Ugly Little Things

by Todd Keisling

  David Ruiz of Arizona, age 29, was disqualified on account of being a registered sex offender. Considering he met all other requirements, my peers argued that he would be an ideal candidate for expulsion from the planet based on his disposition toward children. Once our superiors learned of his record, however, Mr. Ruiz’s candidacy was denied.

  Maxwell Foster of Arkansas, age 25, was a normal, healthy male of above-average intelligence, with no history of violence, substance abuse, or sexual deviation. His parents were killed in a car accident when he was nineteen. Following their deaths, he learned to live on his own, working in a garage by day and attending trade school at night.

  My first impression of him was less than hopeful. His psychiatric evaluation revealed a longstanding guilt over the death of his folks. This sort of result was a huge red flag, even in the face of all his favorable qualities, but compared to the other two—and in the interest of our timetable—our superiors urged us to clear him for duty.

  So after three years of screening, testing, and deliberation, Offworld Incorporated finally found their MVP.

  In the months following his selection, we subjected Maxwell to every possible degree of training we could muster. Physical training, safety drills, zero gravity acclimation, preparation for atmospheric ascent—he took it all in stride. Maxwell was sharp like that. He could wrap his mind around just about anything you gave him.

  We even gave him a crash course on ODESSA’s override commands in the event of an emergency. That genius decision was made by Paul Pinsky, Offworld’s former CEO, much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone involved in the project.

  A lot of emails circulated over that choice, many of which made their way into the Foley Commission’s final report on the tragedy, and for good reason. The whole point of the system was its ability to self-correct and negate the need for manual commands. The entire MVP initiative was built around this proprietary tech. Pinsky had effectively given Maxwell Foster the keys.

  “It’s a fail-safe for our fail-safes,” Pinsky wrote in one email. “The odds that Mr. Foster will need to engage a manual override for any reason are a million to one. A billion, even.”

  Months after the disaster, when the finer details of Maxwell Foster’s final days were coming to light, Chief Justice David Foley (the Foley Commission’s namesake) subpoenaed Mr. Pinsky to testify before a congressional committee.

  Of course, he never made it to that hearing. Paul blew his brains out an hour after he received the subpoena. They’re still scraping him off the walls of his office. Poor bastard.

  The commission built their entire case around Paul Pinsky’s lapse in judgment. I admit it was, in some ways, unfair to paint Mr. Pinsky as the villain in the whole affair, but at the end of the day, someone had to play that part. The public demanded answers to the most fundamental questions related to the tragedy: Why did it happen, and who was to blame?

  Pinsky took the spotlight for the latter. The former, however, is something that will be studied, speculated, and puzzled over for decades to come. Data transmitted from ODESSA indicated that there were no anomalies prior to Foster’s engagement of the system’s manual override. Why, then, did he engage it? And why open the airlock?

  Why, indeed.

  Here’s something they didn’t disclose to the public.

  About a week before the depressurization event, Maxwell Foster sent a transmission to Mission Control requesting a full scan of the shuttle’s systems. His reasoning, he said, was due to a strange knocking heard from outside the hull of the DSS. Mission Control complied with the request, but with the caveat that he get more rest. ODESSA reported all systems were functioning normally.

  Two days later, Foster sent another transmission: “Knocking again. Please re-scan. Louder this time.” As before, all scans returned with normal results. When this was communicated back to ODESSA, Foster responded with four words: “It has a pattern.”

  Let that sink in for a moment.

  Maxwell Foster was approximately 30 million kilometers from home and roughly halfway into his journey. His trajectory was calculated and plotted by a supercomputer and then re-checked by a team of geniuses. Short of there being an errant chunk of rock floating through the chaos of space—which would’ve done more to the shuttle than produce a simple tap on its hull—there was absolutely no reason for anything to be knocking on the outside of the ship.

  Foster’s comment raised more than a few eyebrows. Naturally, everyone thought he was hearing things, that the knocking was perhaps his mind’s response to a lack of stimuli, similar to the effect of a sensory deprivation chamber. To be honest, that seemed like as good an explanation as any, but the executives in the company weren’t taking any chances. They ordered constant monitoring through all means necessary.

  Until that point in the mission, the DSS’s onboard cameras were checked only once daily. Foster signed away his right to privacy the moment he accepted his place aboard the shuttle, but the folks in Mission Control still liked to stay out of his hair when possible. Simply put, watching a man live day to day on a space shuttle is pretty damn boring.

  After his troubling messages, privacy was a luxury he could no longer be afforded. Mission Control began monitoring the camera feeds at regular hourly intervals. These were more than still images. I’m talking about full video and audio—yet another fact conveniently omitted from the Foley Commission’s final report. If there truly was something knocking on the outside of the ship, we’d hear it.

  So we flipped a few switches and started listening.

  Most of those recordings were about as banal as you’d expect. We recorded Maxwell talking to himself, singing along (poorly) to the music he’d brought along for the trip. Occasionally, we’d hear him snoring. Mostly, all we heard was the hum of air circulating through the shuttle.

  And then . . . there it was. A pattern of sounds: Knock. Knock. Knock-knock. Knock. Tap-tap-tap. On repeat, at various speeds and pitch. One of our engineers spliced together the footage of multiple camera feeds from throughout the shuttle as a way of tracking the sound’s progression. The result was a montage of knocks and taps running from outside one end of the shuttle to the other.

  I get goosebumps just thinking about that moment. All of us standing there around the computer terminal, listening to this cacophonous rattling of something that simply should not be. And yet it was right there. We could all hear it, and not one of us could offer an explanation for its origins. The team at Offworld had conceived of every scenario imaginable in preparation for the worst—except this one. We were watching from the shore of a vast, impartial ocean, and caught in its riptide was the most innocent sailor of all.

  God help us, we cast him off without a lifeboat.

  Looking back, I think that’s the moment everything began to fall apart. Honest panic spread through the Offworld offices. No one really knew how to deal with this discovery, but despite a general breakdown in communication from executive leadership, Mission Control continued to observe and report on Foster’s daily toils.

  Maxwell stopped responding to our transmissions, and further downloads from the AV feeds revealed that he wasn’t just talking to himself, but responding to something coming from outside the ship. He would pull himself along the railings in the halls of the DSS, floating back and forth along the wall with the anxiety of a distressed animal, pausing every so often to press his ear against the surface. What followed was usually an outburst of some kind, either in reply or in defiance.

  “I can’t hear you,” he’d sometimes say. Other times, he would scream, “I won’t! I can’t! Impossible! STOP IT! IT ISN’T TRUE!”

  Our camera feeds revealed that he’d injured himself in those final days. One of the techs noticed dark globules hovering in front of one of the lenses. Subsequent footage revealed Maxwell raking his nails down his arms, carving deep crimson canyons into his flesh. That discovery led to another moment of panic among our ranks—not just over the sight of Maxwell’s self-mutilatio
n, but our complete helplessness and inability to stop him from doing so. What could we do but watch this young man tear himself apart?

  Those final days followed the same pattern. There wasn’t a single audio feed that didn’t contain the goddamn noise. The knocking was bad enough, but over time, our recorders began picking up a kind of low, raspy gibberish that none of our engineers could decipher. Together, the sounds formed a maddening song only Maxwell could understand. According to ODESSA’s latest data report, Maxwell hadn’t slept in 72 hours, and it showed. The sickly, mutilated thing we saw on camera in those last active transmissions was a shadow of the young man I knew.

  I wasn’t there when ODESSA’s transmission revealed the manual override had been triggered. After living at the office for the better part of a week, I’d finally allowed myself a short reprieve, removing myself long enough to get some proper sleep. A lot of good that did me though. I spent the time thinking about Maxwell, about the last conversation I had with him before his departure.

  The night before launch, I wandered into the office cafeteria to grab a bite to eat, and I found Maxwell sitting by himself at a corner table. He was staring out the window, toward the launch pad where the DSS and its carrier rocket were being prepped for their big day. Even from that distance, the rocket towered over all creation, a silent testament to man’s determined curiosity.

  And sitting there, looking up at this pinnacle of modern ingenuity, was one brave soul who’d selflessly volunteered to lead his species toward the stars. After I’d collected a bag of chips from the vending machine, I approached and asked if I could join him.

  “Sure,” he said, smiling. The kid never failed to muster a smile when he was here. It’s a smile that haunts my dreams to this day. We sat in silence for a while, staring out toward the DSS. Finally, Maxwell turned to me and sighed. “Do you think anything will happen?”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. There’s a whole lot of empty space up there, and we don’t know a whole lot about it.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “That’s why your voluntary service is so important.”

  “I guess,” Maxwell said, “but what if we’re not meant to know it? What if we can’t?”

  “I suppose we’ll never know if we don’t try.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Mr. Foster. You have an entire planet cheering for you.”

  He smiled and wiped his eyes. I was so caught up in staring at the launch pad that I hadn’t noticed he was crying.

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Maxwell rose from his seat and wished me a good evening, but before he could leave, I stopped him with a question of my own: “Why did you really volunteer for this? Off the record, of course.”

  His answer was almost immediate, spoken with that characteristic smile: “Because I have to know.” The conviction with which he uttered that statement gave me chills then. It still does.

  That was the last time I ever spoke to him. God, what I wouldn’t give to go back there and tell that kid to walk away from the whole thing.

  I was asleep for maybe an hour when the call came through. The final AV transmission had just finished downloading when I arrived at the office, and I found my coworkers standing around the terminal in horrified silence.

  That image you all know from the Foley Commission’s public disclosure, the grainy close-up crop of Maxwell’s hand clinging to the edge of the hole torn into the side of the shuttle, was exactly that: a cropped still image taken from the video of the entire ordeal. Out of all the available data, Offworld’s PR department chose that image because “it would provide the world with closure.” Let me cut through the bullshit: All AV feeds to the DSS were in high-definition. The graininess was an effect added to the cropped image by Offworld’s media department prior to submission to the Foley Commission.

  Here is what was withheld from the world:

  The last transmission begins with Maxwell Foster hovering before ODESSA’s master panel. His hair is disheveled, and his face and shirt are caked in dried blood. A pattern on his forehead suggests he tried carving symbols into his skin with his fingernails. His eyes are vacant and swollen. For a moment, he looks up into the camera, almost as if asking permission for what he is about to do. A beat later, his head jerks back, and he digs one blood-caked finger into his ear.

  “I told you I would,” he mutters before clenching his jaw and shrieking, “I PROMISED I WOULD!”

  When he removes his finger, fresh dollops of blood blossom outward from his ear in a sickly spiraling pattern. He moves his hands to the master panel below, and from off-camera, we hear him inputting the manual override codes. ODESSA’s warning system announces the override is in effect.

  At this point, Maxwell looks up into the camera once again and smiles. One of his incisors is missing. A thick globe of blood tries to escape his lips, but he sucks it back into his mouth with a childish slurp. He mouths a goodbye to the camera, offers a cursory wink, and leaves the frame.

  When we switch feeds to the camera opposite the airlock portal, Maxwell is hovering before the security panel adjacent to the door. ODESSA announces activation of the airlock and begins a countdown to imminent depressurization.

  This is where things stop making sense. After the count of ten, the airlock blows open, revealing the infinite pit of space beyond. From that stygian maw comes the source of the shuttle’s impossible knocking. One by one, crawling along the rim of the portal like insects, are hands. Small, bloated hands, their flesh flecked and peeling like wallpaper, all beckoning to Maxwell’s floating, agonizing body.

  The young man is already suffering from ebullism and hypoxia, struggling against the fate he has wrought for himself, gasping for air that no longer exists. And waiting for him are those impossible hands, tapping and knocking along the rim of the portal.

  A total of fifteen seconds elapses following depressurization, during which Maxwell endures one of the most painful deaths imaginable. In the final frames of the recording, the hands reach into the portal, clutch his body, and pull him from the vessel. The infamous ‘closure’ shot of Maxwell’s hand gripping the edge is nothing more than a matter of happenstance as his fingers drag along the portal’s rim.

  The video looped on repeat for twenty minutes before anyone regained enough composure to stop it.

  Most of Offworld’s staff resigned that day. I stuck around long enough to see through the commission’s inquiry, hoping I wouldn’t have to do what I’m doing now. As I mentioned before, congressional pockets were lined with enough blood money to keep my testimony from seeing the light of day. Everything I’ve said here was stricken from the commission’s record.

  I’m not so naïve as to believe that what I’ve revealed to you here won’t be met with speculation and conjecture. I’m cognizant of the fact that I will be labeled as a conspiracy theorist. So be it. The A/V footage—all ninety-six hours of it recorded from the first sign of the knocking anomaly—has been uploaded to the deep web for your perusal. It’s there if you know where to look. And when you do, I encourage you to watch it. Form your own opinion.

  To this day, I still cannot reconcile the events as I witnessed them, nor do I suspect I ever will. I can only speculate. Whenever I look skyward, I find myself contemplating Maxwell’s words that night in the cafeteria. Perhaps what Maxwell Foster found waiting up there in the ravenous darkness between all those dead stars were answers to his questions.

  What if we aren’t meant to know? What if we can’t?

  HUMAN RESOURCES

  From: Alex Newmarth

  Sent: October 28, 2014 2:38 AM

  To: Elizabeth Cameron; David Miller; Rena Oppegard; Mary Griffith;

  CC: charles.boid@zerzeph.net

  Subject: My resignation—Boid be praised!

  To All:

  It is with deep regret and sorrow that I must bid you farewell. Effective immediately, I am resigning from my duties as HR manager on account of having just murdere
d my assistant and misleading others at the company. Additionally, let this email stand as my last will and testament, and as my confession for the sins I have committed against our glorious prophet, Charles Boid.

  Three months ago, members of our IT department approached me with evidence of misappropriation of our company resources. Although they could not prove it at the time, signs pointed to one of our senior programmers, Charles Boid (Praise His Glory). They alleged that he was using our company’s software and network to build, and I quote, “something evil.”

  Although improper usage of company resources is a serious matter, I was taken aback by their claims, and I can honestly say that I have never heard anything like it in my twenty-year career. That being said, I approached the matter with utmost care and professionalism, and acted accordingly despite my ignorance of the greater picture. My intention now is to set the record straight regarding these allegations and sing the praises of the Anointed One who has shown me the truth beyond this veil of flesh and electrons.

  My original report contained a number of egregious errors which I intend to rectify for you now, per the instruction of the Anointed One:

  Charles Boid’s attitude and work ethic are not “poor” and “questionable” as previously indicated; the Anointed One requires isolation to contemplate the nature and machinations necessary to resurrect He Who Lurks Beyond the Code. In light of this, I find our prophet’s actions acceptable, and I was wrong to factor them into my investigation.

  An addendum to the previous point: The account of my assistant, Jessica Beatty, which included allegations of “harassment” and “violent conduct,” are hereby stricken from my report. The Anointed One’s reaction to Ms. Beaty’s interruption of his meditative process should only serve as an example of our prophet’s dedication to his cause. Furthermore, Ms. Beatty recanted her statement shortly before transcending beyond this mortal plain. May she find solace and mercy in her ascension as she is judged by He Who Lurks Beyond the Code.