Pressure E-Book

Christopher H Lund Jr

• Herausgeber: Christopher H Lund Jr
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Gerald was the listener, but what he was listening for he did not know. The tank had no windows and no hatches. Nobody knew what was out there — not him, nor the crew, and there was nobody they could ask. They were on their own, completely isolated and without any kind of oversight.
Only Gerald heard the sounds from outside. There was weather and wildlife, there was static and music, and sometimes there were voices. He never discussed them with the crew, for the crew wanted nothing to do with him. The pressure was building.
Then one day, one of the voices spoke to him.
‘Let me in,’ it said.

Leseprobe

Day #151

After the first few rounds of “pass everything Gerald wants somewhere else,” he gave up and ate in the kitchen. He had to eat standing, but he’d rather do that than chase his breakfast around the table.

The shift that followed was like any other. When it was almost over, and he was just waiting for the recorder to stop, something landed on the tank. It wasn’t the first time. After a brief scrabble for purchase, the critter began exploring the hull — click, click, thump-scratch in the headphones. It sounded like a small monkey or large bat, or something in between. Whatever it was, the distraction was welcome. It would be worth a line or two in the report.

He opened a layout of the external sensors. The screen showed a globe of microphone icons, each one tagged with a collection of graphs, bar-charts, and tables. The listening post was a pair of blue headphones just inside the equator. There was no icon for his visitor, but he could tell where it was by the way the graphs and charts spiked and bounced when it moved.

He watched with idle curiosity as it climbed around on the tank; this way, that way, and nowhere in particular. It eventually ended up outside the listening post, and then the sensors went quiet. So did his phones. There was nothing in the feeds but faint ripples of background noise. He looked up from the screen. His visitor was right in front of him, on the other side of the hull. If there had been a window behind his desk, he would be looking at it now.

A soft bleep came from one of the filters above his workstation. He tipped his chair back and looked up. The indicators were red and orange instead of the usual yellows and greens.

Okay …?

He had no idea what the colors meant, nor did he care; it was just data for the recorder. He returned his attention to the screen, mashed the phones against his ears, and held his breath. There was faint static, some very faint, distant music, and then a leathery rustle, followed by a heavily garbled voice. The graphs and charts bounced back to life.

‘Let me in’ it said — maybe. He wasn’t sure.