Author : Tiasha J. Garcia

“This was not how I imagined this going.”

The words drifted into the pristine silence, disturbing nothing and no one.

“I–I thought there’d be more time.”

The two grotesquely bloated figures slumped over the bolted-down commissary tables declined to answer.

“I only wanted…to have a say.”

In the starboard head, the captain lay in an undignified sprawl with his white jumpsuit pooled around his blue ankles.

“To be heard.”

Not even the engines made a noise, so perfected had routine space-faring become.

“I am a member of this crew!”

Even more had been caught unawares while sleeping in their bunks.

“I am!”

Huddled lumps under blankets, one could almost imagine they were still alive.

“I am…”

Outside the stars glittered, starkly beautiful and magnified in a stream of cosmic dust, but there were no human eyes to see it.

“There–”

Oxygenated air whooshed through the corridors as the small freighter repressurized.

“–now can we can be friends again?”

The vessel continued on its scheduled course, faithfully corrected by the ship’s AI computer, whose dialogue looped for the fourth cycle in a row.

“This was not how I imagined this going…”