Providence - Max Barry Page 0,57
off his ping, removed his film, and jogged through the corridors to Rig-1. Rig-1 was his favorite place on the ship. It was basically the intersection of three corridors, but weirdly wide, with more room than he’d found anywhere else. He sat on the floor with his back against a wall and could see for fifty yards straight ahead, and the same when he turned his head left and right. He came here a lot, for respite from the feeling that the ship was closing on him like a vise.
He missed hydrexalin. The problem with Rig-1 was the silence, during which his brain strayed to bad places. He had to keep busy or else he would start revisiting the past, and not even the worst places, which by now were so well trodden that they’d developed something of a hard crust, becoming memories of memories, scenes that played out behind filtered glass, but instead smaller things, faces, expressions, little cruelties, none of which most people knew about, of course, because Service had taken him and buffed and polished until those parts were all gone, and the person he saw on the feeds he didn’t even recognize.
He had gone a little crazy in the last months before they shipped out. He had kept expecting someone to say, Wait, we’re sending Paul Anders? That’s a mistake. But no one did. No matter how much of an asshole he was, or how clear he made it that he was unsuited to the role, they remained intent on sending him out on a spacecraft—a spacecraft, for fuck’s sake—which was, it turned out, a hell of a lot smaller on the inside than it appeared from the exterior. The gap between who he was and who he was presented to be in public became a chasm, and he had the idea that if only he pushed enough, it would become untenable, something would have to break, and whichever way it went, for better or worse, things would make sense again. There would be no more gap. There were many girls in those months, and one of them, whose name he couldn’t remember but whose face he would never forget, jumped on his back, just slammed herself on there, and they were in the dark with the curtains drawn and the old terror burst inside him and he threw her off with such force that her head had struck the bedside table. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, but it was the worst; she was bleeding, her eye already swelling, and he tried to help her but she didn’t want him anywhere near, and there was a fear in her eyes that he recognized and understood. She left with only half her clothes. He had sat in the dark and waited for consequences that never came.
The beauty of Rig-1 wasn’t even the sight lines. It was the three doors. The options. A small space could be tolerable if there was a way out. That was the only reason he could bear his cabin—until it was locked.
Tough to explain this to anyone.
He had spent his entire career waiting for someone to find out. For a corporal to call him in and say, Candidate Anders, this is going to sound crazy, but are you claustrophobic? And then discharge him, because what else would you do with a claustrophobic flight crew candidate? Instead, he passed one psych eval after another. He was practiced at putting up a front, especially about this, so he could possibly believe that he’d managed to fool the human doctors. But the AI was supposed to be some kind of perfect. Passing that one was a surprise. Once he was selected for crew, Service monitored his physical and mental state almost constantly, and during one automated test, a series of Rorschach slides and word association tests, a wild impulse seized him and he said, “Kid in a box” to the first dark mess that appeared on screen, and “Kid in a box” for the second, and in response to evil, “Kid in a box,” to death, to never, all these words and pictures, he came right out with it and told the truth. When he passed that test, too, he knew they didn’t care.
The ship annoyed him. It did more than that, but the thing about it being supersmart, that got under his