#marooned

[arinewman7]

Marooned

Howard Pyle

oil on canvas, 1909

[thelesbiandeli]

Fraggle Rock season one really had it all:

Love potion episode

Two main characters nearly die. Like it’s properly up in the air for a bit.

“Sometimes slavery can feel like freedom”

Let’s kill another main character

Mokey starts a cult?? Twice????

Mass famine

Wembley gets squashed by a building so maybe that’s mc death #4

having a lesbian dream sequence about how beautiful and perfect your best friend is

Reds fish costume

[insomniattic]

after burn.

[stone-cold-groove]

No one will ever find my bones!

[im-staying-calm-this-time]

Series 3 really does give us some great toxic yaoi moments. Lister burning Rimmer’s trunk instead of his guitar, Rimmer manipulating Lister into literally giving him his body and then later hijacking it, Rimmer altering the course of history so that Lister can’t be happy with someone else

[mr-e-gallery]

Edmond Simpson "Marooned" (05-26)

[suddenlyleviathans]

Compression Sickness

It took me 4 minutes and 23 seconds to realized the Earth was gone. The video logs showed me tapping out a text message to my brother after the video call cut out. Looking back at the footage from the external cameras it took 9.48 seconds for the Earth to completely disappear after I lost connection with the ground satellites.

Maybe if I had rushed to a window I would've seen the blue marble split in half along a Longitudinal line from the north to south pole. If I had been looking out on my home reminiscing about my family or my crew mates that had left earlier that morning I would've seen how the clouds in the upper atmosphere part.

A fissure slithered over the horizon, creating a great gash in the sea until the crust cracked open like an eggshell in slow motion to reveal the glimmering molten center like the middle of a spicy cadberry egg. Instead of erupting onto the surface of the Earth, however, the magma sunk down before disappearing as if some invisible giant was slurping it up with a straw.

The seas and continents began to fall into the fissure swiftly and, almost, seemingly without incident. There was no bang or explosion. There were no fireworks for the end of the world. Instead the world broke apart and began to swirl in place like water being sucked down a drain. Then it was gone.

Zip, zilch. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everyone I had ever known or loved or hated was gone. Both the crew mates and colleagues that had departed mere hours before as well as the crew that was supposed to come up to replace them.

There was only me now. Me in my haven amongst the stars that was only meant to hold a person for two years at maximum. And the moon.

Yes, the moon was still there. Luna. She's still here with me, keeping me company. You know, I would've expected her to leave with the Earth but I wonder if there's still something for her here. Not the seas or the Earth or the land or the people.

Maybe its for the memories. Or maybe she's holding a wake for her companion. There isn't anything left for her so maybe she will stay as long as she needs and then she'll leave.

I hope she's staying for me. She's one of the only things left to have gazed upon the pale blue marble before her disappearance. Actually, maybe she's only gone missing? If we put her face on milk cartons we could get the word out that she was gone and someone would call in and we could reunite and be one big happy family again...

Space isn't cold. If you ignored the lack of pressure and the lack of food and water and oxygen you wouldn't die easy. You would float around waiting an eternity to die because the bulk of your heat would be lost through thermal radiation. Now, you might think that's bad but, like, compared to things on Earth that's nothing. Most heat we lose is due to touching or rubbing up against things that are colder than our bodies. That can be metal, the ground, the wind, or a frosty smoothie that gives you brain freeze when you drink it too fast.

On Earth we have to wear layers of insulation (coats) to keep ourselves from getting cold by separating our bodies from the environment surrounding us. In space, however, there isn't anything of substance. No breeze to chill us, no ground to draw the heat from our body, and most certainly not tasty beverages to give us brain freeze.

If anything, you're more likely to get too hot if you're in the path of the sun. It can get hot, very hot, and most of our equipment is designed to make sure the inhabitants of the cabin don't become cooked like a can of beans.

That's what I'm thinking about as I'm floating outside of the space station. I needed to get out and take a space walk. I've been wondering about how I'm going to die now that I'm here by myself.

Decompression sickness didn't seem likely unless the life support system met a rather unfriendly end from some piece of space debris. Starvation or dehydration was a bit more likely but Houston had sent up enough provisions for a group of eight people to subsist for a year and water was continually getting recycled from my sweat and waste so I probably wasn't going to go hungry or thirsty for a while.

Maybe it would be madness that would do me in. It would be a lot better than the boredom I was dealing with. Fortunately they had sent up more sleep medication with the last shipment so I should be able to get enough sleep to avoid madness from setting in too fast.

Another problem with space is that there isn't really any cycles of day/night so there isn't anything for my circadian rhythm to adapt to. I remember hearing something about spelunkers having trouble maintaining normal sleep schedules when they've been underground for weeks-to-months at a time so they start experiencing time differently. They might be up for three days without realizing and other times they'll sleep for 27 hours straight like its nothing. Or, well, they used to do that.

Regardless, in space it was always daytime. At least, that's the case when you're close enough to a star for it to seem more like a sun than a star. Everywhere else is night time. Or, at least, I think that's what its like. I hope I never have to find that out but I probably won't have a choice in the matter if whatever gravitational force is keeping me here suddenly disappeared and sent me flying into the nothingness of space.

Space. Space... we really should've stored more things here. There's just so much space. "Heh," I managed to get myself to laugh that time. 32nd times the charm.

I'm looking at the place where the Earth used to be. There isn't anything there. Nothing I can see, at least, but I'm still here. And so is Luna. All I'm seeing is infinity and the stars it wears like a kid playing dress up.

The thing about infinity is that we can't really comprehend it. Humanity wasn't built for comprehending to full scope of eternity with just our eyeballs. The first time we encounter infinity it feels like we have unlocked a door to some deeper consciousness buried deep within ourselves that truly understands our place in the universe and how deeply insignificant we are. The problem with us, however, is that the more we feel like we understand something, the more we're going to want to go poking into it with our sticky fingers.

So we stare into the blackness and try to understand everything on an intellectual level. But if you overexpose yourself you'll start to see it as a patch of paper glued to a wall. Sure, its big and untouchable, but its so incomprehensible for our terrestrial brains that eventually it becomes like a picture. Two-dimensional. There is no depth to it. It is an image that we will never be able to visit. That isn't to say it isn't beautiful. All I'm saying is that I've been staring at the place the Earth used to be and all I'm getting is how much Earth I'm lacking in my peepers.

I've got a theory as to where the Earth is. I think she's right under my nose. You see, I've been able to ping some of the other satellites that were in Earth's orbit prior to her disappearance. The message delay is comparable to the pre-disappearance time frame.

In addition, the moon is still with me. And, not only that, it seems to be maintaining a similar orbit around where I guess the center of Earth was when it had disappeared.

Imagine you've got a yo-yo. When you swing it around in a circle the string pulls it towards you, keeping it in place. However, if you cut the string while the yo-yo is moving in its circular orbit it'll go flying across the room in a straight line.

If Earth had disappeared without a trace, the moon would've disappeared into the great unknown (and me with it), traveling in a straight line into the blackness. But, instead, it has been moving in a circular direction the whole time I've been with it and one that matches our projections that we took before we left Earth.

In addition to this, Calypso 7, the space station, still seems to be moving in a fairly regular orbit.

In order to be in orbit around an object (planet, moon, satellite, whatever) the object needs to have mass. You can't be in an orbit around something that doesn't have mass. Therefore, if Luna is in an orbit and I'm in an orbit, that means that there must be something with mass that we're still orbiting around.

More than that, it must mean that we're orbiting around something with a similar mass to Earth.

I know it must sound insane, I'm still trying to comprehend the idea myself, but there's only a couple things in the universe that I know of that could be both incredibly small and have a mass substantial enough to keep Luna tethered, while also being invisible to the naked eye.

I think I'm orbiting around a black hole.