Special Mention - David Lee

The Man Behind the Glass

By David Lee

The ship’s computer told us about a holiday they used to celebrate back on Earth. We didn’t
say “back home” anymore, not now, two hundred light years out. Home for most of us, especially
the younger ones born in flight, was the Nostalgium. The elders said that we were heading towards a
new home, but they refused to tell us when we’d actually get there, or why we left the old one. So
we ignored them. There was a group of us who were assigned to work in the cargo bay, one of the
easiest jobs on the ship. The shuttles and supplies and everything we needed should we ever land
had been manufactured and inventoried on Earth, stored in a scrubbed atmosphere for
preservation. This meant that all we had to do was check that nothing had been damaged (by
what?), nothing stolen (by who?), and that the immense cargo bay door, which under gravity
weighed hundreds of thousands of tonnes, would open and close smoothly on command. This took
no more than two or three ship hours. So we had the rest of our days to ourselves.

It was me and Rikki that day, sat in my cabin scrolling through the old data feeds from Earth.
They’d continued to beam us updates until we were about twenty lights out, then the elders had cut
them off. They claimed that this was because the time lag meant any information we received was
out of date and useless. Other times they said it was because there was a war on Earth, and they
didn’t want us exposed to military propaganda. They had probably forgotten themselves. Anyway,
we still had the original feeds and the troves. Even with our artificially extended lifespans there was
no way we would ever get through it all.

“Dim the lights,” I said, and the ship obliged, muting my cabin to a soft yellow. The screen
hovered in the air above my bunk. It had suggested some content for us based on the shipboard
date, October 31st. This calendar was meaningless to us, but the elders insisted on maintaining it, for forms’ sake.

“Play.” Rikki lazily swiped his hand in the general direction of the screen. We skipped past
the boring history lesson about Earth’s dead religions, long abandoned cultural practices, saints and
such, and got to the good stuff. Little kids draped in white sheets running down lamplit streets, big
buckets clasped in both hands. They were pretending to be dead. but their living breath steamed
and swirled in the air. Adults held their hands or ran clumsily after them when they strayed too far
and scooped them up into strong arms. Rikki and I looked at each other. We’d never seen an elder
do anything like this. I tried to imagine what a crisp autumn evening might smell like, might taste
like. But I had no reference point. The recycled atmosphere pumped through the ship was clean and
sterile, always the same. The screen showed us the sort of thing that used to scare people back on
earth: pale men with red eyes and lips, a green faced monster, a little girl with no mouth dragging
chains behind her. We just laughed. On the Nostalgium we were raised to fear only one thing. The
outside. The outside with its choking emptiness and heart seizing cold. You must not let it in. You
must not look at it for too long. You must not listen to it.

Then came the best bit of all, the party. We’d never conceived of such a thing. Hundreds of
people in a smoke-filled room; drinking and dancing and showing off flesh. And they were our age.
Weird coloured lights strobed over their costumes and over the decorations; strange vegetables
with carved faces. They shouted at each other happily over the blast of the music, but they didn’t
seem to care if anyone heard them. There was clearly no automated cooling system like on the
Nostalgium because they were all sweating. We were transfixed. I called up the rest of the cargo bay
crew and their faces appeared in mid-air next to my screen.

“Look at this.”

It was organised within the hour. We compiled all our allocations of the ship’s matter printer
for the costumes and decorations. It even had the genome of an earth pumpkin on file, so we went a
little crazy and printed out a thousand. I beamed a message to everyone’s personal file in what I
hoped was spooky writing: Cargo Bay: Midnight. While I was trying on my outfit, an Earth doctor in
gore splattered green robes, Rikki continued to watch the feed.

“Weird.” Almost to himself. “Raya come and look at this.”
 

“More costumes?”
 

“No. I looked up significant events from this day in history.”

“From Earth?”

“And on the ship.”
 

“So?”
 

“So look at the last entry. The day they cut the feed from Earth. October 31st.”

I looked at him. “A coincidence.”

“Maybe.” He drew up the black wings of his costume above his head and wrapped them
around me, laughing. “Maybe not!”

“You idiot,” I said, pushing him off me, laughing as well. “Come on, we’ve got a thousand
pumpkins to carve.”

It would’ve taken a thousand thousand glowing pumpkins to light up even one per cent of
the volume of the cargo bay, so we confined our party to the area between two shuttles. They were
arrayed in gigantic racks, clamped onto the inner hull facing the doors. Hundreds of them, like
predatory birds frozen mid-flight. Ready to ferry us down to the surface of the mythical world that
was supposedly waiting for us somewhere out there in the darkness. A world none of us believed in.
It was part of our job to fire up the shuttles’ systems from outside so we could check them for flight
readiness. Rikki used his screen to link the two together and combine their spotlight beams for our
dance floor. Some of the others had climbed onto the clamps and draped them in strings of earth
ghouls, pulsating a sickly green light. None of us had ever seen a cobweb before the printer churned
them out, and we had great fun hanging them between the noses of the two shuttles, trying not to
get them tangled in our hair. Maz was trying to slosh every surface with fake blood, but a cleaning
drone kept following her around, washing it away as soon as her back was turned. They were the
only things on the ship that never broke down. My moment had come. I heaved the crate out of the
air vent, dragging it across the steel walkway as loudly as possible so that everyone stopped what
they were doing. All eyes were on me. I undid one clamp, stopped, adjusted my robes to increase
the tension. The second clamp came loose, and everyone heard the clinking of bottles from inside.

“Is that?” This was Maz, wide eyed. We all knew. I opened the first bottle and the fizz
echoed in the cavernous space. Maz took a sip, and grinned wider than the flickering faces of the
pumpkins leering down all around us.

A lot of drinking, a lot of dancing, not much sweating; the bay was too cold for that. We
were sat under the spotlight, dialled down to protect our eyes. Maz had managed to capture the
cleaning drone and turn it upside down. It was sending a catastrophic error message to the ship,
which was a little bit overdramatic. Eventually the beeping started to get on my nerves, so I righted
the thing and it whisked away over the walkway and out of sight. We could hear it trundling along
deep into the cargo bay, looking for dust in a place where there had been no dust in centuries. Then
the beeping abruptly cut off.

“On Earth they told ghost stories.” Rikki taking the last swig from his bottle. The others had
stumbled back to their cabins and he and Maz were the only ones left.

“Don’t get why they were scared of ghosts,” Maz said sleepily, “they knew they weren’t
real.”

“And no one has ever died on the Nostalgium,” I added.

We were silent for a while. Rikki’s tone was more thoughtful than usual, “You know there’s a
room in the bay that we’ve never been inside.”

I looked at Maz, who was now wide awake. We both understood what he meant. I put down
my bottle clumsily and it rolled off the edge of the walkway. We all tensed for a few seconds before
the smash came. “That’s the closest you can get on the ship to outside.” There was no specific rule
forbidding us to go into the airlock. Unlike the rest of the ship there was no triple hull separating you
from space, just a door. Then nothing. But a nothingness that seemed like it was clawing to get in. It
even felt colder when you walked past the inner door, but this was probably just my imagination. I
don’t remember agreeing to go, but we ended up outside the airlock anyway. We took turns
standing on tip toes to look inside. The technology looked older than the rest of the ship, blocky and
functional so it could be operated while wearing a spacesuit. I saw the big handle on the outer door,
the one you heaved open if you wanted to go outside. I shivered. Something crashed into my foot.
The cleaning drone, beeping wildly, red lights revolving around its ceramic plating.

“Stupid thing.” I nudged it away and laughed.
 

Rikki was trying the handle of the inner door. After applying some force it began to swing
open smoothly on steel hinges. We knew we weren’t in any real danger. Only the elders could
authorise the airlock to be pressurised or open the outer door. The ship’s hull repaired itself from
impacts with interstellar dust and micro meteorites. Anything bigger the shields took care of. No
need for anyone to go crawling over the Nostalgium’s skin like a bug. It was a failsafe only. Still, we
stood on the threshold for a few minutes before eventually I dared to step inside. Rikki closed the
inner door. We grinned at each other nervously. There wasn’t much to see apart from neat networks
of cabling and a control panel on one wall, inactive. Just that and the window. It was the only one on
the ship. They weren’t needed anywhere else, not when you could send out a fleet of camera drones
to scout ahead. Maybe this room was built first and the rest of the ship constructed around it.

“I can’t see anything.” Maz was looking through. “It’s just black.”
 

“What did you expect?” Rikki pushed her out of the way and peered out. “There’s not even
any stars. Maybe we took a wrong turn.”
 

I was getting cold by now, and a little bit bored, ready to go back to the cabin. “We’re
between systems. Wherever we’re headed, one day we’ll see it in the distance.”

“One day.” Maz heaved open the inner door and was heading back into the bay, Rikki
following. I went for a look out of the window. I had to grasp the handle to pull myself up to the
right height. There was a man outside. His face filled the entire window, and he was screaming
behind the glass. The shock was so profound I launched myself off the handle and collided with the
wall. My costume ripped, caught on a protruding strut. I bundled Rikki and Maz back into the bay
and slammed home the handle of the inner door. They were staring at me for an explanation but I
couldn’t speak. I was on my knees. I think they carried me back, because I woke up in my cabin a few
hours later, head pounding. They were both there, Halloween make up removed but faces white
with the pallor of the dead.

“Screaming yeah. But he didn’t look scared. I don’t know. More desperate. Like he was
trying to get my attention.” Thankfully they didn’t immediately call me insane. Or claim I’d had too
much to drink.

“Let’s figure it out in the morning,” said Rikki. “We’ll go back and investigate.” He saw me
flinch. “Or tell one of the elders.” Maz squeezed my hand.

I couldn’t sleep after they left. I opened up my screen and trawled through the videos we
were watching earlier. Then I fired up the search to look for...what? Screaming ghosts? Humans who
could survive in the vacuum of space? It made no sense. I closed the screen in frustration. It opened
again without me touching it. He was back. This time the view was from outside. From a vantage
point higher up on the hull. He was pounding on the airlock door with both fists. Fists that weren’t
inside gloves. He had no suit, no helmet. And he was floating freely, untethered from the ship. Then
his face filled the screen and I could hear him screaming. He was screaming one word over and over.
“Please.”

I’d practiced suiting up in class, but in the confines of the airlock it took much longer. My
breathing was loud inside the helmet, amplified by the microphone. The faceplate fogged and I
wiped it clean. As soon as I shut the inner door he appeared on my screen.

“Please.”

“I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“You need to give me access to the ship’s network. Then I can open the door from outside.”

I was already in huge trouble for using the suit, for being in the airlock alone. So I did it. The
warning lights came on and I could hear the hissing of the air as the lock depressurised. I tethered
myself to a wall as the door swung open, and he stepped inside.

He was partially transparent, like the ghosts from the videos, and he flickered in and out like
a candle. He tried to grab my arms and his fists sunk right through. “You need to turn the ship. Or
hide it.”

“What are you?”

“They beamed me here from Earth. The last message. I almost got in but the elders locked
me out. Confined me to the hull’s substrate systems.”

“The elders?”

“They lied to all of you. They didn’t cut the feed. It was severed by someone else.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The world you’re heading to? It’s not empty. They’ve been watching us for thousands of
years. They reached Earth first. Wiped us out. They know you’re out here. They’re faster than you.
And they’re coming.”