Dismal is the life of a research station's sole survivor, stranded forever in space and time!
I stumble out of my sleeping alcove at quarter to seven in the morning. Another dismal day in this place I've learned to call home. I'll never get used to it, the cold concrete and tarnished metal walls of the research station. Whoever could?
It's only a short walk from my alcove to the food repository, and I grab a nutritional supplement pouch from the shelf as I pass on my morning jaunt. I bite into the grainy package that reeks of artificial flavors. When was the last time I'd had a regular meal? I can't quite recall, despite my extensive memory. Decades, perhaps?
A brief jog around the station, all fifty feet of it that's still inhabitable. An easily traveled circle in my small isolated corner of this place. The gloomy ceiling lights are always on, except in my sleeping alcove. The light diodes shall continue to shed light into this technological tomb for a thousand years, wired into the limitless power generated thirty thousand feet below me. The limitless power harnessed from the core of a half dead planet. How? I could not tell you. I know it's a fairly simple concept, and an easily accomplished feat, so long as you're a sci-tech. I'm not. My parents had been, but I haven't seen them since the accident. That was twenty years ago, according to the ever reliable computer.
The cold metallic companion whose voice has long been erased still speaks to me. Through words on the screen it can answer my questions and respond to my constant queries to the best of its programmed abilities. Some days I prattle on for hours through the keyboard, recording my dreams, or asking it about the other worlds it knows. Much of the information is spotty. There are many data holes, extensive damage to the entire station's network. Despite its shortcomings, I'm fortunate to have such a friend, or I would surely have given out of mind and body many years ago.
It had been much harder at first. A ten year old boy can barely stand being alone for very long, and here I am completely isolated for the rest of existence; the only living soul on this accursed orb of dust and vacuum. All that protects me is a thin layer of metal and a great deal of debris which stacked itself in such a way that it prevents harm to the tightly sealed section of this dead fortress, which was once rocked by some deadly bombardment all those years ago.
I once thought someone else might someday find me here, but after two decades, I have come to terms with the truth; the inevitable, inescapable truth. I am never to be found, an isolated victim of time and space.
Suite 16 is a collection of sixteen sci-fi/paranormal novellas and the book represents author Jay Dubya's 38th published work, presented in hardcover, in paperback and in Kindle and Nook e-book formats.
