An Inhuman Condition

The lights dimmed again. They were always blinking in and out or wearing down like an abandoned campfire. He always thought his life would be more glamorous than this. Even a few years ago he still thought there was something important ahead of him. They never told him that everything extraordinary he wanted would fade into the background and wilt into something like the petty nagging of poor lighting. It wasn’t just the lighting though, their electrical systems were all in a state of decay. On any given day, it was a crapshoot what would work correctly. One day it’s the computers that glitch and go down while he has to sit and wait for the automatic repairs to finish. Another he might find the refrigerator has already thawed out his frozen breakfast and have to go through it all checking to see if anything spoiled. The microwave was the worst part of the kitchen, blowing the fuse at least once a day. He was so used to things not working that it was remarkable when a day passed without beating on an appliance or turning a breaker. But even on these rare days, he would still see the dimming of the lights.

Every morning was a struggle to get out of bed and start working. He thought if he could just stay there, the only thing that could go wrong was the lights. His room wasn’t large or particularly inviting. There was a cold, military feel from his lack of decoration. It was messy, but not slovenly per se. The room was just an extension of his apathy and growing ennui. He kept a stack of old books next to the bed for the mornings he woke up early. If he couldn’t go back to sleep, he would grab the one that looked the best, pull out the playing card bookmark and try to pick up where he left off. He couldn’t really commit to any of them since they all seemed terribly outdated to him. It was like they were written in the same bright past he felt as a young man, and the sentiments now had the disingenuous tone and faded luster of a future humanity wasn’t living up to. After a chapter or two, he would start to feel the bygone lies in those books and put them down. He thought about getting rid of them, but for one reason or another the thought would leave him while the books stayed.

He barely talked to anyone else anymore and would only respond if it seemed like they were insistent. He didn’t really have anything left to say, and he couldn’t imagine that anyone else felt the same sense of desolation as him. The rest of the company seemed irritated, but it wasn’t the same. He occasionally caught them laughing still and overheard their excited conversations with each other. Most of their anger seemed centered at him anyway since it was his job to maintain the computers which meant to everyone else that he was responsible for everything with a wire. He didn’t know the first thing about electrical boxes though, and there was no way he could fix the damned microwave. He carried on through these lonely motions waiting for something else to come along or at least for a resolution to this ongoing torment, but he’d lost any hope of getting off this ship with his sanity in tact.

When they first set off, he expected they would actually find something. Now the mission seemed more pointless than ever like some cruel joke that was being played on him. He thought maybe it was an elaborate prank with everyone else on the crew just an unwitting participant in a plot to ruin his spirit and stomp out the dreams. Maybe that’s what the service was all about though: grinding them down to cogs going through the motions. He mused that it was an exercise to turn them all into fixtures. He thought of the rest of the crew as the dimming lights everywhere tormenting him in the background. They were always there like a rock in his boot that was small enough to get lost until it pinched right under a toe. He felt like the stubborn microwave that always caused problems, broke down constantly and was on the edge of quitting for good. Like the microwave, he didn’t know how to fix himself either. Onward they all went, never quite working at capacity but never breaking down enough to be retired. It was never going to end, he thought.

When the computer beeped excitedly that they’d found something, he assumed it was another glitch, another poor punchline meant to bring him down a little further. He turned off the alert and rebooted the thing before going through the laborious task of reading the log. It was all more technical than it had to be, like it was written for people that speak the binary language of the computer. Maybe the programmers had intended to make another computer module just to read the logs but never got around to it. When he finally made it through the log, he couldn’t find any errors. He checked the data again, and the computer seemed sure it found something. He sat up in his seat and poked through until he found the detail he was looking for. He’d assumed maybe it was still a glitch, some sort of electrical flare, some piece of garbage voided from another ship and forgotten about, but he would have report it anyway. He’d have to talk to the others and let them know. The computer thinks it found another spaceship heading their way.