Event Horizon

Chapter 7

You'll be dealing with a rock planet tidally locked to its star. The day/night sides have weather far too extreme to possibly sustain life, but the twilight seems promising. Good luck!

Good morning, unnamed planet! Gooood~mooor~niing!

First night out in space: not bad. It's a little lonely, but liberating; back on Earth I was always afraid that if I started thinking too loudly, other people would hear me. It's nice to have a place to keep thoughts to yourself. I spent a lot of time exercising my newfound mental freedom. Liesel isn't around to nag me about using too much water in the shower anymore.

As was ritual I woke up and had three good, hard blinks. To refresh the eyes.

I wanted to start planning out my day but some stars distracted me. In particular, a dim light- it was so faraway that it might've died on the way here. I think I'm a star: let me explain.

When I was 16 I had a girlfriend. My brain didn't like her but my ardor did; not that she was particularly remarkable herself, but she had a bunch of older lady friends. We'd hook up once in a while to do lines of molly (and if I was lucky, a little bit of coke instead) off a trashy, gummed kitchen counter or do each other. Mom would feed me wads of cash for breakfast and I threw it all up into the gaping jaws of my girlfriend's lavish life. It was quotidian: Get Tammy whatever nice bag she wanted, get high, get laid. Did it feel like the high life? Hell no- mornings in particular were dreadful. But the joy of the little death I had in the moment was enough to keep me going, through the sludge of nightmares that choke me a little at night, through the Lilliputian form I'd assume when I curled up from my fears, through the corpulent guilt that sat on my shoulders as I walked.

What I didn't know was that I'd made a name for myself online. This is why I think I'm a star- your thoughts notwithstanding it had nothing to do with stardom. At the time I failed to realize or simply failed to remember, but video clips of me and those older ladies- particularly of us in the bedroom or wherever else was convenient- made their rounds on foreign sites, behind a forty-buck paywall apiece. I was usually the centerpiece with my strange, diminutive appearance (there's truly a market for everything), and it paid my girlfriend Tammy well. Nevertheless my friends were not aware of any of my dealings; we hung out as usual and passed around a pipe of camaraderie. My life then was not brilliant but it was passable, up until a clip ended up being posted on a popular site and my name made a home under every Carnerian degenerate's tongue.

That day the light died. In the eyes of others I was once as bright as any other star in the sky but the speed of light had finally caught up: what remained of Lucifer Doyle had already cooled to a black dwarf. It was too late and nobody helped me. Everyone was blinded by an effulgence of a former time.

If I screamed, it would be too far away for anyone to hear it.