My Sweet Satan

by Peter Cawdron

  His smile faded. Her father's face looked solemn, unnatural, almost a figurine carved in a wax museum. All emotion drained from his features as he spoke.

  “Hang in there, Jazz.”

  ~

  Jasmine's eyes opened, but for a moment she couldn't see. A pungent odor filled the air. At first, Jasmine thought it was gunpowder, but the smell wasn’t that sharp, more burnt and metallic than the acrid chemical residue of a shot going off. Whatever it was she could smell, it sure wasn’t her Mom’s freshly baked homemade apple pie.

  Flashes of light burst around her as she gasped for air. Slowly the blinding light resolved into a view of a spherical room. White cabinets and computer workstations lined the far surface, but they appeared upside down. Jasmine couldn't think of them as being mounted on a wall or a ceiling. There were no edges to the room, no corners, no point of reference for her mind to cling to.

  A second, clean oxygen mask had been slipped over the back of her head but the mask hadn't been placed properly on her face. The upper edge sat across the bridge of her nose, causing the plastic cup to sit raised, slightly away from her mouth. Jasmine could feel precious oxygen running out across her cheeks. She wanted to straighten the mask, but her arms felt like lead weights. She tugged feebly against the Velcro straps holding them in place.

  “That's it, babe. You can do this.”

  Jasmine fought to free herself, but her hands were caught in the straps. One of her legs came free and she pushed against the table, trying to pull away from the blur of the mechanic floating before her. She was disoriented. She couldn't tell if she was lying on a bench or if she had been strapped to a wall. Her senses deceived her, she could have been strapped to the floor or hanging from the ceiling for all she knew. Vertigo swept over her. She felt giddy, unable to determine which way was up.

  “You're going to be fine. Just relax and breathe deeply.”

  Mike's hand rested on Jasmine’s shoulder, but she felt repulsed by him.

  “No,” she gasped from beneath the mask.

  The man before her sounded like her Mike, but he was too old. Mike was twenty-two, not forty-five. Who the hell was this man who had ripped open her shirt?

  Jasmine looked down at the patches stuck to her chest above her breasts. The torn remains of her tank-top drifted to either side of her, still attached under her arms but floating in the air as though they were drifting in water.

  She squirmed, trying to get away from this monster in front of her.

  “Hey, take it easy.”

  Jasmine tried to speak, but her mouth was numb, as though she'd had a shot of Novocain at the dentist. Saliva dribbled from her lips.

  “No,” she struggled to say. “Please.”

  Mike pulled the oxygen mask to one side, resting it on her cheek as he daubed gently at the corner of her lips, speaking softly with a tone of concern she found confusing.

  “Easy, babe. Easy. Let it go. It'll take a few minutes to reorient. Just relax. The more you stress the harder this will be.”

  “What?” she managed, her speech slurring as she spoke. “Where?”

  Single words were all she could manage.

  “Coming out of deep sleep is a bitch at the best of times, but you. Damn, I thought I'd lost you. Don't scare me like that, Jazz.”

  “Who are you?” she said, still trying to twist her hands free. Jasmine managed to pull her right hand loose and held her palm out in front of her, wanting to push Mike away, but she was struck by uncertainty. Just having her hand between her and him seemed to give her some much needed distance. She wanted to go home, back to Atlanta. Being topless, she felt the need to cover herself, to protect herself from this stranger.

  “It's me, honey. Mike. Remember?”

  “Mike?” Jasmine asked, touching gently at his face. Her fingernails scratched softly at the skin beneath his haggard beard. “My Mike? But—I don't understand? How?”

  Mike ran his hand up over his own neck, through the hair on his cheeks and chin, saying, “Yeah, six months stuck in a sleep pod without shaving scares the crap out of me too!”

  He smiled, then laughed, but his laughter wasn't relaxed. He sounded manic, unhinged, which scared her.

  Jasmine forced a smile in response. Slowly, a vague recollection seeped through the fog in her mind.

  “But your hair,” she said, still coming to grips with speech. Her words sounded clumsy, as though spoken by a child. She touched softly at his temples and ran her hand gently over his forehead. A tuft of hair sat high on his crown. The hair on his head was long and straggly but had receded back several inches revealing a high brow. Mike looked like a homeless bum on some sleazy street corner.

  “The years catch up to us all sooner or later, babe.”

  Mike peeled the patches off her chest, pulling them back and raising the skin as he did so. Dark red welts broke out on her blotchy skin.

  “What happened to me? Where am I?” she asked, pulling the oxygen mask from her face.

  “Where are you?” Mike replied with an air of genuine surprise. “Honey, you need to take a look outside.”

  Another hand towel floated before her, so she pulled it to her breasts, covering herself as Mike tore open the Velcro straps holding her in place. Once the straps were released, Jasmine felt herself float free, flying like a bird. No, not a bird, she thought, like a helium balloon, drifting without any effort at all.

  “I don't understand,” she said, astonished by the floating sensation. Pinpricks stabbed at her bare feet, giving her the sensation of standing too close to the edge of a rooftop.

  Her inner ear deceived her, telling her the room was in motion, fooling her into thinking she was caught on a roller coaster, plunging down into a corkscrew, but her eyes assured her the walls were motionless. She felt a slight tingling feeling in her hands, they were puffy, bloated, and she was tempted to think of them as fat but that was the wrong term.

  Jasmine wanted nothing other than to feel her feet set firmly on the ground, but where was the floor? There was nothing within the spherical room to suggest one direction or another was up. A series of dark tubes sat either above or below her, she couldn't decide which. Two of them were open. Frosted glass hid the occupants of the other coffin-like tubes.

  Jasmine felt as though she was falling, but she wasn't, or was she? Blobs of spew floated before her in perfectly round droplets. She was in space. She had to be, but how? She ducked beneath a blob of bile and reached out for a handle on the wall.

  “It's OK,” Mike said, moving away from her. “Jason will get the cleaners running. They'll fix this.”

  Jasmine turned toward him, seeing him floating in a corridor that extended out of the room. She'd assumed his orientation was up, but there was a sign on the wall beside him: Emergency Release. Either the sign was lopsided and upside down, or both he and she were inverted. From her perspective, it looked as though the sign had been knocked loose and had fallen to one side, perhaps hanging from a single screw. That there were no screws jarred her mind, and she tried not to think about the Alice-in-Wonderland world into which she'd been thrust. A talking rabbit with a stopwatch couldn't have been more alarming.

  “Come on,” Mike said. Without moving his legs, he pulled on a rail, pushing off with his other hand and gliding effortlessly into the corridor outside the medical bay.

  Jasmine pushed off. For a second, she felt as though she were completely stationary and it was the walls of the spaceship that were in motion, moving slowly past her like a train pulling out of a station. The hatchway drifted past and she found herself in a white, sterile corridor stretching out well over a hundred feet in front of her. Like the sphere she'd emerged from, there was no floor. All the walls looked roughly the same and she noted Mike was sideways relative to her, or she was sideways relative to him. She couldn’t decide which perspective held true.

  There were three ladders running the length of the corridor, spaced equally apart, but they seemed redundant. Jasmine pulled on one of t
he rungs and thrust herself down the circular, tube-like corridor behind Mike.

  She was flying. She could have flown on forever, darting effortlessly through the air. Her terror faded, replaced by a childlike sense of wonder at life in space. If this was a dream, it was a dream she never wanted to wake from. Jasmine still felt a little sick, but the awe of flying through the air like she was swimming through water kept her stomach in check.

  The handholds and hatches lining the corridor disappeared beneath her. Computer consoles and flat screens made up workstations. The odd scrap of cotton or speck of dust floated stationary, suspended in the air.

  Mike stopped and opened a locker. He tossed a bunched up rag over to Jasmine.

  “Put this on.”

  Jasmine copied him, coming to a halt with ease. She watched as the cloth drifted straight toward her without arcing through the air or slowing. She grabbed it and realized it was a tank-top.

  “Thanks,” she said, turning away from him and slipping the cotton top over her head and down over her breasts.

  “Hey,” he said, coming up behind her. “Don't feel bad. You had it pretty rough back there. You just take your time, Honey.”

  Jasmine jumped at his touch. Her body spasmed as though she'd been hit with another electric shock. She wasn't sure why, but she felt overwhelmed and confused by everything that was happening. Her body ached. There was only so far the novelty of being in space could carry her.

  “Where the hell am I?” she said, turning back to him and repeating the question she'd asked in the medical bay. Tears formed in her eyes, only her tears never ran down her cheeks. They formed ever enlarging globules of water near the bridge of her nose, blurring her vision and forcing her to wipe them away. Drops of crystal clear water drifted through the air, reflecting the light like dozens of tiny mirrors.

  “I was at home,” she said. “I was sitting on the porch waiting for you.”

  “Hey, it's OK,” Mike replied, putting his arm around her shoulder and pulling her in tight under his arm. “You're disoriented. Focus on the little things. It's going to take some time to clear your head. You've had a nasty shock.”

  Jasmine trembled in his arms.

  “Come on,” he added, pushing off the bulkhead and drifting further down the corridor, holding her hand and dragging her with him. “There's something you're going to want to see, something that's going to make all of this better, I promise.”

  This wasn't her Mike, she was sure of it. He may have sounded like Mike, even looked like him. He may have had the same mannerisms, but there was something strange about him, and it wasn't just his age. Although Jasmine was distressed, she could see Mike was struggling as well. He seemed nervous, perhaps anxious. He wouldn't give her straight answers. He changed the subject. He shifted himself physically. He was antsy, bordering on frantic. Whereas she wanted to curl up in a ball and be left alone, Mike was hyperactive.

  Behind her, several automated cleaners the size of basketballs whizzed through the air. Multidirectional fans within each unit allowed them to navigate precisely as they cleaned up the droplets of vomit that had drifted into the corridor. The mechanical basketballs disappeared into the medical bay.

  Mike let go of her as he drifted too close to the curved wall of the corridor, correcting his motion with a soft touch on a panel marked HVAC. Jasmine followed behind him, pushing off gently and stretching her arms out in front of her. She felt as though she were diving into a pool, only the water never rushed up to greet her, instead her dive took her further down the corridor.

  An eerie glow shone in the distance. The corridor opened out into a bowl-shaped room with a large glass dome. Beyond that lay Saturn, frozen in three-quarter profile, with most of its wispy, golden clouds reflecting the brilliance of a distant sun.

  Instead of being millions of miles away from her, it seemed as though Jasmine was looking at an elaborate model of Saturn. The apparent size was an illusion, she understood that, but the gas giant seemed no larger than a tennis ball held at arm’s length, while the rings reached out roughly the same distance on either side. The rings appeared razor thin, almost fragile. If this had been a model, she was sure they would have been as brittle as a wafer-thin sheet of glass. Thousands of fine lines stretched around the planet, disappearing into the dark shadow of the gas giant.

  Jasmine had visited New York with her high school art class and had seen the Starry Night. The swirling cloud tops on the distant planet reminded her of Van Gogh's entwined brush strokes. The contrast between the chaotic, repeating cloud patterns and the smooth, record-like curves of the rings was alluring—hypnotic.

  Ornate curls wound their way around the various latitudes on the massive planet like the cornice work in some 17th century French castle. The intricate patterns repeated like calligraphy, with flourishes of passion and brilliance visible in each stroke.

  “Magnificent,” she whispered.

  The spaceship that had seemed so large around her now felt small, as though it were a toy boat adrift on the open ocean.

  Mike spoke rapidly.

  “Oh, Jazz. You should have seen her on our closest approach. We’re outbound now, but once she filled the entire dome.”

  Jasmine was stunned by the rich depth of color before her. Oranges, whites, yellows and browns all entwined upon each other, swirling before her like the color palate of some medieval painter.

  “But—But how? I mean, a minute ago, I was sitting on my porch in Atlanta, Georgia.”

  “A minute ago,” Mike replied. “You were flatlining. After twelve months of cryo-sleep, the reanimation procedure had stalled. Your body was starved of oxygen for almost nine minutes. Had it not been for the millions of nano-bots floating around in your bloodstream, I doubt I'd have been able to bring you back.”

  “But this is not me,” Jasmine insisted, looking down at herself. Her body looked lean, but older. Whereas she remembered the soft skin on the back of her hands, now veins and thin tendons appeared beneath the taut skin.

  “Honey, it's been a long time since we first met at the Marshall Space Flight Center, but I can assure you, you've been pushing and prodding me along ever since then.”

  “I—I don't understand? How did we get here?”

  “We're on the Copernicus,” Mike said, scratching at his straggly beard. “We're out here to make first contact.”

  “First contact?”

  “You really don't remember, do you?”

  “No,” Jasmine replied, looking around at the equipment on the flight deck in amazement.

  Every square inch seemed to have a purpose. Rungs marked several ladders evenly spaced around the deck, reaching up from the seats and around the sides of the bowl-shaped command center. They seemed redundant given the magical quality of flight the crew possessed in a weightless environment. Like Supergirl, Jasmine could dart wherever she wanted, flying with ease on the slightest whim.

  To her mind, the dome over the command deck should have marked the front of the craft, pointing the direction of travel, but Jasmine got the impression the Copernicus was drifting sideways, pointing other than where it was heading. Front, top, left, right—these terms were meaningless, nothing more than her own assumptions. Jasmine could have been looking backwards at Saturn for all she knew.

  Although there were numerous flat screen panels with various displays and controls methodically laid out around the center of the command deck, there were also old fashioned toggle switches and analog knobs, which surprised her. There seemed to be a mix of old and new technology on the Copernicus. Some of the mechanical switches were protected with see-through plastic flip covers so they couldn’t be bumped into a new position by accident.

  “Babe, it's been twenty years since we left Atlanta. Don't stress. Give it time. Your memory will come back.”

  And again, he was off. There was something wrong. Mike didn't seem to want to focus on any one thing for too long. He was in a hurry, but why? What was so important? Was it importance that dro
ve him on, she wondered, or manic anxiety?

  Mike floated in front of a mirror. It took Jasmine a moment to realize what she was looking at: a bathroom! Mike had pulled back an accordion plastic panel revealing a multipurpose region at the back of the spherical deck. A buzz filled the air as he ran clippers over his face. A thick tube attached to the clippers sucked up the loose strands of hair with vigor, vacuuming them away as he trimmed the straggly growth on his beard. Mike ran the clippers around his chin, up and down his neck, over his cheeks. The buzz of the clippers seemed incongruous with being in space.

  Like all the men she’d known in her life, including her father, Mike made faces in the mirror as he worked with the clippers to trim the hair around his cheeks, his nose and chin, being sure to catch every last strand of hair. He even pulled his upper lip down, stretching it so he could catch any long nose hairs, which Jasmine found gross.

  “Ah,” she said, raising a hand and wanting to continue talking, but Mike ignored her, looking at himself in the mirror. Perhaps he didn't hear her, but the clippers weren't that loud and he must have seen her lips moving out of the corner of his eye. He didn't want to talk to her. As unsettling as everything was around her, it was Mike that scared Jasmine.

  Mike floated in front of the bathroom with his feet hooked under a bar on what Jasmine assumed was the floor, watching his varying expressions carefully in the mirror. The suction sounded like a vacuum cleaner, and it probably was, she thought. She marveled at the transformation before her. Mike didn't stop with his beard. He took time to cut his long locks as well, reducing the hair on his head and face to a fine stubble. He had no regard for aesthetics, trimming all the hair on his head with what seemed to be a number one setting.

  Once he finished, he grabbed a damp washcloth and rubbed it over his face, clearing out the sleep in his eyes before working the cloth over his head.

  “Oh, man,” he said, putting the cloth in a pull-out bin. “That feels better.”