Beast in my mind
I'd like to think someone can hear me, although it has been months since I've heard word from Earth, traveling out into deep space as I was told.
Deep in the hold, I can feel the restlessness of my cargo, the stirring of a beast that grows stronger each day despite the distance from the sun.
If I dare to turn on the monitor, it will stare back at me in rage, saying without words that it will kill me some day.
The son of a bitch!
I used to get the same look from bulls on my father's farm when I was a boy, that plotting of escape so alive in the mind of a beast, it knowing the full power of its sinews, recognizing no master in the mind of a man.
When we launched so many months ago, I was told that the container that contains this beast is made of metal no mere bull could dent, the hardest material made by man resisting this beast, keeping it safe in its weakened stage.
Gravity, my superiors said, is this monster's secret ally, and the lack of it, our civilization's desperate hope.
In theory, the further from the sun I can take this ship, the weaker the beast will become, and the green lights that indicate his imprisonment will remain green.
Europe, I was told, suffered greatly before the beast tired, city after city vanishing under its heated breath, our missles doing little but to make the beast more angry and push it on so as to wear itself out with its fury.
We put it in a box and rushed it to space, giving me the assignment to take him away.
What fools our kind is in thinking it alone in the universe, motherless and fatherless and purposeless in its arrival. I study the outer planets endlessly for sign of its rescue, to find a ship that will swoop down upon mine and rip over this box to take its child.
And ever, the beast stirs, dragging itself from wall to wall to wall as if seeking a crack in which it can slip its claws, or blow its foul air.
If only you could hear me now and tell me with your vast banks of computers if it weakens or grows, is its wish within the realm of possiblity.
Even from the beginning, I saw it regain strength, stretching towards the sunside of my ship as if it could feel the warmth so many millions of miles away, drawing from the sun's gravity substinance, turning aside only as my ship came closer to one of the heavily giants, sipping at Jupiter, Saturn or Neptune, gloating at me over the monitor as if to say, it could not be cheated wholy even as I fled.
I never thought this would be my fate when I fled my father's farm. I wanted only to escape the tyrany of the soil, believing that in order to avoid my putting down roots like my father did, I would have to lift off the face of the planet. But this flinging myself into unknown space brings a pain to me, as if I was the one bound by gravity and not my prisoner, and I was the one growing weaker as the ship rushed out from my home.
Even if the beast does not escape, I shall die from this trip.
We have long since moved beyond a point of return, fuel and food and air down too low to make it all the way back, even to the outer planets where bases still exist.
We might not have made it even this far, had I not ordered to crew to evacuate, they growing more and more restless as we plunged farther and farther into space.
An object will keep moving unless some counter force resists it, one rule of basic physics, but men will wither in spirit and in body without such force.
I watched them depart, pods firing off the sides of the ship, one my one, their sparks making for the outer bases where they might hunker down and call for help, as my ship sped on.
Speeds on, me and the beast locked into a dance that can end only in death, must end in its death, mine comes as a side effect.
But oh, how it stirs, and moans, and beats at the walls.
I hear its singing, or crying, or pleading, it talking to me long after you have given up, trying to convince me that my hope is lost and earth has suffered worse since my departing it, his family and friends having swept across the surface in a mad rage to revenge him, feeding on the power plants, on the dams, on the gravity of our sun.
It is a siren's song that I struggle against, a test of wills, the beast seeking to lull me into dispair so I might turn the ship around, or stop it, allowing the beast to break free.
I will not, even if what it says is true.
I remember the pained broadcasts from Europe during its attack, and remember how helpless I felt to help.
It sings to me now, telling me I can be just like it, feeding on powers greater than myself, living for as long as the universe had gravity with which to supply us.
I do not believe it, but I can not shut my ears to its call.
I think of my father, and his farm, and dig roots deep into that earth with my mind, hoping I can generate enough strength to keep on going.