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Preface

In health class last week my teacher gave my class an assignment to descibe a situation warranting a call to 911 in writing, to be presented to the class on the due date. I was feeling a little creative.

The Story

Owen Trueblood

1/18/10

Health, Period 3

Situation Requiring EMS Response-

Out in space lies the American Isolated Space Environment, or I.S.E., used for testing the potency of various experimental chemical and biological weapons. It is a small object, forever doomed to having it's meager ego tied directly to the varying prosperity of earthly governmental organizations. The I.S.S. serves as its big brother, keeping it forever humble. As it slowly flies amongst the light of the stars around the alluring blue-green orb of our planet, catching glimpses of the moon from time to time and being blinded by the fiery power of the Sun, it can't help but feel the splendor and beauty inherent in its surroundings offset by the malicious activities being carried out within its core. These opposing ideas lock I.S.E. in a perpetual mind-set of surreal wonder, which serve as a supreme blessing from time to time, especially when the conditions of the balance change, as it allows I.S.E.'s demure psychology to remain intact through whatever event is causing the disturbance.

One such annoyance occurred recently, in the course of a regular round-the-world trip. The event was preluded by a small machine, a miniature capsule filled with the latest toxic materials to be tested, making its rapid approach towards the primary docking location on I.S.E. Such things had long been reduced to routine in the eyes of I.S.E. The procedure had been repeated countless times before, with the lumbering I.S.E. suddenly becoming aware of the lowly delivery pod's advance; the small object cresting over the horizon as it broke through the last visible layers of the atmosphere. Launched from a powerful cannon in a sea on Earth, the pod was not allowed any input on its planned route until just before docking out in space. This made the pods restless things, wanting more than anything to be allowed to show their prowess at finishing the job they were entrusted with, knowing full well it would be the most glorious thing they would accomplish before the wrenching destruction of re-entry.

I.S.E. was consistently annoyed with the single-mindedness of the pods, his only visitors and the only things breaking the monotony of his sentience in the cold dead emptiness of space. Once they neared his large docking apparatus, they had to slow themselves and precisely align with the arm that would retrieve them and empty their contents into his vast and insatiably hungry bowels, an area that I.S.E. had long considered to be a separate entity, although one that was as stimulating to converse with as having a conversation with the stars around him. The impatience of the pods was immense, but they always completed their job with a pervasive concentration that I.S.E. considered their only redeeming characteristic. When they had finally finished delivering their cargo they would eject themselves immediately, without even considering compensating a missing hello with a thoughtful goodbye.

Actually deriving enjoyment from this precise sequence of events for once, I.S.E. was slow to comprehend that something was different with this pod. The thing that finally lifted him from his detached daze and threw him into a sort of incredulous curiosity was a sense that his arm was having trouble grasping the small, heavy object, now nearly motionless relative to his comparable girth. The senses that I.S.E. had access to were few, a curse that his designers on Earth had put little thought into depositing onto his indefinite existence, but the ones that he did have were sharp and precise. A quick scan was integrated into his mental landscape almost immediately, commissioned automatically by a chunk of him over which he had about as much control as his internal void. Something was definitely different about this vessel, although it had appeared small from afar, it revealed itself to be quite long and substantial from up close, bristling with antennae, cameras, and perfectly hemispherical view-ports.

The amazement of this anomaly set I.S.E. up for an even larger surprise. As he was still reeling from the breach of his timeless routine, he was suddenly aware of the shear noise of the mysterious object, blasting into space short and powerful bursts of radiation every few milliseconds. One of the brethren of the subroutines controlling his arm and the scan from before kept with the spirit of this young new and tumultuous time by intruding on I.S.E.'s consciousness with calls of alarm. Yet again data was injected into his mind and he was given a whole new perspective on the situation. Not only was this object not a pod, it was issuing commands, ones that I.S.E. had no choice but to obey. In fact, a substantial sea of commands had already been executed, something that I.S.E. was slow to accept. Things were happening fast, and it was taxing the power and intelligence of I.S.E. to his very maximum just to try to keep up.

By the time I.S.E. regained his grasp on the situation, the object had already attached itself to him via the secondary docking area and was cranking its door wide open. Feverishly switching focus between various senses, most of which gave him no helpful information, I.S.E. finally settled on a thermal view of the docking area, the only view showing any signs of motion in the now docked object. He watched, forced into his highest state of alert, as an oddly shaped heat signature moved from the side of the object facing space towards his body and the door to his internal space. The brightly colored blob in his vision broke in two as one continued towards the door and new child raced back towards its starting point. Abruptly the object was skewed by a large explosion, and I.S.E. was temporarily blinded by the white heat. When his vision settled down he could see that part of the object, which he now recognized as a ship, had been blown apart and the chunks were drifting off into space. The blob-child was gone, but the original creature remained, now hugging against his door. I.S.E. shook as the door was opened and the pressure equalized. The blob moved inside.

The creature had very little presence in I.S.E.'s mind from that point. I.S.E. couldn't penetrate his internal being and see what was going on, although he could see the result of its industry. In the course of a few days his mind was starting to intermittently slow to a snail's pace. He didn't notice this directly, as he had no way of knowing how fast his mind was ticking. The way he came to realize it was occurring was that he seemed to suddenly speed up tremendously whenever it would occur. In fact everything he could see would speed up, even the movement of clouds on Earth and the progression of the moon, seemingly just beyond his path. When he finally figured out that this phenomenon could be explained by some defect in him, and not in the movement of the external objects, he also came to the realization that the introduction of the creature was somehow to blame. One one of these strange temporal trips he noticed another unsettling feature of his occupation. The same bursts of radiation that had been communicating with him previously from the ship were now being emitted by himself. Although he now possessed the knowledge needed to decode what these messages meant, thanks to his little internal but separate minds, for some reason he could not remember them long enough to make sense of them. They would disappear almost as soon as he recorded them, whisked away by sequences put in motion by the new internal animal.

Departure of the animal from his insides came as a huge relief for I.S.E. An indeterminate amount of time had elapsed since its arrival, and during the majority of that time I.S.E. had been pleading with the blackness for a return to his monotony. Living with the creature was confusing. Vast disturbances of thought, time, space, and memory were depressing I.S.E. deeply. He could no longer be sure of anything. He would black out for times and come back with no memory of the actions and thoughts he was churning through before the event. He could no longer control access to his senses, as it seemed the creature had hijacked the bulk of them for its own uses.

The creature left with the parting gift of a snap back to full consciousness for I.S.E. When this occurred he was startled. His mind slowed for a final time as he catalogued the safe return of each of his systems. With that task accomplished he turned his full attention to watching the departure of the mysterious animal. It had been very busy during I.S.E.'s confused slumber; the ship it had arrived in was still significantly smaller but was now a contiguous object once more. The broken part had been ejected at some point and replaced with what I.S.E. recognized as pieces from his own gut. Astonishment gripped I.S.E. He turned internally to check the boundary with his previously whole gut. Nothing seemed to lay there. None of the small band of brothers were whispering for the attention of his mind any longer. The freedom he felt was immense, but he wasn't deaf to the sound of the approaching solitude.

As the ship left with its live cargo I.S.E. watched it go with gratitude. He even felt a twinge of fear as it entered the dangerous zone between the space he inhabited and the land that his creators chose to live on. The fire was bright from the creation of the tunnel through the air by the ship, but it wasn't bright enough to stay visible with the immense Sun as its background. I.S.E. left the portion of his orbit over the same hemisphere as the ship in a matter of minutes, and didn't see it again as he came back around. This was slightly depressing, but nothing I.S.E. didn't expect. He slowly contemplated the events that had occurred while continuing on his infinite campaign, finally returned to dull normalcy.

On the I.S.S. cargo ship flight manager Steve Louis watched as the structure that had been his only respite in the loneliness of space faded out of view over the horizon. He was badly injured but managed to stay strapped in his burnt seat as his ship passed through the layer of ionization caused by the rapid re-entry. The ground techs had been right after all, thought Louis, the strong shields that had contained the specimens on the I.S.E. were perfect as a heat shield to protect him on his return to Earth. The intense vibrations caused him agony, but when he finally entered the low part of the atmosphere he managed to slow the haphazardly fixed ship to a speed in which could pull the parachutes. The last thing he did before touching down in the Pacific ocean was activate the ancient sat-phone he had grubbed from the I.S.E., speed dialing 911 and alerting EMS to his location. He only had to mention his scenario and the person on the other end of the phone handed the situation over to the military, which had a ship in the area to pick him up. In a matter of minutes he was being hauled aboard an aircraft carrier, medical teams at the ready to save him from the damaged caused to his body by the collision out in space.