Stars, the Sea, and the Whale- part 1

1

I always had a fantasy of being lost in vast nothingness. A sailor of the mysterious ocean was my dream. Never did I imagine that I would be lost in the vast nothingness of space and null gravity instead of waves and salty air. But life seems to have this weird way of twisting and turning itself until it reaches unexpected ends and means; my life was no exception.

Three days from the death of Ben, I got a message from the team leader back on Earth to continue with the project. I couldn’t turn back anyways, so I could as well as make myself useful. And so light went back on the experiment lab and the log started again. The light was a little too much to use by myself, so I turned the lights off on areas I didn’t use. Along with the lights, it seemed like the breaths of the owners of those seats were being turned off too. I decided never to look at those desks again, lest I reminded myself of them. Instead, I looked out the window, which I had never really paid much attention to. The emptiness of null gravity was glittering. For the first time, I thought that space might be more beautiful than the sea. But I quickly shook that thought away. Because the sea had adventures and lives, especially dramatic ones like whales, while the space was just an infinite blank nothing with no story to tell about itself.

A week since the experiment restarted- things weren’t going well. It was a project meant for a team, and I was hopeless at everything else except my own expertise. The steady log started to show holes a few days, and sometimes there was not light in the lab. But I still went there every day. I didn’t do my job, but I still sat at my desk every day and stared out the window at the vast nothingness that was a little different from what I had dreamed since I was a sailor in my sleep. But that didn’t matter. What could matter now? With all the team gone, left alone in the spaceship with only the project and the window to accompany me, my days were an endless daydream.

2

“Jimmy, wake up! Let’s play!”

The creatures of the sea were calling me in my sleep. I followed them without hesitation like I did every time I slept- and found myself staring at a giant whale. She was giant, white and beautiful, just like the violent smashing waves of the ocean. I stared in awe at her enormous eyes, unable to find anything to say. I just stood still, not swimming, not breathing, not talking to the sea creatures.

She winked at me. The slow movement of her eyes was quiet clear. The heavy eyelid moved down to cover her eyes that could be as large as the window in front of my lab, then slowly slid back to its original place. I still didn’t know how to respond.

She chuckled. I could actually hear her voice- a very low tone that would have belonged to a fully grown man if the whale was a human. It was the sort of voice that I had always envied, wanting to change my voice that was a little too high for a grown man.

The unconscious stream of thoughts led to sudden recognition that for the first time in my life, I had a whale in front of me. A whale! The symbol of life and drama of the sea! The symbol of adventure and of astray! This creature in front of my eyes that was even larger than our- now mine that all the other owners were dead- spaceship was the legendary creature of my dreams! If only I could have a conversation, or just even get to touch her body...

3

The transition from dream to reality was sudden compared to other days. Perhaps it was because I had fallen asleep on the hard desk instead of in my bed which wasn’t so comfy, but still had everything that a bed should have. The sudden transition left me confused.

“What…where…what…the whale…”

I heard my own mumbling, but they didn’t make any sense.

“The whale…what…white…whale…”

Whale? Oh right, I had seen a whale in my dream. This was reality, back in the spaceship were no life existed and only the silent void greeted me every moment that it was starting to get boring. Looking out the window no longer gave thrill and delight. The beauty of space was a dead one that repeated itself- or rather, was the same infinite thing without any drama or change. Stopping my head from automatically turning towards the window, I turned off the computer that had been running the experiment during my sleep, giving off error notes. The log would have to wait again- there was no result from the experiment and I was in no mood to report the sort of state I was in. Messages from the team leader kept blinking on and off in the corner of the computer, but I decided to not read them- again.

Sleep was the only thing I could do right now. My body must need more comfortable rest in a bed, not on a square metal desk. I turned in my wheeled chair to wash myself before sleep, not bothering to clean the desk. Those test results were all useless anyways and so was the desk. They weren’t worth my labor.

CLUNK

A sound like apples rolling around in the food cabinet hit my ears. I didn’t bother to open the cabinet and put them in neat lines just like Jenny would have done if she was alive. That was Jenny’s job, not mine. Jenny wasn’t here to do it, so no one would be doing it. My job was to conduct the experiments, do the logs, sleep, and be friends with everyone. There was no line on my job contract that asked me to spend a seemingly endless amount of time alone in the spaceship. That damn team leader, I should probably sue him or something for making a false contract.

I imagined what the team leader’s face would be like if he found out that I had sued him. It was the most entertaining thing that I had thought during the recent two weeks, Earth time, after the accident that killed all my teammates, leaving me alone in here.

4

“Jimmy, let’s play!”

Again, the sea creatures visited me in my sleep, calling me with their extraordinary high pitched voice that was strangely not bad to listen. I accepted without hesitation. We went to the unexplored areas of the deep ocean where life became death and death became boring. Small fish tickled my feet from time to time and bigger fish slipped up against my body playfully and thrust themselves back, creating a small show under the depths of the ocean. This area was the part where life became death, but the rule didn’t seem to apply to these creatures that had brought me to this place.

“Jimmy, play with us!”

I had no reason to refuse. I followed the creatures deeper and deeper into the sea, unaware of how the environment surrounding me was drastically changing. Only when we stopped once more did I notice that this place was somewhere deeper than where I had been, but brighter and livelier. This place was glittering, as if stardust had been sprinkled everywhere. Underwater plants swayed gently as the current of the water swam around in a calm move and the warm water caressed the sparkling stones, creating a blur of light like that of the stars when one looks at it without glasses. At the center of the place was a cave. Life was bursting out of the cave- anyone could see that it was the heart of this unearthly place under the sea.

It was so large that I could not even guess where the end was. Maybe that was why it was so full of energy.

“Jimmy! Let’s go!”

The sea creatures once again rushed into the cave, bidding me to follow them. They seemed to be filled with more life than before- probably the effect of being around the cave. Even I could sense how much lighter my body and head was feeling. Instead of the calming, but retarding effect the sea had, water here was calming and seemed to push me forward.

We reached the bottom of the cave, which had seemed like it would never come. The bottom was just like any other cave bottom that one would imagine. It was dark and it was stuffy. It felt familiar- this boring and stuffy nothing that seemed to have no end. The darkness was about to remind me of something, a place, familiar and yet so detesting that I did not want to remember. Where was it? What was this place? Where had I come from and where was I going to?

Questions of now and questions of a past which I wasn’t even sure of its existence mixed in my head to create the surroundings to look like somewhere else. The place no longer seemed like the deep sea, but more like…more like…

“Jimmy?”

Yes, it was more like the space, the painfully boring reality that I so wished to escape. With the sound of my name being called in a low base tone ringing in my ears, I was suddenly swept up back to the most topper layer of the ocean in a moment. In that split of a second, I thought I saw a large eye opening itself, but I wasn’t sure. The fast current of the moving water seemed to erase everything I had seen from my head during the sudden transition.

#fiction #stellakim