WHEN THE WIND HOWLS

Twenty years ago, in training, they told me that the probability of being killed by a piece of debris from a Russian rocket or a can of Pepsi, thrown away by a negligent cosmic tourist into the earth’s orbit, was so small that it wasn’t even worth thinking about. Much less be afraid of. I wonder what those experts will say when they learn that space debris only two centimeters in size pierced right through the anti-meteor defense system and damaged one of the components of the space communications station where I work.

The on-board computer, Val, named in honour of one of the developers who had died of a heart attack, quickly isolated the damaged module. And even though I was sleeping like the dead, my sleep instantly dissolved into the sound of alarms. After that, the adrenaline did its job: it widened my pupils to their limit and forced my heart into a frantic rhythm. I leapt up from my bed like it stung me (as much as was possible in zero-gravity conditions), climbed into my spacesuit, grabbed my tools and went out into the open space to save the property of the corporation, and at the same time my own life.

I had already been in similar situations. They are common when you are a repairman on one of the old, rusted tin cans that the corporation has been using for decades. Usually I am calm, even cold-blooded, when the station tries to fall apart – and it would have done so long ago if it weren’t for my golden hands and a magical sealant – but this time it was different. The thing is, in a week’s time this old girl would be written off and sent on a happy journey to burn up in the thick layers of the atmosphere. And that means that I only have six days left before they send a kind of space Uber for me, to take me to Earth. To die just a few days before my departure home is not the most pleasant scenario. So when the screen of the on-board computer displayed the final countdown – SIX DAYS UNTIL PLANNED EVACUATION – you can imagine that I had dreamed of seeing those words every day for the past five years I have been stuck here, in complete isolation.

The corporation has hundreds of thousands of communication stations with mechanics on board. Even with the insurance and the large risk of someone suddenly burning to death with one press of a button, using manpower is still cheaper than sending repair robots or launching new spacecraft. And so we just stay here. My tin can’s job is to ensure that some dating app in Central Europe works properly. When I signed the contract, they offered me various roles: maintaining the internet, telephone lines, photocopiers in finance offices, robot vacuum cleaners and even smart toasters. But I chose this one. I guess it seemed fun, especially considering that my wife had left me a couple of months before I put my name on that contract.
The damage didn’t seem as serious as it had at first. Yeah, maybe some guy in Italy won’t be able to find a girl for quick lay, but there was no threat to my life. Although I’m sure that the manager responsible for the function of the app will still send a complaint to the technical department. And then they will almost certainly cut my salary for this month. In the incident report they will write something like: “The mechanic took too long to repair the communication station, and as a result the button PROPOSE A HOOK-UP did not work for several hours.” And ‘too long’, by the way, means about an hour to patch the holes on both sides of the module and repair any damaged equipment. And all that in zero-gravity conditions and with the constant risk of dying. But to me, it was an excellent result, and now they should put me in the Guinness Book of Records for this goddamn station. Even Val praised me, which is rare.
Having repaired the damage, I floated fifty or so metres away from the station to look at Earth for the last time, and then connected with Carol from the Mission Control Centre.

“Two things,” I said, “One good, one bad. The good news is that I finished the repair, and now everything is working better than before. The bad news: I think you’re going to miss me.”
“What the hell!” Carol swore loudly, just before the line cut off.
“Please don’t tell me that you accidentally spilled coffee on the instrument panel, and now the station is going to burn up somewhere above Idaho. Carol? Come in, Carol? Are you there?”

But no answer followed, and the line stayed treacherously silent. My first thought was that the guys down there had probably decided to play a joke on me. I had heard that when a mechanic has a couple of days left before going home, the mission controllers will switch off the connection for a bit, or pretend that a war has started on Earth, to try and scare their colleagues one last time. But when the joke started to drag on, and Carol had still not come back on the line, I started to get nervous. A few minutes later, Val reported that it had stopped receiving data from the mission control servers, which had never happened before. After that my nervousness grew into something more like fear.

I tried to reach Carol again, even though I knew that as long as the on-board computer wasn’t receiving data from the server, the line wasn’t working either. But it made me feel calmer. Receiving no answer, I grabbed onto the cable and pulled myself up to the airlock hatch. I wanted to get onto the station as soon as possible to get out of this suit and try to connect to mission control from the control panel. But the hatch didn’t give way. I tried again, but it still didn’t open.

“Hey Val!” I called, “It seems I have a small problem… the hatch isn’t opening. Can you let me in?”
“Access to the station is denied,” Val answered coldly.
As if there were moments when his answers weren’t cold.
“I don’t understand. Please repeat.”
“Access to the station is denied. Protocol FUCK YOU has been activated,” answered Val.
Val’s creators had quite a specific sense of humour, but every mechanic knew about Protocol FUCK YOU, and it didn’t bring a smile to my face. It meant: “fuck you, you’re not coming in.”
“Val, why was the protocol activated?”
He replied, “As I am not receiving a signal from the mission control servers, the corporation cannot guarantee the complete safety of valuable information located on the databases inside the station. In order to avoid data leaks, which could harm the safety of the whole corporation, access to the station is forbidden. The risk of death of the mechanic is considered an acceptable loss.”

At that moment, an unpleasant chill moved through my body and my temples throbbed, almost like someone was trying to break through my skull from within. I was paralysed with fear. While the line wasn’t working, I couldn’t get onto the station, no matter how much I wanted to. There was nothing I could do about it. Usually in similar situations I would quickly figure something out, but not now. The only thing that was left for me to do was to check the oxygen levels in my spacesuit (there was enough for twelve hours) and to murmur “fuck” under my breath.

Whenever I realize that I’m in deep shit – and this case was certainly one of those moments – my brain starts to work differently. So the most random ideas about what was happening on Earth started to fly into my head. A global fault caused by Russian hackers, a third world war, or a natural disaster were the obvious answers. But I looked over at the East Coast and saw that lights were still on, and so all those options were unlikely. The people below were probably continuing their daily lives, unsuspecting of the drama unfolding in the sky above them. I don’t believe for a second that the corporation had suddenly started having technical problems. It was unlikely that the richest company in the world, even bearing in mind that they use decades-old communication stations, could experience such serious problems with their servers.
Realizing that none of the obvious answers fit, my brain started to suggest wilder and wilder ideas that I would never have dreamed of in my right mind: an attack on the mission control centre by little green men, the appearance of Cthulhu, or a mass brain fog causing people on Earth to decide to avoid using communication stations, walkie-talkies, telephones and even carrier pigeons.

It sounds delusional, but sometimes you read about things like that in the news.
There was another idiotic option: they had forgotten about me. I even wondered if Carol really had spilled coffee on her computer, and accidentally deleted all the files about my existence and my station. This would lead to a knock-on effect, with everyone who had once featured in my life suddenly having all evidence of my existence wiped from their minds: paint poured on my high school yearbooks, photos of us together suddenly burned to ashes, phonebooks with my number lost, or simply everyone forgetting my name. This chain of events would continue to spread, and now for some unknown reason my Facebook page has already been deleted, I have been removed from the national database, and even the banks have forgotten about my existence, although normally they would never allow that. At this very moment my parents are probably forgetting about me. Which is fair. I haven’t seen them in ten years, and in all that time our communication had been limited to greeting cards sent over email, and those have most likely ended up in the spam folder. The only one who might theoretically remember me was Ellis. But she had done everything to cut me out of her life, even back when at least someone remembered me. So there was not much hope that she might wake up in the middle of the night and decide to check on how her ex-husband was doing.

My composure only returned to me an hour later, and I began to understand that it was useless to wait for help from anyone. Even if Carol had sent a rescue shuttle, it wouldn’t get here any sooner than eighteen hours. By which time I would be most definitely dead and hardly able to shake hands with and greet my saviours.
So my only way out of this was to save my own backside.

I tried to force open the external control panel, trying to break into Val. Theoretically I could connect a few wires, and in doing so, get access to the entire system, allowing me to deactivate the safety protocol and open the hatch. But my plan didn’t work because Val’s defences turned out to be too strong. If I survive this, I will definitely need to write to the guys who developed them. They had clearly foreseen every scenario in which someone might try to break into a locked station from the outside, however ridiculous the idea might seem in ordinary circumstances: my case, I inwardly chuckled, is an exception.

So then I tried to connect to the communication module, hoping to get in touch with someone. I managed to connect to it – I’m a damn genius – and send an SOS to mission control, to the International Space Station, the Chinese station Tiangong, Darmstadt, Toulouse, Korolev and even to my neighbouring communications stations (the closest one to me being responsible for the maintenance of cash machines in grocery shops in Central Europe), but no one got back to me.

I tried another ten different ways to get inside the satellite, but every attempt failed. So the only thing that remained was to float in the open space, listening to the radio interference, its hissing noise reminding me of a wind from a long time ago, and to hope that they had heard me.

I remembered how at the end of the nineties, when I was fifteen, I took the money I had earned from working in the summer at Earl’s Car Wash and bought a bus ticket to Florida. The journey that laid ahead was more than ten hours long, but that didn’t scare me, even though I had never been further from home than a few blocks. I imagine the adults sitting next to me were watching me with mistrust, because to put it lightly, I looked strange: a small, thin teenager in a jacket two sizes too big, constantly biting his nails and staring out the window of the bus, as if watching something fascinating.

Having reached Florida, I stayed the night in a cheap roadside motel, where they didn’t even ask to see any ID. I remember the feeling of loneliness that engulfed me when I lay in the bed, covering myself with the bedsheets until only my eyes and forehead were visible. I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep as quickly as possible. I woke up early the next morning, quickly got dressed, grabbed a few chocolate bars to take with me, and set off for Cape Canaveral. After a couple of hours hiking along dusty roadsides, I reached a small hill, on which some onlookers were already standing, waiting for the rocket launch. All around there were cars, foldout tables and sunbeds. Loud music was playing. Someone was cooking sausages. All of this ruined the sense of wonder around what was about to happen, so I scowled and walked further along. I found the ideal destination for my pilgrimage when I reached a field of overgrown grass. In the midst of the grass was a huge boulder, as if left standing there specially for me by an ancient giant. I climbed up onto it and looked up into the clear sky, that endless dome that hung above me. After a few minutes of waiting, the rocket soared upwards, leaving a long trail of smoke behind it, like a rope the astronauts could use to find their way home when they got bored of the cold outer space. I closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the wind, and then fell asleep with a smile on my face and dreamed of one day being among the twinkling stars.

Remembering that boy, I thought that now, so many years later, I was looking at the same sky again. Only now everything had changed. I was looking at the sky from the other side, from the cold expanse of space, and would give anything in the world to get out of here. The display on my wrist glowed red, which meant only one thing: the oxygen in my suit had run out. There wasn’t long left. My eyelids were growing heavy, my breathing slowed, and colours were swirling behind my eyes, like a Dali painting. Closing my eyes, I mentally rewound the moments preserved in my memory.

Suddenly a warm, bright light started to shine through my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw a boy in front of me. His space suit, reflecting the rays of the sun, glowed like a halo around him. In his hands he held a long cable, leading all the way to Earth. And on his back I could see huge white wings. I figured this boy could be anyone: a rescuer sent by Carol; a hallucination caused by lack of oxygen; or even a guardian angel. In the end, I didn’t care. I had finally found what I had been seeking for a long time. Peace. My eyes closed. It seemed that I had found my way home.