A Time of Useful Consciousness

Lucid

"The only upside is you'll blackout before you die."

We dumped the equipment salvaged from the Hlé field into a pile. The haul consisted of two backpacks, duct tape, climbing rope, the remains of Robert's spacesuit and the satchel of explosive charges.

"So it won't hurt?"

Anna had been securing the ripped spacesuit around me with a combination of safety belt straps to apply pressure and generous applications of the puncture repair tape. We'd found that each galley contained a survival kit intended to go with the life rafts. She paused thinking over my question before simply replying "No... it will hurt but the goal here isn't comfort."

With a yank she pulled a belt tight around my waist.

"It's to get us both through that airlock. I'd rather take a risk on that than the certain death that awaits us once the Hlé wall comes down. Also simply being alive is not enough, we need to be conscious and lucid enough to deal with that door."

"Lucid?"

"You're going to be alive longer than you're going to be conscious and you're going to be conscious longer than you'll be lucid."

"What, like drunk?"

"Essentially yes, once we leave here you're going to be depressurizing, experiencing temperature extremes and drawing on a relatively unreliable oxygen source. Without a properly pressurised suit I think the best we can hope for will be just a few minutes, after that you'll be awake but basically dead weight."

"Oh great, dead weight and then just plain dead." I pensively returned to my task of duct taping down the dozen small tubes that would feed oxygen into my helmet.

At Anna's instruction we'd spent the previous hour smashing apart the consoles above the seats. Behind the plastic layer was an array of metal cylinders that were connected to the gas masks that drop down in an emergency.

"What are these things, oxygen tanks?"

"Oxygen generators would be a better term, pull this firing pin and it ignites a mixture of sodium chlorate and iron powder. Gives you about fifteen minutes of oxygen and importantly a fair amount of heat, you'll need both. "

"How do you know all this?"

"Partially because we found the designs for these cabins on Ganymede but mostly it's my suit. Everything I see, say and hear is run through the suit and it just keeps offering information. When we were sitting down earlier I was staring at the no smoking signs on these consoles. That triggered the suit to pattern match it against possible matches and from there it found a Wikipedia article about aircraft emergency oxygen systems. I have no idea why the Librarians included the oxygen generators or the life rafts in their design, for all we know they thought they had some cultural value?"

"With all this tech you have, none of that helped fix the world's problems?"

"When I left we were starting to get some very firm ideas on why things had gone wrong but not necessarily the tools to fix them. The generation before mine believed that you should take your hand off the steering wheel of society for the best results. It was only after we'd driven off the cliff did my generation try to grab it back."

"Yeah and by the sound of it the cars were driving themselves by that point."

"Ha, well exactly. We had all the technology for a utopia but our social structures hadn't changed much from when most people were still illiterate."

With that Anna yanked the final belt around my chest, also securing into place a dozen of the oxygen generators. The tubes snaked around me and fed into the base of a helmet she'd salvaged from her team. She then strapped on the backpack unit that we'd removed from Robert's corpse. At some unheard command from her eight tubes ending in nozzles clicked out from the sides of the pack. She detached half the tubes and screwed them into her own backpack.

"These packs are propulsion units, originally designed for spacewalks but this model is modular. Four units is a Reaction Control System that will stop you spinning, eight is a standard zero-g maneuvering unit and twelve is a jetpack intended for traversing uneven terrain. The problem is that we need twenty four and we only have sixteen."

"So how's this going to work then, one of us gets out and then pulls the other up?"

"Something like that." She unslung from her shoulder the coil of rope we'd found at the Hlé field. "Have you ever bungee jumped before?"

"Yes, in New Zealand once on holiday."

"Well picture that-" she said while fastening the rope around me. "...but in reverse."

**

Anna had just finished setting the charges when the drone returned from the Hlé field. We'd left it there to monitor for movement and it returning meant our time was up. Anna secured the rope one last time and then pressed her helmet against mine.

"Remember, pull the cord when the rope gets down to the last few meters, too early and I won't have the momentum to pull you out. Ready?" I nodded in a mute lie.

She walked a few rows away from me and placed the coil of rope that was tied between us on the ground. Duct taping a flashlight to a nearby chair she lit the coil so I could clearly see it in the aisle despite the dark. Once she was satisfied both ends were secure she knelt down into a sprinters stance.

There was a brief moment where I thought she had reconsidered when suddenly the entire cabin shock. In the far distance I saw the curtains we'd left closed get torn from their rods and then the entire roof began to rip away, behind it all I could see was stars and the vast blue curve of the ring. The wind was a cyclone and all around me various debris were sucked down the aisle towards the widening tear.

The second explosion came 5 seconds later and they then followed one after the other a second apart. With each explosion the roof was pulling away like the lid of a sardine can as the spin of the ring could no longer keep it attached. Even in this roar of destruction the cabins remained dark only now briefly lit by the regular flash of the explosives.

It was then that I saw them, scrambling across the chairs and down the aisles in a swarm, unfazed by the hard vacuum of space. Only the fact I was now gasping for air distracted me from their charge. I yanked the pins on the oxygen generators and my helmet quickly filled with pure oxygen and a strong burning smell followed by a slowly building heat around my waist. The wind that had begun as a roar was starting to fade when the final charges in the galley ahead blew. The last noise I heard was the metallic screech of the roof tearing off before all was silent and dark.

Sensing a clear ascent Anna's backpack dazzled with twelve bright points of light before she was swallowed up by the dark, only the rope suspended vertically in the air marked her passage. I watched the rope in the aisle carefully, each coil snaking upward lazilly at first and then faster and faster.

My chair shifted slightly and looking up I saw they now surrounded me, their faces expressionless, their lips moving wordlessly in the vacuum. In unison their heads snapped to look backward, the ring had been turning and our section was now coming into the light reflected from the planet below.

The damage from the explosions was too great and with a silent wrench the broken section snapped free from the rest of the ring. Now free the entire structure was like a whip uncurling, the baby blue outer surface of the ring was shattering like glass mixed with seats, luggage and drinks trolleys.

With the final coil of rope whipping away and I unbuckled my seatbelt, a single creature reached for me before I was wrenched upward by the force of the rope around my waist. My vision was a blur as I tumbled helplessly as if fired from a cannon. Like a horse kicking me in the back the RCS unit lit up and stabilized my freefall. I was still facing the ring below and watched as the wave of destruction approached the creatures. Even amidst the destruction they never broke eye contact as I rose above them and beyond their grasp.