:11
  a child and manipulating a person into going into this field,
• 1:14:15
  you know, giving him these things. You know, I wonder too,
• 1:14:19
  how much because here's the thing, the date that the
• 1:14:21
  numbers written in them, just as aneurysm. I wonder how
• 1:14:24
  much of I wonder how much of it he knew
• 1:14:26
  that it was going to happen to him, or like
• 1:14:27
  the emulation immolation, or if it was just like flashes
• 1:14:31
  or signs that he's like a dream maybe.
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 4: Even understand what he was writing.
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, right, because at that point too, I feel like
• 1:14:38
  just from the character and from like you know, he was,
• 1:14:41
  he was psychologically sane to go through things and to
• 1:14:45
  be paired up with somebody to where you would just
• 1:14:47
  think that it's a guy who's like, yeah, I mean
• 1:14:49
  I'm destined to do this like you.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: And to have him hide his journal also would make
• 1:14:54
  me think that he's like, yeah, I feel like I'm
• 1:14:56
  cosmically attached to things that'd be a hard thing to
• 1:14:58
  sell to just random people, you know. So awesome story,
• 1:15:04
  absolutely awesome coming.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 4: In that hit the spot though.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was just such a such a great one, unbelievable.
• 1:15:12
  Really really enjoyed that one. We're gonna have to keep
• 1:15:14
  reading his stuff because love that, love that wish there
• 1:15:18
  was you know, and selfishly and the best thing you
• 1:15:20
  can have from people is I wish there was more.
• 1:15:22
  That's the best kind of reaction you can get from
• 1:15:24
  a story, and that's what I feel wholeheartedly right now.
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 4: Oh that was great. I'm so glad we read that. Dude.
• 1:15:30
  We have to read more of his stuff.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, and I have to ask the viewers as well,
• 1:15:34
  were you immersed as well? I'm curious sometimes whenever we
• 1:15:37
  read these things, we have such a visceral reaction. It's
• 1:15:39
  always funny to see people who are just like I
• 1:15:41
  hated that, I hated it. Always curious, But usually the
• 1:15:45
  people that say that don't ever give a reason why.
• 1:15:47
  So I'm curious if you don't, if I just, I'm
• 1:15:50
  gonna be curious to see people.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 4: If you don't, if you don't like this, why.
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. At least put a fucking inblence of thought
• 1:15:56
  into your response.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 4: So, but no, that is our episode for this week.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: It was an incredible one, and thank you guys so
• 1:16:02
  much once again for listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and
• 1:16:05
  of course.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: All of our YouTube fans. We appreciate you out there
• 1:16:08
  as well. Be sure to share the episodes if you
• 1:16:10
  like them, try to get some of your friends into
• 1:16:12
  the show, and like as always, give us a nice
• 1:16:15
  rating on Spotify or Apple podcast It really does help.
• 1:16:17
  But until next time, my friends, if you find your
• 1:16:20
  friend dead on the floor.
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: In a spaceship, maybe don't go out and check on them.
• 1:16:24
  Maybe keep them in this giant ziploc bag because they
• 1:16:27
  might be alive and fucking trying to kill you.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 4: Stay creeped, stay spooks your creeps, and uh, this was
• 1:16:37
  just really good. I have nothing else to add.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 10: By such us, such unst