Beyond The Rim

It was cold. Oh, there was no actual chill, but the relentless emptiness just beyond the thin shell pressed down on him. He'd papered over some of the windows, with a child's drawings of his dad among the stars. They'd helped, for a while, not long enough.

During the designated sleep cycle, he could hear the fragile can buckle and moan, complaining in its own way about the lightless night it had been forced into. It had been conned too. It had thought that travelling beyond the rim would be exciting. It hadn't realised that outside the universe was nothing!

He ran the important tests on the expensive equipment and marked the results on his irrelevant clipboard. Again. Sensors: nothing. Electromagnetic radiation: nothing. FR-KCPG15 machine: nothing. Science: nothing. Energy: nothing. Life: nothing.

The final check was a visual one. He approached each porthole and prised off the drawings. Beyond, was nothing, an empty, black void that refused to give anything back to the man that had penetrated it. Once more, he wondered if the void was a lie, black paint sprayed upon the window to trick him. Some evil form of psychological experiment. There was no way to tell. The windows and the door were sealed. Nothing came in or out - his waste was endlessly recycled.

Surprise came from the aft, port window. A vague smudge, something almost unnoticeable, yet concrete. Laughter bubbled out. After all this time, he'd been wrong. There was something out there and he had been the one to find it! Even if it was barren, he would feel starlight on his face and see planets, moons and stars again.

He dashed down to the science station and recorded the event: a new universe. On the ship's computer, he entered the direction and waited for the co-ordinates to come through - the points from which he would triangulate the universe's position and after which, he would be able to set the course.

The machine blipped and bleeped, finally spewing out an error message in unfriendly tones: ORIGIN ERROR.

He ran the program again, working the last few days' manoeuvres in his head. The lonely smudge of light - that vague flicker, was all that could be seen of his home.

The program rumbled on, but hit the same conclusion. With the final bleep, he settled into the pilot's chair and manipulated the thrusters, to aim for the next empty patch of lonely non-space that he'd agreed to waste his life on. Slowly, the wallowing pod came about. He watched the readouts on his screen, trusting the ship to steer him right - the only landmarks were artificial ones, kept by the onboard computer, to keep it sane.

'That's it!' he said to himself, yanking at the delicate handle and re-aligning himself and his lonely tin can with the faint smudge of light that had forgotten him. He flicked a switch, blasting power into the engine, nearly forgetting to leave enough fuel to slow down again.

'I'm going home.'