Atomik Rock

By Stephen McGowan

He ran on pure atomik rock and liquid energy from recycled Birmabright cans that littered the cockpit like so many multi-coloured stalagmites. At times like these he locked the thick, heavy cockpit door and cranked the PA circuit up as far as it would go and then some.

He was a pilot. The Pilot, and a man named Colm. He flew starships, big or small, whatever ran. Today it was the Neena, a bulk cargo scow with a heavy ass and an uptight ex-navy type for a skipper. That skipper’s voice, terse and furious, became a harsh melody through the thick frenetic haze to go with a pounding fist bassline on the bulkhead door.

Hazard lights bathed him in a scarlet haze that danced with the cobalt-blue status screens that streamed with code like an Europan discotheque’s laser-lights. He surfed the ship like a toy boat on salty cosmic radiation waves.

Micro-motored scrap arms – neural linked to power-gloves and blinking brain strips – watusied to old music from musicians long-dead but alive in the here and now. One song ended, some synth-pop headbanger that lingered on the edge of Colm’s ear, and he heard the banging on the door but thought it was the banging in his head. On concave, paper-thin vid screens, he watched himself do Elvisesque karate chops and kicks in his scuffed, cherry red combat boots.

He wrung out his limbs and rubbed his rough, greasy half-beard with old, calloused hands until he covered his hand and shirt with dandruff. His olive coveralls were tied at the waist by the sleeves and his stained, yellow crew shirt hung off his wiry, unhealthy frame. Sweat beaded on his short, crinkled arm hair. He’d meant to go to the barber last shore leave and pay far too much for the sea-green laser to remove all the keratin leaving him, baby-smooth.

He’d meant to, but The Ex had hit him up and that was that. The Ex, capitals included and necessary. When he talked about his ex-partners this one was always the one that needed no introduction or explanation. He could kick-shift anything from a military-grade fighter to a half-million-tonne cargo hauler round the gravity well so close it’d scorch the paintwork chocolate black and crispy, but one message from her and he was done.

***

The message had come through the moment the ship slid into Ceres orbital. He didn’t know how she knew, he was there but it didn’t matter. He read the gist and scraped the starboard hull on ingress. The skipper spilled his tea and swore in sotto voce. Then he was gone.

They turned up places, intertwined and wet. Ceres had three bars, and they were in all of them at once, or so it seemed through the rose-tints. He didn’t drink alcohol, though she couldn’t live a day without the cheap, clear hooch and maybe that was why he didn’t. A head-doc could look at that and wonder.

His blood ran squeaky clean of psychedelics, super-strength relaxants, and the more enhanced stimulants available to a rocket-jockey with no fixed budget. His drug of choice was the life he led, and her.

On the last day, he was arrested outside some wild-west themed corporate bar full of animatronic cowboys, sequinned ten-gallon hats, and a gods-awful mechanical bull that was always on the fritz. Colm drank pseudo-sarsaparilla and took the high score at the pistol arcade-game.

Colm didn’t know or care to know that The Ex had a boyfriend. The boyfriend berthed a day early from a company financed PR run and caught them inside and in-flagrante. He was older, but taller, and fitter, and threw the first punch. It was a bad one, telegraphed and messy but the return was worse, and the fight turned out like an amateur tennis match inside a ring of chanting roughnecks.

It was impossible to say who won, maybe no-one had or maybe she had. No-one got hurt too much and The Ex wasn’t there when the dust was settled. When local law decided to let them go the boyfriend went looking for her, and Colm went back to space silent and sullen. It would happen again in a few months no doubt. Some new boyfriend, some new station, same old story.

***

Another day, another dance, The Neena skimmed the border lines. Colm brought pained grace to even this old boar of a ship, all grunt and vulgarity like a hippo ballerino. He pulled turns past customs defence lasers and IPBM batteries that groaned at the metalwork. He was tuned into nothing but the ride and the music.

Halfway to Deimos it happened.

Bam ba-bam bam, bam ba-bam bam reverberated on the inner hull like a baseline or a sonograph. Still, he flowed like thick syrup, flowed until the sensors found another. A competing rhythm reaching out across the void, taking up the comms and the sensors and his senses. No not a competing rhythm, a complimentary one.

He angled the sensors as he would his head, a fan in the front row straining to hear and see and be seen. The pulsating signal overtook it all, a real ear worm that burrowed hard. Nothing like he’d ever heard or would ever hear again unless he kept hold of it tight. He was sure if he looked away for even a second, it’d disappear. He overrode the warnings and took the volume past the red line again.

Everything else became silent as if by turning the volume up, he’d turned everything else down, even his own breathing. The Neena’s lived-in noise, the settling groans and creaks became a hushed whispering. The banging on the door and the skipper’s rage became the loudest, most intrusive, and the most unimportant. The universal music was beyond them all.

Cracking another can without looking, Colm let the the beat enter his muscles through his ears and mouth and extra-sensory perceptions. It moved him as if he were a badly made marionette, strings taut. Wild, bloodshot eyes held the pinpricks of stars so far away they were long dead. He wondered if the music was dead. Was the virtuoso dead? Was he?

The beat became blood, became hydraulic fluid in his weak limbs, lifting them jerkily. First the right arm, then the wrong one. Colm waved explosively like Enceladan water plumes. The scrap arms shot straight out and stuck fast.

Legs next, and feet. He couldn’t keep them still usually, they tapped and bounced to some internal metronome. The beat turned them rigid, toes splayed then curled inside the boots, knees locked tense. Spring loaded. He lifted off like a Saturn V.

The usual throb was long gone, his heart matched the invading sound beat for beat like an atonal arrhythmia that lit sparklers in his neurons. He felt and smelled and heard and tasted and sensed everything. Colm was a surprised but willing passenger in a body that would never be solely his again.

Almost as soon as it arrived, and with the same announcement, it left. Colm was a crumpled, helpless heap on the floor. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think. He voided his bowels and didn’t notice. The Neena’s biosensors sounded an alarm and overrode the cockpit seal.

He had a vague image of the entire crew on the other side before one of the roughnecks carried him like a baby not minding the luminescent effluent and spit bubbles that foamed on his lips. He floated past the skipper who ignored him entirely, and the engineer who looked at him with sad eyes. With the last of his strength, he forced something out.

“It’s so quiet.”

***

Recovery from a session that big took most of the journey. The first thing that came to Colm when he woke after the music were names. The engineer’s name was Alex, his was Colm. Why he’d thought of Alex before himself was something he’d not think about much outside his dream state. The roughneck that had carried him was called Nico; he was called Colm. The Skipper’s name was Keats. His was Colm.

He didn’t feel like a Colm.

The auto-doc pumped his blood full of company-branded panacea, wrapped his head in neural cross stitching and massaged his muscles daily with soft, gentle machine arms. A rudimentary AI talked to him with a voice like apathy.

“How do you feel?” it asked.

The question hung like a bad smell. Or maybe that was him.

“Like the morning after the biggest rave to ever have been,” he said.

The aches were immense in parts that shouldn’t hurt but did.

“I do not understand your response.”

Neither did Colm. Not really. Not in any way he could explain.

“Why did I hear it?”

He hacked a cough that felt wet, and the robot arms wiped at his mouth firmly with chemical smelling gauze that reminded Colm of a night out on Titan.

“What do you want out of therapy?”

“I want to feel the colour again. See the music.”

Like the best dreams, he was having trouble holding onto the memory and it pained him more than anything he’d ever felt.

“I do not understand your response.”

It asked that question every time he woke up. Colm wasn’t sure it was his job to know the answer. It should tell him surely. He didn’t need therapy. All he needed was to get back to the music.

“What do you want out of our therapy?”

“I don’t want anything. You’re making me answer these stupid questions.”

Company contractual occupational health. Fought for and won by the stellar unions but right now it could take a long jump out a short airlock.

“I do not understand your response.”

He wasn’t sure how long it’d been. His sleep was fitful and erratic. There wasn’t a clock here, and he couldn’t reach anyone else. The waking wore on him. That brief period of hope before the realisation of silence.

“What do you want out of our therapy?”

“When I wake up. I don’t want to be disappointed I did. I want, to not want to die.” As he said it, the immensity of the truth overwhelmed him, and he began to cry. Without the music, there wasn’t anything.

“We do not have time for that goal. Please pick a more achievable one.”

“I want to stop talking to you.”

He began to shut down. Mind and body.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Alone.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“I have prescribed you a high-dose antidepressant. Take as directed by company policy.”

***

Colm was on his feet by the time they reached Enceladus. Weak and unsteady, but upright and walking. He insisted on docking the Neena at the loading station. Alex walked with him in case he fell, trying but failing to not look like she was escorting someone’s elderly grandad.

Keats rose from the command chair as they entered, as if he was going to say something but Alex glared at him and Colm tottered to the pilot chair, stopping only to make a harsh throaty noise in disgust at its cleanliness.

He had a system, and this was all wrong. The cans would be put in the ResCyk compactor to be sold for scrap to the shipyards or industrial zones. By tradition, the skipper of a ship would pocket the cash, but someone – probably Nico – would make sure he bought them all a drink and put some in the petty cash.

Colm sank into the cold memory-leather, feeling it mould around the curve of his backside. He’d lost weight in the infirmary, and everything felt a little too bony. He checked a drawer that was built into the console but not supposed to be, pulled out an unopen, lukewarm can, cracked it and set to landing. The doors opened Nico sauntered in. She wasn’t usually here for this, but then again neither was Alex. Colm wouldn’t have noticed usually, but today he felt his personal space extend to the entire room. He supposed that they were here to gawk at him. Colm the energetic, Colm the raver, Colm the decrepit.

He sat rigid as he landed, still as a dead man. He worked on automatic, didn’t check the instruments much after a cursory glance, didn’t think much either. He didn’t need to. He could land in his sleep and Alex surreptitiously nudged him once to check he wasn’t. He gave her a wink with bloodshot, sunken eyes as the Neena landed cleanly. He shuffled out, ignoring everyone and everything until he’d collected his things and left the ship without waiting to be told.

***

He walked better in zero-g. It wasn’t exactly zero – about a tenth of Earth’s – but the cane they’d given him back on the station helped. It was made of buffed durasteel with a black polymer handle and a rubberised ferrule, fitting snugly into the palm of his suit as he skipped over the smooth ice Planitia like a flat stone on a calm lake.

He had endured too many days of people talking to him or about him or avoiding doing the former. He needed out. Without the noise of the station or ship he might finally hear it.

The suit was his, bought a while back from a down-and-out scrap dealer on Deimos for a void-disco on the asteroid belt. He’d fixed it up and added bits here and there. There were no flame decals or booster-packs, but he’d added tiny micromotor muscle enhancers, a stim injector system for meds, and other stuff he used way back when to keep the party going when he couldn’t. He didn’t use it much anymore but now the injector carried the company panacea through his body but not the mood pills. Never them.

As he left the airlock, he saw distant plumes of water quickly turned to ice particles in the exosphere, and he thought they looked like rocket boosters from the southern pole set to blast the moon off into deep space. He’d set off to see them up close and as they became larger in the faceplate of his helmet, the raw sunlight glinted off the particles, reflecting a rainbow of diamonds.

He noticed his fingers drumming. It had been on and off most the last couple of hours, and he was sure he wasn’t doing it. The music was a muscle memory of a dream, and it kept haunting him when he stopped thinking. A melody here, a beat there, his body remembering what he couldn’t. He tried to stop his fingers, but he couldn’t, and maybe he didn’t want to.

A message came through, forwarded over by the Neena. The Ex again, and again. He didn’t read it. Just sent it to trash and kept on walking and tapping and now humming. It was incoherent, not a tune he could say he knew with any real conviction, and punctuated by the occasional noise that he couldn’t identify.

The Ex called again. He let it ring, and it mixed with the music he knew. The geysers hummed along, the polychromatic waves looked like sheet music in the black sky, and he had it. He knew what to do.

He danced back to the station and just before he reached the airlock, he threw the cane away as hard as his assisted arms could. It whistled as it spun further and further, towards that big orange-brown bastard of a gas-giant. Jupiter was watching the geysers, one big amber eye on the show and on that small speck of a man who knew the music and always would. He watched the cane until it went too far out, twinkling like the stars around it, and then he went home.

***

He grooved through the ship; aches long gone and found the cockpit empty. People were probably ashore; he thought happily and closed the door with a quick jab of a bony elbow. He took a can from his stash and poured it in the door electronics. Sparks and smoke shut the door solid. Just in case he opened the workspace that contained the ships Virtual Intelligence and ripped the wiring out.

Then using codes, he shouldn’t have but did, the Neena left the moon’s surface just as cleanly as it entered but this time with panache. He put his lesser tunes on to fill the silence, though it seemed only to concentrate it.

The coordinates were easy to find, recorded by the ships logs and he plotted a course, something pragmatic and direct. A course back to the music, to the galactic gig.

Though the course was straight, it didn’t mean he couldn’t have a little fun along the way. He’d been inspired by the geysers of Enceladus and he knew a bit about the Neena’s engines. Just a little working knowledge, enough to get the right oomph out when he needed to by spewing gas out the back and then sending streams of ions out to push everything forward.

Before flying the light fantastic, Colm had worked a bar, several bars in fact. All in a variety of rain-soaked cities or dive-stations in the ass end of nowhere. He’d learned a few things slinging drinks and fixing things. Especially about those big retro signs that lit up in all weathers. Colm had never connected those signs with the ion drives, but he did now. All it would take is a little noble gas.

By design the Neena’s engines used xenon which made the exhaust white and boring. Like the signs, different gasses made different colours and the Neena had Argon, Radon, Krypton, and good old-fashioned Neon stashed away on tap.

Colm bypassed the engine room and turned the rear facing vid screen on large. Sure, it’d cause issues on the engineering deck but that would be no problem if there was no-one there and there was no-one there.

With the brief cough of a conductor clearing their throat he pressed a button and the contrails became a radon red that left flashes on Colm’s eyes when he blinked. He tweaked the dials, and they lengthened and refined until they were like the vapor trails of atmospheric stunt teams, spreading far behind. Colm tried a barrel-roll and watched the trail twist and turn in time.

He itched to see what it could do, moving the ship to the groove of the tunes he heard and the ones in his head. Metalwork screamed in protest and the door started banging again, this time less melodic and more insistent but he could work with it.

Bright red warning lights flooded the cockpit. Colm threw an unopened can hard at the emergency panel, smashing through the display and spewing pressurised, carbonated sugar over the deck.

The ship still felt sluggish, so he tried to check the inventory, but the screen didn’t work and smelled of burning rubber. The Neena had been docked for a couple of hours on Enceladus, more than enough time to unload. Probably something extra, something for Keats, something big and heavy like his ego.

One button press, and the cargo bay alarm blared intrusively. He ignored it until it stopped, and the bay was open to space.

On the rear camera the cargo flew in lines out the door to make the contrails solid. Colm watched the container colours blend and flow with the background of space and ignored the bodies as they flailed and jerked desperately until they disappeared and then ceased to exist.

The dump had given the Neena a brief boost like a caffeine shot straight to the vein. He pumped argon into the engines, changing to pale purple like the sweets he used to eat as a child. He wondered if they still existed, where to get them, if they still tasted of chalk and faux lilac.

Alex’s face appeared on the engineering room camera shouting something. pity there wasn’t any sound. Not that there would be. She wasn’t real after all. Maybe she’d never been real. Just the company drugs, energy drinks, and the haunting sounds of space. Colm had a half-idea, not fully formed, he mixed the radon and argon and waited, waving absently at the screaming face. The trail was still purple, but more vivid, deeper than before.

Alex screamed harder and put her hands to her head and scrunched up her eyes like Colm did when the bass got into his stomach and wrenched.

“Exactly,” he said to the screen, and he thought to try the krypton.

It should be green. He’d read the comics, seen the films, kryptonite was green. Or red, or gold, not this lightish blue. Not this planet-side summer skyway. Colm considered it for a moment and decided it was good regardless.

Alex was on her knees, coughing and shuddering and reaching out to grab some invisible…thing.

“Do you hear it too?”

Colm shouted into the screen, flecks of spittle hitting it and dripping down but even he couldn’t hear it. they were still a way off yet and she was back on Enceladus, not on the engine room floor spasming as the room filled with gas.

He thought to attract the music, to show he was the biggest fan. A true groupie. He twisted the ship in knots and twirls that it had never experienced or would again. He changed the gases on the fly so that the rear-view showed the rainbow quavers, minims, crotchets, and semibreves. The deep inky blackness of the void was the parchment he wrote the opus of his dreams and such surreal nightmare-dreams they were.

The door-timpani stopped as he turned the ship fast, punctuated by one final loud bang. It wouldn’t be far now, wouldn’t be long. Whatever gods or monsters who played that space jazz would notice him, and he’d be allowed to listen again.

Another alarm, so Colm ran around the room smashing the red lights and shouting at them to shut up and then the missile he’d half-seen, half-hit, and he fell asleep fast and hard like a bass-drop.

***

He awoke in zero-g, thinking he was back on Enceladus, or in the infirmary and this was all some drug-induced side effect. The kind they know about but don’t tell you. The only lights were fires, the only sounds were alarms from deep within the ship. The door was open, cracked open by some enormous force. Outside, the opening riffs hit like his heartbeat.

“I’m here.”

Pushing himself on a console, propelling himself through a cloud of clear plexiglass shards and out the doorway. He floated past the thick red stain congealing on the porthole and over the slumped shape near the floor. He floated through droplets of red towards the airlock. His suit was there and worked. In no gravity he pulled it on fine, humming to himself first quietly then as loud as he could. The micromotors powered to life as the helmet clamped down, but the Neena’s airlock wouldn’t open without power, without direction from a dead system.

He plodded through the ship like a ska band, searching for a way out, past more slumped shapes and droplets that speckled his faceplate until he saw the hole. Metal buckled and bent inwards, scorched, and melted at the point of impact. A hole into space and timbre, the stage entrance to the mosh pit. Behind a door, just one door, that had a lever and a warning, or maybe an invitation.

The lever was stiff, but it was soon open with the cost of blood and tearing muscles. With the rest of the air, Colm was flung out into space, arms open wide, eyes open wider. More shapes shot by, some near, some far, others with their arms open to greet the music. Fellow fans and groupies united in the void.

Hours, or days, or seconds later, he heard everything.

——–//——–

Stephen is an award-winning author, cat dad, and Jolly Rancher enthusiast from Sunderland in the UK. He is the current membership officer of the BSFA and has been published online and in print in magazines such as Schlock!, Punk Noir Magazine, and the north-based Uncommonalities anthology series. When not writing stories he writes reviews for the award-winning magazine Shoreline of Infinity, is an academic support worker, helps to run a major UK LARP, and paints and plays with miniatures.