The Only Other Astronaut On This Mission Died Six Weeks Ago

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Welcome back to Creepcast.

Today we are diving into another cosmic horror phenomenon known as the only other the only other astronaut on the on this MAG!

The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago, but the computer insists there's life.

Oh my god, but the computer insists their life still

fuck!

The only other astronaut died.

No, just wait!

Wait!

The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago, but the computer insists their life signs are still stable.

Got it!

First try!

And this is an author.

What's funny is people are going to start thinking you're doing that on purpose.

I cannot read.

I'm dumb.

I am a fucking moron.

Okay.

Why do you think I only do the voices?

Okay.

If I had to read this.

Can you imagine if I had to read the whole thing?

It would not work.

Would not work.

Now, this is by Christian Wallace.

That's why you need me.

Don't forget that.

That's true.

So yes, the stories by Christian Wallace.

So we actually,

we have a list in like our Discord of like stories you all recommend that we just kind of keep tally of and then before we record an episode we just go through and like say like this is a good one so this title sounded interesting and it was highly rated and then after we go to check it out Sure enough, Christian Wallace is the author of the My Wife Has Taken Our Roleplay Too Far and My Husband Has Taken Our Roleplay Too Far, which were some pretty good stories I'm a big fan of that we read on the channel.

Yeah.

They're pretty cool.

very unique very creative interesting body horror uh so now coincidentally we've come across another one of this guy's work um so christian wallace is a fantastic author uh you can check out a bunch of his stories he has his own website christian wallace uh it's chwallace.co.uk uh he's british but don't hold that against him also just want to say the guy seems like a complete sweetheart his bio on uh his reddit is pretty much him just basically being like, yeah, feel free to narrate my stuff.

Just be sure to get permission.

And, you know,

if you want writing advice or writing help, just hit me up.

He seems like a complete and total sweetheart.

So I'm excited to do that.

And also, I'm excited to read this one too because we do not dive into cosmic horror enough.

Not enough.

We do not.

I agree.

Especially with stuff that's like, I'm obviously guessing that this is centered in space.

So, you know, we've had, we've had stuff that's like landed on Earth or, you know, cosmic things that have come down to Earth, but to have it actually be about a spaceman is pretty, it's a lot of fun.

I agree.

I agree.

uh i'm trying to see if he has any published works right now i know he has some like audio readings and stuff like that i think a lot of his work here is publisher or a lot of the short stories here are published on these

it seems that way yeah yeah okay he has some horror stories uh published through relix books one of them that it looks like came out uh last month or a couple months ago is a story or is a book called with teeth uh which seems to be about a temple under the arctic ice I like that.

Oh, that's one of the short stories in there.

Oh, it's a publication of short stories.

I see.

Because if you go to

his website and look through a lot of his stories, he has a ton of stuff that has to do with like Arctic expeditions and stuff like that.

He's posted to No Sleep.

Arctic expeditions.

Expeditions.

Arctic expeditions.

How fun.

Just for like a whole, like I said, for a horror thing.

Also, who actually is, who would want to do that in their real life?

Why?

Why do that now?

No, absolutely not.

You know, I mean, like, I get it when it was old.

It was pretty cool when it was old.

But only so much to it now.

I'll pass.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

But With Teeth looks pretty cool.

And it looks like it has four and a half stars on Amazon, which is pretty solid.

So you can get a Kindle version, get hardcover, paperback, all that stuff.

So if you like the roleplay story and like this one, be sure to check out his work with Teeth on Amazon.

Show him some love.

Oh, also, I want to start this off, too, by saying, just to get a general consensus of what people think about.

I sent Isaiah this message.

No, please, before

I say Isaiah this message, and he said, Hey, are you good to record now?

Or when are you going to record?

And I said, I said, I'm Golden Wright, meow, which I thought was really cute because instead of now, I put meow.

And now he's been giving me shit because I sent him a voice memo kind of explaining that joke.

And I was just saying, do you want to play it over your phone, Isaiah?

Instead of right now, I put right meow like a cat.

Meow,

I'm purring because I'm happy.

I'm a good little pussy

instead of right now.

I thought that

I just thought that that was a fine.

I don't know.

I just, I guess, you know, when you send your friend something,

it's met with such an abrasive reaction.

I just thought it was, you know,

I don't know.

You know, I guess am I the bad guy for sending that message?

I guess is what I want to know out of our audience here.

But without further ado, I'm ready to dive in and hear about this spooky astronaut.

Be sure to um keep liking and uh supporting us on spotify oh true

true see now you're being now you're being a cute little kitty now you're being a good little kitty by saying that because also

be sure to check us out on spotify

Give us a rating there.

It helps us out.

Also, check us out on Apple Podcast.

Check us out there, audio listeners.

You know what?

If this is your first time listening to us or if you've listened to us before, maybe take this one solo and go listen to it in the audio in your car right on Spotify and rank us there because it helps us.

Thank you guys so much.

All right, my cute little, my cute little whiskers.

Go ahead and start us off.

The only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago, but the computer insists their life signs are still staple.

When Ben died, he made very little noise.

When Ben drowned, it was the

when Ben drowned.

I can't even do the gold bloom thing right now.

Why?

What's wrong?

A story can't start with when Ben died without us thinking of when Ben drowned.

It's just everything.

It's just so much at once.

It's you.

I was on the phone earlier talking about...

entertainment lawyers for like a copyright strike thing on the channel.

And then I'm like, oh, my good pal and business partner, Hunter, responded.

Let me hear what he has to say.

And then it's just,

it is that.

It is something that I, I'm not built for.

It's just, it's, it's a lot at once.

Yeah.

It's haunting.

It's haunting and eerie how similar that sounds to the conversation my mom had before she left my father.

Go ahead.

If I could, if I could divorce you, I would have done so.

No, no, no.

No, you wouldn't.

But I'm stuck here.

This love is too good, isn't it?

You can't watch it.

It's too good.

Too many people watch the show.

There's too much money in it at this point.

Give mama a kiss.

Come on.

There's too many advertisers and there's too many employees tied to it.

I can't get out.

I'm stuck here.

Give me some sugar now.

What if I did it?

What?

Well, you would have had a lot of...

There'd be, you know, there'd be a pin of kittens very sad right now.

I'd be free.

I could be out of here.

It would be over.

You know what?

Then just go ahead and do it then, dude.

If it's that bad, then do it.

Okay.

You'd like that, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what I thought.

Okay.

The astronauts are dead.

An astronaut is dead now.

Okay.

Okay.

The only other astronaut's dead.

Six weeks ago.

When Ben died, he made very little noise.

It was the computers that alerted me.

Shrill alarms and flashing lights.

I hadn't even got it out of my sleeping bag before my smartwatch had lit up with half a dozen messages about system failures.

The situation didn't sink in until I was shaking an unresponsive Ben.

White eyes rolling back into his skull, blood pooling in his ears like red jelly.

Viscosity, mass, no gravity.

It made me nauseous to look at.

HQ would later say Ben died from an aneurysm.

One in a million.

A freak death that just happened to occur in low Earth orbit.

So what now?

I asked her after all the panic had died down and the reality of my situation finally settled in.

HQ sent me a rarely used or discussed document that outlined what I'd have to do.

Bodies pose a unique threat in microgravity, it explained.

All that order becomes disordered.

What is solid turns to liquid, what is liquid turns to gas.

First thing I needed to do was to put Ben's body somewhere that had no oxygen and was freezing cold.

Somewhere he would pose no danger to himself or me.

Isolated, but easily retrievable.

The conclusion was obvious.

I knew what they'd suggest before I even reached that part of the booklet.

It happened so fast that Ben was still warm when I put him in the special bag designed to endure the vacuum of space i kept expecting him to protest as i pulled at stiffening limbs and manipulated swelling joints every step of the process every zip every bit of velcro i had to remind myself he wasn't going to complain

it felt intimate but it wasn't intimacy requires two people by that point ben was just me I don't know if I agree with that last line, by the way.

This, this author.

Wait, what line line don't you agree with?

Intimacy with crash two people.

I've been very intimate.

That's what I was.

That's the part I was afraid you were going to agree with.

Come on, man.

Don't say that on the podcast.

Dude,

you know what's actually funny?

To tie that in, if intimate with yourself, right?

You say the craziest things that just diverge.

Go ahead.

Whatever.

I just want to say that I saw everybody in their life as a human cryptid.

It's true.

And mine, his name was Mr.

Floppy.

And the way that the reason that is because I know very well that a man can be intimate with himself is because I remember one time

at a sleepover, we sat there and

a kid excused himself.

He said, I feel sick when I go to sleep.

Like, all right, who gives a shit?

We're playing MLB the show on PS2.

Great game.

Go upstairs.

And before we know it, we hear him like giggling in the room.

And we hear like a.

We're like, that's disgusting.

We know what he's doing.

But when we heard what he was talking to himself in the room, Isaiah, and he was saying, it's so floppy.

So floppy.

Like he was flopping it back and forth, and we never said anything about it.

But we made an inside joke and we called him Mr.

Floppy for the rest of our lives.

And I ran into him at the grocery store the other day.

If I do it, I'm killing you first.

What?

What?

Do you not have your own cryptid kind of character in your life?

It would be cruel to push this on to someone else, I've decided.

Okay,

man.

Come on.

You tell me you didn't.

You don't think that the Mr.

Also, we are young.

Mr.

Floppy, that boy, I don't know what was going on, but there were some noises being made.

It was disturbing, right?

So floppy.

I saw him.

What are you even talking about?

What do you mean?

What am I talking about?

I've like, my ears are ringing right now.

I'm starting to sweat.

I'm getting like.

I'll tell you what was the most disturbing part about it is is that he had pistachio muffins in his cart.

No, no, he didn't.

He wants that.

No, you know what?

At this point, no, he didn't.

I don't know what you're talking about.

So I said, there's no way.

I said, Derek, it's nice to see you.

He's like, oh, my God, it's been so long.

And I knew that he was just packing some heat in his pants, so I didn't get too close.

But I saw that he had four trays of pistachio muffins.

To me, that was like a new thing and more lore.

If you eat a lot of pistachios, maybe it makes you well endowed.

That motherfucker had pistachio muffins out the woohah.

What do you think listeners' response to things like this is?

Do you think they hear this and they're like, wow, that's that's so

you know what, man?

Sorry that I'm just trying to tell you bits of my life of things that are going on.

What's, you know, I thought that, you know, for what pertained to what we had, absolutely should be, to be fair.

How does this pertain to what we're talking about?

How does it mean?

Intimacy requires two people.

Intimacy requires two people.

I said, I disagree.

I know that people can't.

I know you're talking about a guy in a store with the pistachio muffins.

Mr.

Floppy is the connection.

Mr.

Floppy.

What does that have to do with an astronaut?

It has nothing to do with the astronaut, but it has to do with the intimacy with two people.

Mr.

Floppy was very intimate with himself.

That's all I had to say.

And

I was going to say that the rest of it was very well written.

And that's a to, I love the visual of the swollen joints and having to put somebody basically into a giant goddamn Ziploc bag.

But then I couldn't get past the Mr.

Floppy.

I thought it pertained.

I'm sorry if it didn't.

I apologize if it doesn't.

Maybe I can say like the right combination of words to get the podcast taken off of YouTube, and then maybe that would be enough to get me out of the obligations for it.

I bet I can come up with some colorful ones right now.

You know,

I'm surprised.

I actually thought that you would be somewhat intrigued by what I had to say, but I'll keep it to myself.

I'm going to drop words you haven't heard of before,

if it gets me out of this.

God.

So, every syllable.

Lovecraft in dialect of something I've never heard before.

Every language, every pronunciation.

If consumers said hate speech, that's what it would sound like.

They're going to have to make a new word for what I'm going to do.

Yeah.

I'll hit everyone.

I won't take any prisoners.

All right.

Well, we're going to get back on.

What do you think of the idea of having to pack somebody up and put them out in space?

I think think what I was going to say about that paragraph is I love the way that Christian,

because he did the same thing with the descriptors in the roleplay stories, where he takes these like

these like concepts no one can relate to, like an adult man reverting to a baby's form or here talking about like someone dying in space, how the blood congeals.

But he describes it so well and so thoroughly, it feels like you're there.

Like I was imagining like the stiffening joints being shoved into into a ziploc bag of like the spacesuit and stuff like it um

it he he does so well at relating these impossible scenarios well it's funny that you say that too because i thought to myself you know what the bag made me think of was on like a canoe you know like whenever you're going into like you're floating with your buddies whatever and you have a trash bag and usual what happened is you you have like uh like a net trash bag you put your cans in or whatever and it kind of floats with you the side i was like god he's describing it the same way like a float trip almost.

Like,

it felt, it felt that relatable to like a float trip, even though it's in the vacuums of space, I kind of immediately am now picturing this body just floating on a spacecraft idly, the same way that like this trash net would float in water.

Yeah, yeah.

And I imagine what they're going to do, unless he's just pushing him out into space, is they're kind of going to, in a similar way, like tow the body.

Well, that's what I thought it was going to be.

Yeah.

Tow it, because then you don't want to just, you obviously want to leave.

You don't don't want to leave the body.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it's like they have to pull it behind, kind of like a trash bag, like you said.

Yeah.

Also, the way that he's kind of disassociating him, like at the end, he says, Ben was just meat.

I think that he's doing that just from the act, but I think that there's still obviously an emotional tie-in with their relationship, you know?

So, yeah, kind of what he phrases, you know, it felt intimate, but it wasn't.

Right.

So it's kind of like him justifying, like, I can't assign more weight to this situation than it is because he's just meat now.

Right.

Like a cope with it almost.

The spacewalk itself was something else.

The bag that surrounded Ben's body inflated in the vacuum and I instinctively felt the urge to undo what I'd done.

There was a body in there and bodies aren't meant to have so little between them and outer space.

When I touched the bag, I could still feel him beneath the paper-thin material.

The crease of an elbow.

The bump on his nose.

By the time I reached my destination, his body already felt brittle.

Attaching him to the station was easy enough on a technical level.

Leaving him there went against every instinct I had.

After that, there was no pretending he was coming back.

A day later, and I began to pack his things away.

There was a catharsis in it that I found calming.

I cataloged his belongings within detachment.

Most of his things were dry and uninteresting.

Photos of him with the dog, a copy of a Michael Shea book, a certificate of excellence from NASA that he received when he was 10.

He discovered a comet, he told me during our first meeting.

Backyard with the telescope.

NASA let him name it and everything.

That was how he knew he wanted to be an astronaut.

Described it as a calling.

Ben was like that.

A real-life Boy Scout.

In life, he'd had no edges.

You'd think given our history we'd be close.

Two men selected based on extensive psychological profiling.

Together we had simulated multiple missions to Mars.

Two on the ground, one in space.

All of them highly secretive.

An official mission to Mars was meant to be next, at which point the whole project would be made public.

But the key to having two people work together, alone, for nearly an entire year isn't to find two guys who are best friends forever.

It's finding people who won't grate on one another.

Neither hate nor love.

Two men who enjoyed their own company, but don't mind one another.

Ben and I had become acquainted over all that time together, but it wasn't like we were brothers-in-arms.

Oh, so sorry, I have to go get my package one sec.

Man, Isaiah's gone.

Now, I get to finally say my true piece.

What if Ben's in the bag right now, flopping it around?

What if Ben's sitting there and he's saying

it's so floppy

in the bag?

And our hero here has to look out the cockpit window

and see what he thought was his rigor mortis friend

flopping it around in a bag in the vacuums of space.

Would you go out?

Would you go out and would you

help this man or

is it his own fault?

Would he just be flopping it forever by himself?

Apologies for killing the vibe.

No problem.

Ben and I had become acquainted over all that time together, but it wasn't like we were brothers in arms.

We worked so well, precisely because there was no meat to the friendship.

No stakes.

Nothing to argue over.

To me, Ben was a nice guy, but that was all.

I figured he was plain and simple all the way down.

No dark secrets.

No real problems to speak of.

The journal changed that.

So this, I'm like, the way he's describing everything with Ben and like the stuff about when he was a kid, he discovered a comment, like humanizing him, and now, like, there was a dissonance between them and stuff.

But I just like the way the author sets up his characters.

Yeah, yeah, he's good about making you give a fuck about him.

You know, they all immediately have personalities that you can like attach yourself to.

And a lot of times, the stories that we do, everything's so vague, you know?

And it's nice to, it's nice to have a change of pace where there's actual, I don't know, relationships building.

You kind of get an idea even who this, who our storyteller is here, of somebody who maybe, you know,

gave us a mission, kind of like, obviously gave a fuck about this guy that was next to him, even if maybe he didn't reciprocate it as much.

You know?

Yeah.

There's like a real feel to the people involved.

Right.

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It was taped to the inside of a panel of a computer at his workstation.

He must have hidden it close to his things, somewhere out of sight, but easily retrievable.

Frayed leaves and yellowed pages, like some ancient artifact.

Last thing I expected to find in a space station.

I almost mistook its leather cover for some sort of personal Bible, sort of well-worn tome held up by a preacher making exclamations about the devil.

But its insides were handwritten, and hardly in keeping with the Bible.

Scribbles, shapes, phrases repeated and dissected.

Some of it was even in binary.

It seemed like the ravings of a child or a lunatic.

I thought it was maybe a mindfulness exercise, empty-headed doodling to help him get his head straight during stressful moments.

That didn't explain why he'd hidden it, why the numbers and pages seemed strangely organized.

I don't know how to describe it exactly, except to say that there was the vague impression that it meant something to the person who'd made it.

Every last gram on a shuttle is accounted for.

What you bring up with you, it can't be some random crap you want last minute.

Ben would have had to clear the journal.

I'm assuming he kept the content secret.

One look at what he'd been writing in NASA would have had him in Psyche Valve before the end of the day.

But the book's size and weight would have to be logged and accounted for.

It could not have gotten on the station by accident, so I knew immediately that Ben had wanted it for something.

I studied it for over an hour trying to figure out what that was.

Flicking from one page to the next, glaring at rows of numbers, strange fractals, something that looked like a cross between an eye and a textbook drawing of an atom.

Given the way his writing and art skills develop throughout the book i began to suspect he'd been adding to it since his childhood which was just another layer to the growing mystery love that that's great that's so cool little little cosmic boy is writing a like writing a cosmic horror like well you know what makes me think of is that potentially the comet he saw interlinked with that somehow Like almost as soon as he saw that, he started getting signs or visions or something.

Yep.

That's what my mind went to as well, that when he he was a kid, he found something, saw something in the stars that started to speak to him.

That's why now he's in this place.

I love those setups.

I love the setup of like a passing object or a fleet, like a fleeting moment leads to like a lifetime of like visions or seeing something.

I love yeah, like he was inducted into an order or religion at a young age.

Yeah, enlightened in some kind of way is always kind of fun.

Like a lot of fun flavor with that.

Yeah, I'm in.

He's got, he's got me hooked so far.

I thought I was never going to get any insight in the book until, about three-quarters of the way through, I came across yet another page filled with rows and rows of numbers.

Only this time, one of the strings was underlined and a single word had been scratched, ragged, and angry next to it.

The only bit of English, or any human language, in all those pages.

The only thing written in a way that could make sense to a living human.

The word itself made me stop dead in my tracks.

Made my blood run cold.

170318042636.

Aneurysm.

Oh, that's sick.

Do you think that's supposed to be like coordinates or something?

It almost seems like it's like, it's a part of this plan, this divine plan that he's writing now.

It's either coordinates or there is some kind of like long form writing that was delivered to him, or sorry, there was some kind of long-form writing

that was a code to say he would be, he would die of an aneurysm.

It's almost like it was, like, his cause of death was predetermined by himself.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

It's like he's had like this orchestrated, basically, like

journal of like what's supposed to happen, you know, like star dating shit and everything.

An astrological plan almost.

Man, that's so cool.

The suspicion that came over me felt like a kind of madness.

I told myself I had to be nuts when I checked the data from Ben's biomonitor, that I had to be crazy to even entertain the notion.

But the information recorded by several different machines confirmed it.

Ben's exact time of death was the 17th of March, 2018.

426 hours and 36 seconds.

Oh

man.

I don't think I moved for a good 15 minutes after that.

Just stared at the data as my mind worked its way around a giant impossible realization.

Ben knew he was going to die.

Oh, that's fun.

Okay, so down to the second, he had his death known.

Yeah.

But cause, what would happen, all of that.

Which the creepy thing here obviously leads to me is that he knew instead of being in the comfort of his bed at home, He knew that he was supposed to be on a space shuttle heading towards Mars.

He was supposed to be there for some reason.

Right.

Of course, I tried to rationalize this.

Anyone would.

I came up with half a dozen reasons he'd written what he'd written.

None of them were comforting, although they at least fit in with a more rational worldview.

Take, for example, the idea that Ben had killed himself at that exact moment in time to meet some sort of prophecy he scrawled days or even hours before.

Was that a good thing?

What did it mean for me?

Ignore the logistical issues of like what that poison can be timed to the second.

Let's just say that's what he did.

That left the hair-raising question of why,

and there's no comfortable answer that I could see.

Of course, I went through that book with a fine-tooth comb, looking for any more clues.

I wish I hadn't.

I eventually found another word, this one closer to the very end of the journal, another date and timestamp, one that lay six weeks in the future, and another word scratched painfully into the paper by a clumsy fist: immolation.

Bro, that would be terrifying.

Terrifying, too.

Space station shit always scares me because just because one, you cannot go anywhere.

You can't even go outside to take a fucking breather.

You know, you're just stuck with your thoughts.

And I love the idea that

astronauts and spacemen and women, whatever, would go mad is so believable that you would just go fucking crazy.

You're like, I have no other option.

I'm going to go insane.

I like the idea, too, of like, um,

yeah, you've seen interstellar, right?

Yep.

You remember that scene where Matt Damon gets like sucked out of the ship and just like dies with like not, it's literally goes quiet because space doesn't carry sound.

Yeah.

Is that Matt Damon?

Is Matt Damon an interstellar?

Yeah, that's Matt Damon.

The guy who stole the ship from him and then like did the docking process wrong.

So he got ripped out of the ship.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Um, that I think about that with space all the time.

It's like everything that happens up there is completely unforgiving.

And like, you just die without a sound, right?

Um,

everything with space terrifies me in that way.

So, immolation, it's like, yeah, there'll be a fire on board the ship, and you can do absolutely nothing because it's not like you can leave the ship, right?

Have fun.

Good luck.

Yeah, have fun dying.

Yeah, Ben out.

Permission denied.

I bit my lip and took a deep breath.

What about the station's integrity?

I asked.

No sign of any issue from external cameras,

they replied.

I can hear something banging on the hole, I told them.

Nothing is visible on the cameras.

That's why I need to go take a look.

It's hard to argue with the computer.

You can't shoot at a death glare.

HQ could have easily arranged video calls, but really they wanted the distance.

Made it easier to say no.

So the spacewalk is incredibly dangerous, they quickly wrote back.

Microphones in station hull are reporting nothing of concern.

Usual impact from debris.

Nothing that corroborates reports of external tapping.

Permission for spacewalk is denied.

I made no further responses, but instead closed the screen and wondered if they were being entirely truthful.

The tapping sound, coming and going over the last few days, was unmistakable even over all those worrying machines and monitor.

All those worrying machines and motors.

Space stations are loud.

They even give us earplugs to handle it.

But whatever was out there was somehow louder.

Or perhaps, given the circumstances, I was just sensitive to the thought of something, anything, out there.

There's no denying it annoyed me.

Just one of those sounds I found impossible to block out.

Like water dripping in a bathtub at 3 a.m.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

No sense of order, not even on the surface level.

But something, maybe,

underneath.

Some sense or reason.

Some kind of regularity that the brain detects and can't let go of.

How could the microphones possibly miss it?

Sleep was getting progressively difficult.

At times, I thought the station under some kind of hidden stress.

Materials freezing and warming in irregular ways.

No atmosphere, no conduction of heat.

Things get hot in the sun's rays, objects warm and cool to both extremes.

This is routine stuff for anything up in space, of course.

But it didn't stop me thinking about all the ways that the station was just a pile of metal that could come undone.

Could break and tear, bend and stretch.

Like watching the wing of your plane wobble during turbulence, it's an uncomfortable reminder that you're just a monkey and a fancy toy.

And what if something had come loose?

Something.

Oh,

at first I stuck to this notion strictly, asking myself, what if some antenna or strap or bit of metal had gotten loose and was banging against the hull?

That would be bad.

But of course, that wasn't really what I was thinking.

It's what I wrote to HQ about over and over and over.

What was really on my mind was the thought that maybe,

somehow, he had gotten loose.

And of course, that's not so silly, right?

The specially designed bag he was in, the one that would vent any gases produced by decomposition while maintaining his body's integrity, was brand spanking new.

Know how many times it had ever been tested?

Never.

Never, ever.

Ben was the first.

So, of course, it might come loose.

Just because it's space-age technology doesn't mean it's sophisticated.

He was strapped to the outside like a Christmas tree to the family sedan.

Maybe, I wondered, one of the straps had broken.

Now he was thumping against the side every now and again.

Never mind that there wasn't anything out there to prompt that kind of buffeting.

No air, no wind.

If he'd come loose, he'd just float a little farther away.

Something was making that noise.

And I worried almost constantly that it was him.

Man, this is so fun.

Yeah, I love the idea of a guy kind of slipping into insanity and thinking that this dead person outside is like banging to come back inside.

Tap, tap, let me in.

So fun.

It's like the...

There's a story that reminds me.

Oh, you remember like at the end of the monkey's paw, how their son who died in the factory Oh, yeah, knocks on the door He comes to the door and he's like donk knock knock That's what it reminds me of.

Yeah, yeah, cuz they won't look they never look outside in the story They just beg for it to be over

You can hear the knocking you can hear him calling.

Yeah, yeah, they know that it's him.

Yeah

Only problem was I had cameras lots and all of them every single time showed the same thing The bag barely changed from when I last saw it in person strapped firmly and securely to the station's hull.

Should have reassured me.

Should have, but it didn't.

Something was out there, tapping on the hull.

On and off.

No pattern, no reason, no correlation.

It came and it went, seemingly choosing its moments to bother me the most.

Sleep was difficult for multiple reasons.

The tapping was bad enough, but lately my nightmares had taken a strange turn.

Black, cold.

In them, I was trapped in a suffocating film.

Freezing cold.

Non-stop agony.

Fighting furiously to free myself was this black void of a nightmare.

I love the imagery.

I love the imagery of him feeling trapped inside of the same bag he put Ben in.

But this time it's like a thinner film and it's just like this disgustingly cold, freezing.

I just love that.

The same way the body's left, right?

Freezing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's a thin paper material, he said, which I'm guessing it's like that weird.

I'm guessing it's like like that space material.

It looks like aluminum foil is what I had pictured, right?

Yeah, the space blanket.

Yeah, but then when he says, I was trapped in a suffocating film, it makes me think almost of

fire in the sky.

Whenever he gets abducted by the alien and it's like stretched.

Oh, yeah.

Kind of makes me think of it.

He's inside like the skin.

Yeah.

Skin sheath or whatever.

Exactly.

Like all deeply terrible dreams, it colored my thoughts for the rest of the day.

And each time I had it, it got harder to shake.

I tried to endure, compartmentalize, take my mental turmoil, put it in a box, right, unhinged across the lid, and sit rocking back and forth waiting for my rescue.

And that was an option, a good one.

There's one little word that stopped me going the route of hunkering down and ignoring my own madness.

Immolation.

When HQ told me the date of the sh the shuttle would reach me, I spent quite a bit of time wondering if this wasn't just some big experiment.

The sheer coincidence of it all, the magnitude of it.

They'd sent me the message, and the subject line had three exclamation points, like the communications officer on the other side couldn't wait to deliver good news for once.

Let their professionalism slip.

They'd finally arranged a shuttle to retrieve me after it was done dropping some guys off at the ISS.

It was lucky it had come so soon.

Stroke of logistical genius allowed me to sneak Ben and me back without it being too conspicuous.

I should be very thankful, they told me.

But I was just stunned.

The date matched the one Ben had written out.

Factoring in travel time, I'd be entering Earth's atmosphere at the exact time the prophesied moment would come and go.

Ripe for an error, a misplaced heat pad, a mistimed thruster, something, anything, to go wrong and leave me plunging to my death in a burning metal tube.

Ripe for immolation.

If it wasn't Ben out there tapping away, I wanted to know.

I needed to know.

I was a rational man, a skeptic.

I did not believe the natural world would produce a man that could predict his death down to the minute or the second.

Nor did I believe he could predict mine.

But I'm only an animal.

I am made of meat, vulnerable, a raw nerve in a world of jagged rocks.

And I am risk-averse.

That word.

Immolation.

Not random, not chance.

Up in the void, surrounded by pure oxygen, fire was a constant risk.

Ben's little numbers loomed large in my mind.

I had to make sure everything was in place.

Had to make sure there were no errors.

If it was a prediction, which I refused to accept at face value, then maybe I could take heart from it.

What could Ben do in the face of an aneurysm?

Nothing.

But immolation?

Fire.

An accident?

That sort of thing could be avoided.

Just so long as everything was in working order, just so long as everything was where it was meant to be.

What did HQ know?

Cameras and remote operators, not enough.

No one else was in that tin can except me.

Why even have humans in space if you wouldn't trust their instincts and judgments?

I needed to know what was making that noise.

I needed to get out there.

HQ caught on too late.

I was inside the suit, the airlock cycling by the time they realized.

I chose my timing well.

Halfway through my maintenance shift.

Told them I was taking a look at the suit, make sure everything was in order.

Met they were slow to catch on to what I was doing.

Technically, they could stop the process at any stage.

They could do anything from their side.

But I threatened to force a manual override that would shut them out from that part of the system.

They told me they'd court-martial on return, but that was a piss week threat.

For me, the stakes were higher than a court-martial.

In the end, they backed down.

Know how hard it is to build a space station in secret?

It came first.

If the spacewalk went wrong and I died, the station would still be there.

Billion dollar asset awaiting the next top secret mission.

It was my neck on the line, not theirs.

I accepted it.

Under time pressure, HQ accepted it too.

By the time the door finally opened, I was able to gently guide myself out and around the rim so that I was clinging onto the station's exterior that already tapped into the cameras and were guiding me along to my destination.

But it was background noise to me at that point.

Their voices voices and little pings, constant readouts of soup temperatures in the distance to the station hull.

Meaningless, all of it.

What mattered was the sound?

Tap, tap, tap.

How much of this do you think is in his head?

Do you think that the tap, tap, tap is real, or do you think that it's kind of so?

I had that thought.

I have a prediction for where the story's going, and I don't necessarily want to call it out, but

if I had to guess, his own actions may cause his death.

So, I think there is some supernatural element happening because he did call out his own aneurysm down to the minute, right?

Right.

Um, but I feel like the paranoia that this thing is ensuing in him

might be what causes annimolation.

I mean, the beats of this story are so reminiscent of the raven.

You know, you have never more.

Yeah, you have the tapping on the chamber door kind of thing, like the

raven being that thing.

But now instead of of a raven, it's this body floating out in space, you know?

The similarities are just pretty cool.

It makes it feel like there's an inevitable represented by Ben's body a little bit.

But

I feel like that inevitable is going to be like self-fulfilling.

Like he's going to walk himself into it.

That's where I see this going.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so too.

I don't...

I'm not fully bought in that Ben is alive and tapping.

I think that it's

we're kind of getting into a space of this man is going to drive himself crazy.

But the prophecy is still true.

Like the supernatural element of this guy dying at a certain time, immolation is immolation brought on by himself.

I think that's where this is going.

Yeah, I agree.

I was anxious by this point.

Or perhaps, if I'm honest, scared.

Space is all extremes.

Not just heat, but light too.

Shadows cast are vast and strange.

You move in and out of the Earth's shadow like it's a hand in front of a projector.

And the ones cast by yourself and your surroundings are a special kind of black.

The station, its myriad of pipes and cables, was covered in an abyssal shadows.

Long, warped things with ambiguous origins.

Sometimes I looked at the darkness and wondered if there was anything there at all, or if the station was simply bisected by some kind of strange cosmic force.

Like I might fall into it, somehow.

Forever lost.

Normally I'd think it was beautiful.

Spacewalks had, for me, in the past, been an almost religious experience.

This carried the same sense of weight, but for very different reasons.

I felt watched.

Something I tried to ignore, but it got harder and harder.

Kept looking over my shoulder.

Kept overthinking every little bump and vibration I felt on the station's hull.

By the time I reached the place where I had strapped Ben's body, I was close to having a panic attack.

That whole part of the station was covered in darkness.

The kind where I couldn't see a damn thing.

It was only HQ's voice telling me I'd reached my destination that let me know Ben was lying just a few feet from me.

Under their direction, I found him, and when my light fell upon the bag itself, I saw the metallic fabric glitter with ice.

Touching it, I felt Ben's frozen body inside, hard as a rock.

Gave him a nudge, and he didn't move an inch.

The straps holding him in place were still there, firm as ever.

What else could be causing the sound?

There is one option.

The nameless voice on the other end sounded reticent, but that had been the default since Ben died.

HQ always sounded like they were holding something back.

I looked at the bag and grimaced.

How much blood exactly?

We cannot possibly say for certain how much would have left the body, only that the bag's job is to contain it until return.

We were able to confirm using instruments in the station that the panel you are standing on is well below freezing.

Everything should be in manageable state, so to speak.

Solid, likely one large clump.

They replied, and then, after a moment, they added, You wanted this.

It would be a waste of resources now that you're out here not to investigate further.

You'll need to look inside.

So is he gonna look at the bag and blood just gonna be like

I think what they're thinking

is like all the blood and like decomposition fluids and stuff are just floating around there and that they like freeze and melt like at random as the hole changes with the Sun.

Yeah, like so since they're in the darkness, it freezes back up, but then when it's in the sun, it heats up and it liquefies again.

Yeah, so he's like a

blob.

Yeah,

just a blob of gunk.

Yeah, like that's

I wouldn't want to look in there either.

Um, hold on one second.

Another package is here, in fact.

I'll be right back.

I apologize.

You're all good.

Then again, maybe Ben's flopping it.

Space station never said that was out of question, right?

What if Ben's in there right now, flopping around?

He likes it when the narrator touches him.

Flop, flop, flop, flop.

Could easily translate to tap, tap, tap.

How do we know that bin's not in there right now?

A mass of bone and gunk.

Grabbing his big old dick and flopping it around

inside of a

space like a cocoon.

Would there be a better place to flop it?

You tell me.

I'm still fully believing.

The bin is flopping it around right now.

Grabbing it at the base.

Flopping the top.

A well-endowed man.

Taken too soon.

Prophecy knew that it would happen.

Yet still here he lays.

Flopping it.

From side to side.

Grabbing the base.

Probably one peeky around a ball.

Flop.

Flop.

Or as a story would suggest.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

Okay.

Sorry about that.

No problem.

Of course, I'd wanted this, hadn't I?

To satisfy my morbid curiosity?

To address the rabid thoughts in my mind that had kept me awake, filling what little sleep I had with nightmares.

Now that I was at the threshold, I found myself so afraid that even moving my hand took a kind of effort.

Yet I had no choice.

I had to see this through.

The bag opened with a specially designed sipper.

No sound, but I could feel the click-click-click of the specialized teeth opening up.

It's stupid, but as I unfurled the flap, I I could have sworn a terrible stench passed over me.

Last to no more than a few seconds, but was so vivid I turned and snapped my eyes shut as they watered.

Power of suggestion, I told myself as I reopened them.

That was all.

Nothing more.

No air, no sound, no smell.

Took a few deep breaths, tried not to let the incident unsettle me further, and looked inside the back.

Multiple people watching my video feed gasped when I made a fairly unflattering noise, noise, somewhere between a moan and a cry.

I'd expected something.

Got it worse, I'd expected something ghoulish.

Blue skin, icicles collected around the eyelashes, like a body found in the Arctic.

But Ben,

Ben had transformed.

Great jagged shards of frozen blood had erupted from the eyes and ears and mouth.

His jaw dislocated to an unnatural angle as icicles the size of my forearm forced its way out.

His neck was broken, his torso shredded with strips of flesh hanging off in ribbons, and his hands were clawing at his face with bizarre yellow nails.

It even left grooves in his skin.

What the fuck is this?

I asked no one in particular, only to realize that HQ had been talking amongst themselves the whole time.

Temperature changes.

You don't know this isn't normal.

Let's not pretend this is normal.

Guys!

I shouted, splitting the chatter and leaving silence.

Why are his arms like that?

Muscle spasms possibly caused well.

Whatever caused the unusual reaction to his circulatory system.

Maybe that caused his arms to curl up towards his face, or

there are scratch marks on his cheeks.

Skinned under his nails.

Are we sure he was dead when I brought him out here?

A dozen urgent alarm voices, all desperate to avoid even the slightest hint of responsibility, told me no, that was not possible.

Looking down at Ben's tortured face, I couldn't help but feel a bit of doubt.

I was about to ask what I ought to do next when the sun rose across the station.

Unlike Earth, this wasn't a gentle morning.

It flipped like a light switch.

Thankfully, the suit reacted before I had a chance to blind me.

But the temperature began to rapidly climb.

I watched as something beneath Ben's skin began to writhe in the new new warmth.

The footage you're sending us is under review by a panel of experts.

HQ told me, somewhat urgently and robotically, like the person on the other end was stifling panic.

Current orders are to take samples.

Reseal the bag and return to the station.

You sure I should be taking the stuff inside?

There was some mumbling before the same operator replied.

Forget samples.

Seal the bag.

Return to the station.

Gladly.

I replied before pulling the zipper shut.

I was keen to leave and made the journey back faster than I should have.

That crawling sensation you feel when being watched, it was all over me.

Made me clumsy and I knocked myself more than once on the way back, like I was suddenly unused to the suit's controls.

I just couldn't escape the notion that everywhere I looked, someone or something had darted back just out of view.

Of course, that was impossible, so I told myself.

What could survive out in space?

But I only made it that much worse to imagine something slinking into the shadows, tapping on the hull, stalking me every step of the way back.

When I finally reached the door, the tension inside me rose.

If something was going to happen, it would happen now with my back turned on Infinity.

I never felt so vulnerable.

Reynolds?

The sound made me jump.

I've been so focused on my surroundings, I'd forgotten I was being supervised by a room full of people a thousand miles away.

What is it?

Reynolds, we're uh

we're seeing something here we're not sure of.

Being told you should hold off on returning.

Oh, I love this.

Oh my god.

This is not to give him in a suit, like frozen in an explosion in the body bag, like clawing at his face.

Clawing at his face.

It reminds me of those drugs.

You see it a lot in

a lot in like voodoo stuff, whatever, where it's like people get buried and they're on a drug.

People think they're dead.

And then they are clawing at the doors.

They unseal it.

And the guy's like, the people's nails are like ripped up because they've been clawing at the coffin door.

It reminds me of that.

Just this insane way of thinking that a guy out in space is like, you you know, suffocating and he had like blood exploding out of his face and stuff.

The visual is so good.

Yeah.

It reminds me of in the thing in the original movie when they pull that guy out of the ice and they zip him out of the bag and it's like it's when it's the two faces like melded into each other.

Yeah.

Man, this is so cool.

This is this is like getting all should have have ground control be like, hey,

we're seeing something weird.

You probably shouldn't go back inside yet.

It's like, what the fuck is is that?

Like, what do you mean?

I shouldn't go inside.

Yeah.

Uh, okay, man.

I'm this is great.

Something about the voice on the other end made my stomach sink.

It didn't just sound confused.

And make no mistake, when you're clinging to the side of a station, all on your own, confused, would have been bad enough.

But no, there was something else.

Fear.

We.

There's an anomaly.

Or no one down here knows how to proceed.

We're

currently seeking input from higher-ups.

This is unprecedented.

What's going on?

They began with well signals from some biomonitors, specifically Ben's.

The last word hit like a truck.

What?

Yes, and the cameras are.

At first, we thought that they were malfunctioning, but it appears as if Ben's back was empty.

And then

Reynolds, we noticed something.

Well, something else.

Guys,

what's going on here?

I'm being told I can't say more.

Just

wait.

Yes!

I love that!

Oh my gosh, this giant

frozen blood spike persons crawling around on the icicle blood, like Ben crawling around on the fucking side of the crowd.

Eyes like flying out out of his face, like this panic on his face, and he's crawling around.

Oh.

Oh, my heart.

It almost even has little remnants of that Twilight Zone episode.

The one where it's like, there's something on the plane.

There's something on the wing of the plane.

I'm getting that kind of vibe, too.

Only it's not Bigfoot.

It's an exploded person.

Yeah, instead of a weird, furry goblin, it's an actual fucking disturbed, disgusting person.

I tightened my grip on the railing, my heart pounding.

Finally, the door cycled open and I was ready to disregard all orders when the man speaking to me from HQ practically screamed in my ear: Don't enter, Reynolds!

Do not enter the station!

What we're seeing on the cameras, you can't let that thing in.

Yes.

If something's out here, I'm getting to safety before it reaches me.

Tap, tap.

Yes.

I stopped.

My brain processed.

I'd heard that.

I'd heard something in the vacuum of space.

I looked around at my hands, my feet.

That couldn't be possible.

Not unless.

Tap.

Tap, tap, tap.

Tap, tap.

Without moving my head, I turned my eyes towards the very edge of my helmet's vision and watched as a single yellow fingernail tap gently on the glass.

The man in HQ spoke in a terrifying whisper.

He's on your suit.

Yes.

This goes stupid hard.

Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh.

Okay.

The terror that shot through me was electric.

White fire coursing through my veins.

Without even thinking, I reacted like I just found out there was a grenade strapped to my back.

All instinct, no rationality.

I cried out and swung around, trying to knock Ben off my back, but all I accomplished was setting off some alarms as I damaged my suit.

I thrashed desperately and felt something shuffling around the exterior of the bulky suit.

Finally, my eyes fell on something useful.

The jet controls.

I fumbled my hands into place and immediately blasted myself into the open pressure chamber, turning at the last minute so that the back of the suit smashed into the thick secondary door.

I only hoped that whatever was clinging to the back of me was destroyed by the impact, But when I looked up, Ben was still out there, gawping at me with a mouth full of frozen blood.

Slowly, his movement packed with the eerie confidence of a predator, he prepared to enter the station.

Reynolds, get away from the door.

We're initiating an emergency shutdown.

Ben did one hand inside when the door slammed shut and cut it off.

Even in space, with the bulkhead between us, I could have sworn I heard him scream.

Oh my gosh, dude.

How hard does...

Ah!

Okay.

There was no ignoring Ben or the sounds he made.

Not anymore.

Terrible thumps that battered the station, their location changing seemingly at random.

This drove the people on the ground insane.

Oh, I'd heard my fair share of rationalization over the last few hours.

Ben sent books worth of written material from every type of expert you could imagine.

Ever since my colleague's death, I've been wrestling with all sorts of bizarre thoughts, but after the spacewalk, it was like they'd spilled out of my head and were now terrorizing other like-minded skeptics.

Try as they might, no one in HQ can make any sense of it.

But they didn't have the journal.

After what happened during my spacewalk, it became a priority for me to figure out what was going on.

Those numbers Ben had recorded weren't gibberish.

I sort of known that from the start.

To read them was to feel like you were reading another language, something secret and hidden.

And while I never cracked the code, not even now after all this time, I did figure out where Ben had found it.

Light.

The trick to dig deeper into Ben's research.

Specifically, a pet project of his he'd spent nearly his entire life chasing.

A little comet, ball of ice, way out in the Kepler belt close to where the solar system abates and the great cosmic void begins.

Something small and insignificant that rotated and shifted and occasionally caught the sun, bouncing photons right back at us.

A glittering snowball so faint as to be invisible unless you happened to look at the right place at the right time.

Like Ben did when he was just 10 and playing with hobbyist dad's backyard telescope.

A light in the darkness.

A light that spoke to a few instruments Ben had adjusted to record each little emission.

Flash on, flash off.

Flash on, flash off.

Flash on.

Tap, tap, tap, tap.

Binary to hexadecimal, and from there, God, something else, something that spoke to him.

Something out there had spoken to him.

Oh my gosh, this is so cool.

This is so cool.

Oh, this is so cool.

When he was a kid, when he was a kid, he got his dad's telescope and discovered a comet.

And then, after studying that comet his whole life, it was speaking to him in binary.

And he translated that.

It became a part of some forgotten religion and language.

And now, when he's dead, he becomes this, like, this necromorph abomination for it.

Oh, that is now also tapping.

And I'm guessing, I'm assuming trying to talk to him as well, right?

The taps?

It's tapping the code.

It's like it's the Morse.

It's the binder.

Yeah, I love it.

I love it.

It's so cool.

Oh, it's so cool.

Oh.

How do I buy stock in Christian Wallace as an author?

Oh.

I don't know what scared me more.

The sound of a reanimated bin pounding away at the station, an imminent, all too near threat, or the thought of something in the void whispering unknown secrets to a man for the last few decades.

An idea that occasionally rose over me like the tide, swallowing me whole if I dwelt on it more than a few moments.

I never did figure out what the transmission was saying, but I was transfixed nonetheless.

Not just by Ben's little journal that contained hundreds, thousands of handwritten records, but the live transmission he had set up on his computer, the one he converted into a sound, it was like an earthworm on steroids, like white noise made of acid, a flood of alien ideas that left me confused and drooling if I listened for too long.

All told, I spent more than a few days with access to that transmission, and by the end, I felt like I was on the verge of melting away.

Ben, Ben had been exposed to that thing since his childhood.

Spent years and years listening and recording and waiting, working towards something none of us could really hope to understand.

I had to assume that transmission was responsible for his death, and even worse, what had happened to him afterwards.

Had it always been the reason for his coming to space?

Had the been I known just been a sham?

The sound, the light coming from out there, it felt wrong.

It wasn't a gentle lull or a siren's pull.

It was dark and overpowering.

Why had he given in to it?

Why had he done everything it wanted?

How much of his life had been lived because of its needs and wants?

One thing I could be sure of is I spent days listening to Ben's furious rampage on the exterior of the station, whatever had spoken to him, it was hostile, and it couldn't be allowed to come back with me.

Reynolds, I'm being told this is going to be a bit of an unconventional pickup.

I scoffed as I finished suiting up.

That was an understatement.

What do they tell you?

I asked as I pulled the helmet down and initiated the door's opening sequence.

Told we can come in about 200 meters away, but you'll have to close the rest of the suit's thrusters.

Gonna be something else for you.

Untethered journey from one vehicle to the next.

It's never been done before.

I'm well aware of the risks.

Just keep your eyes peeled.

This time, it was his turn to scoff.

For what?

You'll know it when you see it.

So cool.

Oh, this is so cool.

He's so cool.

Now he's going to have to jump from his space station through space, untethered, and get like

the impossibility of that is so sick but god damn do i want to see that in like a movie or something how cool would that be dude some like event horizon shit uh it's like uh it's that that picture the only man to ever fully be disconnected from the earth it was that that picture of him floating out away from the space station horrifying uh oh man

i made the journey with my back to the shuttle floating in the dire wrong direction at a slow but consistent speed.

My eyes glued to the station, looking for some signs of Ben.

There's the occasional flash of something red, a slight shimmer of movement often obscured by some of the station's panels and antenna, that let me know he was still on the exterior, skulking around somewhere.

So long as he stayed there, I knew I'd be okay.

The entire time I kept waiting for the other foot to drop, for the tension to finally explode into that life-threatening danger I knew was waiting for me.

Came as a surprise when I finally approached the shuttle without incident.

Pilot told me I was a few meters away.

It was time to turn around.

So I did, drifting around as gently as a diver returning to the surface.

Had my back to the station no more than a few seconds when the pilot grunted.

That's odd.

He sounded nonchalant, but the object that hit me was anything but minor.

Ben, uninterested in making the journey safely, had launched himself off the station as fast as he could.

And with no way of slowing down, he hit me at at full speed.

Slamming me up against part of the door frame and sending us both tumbling into the void before anyone had even the time to register his attack.

This time, he was not letting me get a door between us.

He scrambled over my suit like a deranged insect, one that I desperately tried to swat away as the great void spun around us both.

Stars turned to lines, the shuttle swooping past my helmet's field of view in almost random directions.

It was sickening and terrifying, and I hoped to God I'd be able to correct the spin before I got out of control, but all of that came second to the monster who was clinging to my suit.

At some point, he crawled around in such a way that I got a good look at him.

First in a few days, it was up close.

Personal.

Even with the helmet's glass between us, I could make out such stark and startling detail that I momentarily froze in terror, aware only vaguely of the pilot's panic transmissions.

Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that thing?

Reynolds, you need to get yourself stabilized.

Much further, and we won't be able to help.

And whatever you do, you need to- you need to know the fucking thing isn't coming aboard the shuttle.

I wanted to reply, but I was busy trying to get an arm between me and Ben, who was now a profusion of jagged red crystals of varying sizes.

Some as big as kitchen knives, others like sewing needles.

A spacesuit's worst nightmare.

A puncture wouldn't lead to the immediate decompression you're probably thinking of.

Instead, I'd have a few moments at most before the air enveloping the suit dissipated and after that my lungs would collapse.

My blood would start to boil, and the water inside my eyes, nose, ears, and other soft tissues would vaporize and try to escape.

Like frostbite on fast forward.

The punctures weren't my sole concern.

I knew I had to stop Ben's hands getting a grip on the helmet.

I don't know if whatever had animated him had access to all his memories, but Ben sure as shit knew how to remove a helmet from the exterior, so all my focus went on keeping his nasty little fingers away from my neck.

A puncture would still leave me enough time to return to the shuttle, but with no helmet, I'd be doomed to a very painful death.

So, I fought the best I could, knowing everything hinged on me pushing him away, but Ben was lithe and insectile, constantly slipping out of reach whenever I got close to giving him a good shove.

His fingers could easily find purchase on the suit and its many little gribbles, while I was basically wielding oven gloves that offered no dexterity.

I had no hope of shaking him off the usual way, but I did have something on my side.

Inertia.

The whole time we'd been spinning furiously, and that rotational force was just about the only thing trying to peel the two of us apart.

So far, I'd been fighting it, but why?

I realized at the last moment I had one option left, so I jammed half thrusters on and decided to make the nearly out-of-control spin much worse.

Normally, an uncontrolled spin is one of those nightmare scenarios any astronaut dreads.

Humans are irregularly shaped, and once you start rotating along more than one axis, applying more force is likely just to make it worse.

Correcting takes a huge amount of experience and insight, and even then, there's no guarantee you can stop it.

More likely is that by the time you figure out what you need to do, the rotational forces will have you on the brink of unconsciousness, and from there, death is just a stone's throw away.

For me, it was the only chance I had.

So I accelerated the spin and kept accelerating, holding the button down until the forces at play pulled Ben further and further towards the front of the suit.

That's where inertia wanted us.

Two objects in near symmetry, ready to break off in opposite directions at any moment.

Ben held on for longer than I did.

At some point, my limbs went weak, my vision dark, and my arms fell to my side, no longer able to fight the monster off.

But by then, it took everything Ben had to just cling on to me, and he could no longer attack or fumble at my helmet.

Eventually, even he had to give in as the the spin grew faster and faster and the forces trying to separate us grew too strong.

It was like every roller coaster I'd been on merged into one and ramped up to 11.

The last thing I remembered before I lost consciousness was the sight of Ben's monstrous face being flung off into the void.

God damn, I'm like sweating.

What do you want to talk about?

Bro, I went that like I made the joke about interstellar earlier.

That scene where he's trying to like get the ship docked correctly.

like oh i was there oh that was so good

i came to aboard the shuttle several men and women crowded around me jesus christ you lucky son of a bitch

i groaned and made eyes towards the person who had spoken sounded like the pilot i just put a face to the voice

i don't feel lucky

you spun right towards us We were already suited up and on our way.

Timed up well.

That suit was ruddled with holes.

Any later, we wouldn't have been around to catch you and get you into safety.

As it is, pal, you're going home.

Medical check shows no real issue.

I think you're gonna be okay.

Where's Ben?

The people around me shared a funny look before one of them realized.

Benjamin Watley?

The other astronaut on board.

Is that

who was attacking you?

I nodded.

Well, he's gone.

If that really was your colleague, we're.

Well, we're sorry.

I feel like there's a story we're missing.

I'll catch you up when I'm feeling better.

Well, whatever happened to him, he'll be re-entering Earth's atmosphere in the next two hours.

What?

What then?

Pilot thought for a second.

Human body on re-entry.

He'll go up in flames.

Immolation.

Oh my gosh.

Wow.

That's fun.

That is the end of the only other astronaut on this mission died six weeks ago, but the computer insists their life signs are still stable.

That was fucking Christian Wallace.

Good for you, man.

That was,

we have read two of his stories, and they have both.

banged.

Yeah.

First one is giant baby, and then the second one is insane.

First off, I just want to say I love the visual of the monster of like Ben

contorted, reanimated, but then also like red, like his blood crystals being red and like shining.

I feel like he exploded, but then froze right after the explosion.

Do you think that he was, so do you think he died when he got reanimated?

He was like clawing at himself in a state.

Like, how much of the he was, do you think it's

do you think it was something, not necessarily, I don't want to say possession, but I want to say like almost that the thing that was talking about possession or like some space plague or something like that.

Exactly got a hold of him.

So it was like him irrational and it was like a space demon kind of thing.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Whatever was talking with him.

I made the joke about necromorph, but it feels very dead space.

Very

like the marker, the alien presence that like comes over you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very necromorph.

Very necromorph.

The part of him getting tackled and spinning, I mean, my God.

Oh, gosh.

I was just.

Yeah.

Oh, I forgot.

I didn't feel like I was reading.

I was just like, I was in the scene.

It felt so, I was gripped that whole time.

I don't know if this story was for this, because like you said, the Reddit, it has like the awards it gives.

It just puts them out the stories but i will say that was one of the most immersive uh stories we've read by far that killed that that was so so good oh my gosh so fun it was one of those stories too you know we read a lot of stories that are like

god i mean like four to seven hours long you know yeah this is one of those stories that i would have loved to build more of that relationship up with explore the journal more but The way it's written now, what a just awesome, just like punch to the gut.

Just boom.

It killed, man.

That whole, the part where it jumps across the spaceship on him, and it's like they're spinning so fast that everything's going to blur and he's about to pass out.

And it's being ripped off of him into the void of space.

It's going to burn up on re-entry, which means that all of this was predate, literally, told in the stars, right?

That he would die in Anderson to die a second time of immolation.

And like this possession that's come over and what that means.

Is it on Earth now?

Is it going to spread?

Like, oh, there's so many fun angles you could take.

Yeah, I mean,

crystallized into melting and some bits of it, whatever, will survive and land into the earth.

You know what I mean?

It's almost, it's a

doomsday prediction.

Yeah, and he'd spoken to this plague for

20, 30 years, for decades of his life.

And then he goes up here into space and it like takes him.

Oh, gosh, that was good.

Translating a childlike wonder as well.

Like translating a childlike wonder of like, it felt like, it felt like it was,

you know, I saw the comet and it felt like it was a calling like I was supposed to do this when really it was a calling and it was somebody manipulating a child and manipulating a person into going into this field you know giving him these things you know I wonder too how much because here's the thing the date that the numbers written and then it just says aneurysm I wonder how much of I wonder how much of it he knew that it was going to happen to him or like the emulation emulation or if it was just like flashes or signs that he's like a dream drinking.

He didn't even understand what he was writing yet.

Right.

Because at that point, too, I feel like just from the character and from like, you know, he was, he was psychologically sane to go through things and to be paired up with somebody to where you would just think that it's a guy who's like, yeah, I mean, I'm destined to do this.

Like, you, and to have him hide his journal also would make me think that he's like, yeah, I feel like I'm cosmically attached to things.

That'd be a hard thing to sell

to just random people.

You know, so awesome story.

Absolutely awesome.

Coming in.

Yeah, That hit the spot.

Yeah.

That was just such a such a great one.

Unbelievable.

Really, really enjoyed that one.

We're going to have to keep reading his stuff because

love that.

Love that.

Wish there was, you know, and selfishly.

And the best thing you could have from people is, I wish there was more.

That's the best kind of reaction you can get from a story.

And that's what I feel wholeheartedly right now.

Oh, that was great.

Oh, I'm so glad we read that.

Dude, we have to read more of his stuff.

Absolutely.

And I have to ask the viewers as well, were you immersed as well?

I'm curious.

Sometimes whenever we read these things, we have such a visceral reaction.

It's always funny to see people who are just like, I hated that.

I hated it.

Always curious.

But usually the people that say that don't ever give a reason why.

So I'm curious if you don't.

I just

be curious to see people say that.

If you don't like this, why?

Yeah, exactly.

At least put a fucking emblance of thought into your response.

But no, that is our episode for this week.

It was an incredible one.

And thank you guys so much once again for listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and of course, all of our YouTube fans.

We appreciate you out there as well.

Be sure to share the episodes if you like them.

Try to get some of your friends into the show.

And, like, as always, give us a nice rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

It really does help.

But until next time, my friends, if you find your friend dead on the floor in a spaceship,

maybe don't go out and check on him.

Maybe keep them in this giant Ziploc bag because they might be alive and fucking trying to kill you.

Stay creeped.

Stay spooked.

You creeps.

And

this was just really good.

I have nothing else to add by.