The Big Squeeze

At first you travel unaware, desensitized. That is always the danger. You cannot avoid what you cannot see and in outer reaches of outer space, when traveling between galaxies, what you most see is an overwhelming blackness. It pervades you. It absorbs you and you absorb it, until black is you and you are black and there is no light except the artificial lights of your craft, and a distant memory of something called a star. Normally, you would avoid this void. Normally, you'd be traveling at such high speeds that this blackness would be bearable, a blip, and then boom! The light again. Normally, your main guidance systems wouldn't be disabled. Normally, your sensors would be working properly. Normally, you wouldn't be too low on power to travel at anything but the snails pace we were keeping inching through the void, and a rate slow enough to drive men mad.

None of us were conscious of much at first. We had stopped noticing everything. We had gone past the point of the daily nuisances becoming violent arguments that ended in tragic fights. We were the walking dead. Stuck. In the dark. Alone.

So the slight increase in speed went unnoticed, until it was far too late to pull back. After a while, we could not ignore it. We were moving faster, and our engines were not responsible for it. There was a brief moment of joy, the joy of the stupid. The joy of the desperate. The joy of those who had lost all sense of time and space. The speed began to wake us up out of our stupor. One by one, we realized that something was happening, and as we sped into nothing, we began to suspect that we were speeding into something that none of us wanted to be anywhere near. It was far too late.

The pressure became unbearable just as we were regaining the ability to feel. The ship seemed to collapse like a tin can around us and we thought that we would be crushed. Faster and faster we came nearer and nearer to death, and finally, having already endured so much, we gave in and kissed it in the mouth. We welcomed our end, for as it was the end of us, it was also the end of our suffering. Our aching ears, our migraines, our sore joints were all about to leave us and we would become nothing more than a ship-full of dust, not even a ship-full as the ship would join our fate, it would become dust with us and we would be particles and we would be no more.

But the pain would not end, it would not leave us alone, and it would not give us the mercy of death. It forced us instead to come closer, closer to the center of nothing. It pulled us faster and faster towards nowhere and we went properly mad. There was laughter. I remember the laughter and I remember thinking how mad my shipmates had become and seeing a laughing reflection of me, and beginning to weep. If there was any mercy in the universe this would end. If there was a God this would stop.

The feeling of flesh being stretched into light particles defies description, but I thought of taffy. I remembered the hot taffy being stretched on the beach when I was a child. I remember wondering at the blob of confectionery becoming a ribbon and then a string, and going from hot to cold, from flexible to brittle and so many years later I thought, yes. That will be me. A salty taffy on the beach for some alien child to gobble as I once did. But while I was taffy, I could not understand what part of me was left to realize it; what that part was made of I could not know.

I only know that I was not taffy, in the end, just silly putty in the hands of a childish deity, stretched to my limits, ready to break, but holding together defying the laws of the maker; or perhaps we'd all simply read the laws wrong. Then came the blindness, which was unexpected without eyes to see, but the blindness was a white light and it stung what my consciousness still associated as eyes. A flash of such intensity and such power that there was nothing but it. In my life, I could not have imagined such absolute whiteness, the flash of a billion suns. It burned, I know not what, but it seared.

Then there was sleep, and a dream. It felt like a dream. It couldn't have been real, for I was back in the ship, back with my crew, and no longer in the blackness of space, but in an undocumented galaxy, of an undocumented universe, where my journey started fresh. I am still in that dream, for this cannot be real, though I have touched it, and I have landed on planets, and I have drunk their fresh waters, and eaten fruits from rare vines. I cannot imagine that this is anything but a dream; that I am either asleep, or dead and learning that Heaven is the same journey, on the flip side.