Space

         So there I was in a space station, by myself. There was a massive room with most of the equipment in it, and it had a huge window that dominated one wall. It was always facing the eastern horizon of the Earth, so from the middle of the room I could see pretty much along the equator. I would watch it spin below me occasionally, trying to identify each country as they sped below me. I hated being in there during sunrises, though. They blinded me, and they occurred every few hours up here.
         So I spent most of my time in this tiny room, with very little light, adjacent to the main room. It had no windows and only a small incandescent bulb. Looking back on it now, it wasn't befitting a space station. Anyway, I had a small computer of little quality, but it ran on close to no power. All I ever did was wander around online, watching events unfold while I floated above. I also occasionally got missions like testing gravity-sensitive equipment, or animals' reactions to zero-G, or cameras' quality by taking press photos of the Earth, or something. But those didn't take me long to do, so I ended up back online.
         Something about it made me feel so very powerful. I would delight in watching these major events unfold, and bear in mind that they meant nothing to me. They usually affected thousands of people, but not me.
         Of course, I kept in touch with my parents. I had a phone in the main room, and I would sometimes be allowed to make a call back home. The satellite delay was terrible, though. It took me 5 or 6 seconds to hear any response, so I briefly would think they'd stopped talking, or I had been cut off, or they hung up. Then they'd talk to me and I'd be very relieved. Then I would get frustrated because I hate mood swings over something so trivial as silence.
One of my conversations was with my sister when she was in the United States, or the UK, or something. She was in a country more powerful than Canada, and that spoke English, I remember that much.
         Anyway, here's how it went:
         “Hey, bro!” I hate it when she calls me bro. It sounds so preppy and trendy. I cringed and immediately felt sorry. This had been the first time I'd talked to anyone in over a month. Vocally, anyway.
         “How're things?” I never say hi. I don't like saying words that don't mean anything anymore.
         “...They're great! Guess what happened to me two weeks ago!”
         “I'd rather not.” I was tired. I give shorter sentences when I'm tired - especially when I want to go to sleep.
         “...Well, he proposed to me!” She actually told me his name, but I forget.
         “Proposed? You mean, like, you're getting married?” I didn't really care.
         “...Yeah! We're getting married next month.”
         “Wait, how long have you known this guy?” It probably wasn't the best thing to say. I was trying to act interested, mostly.
         “...,” goddammit, that pause lasted forever. I thought she hung up. That she saw through my question, that is. Or that she thought I was so ignorant that I didn't know. But that can't be it, we've only spoken four or five times-- “We started dating in February of last year, so it's about a year and a half.”
         Goddammit. I got so mad that I almost yelled at her. Of course, I stopped myself, and quickly realized I wasn't actually mad at her.
         “Cool, cool. So you planning anything with him first, you know, to celebrate, or something?”
         “...we're going to Paris for our honeymoon. Two weeks. We've already got the reservations,” she was talking so fast that even that bothered me. She was talking about a honeymoon, for God's sake. I didn't mean to ask her about that. I was thinking about myself. I wanted to go home. I wanted her to invite me so I could leave this cold shed and go home, and eat some cake. I'd wanted to eat cake ever since I got up here. I'd been eating toothpaste-ish stuff and water all this time, except once when they sent me up a case of 2-litre bottles of cola, the local brand from my hometown. I'd gotten through all of them in a few days, though.
         Anyway, my sister was going on and on, and this was what I was thinking. I missed cake so much.
         “...hello? Hello?” The first one wasn't a question. She said it in this way that I'd come to resent. The “o” was elongated and it sounded like she was testing my hearing, or something. The second one had an upward inflection at the end, as though she was saying it like the first one, only this time she was putting effort into it. God, I wanted to hang up.
         “Yeah, I'm here. I really want to come home.”
         “...yeah, me too.”
         “What's the date?” I have the date on my computer, but I never bother to check it. I like to lose track of time.
         “...August 2.”
         “Alright. Just a few more months to go.”
         “...yeah, I'll see you then.”
         “Mmhm. I'll talk to you later.” I tried not to impose the idea that I wanted to go. She said “I'll see you then”, which was kind of like she was leaving. So I figured it was the best time to make it so.
         “...bye, big bro.” Dammit. Why can't she call me by my name? I don't get it.
         “Bye.”
         I probably hung up a little too fast. I probably cared too much about it, anyway.
         I was going to go back to the computer when I noticed the window. It was nowhere near sunrise, and I was looking at the dark side of the Earth. I couldn't see the streetlights or anything like that, like you see all the time in ads for power companies and such. The formation of the land was what intrigued me. I stared for what must have been hours, because I saw a sliver of light come up across the horizon, as though the Red Sea was squeezing a sun out from between its legs.
         So I turned away. I never was fond of looking at that type of thing. I went back inside.
         It was a few more days, or something. I don't know. It was a long time. I kept browsing the internet, seeing things unfold. They were about to go into Iran. I didn't care. A nuclear war could erupt and I wouldn't care. I wasn't human anymore. I was an alien. Sitting up here in my UFO, observing the puny earthlings below.
         To be honest with you, I actually conducted a few “experiments” with the Internet while I was up there. For example, I hung around in chatrooms and noticed this one guy picking up girls left, right and center. I didn't mind, but I hated the fact that even the females who I'd been talking to and thought were nice people were falling for his technique. I asked him about it, and he kind of commented that he had a “refined technique”, but he was joking. Or at least, he said “heh” when he said it.
         So I read the log of what he said and his reactions. It was all very cyclical, indeed. All he did was notice what the female had been saying, then say something to everyone in general about how he agreed with her. Then he'd ask the woman how she felt, then play to however she was feeling, and then she would tell him more and he had an appropriate response for it until they had a friendship.
         I decided I'd give this a try for myself. I'd wait for someone to complain, then complain with them. We'd start a conversation. Then it was just a game of connect-the-dots, really. She'd talk about the lag in the room, so I'd talk about this one time when I was in the middle of a huge conversation, and then the guy got so pissed off at the lag...
         You know how it goes.
         Anyway, to make a long story short, I eventually had my list filled with about 20 women. I even tried it on a few guys who I'd known to be gay or bisexual or whatever. It always worked. I felt so tired. Not tired tired, but tired like that old man you see in kung-fu flicks, when he teaches the main character how to fight. Like you know he knows everything there is to know about the events in the movie. He just looks like he wants to sleep and avoid the need for any kind of conflict. But he doesn't look sleepy, so to speak.
         Anyway, so after talking with all these people, I ended up deducing that over three quarters of the women I'd had on my list claimed to be bisexual. It annoyed me so much because I knew they weren't. I could tell in how they spoke. How they never talked about women, but they talked about men all the time. They didn't even try to relate their would-be attraction with women to me, even though it's common ground. It really irked me. I just stopped using the whole client. I couldn't figure out why. Why would anyone say they were attracted to the same sex? Isn't that frowned upon, or something? I didn't understand humans.

         A few sleeps later, they told me I had to test a few pieces of equipment. Photon-based radar, or something, and this device that fired a bunch of laserbeams that were supposed to disturb the passage of time. I remember reading about it online before they gave it to me. Guess they finally finished it.
Anyway, they sent it up on a shuttle, along with a few other things like this really state-of-the-art radio receiver. Could pick up stations worldwide from the station, they told me. They were going to see if it could pick up signals from deep space. They also wanted me to broadcast with it, like some extension of SETI or something. They had these Tesla coils, too. They wanted to check out wireless power while I was up here, and they were on the surface, and the coils were the best way to do it, they said. I had one of those Van de Graaff generators up here, too, so the whole main room ended up looking like some mad scientist's lab.
         I don't remember the conversation, but I remember wanting them to leave me alone so I could try out the new equipment. It might have been a few sleeps. We worked together to install the photon radar dish to the outside of the ship. They said they wanted to leave before I tested them because their suit radios might interfere, or something... I guess it makes sense if you know about that type of thing. At any rate, they finally left, and I was really excited. As soon as they undocked, basically, I fired up the radar and watched the screen.
         It was all very fast. The screen showed the Earth's edge almost immediately. It was entirely bright-green. The Moon, and the station, and even the ship was displayed as it went through its orbit a few thousand miles away. Hubble was there, almost directly under me. I bolted up to look down at it. It was floating between me and the Indian Ocean. I laughed a little and went back to the screen. This was pretty complicated, of course, because I had to push myself off the floor, and forward using friction, then stop myself against the window, then push back off pretty perfectly to get back to the screen. I'd gotten used to it, though. As I stared at the screen, I came to the conclusion that this would be useful in things like finding tiny asteroids that telescopes wouldn't spot, or fast-moving ships, or something. It was all presented in 3-D on the screen, which I thought was handy.
         Anyway, the view kept expanding. It automatically scaled down the map as more of it came into view. After a few minutes, Venus popped up on screen, then Mars a few seconds later. I started getting really excited. I must have sat there for about an hour, watching as Mercury popped up, and then the asteroid belt. Then something happened. The radar went on beyond the asteroid belt, but a thin slit wasn't revealing anything. I dragged the cursor across the screen so I could see the asteroid belt from a different angle, and I could see that this slit went through the center of it, all around it. A really narrow ring. Or, it appeared narrow. It was probably a few kilometers wide, now that I think of it. Anyway, this thing absorbed the light. The asteroids beyond the ring were there, but where the ring blocked the light, it cast a “shadow” on the asteroid. It was the only shadow on the map. It was very strange.
         So I tried to analyze it. I had that radio, so I turned it on and tried all the frequencies with the dish aimed towards it. I had a time finding a spot where nothing was blocking the signal, like an asteroid inside the ring, or a moon or planet or something, but I got one and listened. Nothing.
After a few minutes, I decided to move on to the next device and leave the "shadow" until later. Not that it didn't interest me anymore, but for some reason I figured I wasn't going anywhere with it and so I shouldn't try.
Anyway, so I switched the radio to broadcast mode, and hooked it into my computer. The best I could think of was to tap out the first 15 prime numbers. I saw it in an episode of some sci-fi show, where they wanted to prove they were intelligent to some species with a different language.
         2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47. I think that's right.
         Anyway, I just repeated that message, and listened at the radio. I turned it up real loud so I could even go to sleep and still be woken up if something happened. I waited there for hours, and I was getting tired again. Hopefully there was some kind of intelligence around where the dish was pointing...
Ah, dammit, that dish is still pointing at that stupid shadow!, I suddenly realized. I started getting really angry for some reason. I was getting ready to turn the dish away when I heard something over the radio.
         “4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25.” Well, they were little clicks. I guess it's some kind of broadcast. At any rate, I thought it was pretty clever to respond to my message like that. Then I realized what this meant. Man, I got really excited. I was trembling, and completely stunned in my thinking. I figured I'd send it morse code, just to see how well it knew me. I don't even know why I thought it would know me at all. Anyway, I sent “Greetings”. In English, in morse code. In retrospect, I can't believe it ever worked. It took like, an hour to get a response, because the asteroid belt is, like, half a light-hour away.
         “Hello,” I get back. Jesus, was I ever excited.
         “What are you?”
         I hated this pause. I got so nervous because I was terribly worried this thing wouldn't like me. Sounds kinda childish, I know.
         “I'm a friend. You've been looking for me.”
         Shit. I do like this guy.
         “Yes. How are you feeling?” I shouldn't have asked him such a stupid question. I hate when people ask that like they're greeting you. Doesn't mean anything anymore.
         While I was waiting for the response, I came up with this idea of a program that would sent morse code at a crazy rate if I typed in text on the computer. I'd seen it done before, on morse-code translators. All I had to do was code it so that the tone went out real fast. The radio came with a cable that plugged right into the computer, so I could log anything that came in on the hard drive.
Anyway, so I was plugging all this in and put in this disk they gave me that would set up the program to let the radio stream what it was getting into a file on the harddrive. Pretty good idea on the guys' part, I guess.
         I plug it in, and this crazy noise comes over the radio. It's like that weird buzzy noise you hear when you're dialing an ISP using one of those old modems. The noise was being picked up by the computer, anyway. Then I understood what was going on. The radio was using this CAT-6 plug. One of those jobs that look like they go into the phone jack. Just like a dial-up modem. Now, something you should know about this computer is that it was really, really old. From the 90's. It had an internal modem that was dial-up, like many computers did back then. So I got this surge of energy and I unplugged the cable from the device card and into the modem.
         Then it detected the use of the modem, and set it up automatically. Honestly, it was all very fast. Faster than normal, anyway.
         So then it starts trying to dial the thing. I just thought “Man, that thing's gonna say there was no dial tone...” and I was right. A was a bit disappointed, but then I got the idea that I had to wait the half-hour for a message to arrive. I just let it retry and retry, and then, there was a dial tone. I was astonished. Somehow, I was connected to a goddamned phone line, using dial-up, from space. It dialed the number, then the same noise played.
         It slowly dawned on me that this thing I was “talking” to, around the ring, had made that noise itself so I could attach it to the modem and have it work properly. This, all while the weird scratchy sound played and it said I was connected. Then this text box popped up. Like one of those chatrooms I'd been in before. I found it extremely weird.
         So there I was, staring at the screen, when the message “Use the lasers” appear on-screen. The username wasn't there. Just a weird symbol. I couldn't describe the symbol to you. Anyway, so I figured this thing was telling me to hook up the laserbeam device to the radio, or something. So I did. Didn't take long, but I had to carefully position it so the lasers wouldn't hit the radio itself. Then, of course, the laserbeams came on. I saw the air around the radio kind of warp inward. It looked pretty kooky.
Anyway, then the message comes up really quickly, “Excellent.”
I guess the lasers made it so that signals were being sent a half-hour into the future, and they hit the radio and the lasers sent them back a half-hour, so it appeared that the waves were being received simultaneously. It was quite unreal.
         “This is much better,” I type, trying to contain my ecstasy.
         “Better for you, I hope. I have a lot of patience.”
         “So where are you?” I figure that was the best place to start.
         “I thought you'd know. I'm in the asteroid belt. I have been for a really long time.”
         “How long?”
         “Too long.”
         Stupid question for it, I guess. I tried something else.
         “Why don't you just explain yourself to me? You must know why I'm confused. Let's not play Twenty Questions.”
         “Very well. You assume incorrectly as to what I am. I'm more than you can possibly know. In fact, I'm what you didn't know, wasn't I? You know about me because you couldn't see me,” He was right. It was charming, “and you wanted to see me. Well, now you can. At least in the sense you wanted.” If I wasn't so excited, I would have been angry that it was using such awkward words. Trying to sound all sophisticated. It sounded pretty empty, now that I remember it. But I was too interested in it.
         “Well, then, let me see.”
         He pulled up a webpage on my browser. It was an article about some superstructure called a matrioshka brain. Some kind of big sphere that sits around a sun and soaks up all the solar power. It's a computer. One massive, star-sized computer that runs on a massive amount of power. I briefly wondered about how stars just disappear, and if they're actually being covered by one of these things. How much data could these things store? Some inconceivable amount. I didn't even bother estimating.
Anyway, I finished reading the whole thing. Something about it led me to an idea.
         “You're a matrioshka brain, then?”
         “Yes,” it replied.
         At first, I thought it was a prank, or something. But how could a human have gotten out to the asteroid belt like that? I was confounded for quite some time, but we kept talking. It started talking some nonsense about how it had been around for millions of years, watching the dinosaurs get wiped out and humans arise. I asked it about these things, but it wouldn't answer me with any more details. It did let it slip that the reason it cast a shadow was that it reflected no light. It's albedo was zero, and this absorption of incredible amounts of solar energy powered it very effectively.
         I stopped reading the news or doing anything online. I started spending entire days just talking to the thing. It eventually gave me the web address of a webpage where these directions were given for building a device that cures all diseases. It is attached to your arm and sends a tiny electrical impulse through your body, and this kills all foreign bodies but doesn't harm you. Granted, I had read about this before, in the waking world, as well as the whole matrioshka brain dealie, but it was still fascinating. I didn't even realize it was a dream by this point. Anyway, I built it using parts from the microwave. Really. Little wires and stuff. It gave me directions on how to fashion a zero-point energy battery, or something like that, from this piece of scrap metal on the floor. I had to tire wires to the circuitry and then get a charge from the metal... I was confused, and kind of following without knowing what I was doing, but it worked. I used to get colds and stuff because of the bacteria floating around in the station, but I actually got rid of it using that device. I couldn't believe it. After one day, it'd be gone. Although my sinuses would still clear, and all that, by way of runny nose. It was okay, though. Apparently, people were cured of AIDS and even cancer by this device. I wondered how much longer I would live if I used this all the time.
         “A good long while,” it told me when I asked.
         So it had given me what seemed to be superhuman technology, and had lengthened my life considerably. I was indebted to it. I have to be honest, I started really getting into our conversations. Every conversation I'd ever had before just didn't seem to mean anything anymore.
         I once asked it why I didn't care about humanity below.
         It said, “Because you aren't human anymore.”
         “So, what is a human?” I really wanted to know what its answer would be.
         “A very dangerous creature who happens to be friendly to complete strangers and hate everyone they hear about the most, but never see. I've seen so much of it. Wars have been fought because of this type of thing. It's a good thing the experiment involving them will conclude before they get out of control.”
         Now, that was creepy. I followed it up until the experiment part. It was the first thing it said that I didn't  understand after I received it.
         “What do you mean? What's the experiment?”
         “I've been here for a very, very long time. Others have built me around this system so I could watch you. And I've seen everything. You ever wonder why humans are the only animals to have newborns die because of blood incompatibility?”
         “No.”
         “Your blood is not of natural origin. I'd assumed some of you would figure that out before your time had come. It seems I must tell you. Your state of being is a test. It took centuries, of your time, to find a planet suitable for the experiment. The experiment's goal was to determine how a conflict-based evolutionary environment would develop, and to see if a soul could overcome a body. It ended up with the dominant species being largely self-destructive, and other species being repressed by it to the point of near-annihilation. The conflicting nature of your genealogy won out. Dominant genes versus recessive ones, killing off parasites rather than accommodating them. A very creative process, albeit a dysfunctional one. We'd considered the possibility that you would overcome your conflict, but this doesn't seem to have happened. Well, you may be an exception, but you're not human. You see, if humans had the ability to curb their tendencies, then it would show us that the soul is the main being, no matter the body, and this would explain a little more about the purpose and origin of the Universe. You wouldn't understand that if I explained it to you.”
         I could understand that. In fact, I wasn't all that shocked by this revelation. It seemed to be more of a gentle awakening than a bolt upright in bed. I'd actually considered intelligent design before, but not like God did it. It just seemed so weird that humans killed each other, seemingly by nature, when evolution would not have it that way.
         “So what happens when the experiment concludes?”
         “Well, the humans are going to eventually wipe themselves out.”
         I chuckled a little bit.
         “I've studied them for millions of years. My calculations are based on very accurate data.”
         “Like what?”
         “Their societal patterns, their power heirarchies and their rate of technological advancement, among other factors that you don't yet understand.”
It's odd. It sounded kind of condescending, but I was feeling like it was the truth. This thing, in truth, was the most friendly person I'd ever met.
         I started looking down at the Earth a lot more. Somehow, being told by some higher being that humanity is doomed is pretty enveloping. I let out a sigh. All I wanted to do was to float up here forever.
         Anyway, I decided to look up more information on “zero-point energy”. I found this site talking about the Hutchison effect, or anti-gravity. Causes things to just fly around without any power, or something. It was all pretty crazy. Anyway, they had instructions on how to make anything fly through the air. People'd been talking about how it's a myth, how it doesn't work, all that.
The matrioshka brain told me how to make the whole thing work. God, I wish I remembered what it said to me. It took only a few hours of work, really, but we got the station set up with this electromagnetic field, or something. I wondered about telling people back home about what I was going to do, but to tell you the truth, I didn't say anything to spite them. I'd rather just float away from the planet entirely. With my cure for all diseases, and my fuelless anti-gravity engine, and my friend in the asteroid belt.
         Basically, I had to treat the station like a car. I had to keep the photon radar in my line of sight, while I held onto one of the Tesla coils at the back of the room so I could move it back and forth and “steer” the whole station.
         So I turned on the whole system, and the station started shaking pretty violently. It was a weird feeling. I was floating in the air, but the room was vibrating around me. Then I remembered that inertia could hurt me, so I pushed off the floor and hung onto the wall. I was going to wait there until the station reached full speed, or whatever, and then let go. Then I started shaking a lot. It tickled my spine, vibrating and all.
         Anyway, so then the shaking stops and I start moving forward. Well, everything does. It felt really weird. I saw the Earth out the window kind of sink under the bottom of the window, which freaked me out just a bit. Then I started accelerating. It was strange; the whole station was completely soundless. It was strange to just be moving through space. I felt like a ghost.
         The whole trip took about two weeks. Well, I shouldn't say the whole trip, because I couldn't slow down or anything, so instead of stopping, I had to find a trajectory that put me in orbit around the sun, just inside the asteroid belt. Of course, I kept accelerating at a slower rate, so I had to occasionally turn the ship inwards just a little bit. The Brain told me that I'd have to keep changing the trajectory until the power in the radio ran out, which would be in about four years.
         Instead, I simply pulled the battery out of the radio. The interference that propelled the station stopped, and I had constant velocity. Now, of course, responses from the Brain took a few seconds to arrive, but I knew it wouldn't ignore me, so I didn't mind. We kept having conversations, but now I was without contact with the Earth. All I had was the Brain. It kept talking to me, telling me that I wasn't human, against what I knew of myself.
         So there I floated. I had my cure for everything. The Brain showed me a way to use zero-point energy to isolate atoms from metals and plastic and form glucose. So I could eat the station, quite literally. I built an electrolysis machine that ran on the battery from the radio, so I could put my liquid waste into a tube and the machine would isolate hydrogen and oxygen, then I would mix them together and have water in this way. Everything ran on zero-point energy. It was incredible that the entire station could run from the power in this one piece of metal.
         I don't even know how long I was up there. It was a damn long time. I spun around the sun for what seemed like an eternity. I ate, slept, kept zapping myself with that curing device, and just lived.
All I lived for was my conversations with the matrioshka brain. And we talked. And talked. And talked.
I lost all track of time. I felt wrinkles on my face for the first time. I watched as my hands steadily became more leathery. I started getting more grey hair. Goddammit, I'd spent my entire life up there. I wondered what my family must be thinking. What had happened to them, I mean. I'd just disappeared for, like, twenty years. Man, I was so happy, though.
         The Brain eventually stopped telling me about the Earth. This got me a little concerned. I don't know why, but I suddenly wanted to go back. Even after finding out about how cyclical, how mindless and arrogant people are, I still wanted to check in on things. I hated people. Yet, I had to see the Earth.
So one day, I powered up the radio again using a piece of the electrolysis machine I had. I had to move the Tesla coils so that they switched places, though, and that took a few hours. Once I started moving again, it hit me that I hadn't felt anything for decades. Nothing but the sensation of floating, and those brief moments when I would be eating or drinking or exercising. I even slept while floating.
About two weeks later, I arrived at around the Earth. But I wasn't back to where I was. I was over something else.
         I was over Australia. I don't remember ever seeing Australia. It was weird – Australia was tilted to the side, from where I remembered. So I moved the station around in a different direction.
Then I saw what had happened. Half of North America was part of the Atlantic Ocean. Asia was spun 90 degrees to the right, so England was up by the North Pole, and the continent was split down the middle, so half of Russia was in the Pacific. South America was in the Pacific, too.
         I turned on the computer and tried to get on the internet. Nothing. There were no webpages that I could access. Nothing worked. I started panicking. I even tried looking at cities and stuff with the photon radar, so I zoomed way in on the screen until I could see my hometown. The outlines showed enough. Buildings were blown apart, the trees I had remembered didn't exist anymore, cars were motionless on the streets. I started shaking. I checked a few more cities. They were all destroyed.
         The Brain had been talking to me all this time, but I didn't notice until I started crying and turned off the radar. It was hard to read the text.
         “Don't be sad. Everything's safe now.”
         I couldn't believe it. I kicked the screen away and the normal force pushed me back against the wall. I didn't care, though. I couldn't feel anything. All I could feel was that I'd been too ignorant to do anything. I'd hated this place, and now it was gone. Everything and everyone I'd ever known didn't exist anymore. I kept playing my conversations with the Brain over and over in my head. How humans' genes made them competitive, how they were doomed to kill themselves...
         And in that brief moment when I realized what all that meant, that brief moment when I  forgot what I was crying about, did I finally realize what it truly meant to be human.