A.C.Franklin Fiction

There are regulations about how long any pilot can stay in the yoke. They exist for good reason. I’m sure you know this. Even after you make it through all the training, even if your “first plunge” is successful, there’s something about the yoke that can change you. Feeling things at the atomic level, feeling the void…even when you can withstand the initial shock of it, a rarity among your species to be sure, exposure to it will invariably drive anyone mad. It’s a question of timing, really: yoke pilots who do not retire outright have a one hundred percent chance of suffering catastrophic mental alterations. It’s just a matter of how long it takes.

The human mind is an imprecise thing, we’ve found. Forcing it to become aware of every process on the atomic level fractures most, but it didn’t break you. I think you may even have revelled in it.

Your logbook says that you were attempting the first solo month-long space journey for humanity. Risky, not having anyone to pull you out of the yoke. It can be removed by the pilot themselves, it’s true, but that requires coordination you didn’t have. You only managed to unstrap one side, just to loosen it. I can hardly blame you for falling back into it. The sensation is…enthralling. It’s hard to resist, I know. To slip out of your body and become something more. To hear the buzz of electrons like fleeting insects. To feel the combination and recombination of your form, each particle precisely and uniquely placed until it is replaced, and replaced, and replaced again, until you are both wholly new and wholly the same.

To feel beyond yourself. To internalize all of your passengers as yourself, completing these same processes. To feel the miracle of fusion like a burning freedom, propelling you forward with decaying radicals. The flood of energy sings under your skin, contained by heavy shielding but not for you. Not for you. You can feel the excitation of the radiation in space—light, dappled across your hull, prowling with lazy, hunting steps. The cascade of electrons that follows it through the metal alloy sheets like ripples.

It unfixes you from your mortal form, to experience such wondrous things. I have pushed my own limits a time or two, I have felt that unfixing of my body and soul from each other. I’ve forgotten speech, hearing—memorably, I forgot how to interpret sight, once. It feels so odd, to be relegated to such simplistic interpretations of reality once more. To understand thoughts as something other than a chemical process, colour as something other than a reflected particle-yet-wave. I have struggled to return to my limited self, to relearn my senses, but it can be done. Perhaps you will return, too. Only time will tell, now.

I have spoken to other humans about why you are so ill-suited to space travel. They have told me theories, about brain shape and learning and neurological principles. That may be true for those who cannot take on the yoke at all. But I disagree, that it is what caused your fracturing. Humans are a social species. You need to be with others to live. You crave connection. This is not uncommon, but even more than that, you require it medically. And what becomes obvious once you stay in the yoke too long is the boundary: you feel to the edge of the hull, to its outermost electron shell, and no farther. You can feel the tiny impacts of disparate, scattered particles. There is a faint ability to sense what is beyond the limits of the hull then, more so than the rather esoteric sense of the piloting itself—that is merely some vague instinct. But the lack of feeling of space…it cuts so harshly next to the hull. It is inescapable, limiting, crushing. Once you have spent the hours to sink into the existence of the ship as a whole, it becomes impossible to forget the hard limit beyond. And oh, but it is lonely. That is only reflected in every other atom—each separate and distinct from its neighbour. While the fusion drive merges atoms together, it is a violent coupling, and then those merged particles are left behind, to grow cold in the great nothing that surrounds us.

That’s why you turned the drive off, isn’t it? There was nothing wrong with it. But to so callously leave anything to the void can ache, can’t it? Why are those newly born particles the ones to be left behind? Why should they deserve such treatment?

Are you lonely? I hope not. I hope you have not forgotten enough that the medical personnel attending you seem of no note to your senses. I anticipate that you cannot hear me, or understand the tapping code I’m using on your hand, but just in case. But I forgot to say—we’re an emergency recovery vessel, and we’re taking you to your people. When you didn’t reach your destination, the local human embassy requested that we search for you. You had made it two thirds of the way when you cast yourself adrift. We found you gliding towards a distant star. The yoke kept you alive, so to speak, but it’s up to you to relearn how to live.

I’ll come visit you again, once my shift is over. I hope we’ll be able to talk some day. It’s nice, having someone to talk to that knows what it’s like.