4027 had been an overall normal year. The false sun shone in the artificial sky. The spaceship U.S.A. that contained all of America’s population flew across the galaxy as it had for the past three hundred years. When the Earth had been destroyed by a humongous planetary collision, the humans had all packed onto their spaceships, each country had their own.
The humans sat curiously in their houses with bright and jovial expressions. No one wondered why there seemed to be a colossal planet just a few miles from their spaceship because it really could have been anything. The people not only saw the planet as a planet, but they saw it as every other thing it could possibly be. The reason why they were so intent on seeing every perspective of everything is because they were intoxicated with the Perspctive Drug.
The purpose of the drug had been to make people less panicked about the meteor that might have been the death of all of them. It made them able to see every perspective: optimistic, pessimistic. Instead, it made people go into varying states of extreme depression, mania, and jubilation.
Soon, the spaceship was less than a mile from the planet. Captain Wallace looked up from the paper he was reading. A look of mild shock passed over his face for a fraction of a second (Of course, it was only for a fraction of a second, because no one was surprised by anything for too long. They hadn’t been for three hundred years). He put his hands to the wheel as if to steer away from the planet, but it was too late. Slowly, as if time had slowed just for this important moment, the spaceship crashed into the porous purple ground of the planet.
With a sickening scraping noise of metal against metal, the gears in the spaceship started turning very fast, but the spaceship would not budge. It was stuck in the purple marsh of a planet. Soon, Captain Wallace regained consciousness. His eyes opened, but everything was blurry. Something that looked like a human was leaning over him, but it really could’ve been anything.
His vision cleared and he realized that he figure he saw was indeed a human figure, and it appeared to be holding a club of some sort. That figure was the last thing Captain Wallace saw in his life. Six more murders happened that day on the starship. All of the people that were killed were captains or other important officials on the ship. The people on the ship were in a frenzy. No one on the ship was sure how the murders were happening. In fact, no one was sure if they were even murders. Slowly, the next realization that they were trapped on the starship happened. The people’s energy became as high as a skyscraper, the electricity went out, and chaos became king. Soon, looters had stolen almost all of the supplies from the stores and the people were beginning to starve.
The remaining captains decided they had to have a meeting to decide what to do next. Soon, they were all gathered around a candle in the engine room of the ship. Captain Erle was the first to speak.
“The security cameras have captured blurred pictures of the murderer,” he said. “It appears that the person takes a different form every time a murder happens. We are not even sure that it is the same person, but that’s what we’ll have to assume right now.
Captain Erle was a tall and handsome man of around thirty three who carried himself with a self-confident swagger. His chestnut hair and beard gleamed cheerfully in the candlelight, and his smile seemed to light up the room. But his grey eyes told a different story. They seemed to cut through your heart as if they were diamonds. Anyone who he glared at felt a punch in the gut sensation followed by a breathless feeling. The other captains thought often about his eyes, and many awoke in a cold sweat after a dream about his eyes.
“I will go and look for the murderer,” said Captain Kay.
This statement was followed by a small chirp and a shoulder twitch.
Captain Kay was a small woman with wispy black hair that she often had to push from her face.
“You have not finished your training yet Kay,” said Captain Erle.
What he did not say was that people had started noticing the first signs of mania appearing around Captain Kay. The perspective mania had three stages: confusion and indecision, irritability and depression, and the final stage was complete dementia.
“I think I would like to go,” said Captain Kay, but it came out more as a question.
The room was filled with the sounds of the whispering captains. They all knew that Kay was Captain Erle’s wife, and he did not have that much longer with her.
Soon, Captain Kay was armed with a small pistol and an axe. She walked out of the engine room and into one of the many long hallways that filled the starship. She walked for a little over ten minutes before getting to the section of the ship where most of the murders happened. At this point she slowed her trot to a light tiptoe.
Quietly, as if she was a cat stalking her prey, she tiptoed down the remainder of the hallway. When she got to the end of the hall, she stopped briefly and looked around dazedly because she had forgotten where she was. She sat on the monochromatic grey carpet and looked towards off-white walls. The corner of her left eye twitched briefly, and soon she remembered where she was. She rose slowly, her knobby knees shaking with the effort. When she was fully standing again, she looked towards the door at the end of the hallway. It was painted a bright orange color that did not go with the rest of the hallway.
The sight of the door brought her a memory of her childhood around thirty years ago. She was sitting next to one of the greenhouses that supplied the starship with food. There was a friendly man who had worked there named Gerrie. He was small and plump with bright orange hair. Every day, Kay would wait outside of the greenhouse. Every day, Gerrie had brought her a piece of fruit, which was rare even back then. One day, he brought a fruit the size of her fist that was the same color as the door in the hallway she was standing in. She remembered the sweet juice dripping of her face and into her hair. She also remembered taking minutes to wash all of the traces of it from her hair so her mother would not find out.
Then, she remembered the fate of Gerrie. He was one of the first people to get the mania. He had passed away soon after her seventeenth birthday.
She was brought back to the present by the sound of whispering through the door. She put her ear against it and listened, but the whispering had soon stopped and was replaced by the sound of footsteps. Kay jumped back and stood in the shadows as the door opened. The small hunched figure of an old man hobbled out. He turned towards her and she saw the color of his eyes. They gleamed yellow and cat-like from underneath his huge white eyebrows. He smiled at her and she counted three teeth in his mouth.
“Who are you?” She said with a quaver to her voice.
“I am your worst nightmare,” the man said.
Before she could consider what that meant, the man seemed to change shape into a tall girl with purple hair. The girl smiled at her before changing again into a chubby boy of around six. The one thing that stayed constant was the yellow eyes that seemed to stare right into her heart. The more the person changed, the more the pit of her stomach seemed to drop. She knew what it was doing. It has come to kill me, she thought. It has come to drive me into the depths of madness.
As the person changed into a lanky teenage boy, Kay felt a feeling of her mind getting stung by a jellyfish. The creature really was her worst nightmare. Her brain could not decide what it was because it could be anything, and it made the perspective mania even worse because it didn’t stop changing.
She could feel herself losing grip on reality as she sank to the floor. She was brought back to another childhood memory. It was late afternoon and she had made her younger sister cry. Her mother had said “Now Kay, you can’t just think about yourself, you have to see things from every perspective.”
She saw the person pull out a small gun, but she had lost the ability to move. It was seeing things from every perspective that got me killed, she thought. She heard it cock the pistol.
Back in the city, similar fates happened to many other people, until there was one person left on the ship: a girl with purple hair and bright yellow eyes. There were people living on the planet that the ship had crashed into, but no one would dare go near it. They could sense something was wrong.
The other spaceships such as starship U.K. also had similar fates, but a few survived. Humanity goes on, but often never learns from its mistakes.
