Space, it felt so vast, I couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. I’m standing in space but I’m alive and well, and I guess that’s the beauty of modern technology nowadays. Being in absolute nothing while still being something. Our spaceship was the normal kind of thing you’d see cruising past the stars headed to places unknown, just your average prison transport under the guise of something noble and daring, when it was really the equivalent to delivering mouthwash to Mars.
The ship felt lukewarm, the air was a little dry, and almost silent, save for the quiet hum-buzz of the ship’s lights and the prisoner locked up in his cell yelling nonsense. Not necessarily begging for mercy but protesting what we were doing, which was a little screwed up honestly. He was a little heavyset, wild ginger hair with a beard to match, leg bouncing due to boredom, and a sense of terror in his quivering lip. He was caught smuggling extremely dangerous drugs into the Earth’s border some thirty-six months ago and was sentenced to death via the worst way possible: The Black Hole.
It was a thankless job, everyone sent to The Black Hole was never seen again, completely erased from existence, and only my partner and I could comprehend such god-awful concepts and somehow treat it like we were hauling cargo to Mars. My partner had gotten the job as the ship’s pilot five years ago and yet I could never figure out how he still manages to keep a chipper attitude after seeing all those people fly towards their imminent spaghettification.
“We’re here, bring ‘em out!” I heard the pilot yell from four feet away.
“Copy that,” I replied as I began to hit a code on a keypad to let the prisoner out.
Almost immediately, he shoved me out of his way and he began to run around frantically trying to figure out where he was and how to get out before the “escape” pod of our ship caught his quivering eyes. He proceeds to make a mad dash for the pod, not realizing that it was a trap. With the flick of a switch and the push of a big red button, he was off to that nefarious Black Hole. The button in the pod is fake, I was the one that pushed it.
It’s kind of eerie how you can’t hear them react to their situation unfolding in real time. First it’s all smiles and hoorays like they think they’re going to get out of this mess but it soon unfolds into a horrific awe as they see The Black Hole get closer and closer. They start banging on the door, mouthing “Let me out! For god’s sake, let me out!” as they careen towards the giant void ball of death with a less than 0% chance of getting out. The eerie feeling doesn’t stop there.
As he banged on the ball that was to be his coffin, tears flowing from his face as he got redder in stress, his constant rate started getting slower…
and slower…
The button in the pod is fake, I was the one that pushed it.
and slower…
Until he reached the Event Horizon, where he stopped moving entirely. Now I don’t mean he stopped moving and just sat there accepting his fate. He literally stopped like someone pressed pause on a movie about his life. He stays like this for what feels like hours before a red fade overtakes him and he vanishes completely with that same look of fear in his eyes and more water streaming down his face than a gutter full of leaves.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“Alright, back to base,” I heard the pilot say while I was still reeling from the absolute shock of that execution, “I don’t wanna miss the big game, y’know.”
I turn and look at him, “do you ever think about what goes on in there?”
“I think you get turned into spaghetti, or something like that,” the pilot said with a bored look on his face, “I don’t know, It’s best not to dwell on that sort of thing.”
I nodded, “uh huh, what do we dwell on then? I mean we’ve got a few hours before we’re back at home base, what do you wanna talk about?”
“Hmm, I don’t know, there’s a lot of good music out there, you got any favorites?”
“No, I just put classical music on shuffle.”
“What kind?” asked the pilot.
“You know, piano concertos, string quartets–”
“No, I mean, who’s playing it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you the kind of guy to listen to actual musicians play those piano concertos and string quartets or is it a robot that thinks it could play it, even though it isn’t shit without its programmers?”
“Hmm, good question.”
“Good question? Do they not put stickers on those records?”
“I don’t think so.”
The pilot threw his hands into the air and yelped, “of course they don’t!”
I looked at him with an aire of confusion on my face. In all of the time I knew him, he never once let out an outburst like this.
“You doing okay?” I asked.
The pilot removed his hat, slicked back his hair, and put his hat back on, “I’m fine, I’m fine, sometimes I get really passionate about these sorts of things.”
“It’s fine man, if it makes you feel any better I’ll check out something ‘man-made.’”
The pilot’s face bore a quick and easy smile before he dug into one of the drawers next to him. He shuffled past various piles of junk and unopened instructional manuals before finding a CD hidden deep within the drawer. Aside from a couple of scuff marks on the plastic jewel case, the album was in very good condition, near mint as some would call it. He placed the CD into my hand and wrapped my fingers around it. His dirty hands felt cold, and they were in these fingerless gloves that were somehow even dirtier.
“We’re gonna be here for a couple of hours,” said the pilot, “might as well sit in your little area and get lost in some human-made music.”
I hesitated slightly, “I don’t own a CD player.”
The pilot threw his hands in the air again in frustration. “Of course you don’t,” he yelped before going back into his side drawer, pulling out a CD player, and handing it over to me. It was a little greasy but it felt nice and smooth in my hands regardless.
“There,” he said with a sense of finality, “that should help. Do you also need a pair of headphones?”
“No, I got some,” I muttered before pulling out my trusty earbuds.
The pilot looked at me like I shot his dog. “Oh absolutely not!” he shouted before he placed a pair of headphones into my arms along with the CD and player. The metal part of the band was rusted, which reassured my belief that it was his pair, and the speakers were practically mint. No dust in its output, the sound quality would’ve been crisp.
“Alright, thanks,” I said before shuffling back to my seat near the cell’s door, which felt emptier now that the prisoner was gone.
“Don’t mention it!” said the pilot, who was beginning to ride the high of showing someone what he considered good music.
♫♫♫♫♫♫♫
I placed myself onto my seat, plugged the headset into the player, inserted the disc, wrapped the headphones over my head, and pressed play. The album started a bit slow, twenty seconds of crowd noise ended with a man saying something like, “welcome back, this is a song about clocks.”
The lineup was pretty standard for the most part. Horns filled my ears as a rhythm was tossed around between a guitar, bass, piano, and drums. It was an interesting thing, to say the least. I was almost ready to accept it as the whole song until the saxophone kicked in. I thought the guy speaking at the beginning would come back but when I checked the back of the CD case, I saw that it was the same guy.
“This feels weird,” I thought to myself.
Before I could remove the headphones so I could sit in silence, something caught my ear. The saxophonist screwed up. I don’t know how but I had never heard that sort of thing before. Usually the musicians were programmed to be irreversibly perfect, synthesized to perfection by programmers that were paid more than me, but this felt different. Gone is the synthesized sound, I can hear the saxophone player. I can hear him breathing, I can hear his fingers stress against the valves. There were winces in his playing and yet I still listened.
Is this what I’ve been missing?
For the next hour and a half, I sat there listening to every little bit of song that came from the septet playing in my ears. The dirty trombone solo, the simultaneous piano and organ playing, even a fucking harmonica! I didn’t even know what a harmonica was until I listened to this album. It was all so magical, I had never experienced such joys before.
I looked up at the pilot, he had this shit-eating grin plastered on his face, like he knew the music would get to me one way or another. But I wasn’t really thinking about the look he was giving me, I was more focused on the outside. The way the stars whirred past us as we made our way back to Earth, nothing to stop us for another hundred million miles.
Space, it felt so vast, yet I was able to exist here with such beauty. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the prisoner. Did he ever experience such joys before his execution minutes prior? I wish I could’ve done something to help him ease his worries before his passing.
The button in the pod is fake, I was the one that pushed it.
As the last song fades out with the lick of a clarinet and the crowd cheering, I couldn’t help but shed a tear at what was lost and what is gained.
Velocity 
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