Tevun-Krus #24 - MythPunk

Sisyphus and the Moon, by @krazydiamond

'Sisyphus and the Moon'

By Krazydiamond

Snapping the last buckles into place proved a monumental effort.

It wasn't the suit, though the wear and tear was evident. He wore it day in and day out, for the length of a full rotation between rests. It was dinged and scarred by the minutiae debris surrounding the moon, locked in an orbiting path to scrape and grate on the alloys of the suit. Just like him, locked to a constant path of push and pull, a thankless task he'd endured for innumerable years now. The buckles of the suit formed permanent dents in the edges of his fingers where he had tugged and latched them into place, every day, twice a day, until the buckle etched itself into his bones in curved indents.

There was nothing wrong with the suit's latches today, but the weight of his days dragged on him. What was so different about today? What set it apparent from the endless coil of time curling behind him, spent in the stark surroundings of the station. What brought him here?

Somewhere, amid the endless repetitive routine, he'd forgotten why.

The buckles latched in place, sealing him in the suit. He rose to his feet, marching to the end of the hall where the hatch waited. It was simply routine now. His mind drifted as his body went through the motions; entering the punch code, holding tight to the handles as the inner and out hatches revolved in opposite synchronized orbits, sealing the ship behind him as the outside space gripped him hard and held him tight. The pressure was a distant discomfort, temporary, habitual, everything a repeat performance of the previous day. Nothing changes.

Why am I here?

Tetherhook in hand, he clamped the line and pushed off, his path straight, direct, swimming through stardust and echoes of light to his destination.

It was a small planet, minuscule compared to his home. Elysium was miniature paradise floating through space, blissfully unaware its entire population relied on the manpower of a selected individual for its continued survival.

'Selected individual'....what a joke. It came to him in bits now, strained through the monotony of his memory. The station wasn't merely a job, or an honor, it was a punishment to fit his crime.

His body brushed against his destination. Now the real work would be begin. The station's logs dubbed it the Boulder. Proportional to the tiny planet it orbited, the Boulder was Elysium's moon. At barely twice his size, it was his job to push.

Elysium was a younger world, infantile in its creation, and still in the early stages of supporting sentient life. Unfortunately, it was a tiny world, one that was missed by the great construction crews of the Free Confederacy, a collection of galaxies with a common governing system. In their haste to establish interplanetary ports and travel ways, their neglect of Elysium created unforeseen consequences for the developing world, the largest being a degradation to the planet's gravity. Its moon could no longer complete an orbit around the planet without aid.

The Free Confederacy's solution for such a massive blunder was to build the station. Self-sustaining, requiring a maintenance crew to fix it up every five years, it required only one person to perform the task of pushing the boulder through a half cycle before the planet's own gravity gained enough momentum to take over. Every day, he grappled the Boulder across the planet's night drenched half, an endless expanse of stars to his left and the winking lights of the planet to his right.

It was hard to gauge how time passed on Elysium's surface. It seemed he would blink and things changed, the outlines of countries, scrolled in lines of civilization, population densities as bursts of light in the corner of his vision. Not that it mattered, his attention was focused on the boulder, always the boulder, pushing it on its path. An endless, futile task, but it was his to bear.