#11 - One Hundred Days

  The hallways dulled the sound. She didn’t know if it was by design or by accident, but she hated it. The first few times she went running through the halls of the space ship all she could hear was her own breath and her heartbeat in her ears like she was pressing her hands over them. She managed the quiet for two days then she made sure that music was playing through all the speakers when she ran.

It wasn’t just the hallways that were quiet. It was her bedroom. It was the dining hall. It was the rec room. Deafening quiet that made her ears ring. That made her wonder if she even existed at all. 

It was the fifth day when she decided she had to have noise all the time.

It was the sixth day that she decided that cafe noises were too creepy. Those songs with lyrics were too heart wrenching. That classical music managed to make her feel a little more human.

The eighth day was the day she started talking to the robots as if they could talk back. Nearly everything was automated on the ship, so there were robots for everything. She gradually gave them all names.

By the fifteenth day she had established a routine. Wake up at seven then go for a run. Breakfast at eight. She got something different everyday. The ship made it easy to choose and half of them she couldn’t pronounce. She picked at random without thinking because she needed something in her life to be unpredictable.

At nine she would go to the viewing deck and look at the stars. She never stayed too long. She had thought the stars were beautiful at home, but here in space it felt like they would swallow her whole. 

At ten she would go to the rec room, and hit punching bags or play ping pong or shoot basketball hoops. There was a virtual reality station, but she hadn’t touched it. She knew it would hurt too much to come back or she would just never leave it at all.

At eleven she would get her lunch and take it to the bridge where she would start combing through what she could. She didn’t have access to much of it since she hadn’t been assigned to the bridge, but she still tried everyday. Without that access there was no way of knowing how far they were from their destination. It could be months or it could be years.

By one she would leave the bridge because she had seen one too many access denied screens or her eyes had glazed over from reading the same thing again and again. She always went to the pods after that. 

When her pod first had opened she had slept in it for a week before she decided to find her room. That had been before she started counting days when it all still felt like a dream. Now she just stood staring at the people in them wondering how to wake them. Wondering if she should wake them even if she knew how. If it would be fair to them.

She left the pod room at three and went to the airlock. She would stare at it thinking of the vastness of space beyond. Wondering what it would be like to fall asleep and never wake up. How long she stayed at the airlock depended on what thoughts crowded in her head as she stared at the pods or what she had found on the bridge or if her food had tasted good that day.

She ate dinner at five then sat down to watch a movie at six with a bowl of popcorn. The ship had the weirdest flavors. She had tried bubblegum once and it felt wrong to swallow it.

When the movie was over she would shower and maybe read. She was in bed by eight or nine because by then she had run out of things to do.

On the twenty-third day she started acting out the movies.

On the forty-seventh she threw the smallest cleaning robot across the room.

On the forty-eighth day she apologized to the robot and worked on fixing it though tech wasn’t her field.

On the sixty-fourth day she got access to the suites and jumped on the beds and threw the furniture and took a bath in a tub the size of a pool and drank all the champaign she could find.

On the seventy-fifth day her alarm told her that it was her birthday and she got a cake that she had to order herself. She took one bite then smashed it on the table smearing it until it reached every corner. It was satisfying and depressing.

On the eightieth day she stopped going to the pods because she was too tempted to smash them open.

It was on the hundredth day that a planet popped up on the screen. With the message “Initiate Wake Up Sequence.”

She ran to the pod room and waited. When a pod finally hissed open she collapsed on the floor and began to sob.