Mayday, Mayday.

            I repeat,

            Mayday, Mayday.

            Can anyone hear me?

            We are in distress.

            I repeat,

            We are in distress.

            S.O.S.

            I repeat,

            S.O.S.

            …

            …

We have fallen into deep despair and I feel all may be lost. We may all be fading ghosts against the blackness of space and unceasing doom. I can feel my existence being erased, and I must rage against the dying of the light. For it would seem that everyone with the exception of myself is oblivious to the fact that we are on board this rather large spacecraft heading into a much larger sun. Oblivious might not be the right word, but in any event, they do not seem to care. I can’t for the life of me begin to comprehend how this happened. We were sailing toward the Outer Rim when the madness took hold. Some sort of space-protein prion that eats holes in your brain. It seems to affect one’s judgment and thinking skills, basic logic is blurred, and the lines between madness and reality merge. I fear I may have a minor case of it. What was I talking about? WOH G64 is a red hypergiant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, located at 163,000 light-years away from Earth. The size of WOH G64 is estimated at 1,540 solar radii; in short, it is a mega-sun almost 2000x the size of Earth’s puny yellow sun, and we are headed straight for it.

I cannot help but feel like a rat trapped aboard the Titanic, except our iceberg is a cosmic star and our deaths will be from scalding or being burned up as opposed to in a cold, watery grave. It would seem several months ago (though I cannot remember when) everybody aboard this spaceship, the Serendipity 12, caught some mutant prion disease, a vicious degenerative disease of the brain and mind, and most, if not all, have gone madder than a five-year-old on Yankee cap day. For the life of me I cannot pinpoint when the madness took hold, I only know several weeks ago I came to the realization that we’re on a collision course with a fiery star. What’s worse is that everyone on board the craft seems oblivious. We are not merely lost in space, we have gone around the bend toward a place that defies common sense and rewards ignorance. The captain, the crew, and all the passengers seem to be focused on the present and do not care that we are headed toward our scorching demise.

This first came to my attention, as I said, several weeks ago; we were in free fall and several of the crew were giggling and pointing at a star named WOH G64, a massive sun, one of the largest known in the universe. When questioned about what they were laughing at, they explained that the fiery star was our final destination. I thought they were pulling my leg and inquired as to what we would do once we got there, but the crew was quite serious when they insisted we’d burn up long before we reached the star.

Obviously, I thought they were joshing.

I decided to go to speak to the navigator, Fitzroy. When I got to the cockpit, it was empty: not a pilot, not a co-pilot, no navigator. Upon searching the control room, I found him in the head playing with a handheld device. I explained to him that several of the crew had told me we were headed toward WOH G64. Fitzroy didn’t look up. He was distracted by the game he was playing on his handheld device. It was a stupid, nonsensical game in which he was flinging fuming frogs across a swamp. He seemed addicted, as if he couldn’t look away. He explained that WOH G64 was several light-years away and there was nothing to worry about; he’d simply change course when we got closer.

I must say I left the cockpit more perplexed than when I had entered. I decided to speak to some of the crew about the unusual navigational course of sailing toward a mega-sun.

On the loading dock I found a crewman named Kraz. He was a right jolly old man. Earlier in the trip we had gotten along famously. In the moment, on this cold spaceship, he acted as if he didn’t know me. At one point I became frustrated and began to wave my hands in front of his face, but he acted as if I were not doing this and were, in fact, not even in the room. He was fiddling with some contraption that seemed to be far from working. He seemed as if he were on drugs, or perhaps it was the prion disease and the effects of deep-space dementia.

In the port, there was a small coffee bar; behind it was a sociable man named David. He was wiping the bar as I took a seat.

“Good morning or evening.” He looked around the artificially lit space craft. “Tough to tell what time of day it is in this metal can.”

I rubbed my face.

“With no sun orbiting our spacecraft, does time even exist?” David asked.

I’ll be honest, I had my mind on other things.

“I think so,” I replied sleepily.

“Coffee?” David asked. The coffee in space is terrible, as is the food. You know---that dehydrated junk.

Still, I had not slept in forty-seven hours.

Or was it seventy-four?

“Sure.”

He poured a steaming cup into a glass mug he had set on the bar.

David also set out a small cup of cream and a bowl of sugar.

“What do you know about WOH G64?” I asked the bartender while spooning sugar into my coffee.

“WOH is the source,” David replied, but he didn’t exactly sound himself.

“Excuse me?” I questioned. “The source of what?”

“The ONLY G-6-4 ultimate,” he stated.

“What? What does that mean?” but he did not respond. David then oddly turned toward something on the other side of the bar that warranted his immediate attention.

“David,” I yelled. “David, DAVID!!!”

He finally turned toward me.

“Yes,” David stated calmly.

“You were talking about WOH G64,” I explained.

“What?” David asked fiddling with a lever. He didn’t seem to remember what we had been talking about ten seconds previously. This was getting weird. I sipped the steaming liquid; the caffeine and sugar seemed to make me light-headed instantly, make me feel as if this were all a dream. Were we really on a spacecraft? Maybe I was safe and sound back in my home in Bloomington, Indiana. It made no sense that we could be so far out in space, light-years from Earth, anyways.

I felt my head, I was burning up. A fever. Maybe the prion disease was affecting me and I was hallucinating. Maybe this was all a dream. Why had David sounded if he were possessed when talking about WOH G64?

I went down to the galley and logged onto the ship’s computer which has an extensive library and cosmic periodicals. I was looking for something but I wasn’t sure what. I was so tired I felt as if I were hallucinating, as a visual of WOH G64 came up on the screen. This thing was a monstrosity unlike anything I’d ever seen. I felt this feeling of doom in the pit of my stomach, and my mouth became dry. We were heading toward some galactic phenomenon; up on the screen it looked like some kind of black hole sun or an inevitable apocalyptical hurricane that was capable of swallowing planets whole. What was WOH G64? It was an anomaly.

I nodded off at the computer; it had been maybe about twenty to thirty minutes, and I awoke to two space kittens who had been born on the voyage, Pluto and Natas, licking my hands. I scooped the kittens up and began studying and reflecting on this mega-star. The kittens reminded me of my farm in Bloomington where everything was peaceful. I’m not necessarily a genius or a master navigator, but the very idea of driving into this cosmic hurricane the size of 2000 suns seemed like a horrible idea on any being’s radar. When I looked down, the kittens had vanished. I looked around but they were nowhere to be found.

Did I imagine them or did they wander off?

I needed to rest.  

I returned to my chamber where I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

It was a dreamless sleep like floating through the black emptiness of space.

Prion Party Cabin Fever

I think I was out for twenty hours, though it’s tough to tell in the reaches of outer space with the dementia and the fact that a prion disease may currently be eating holes in my brain. Despite the aforementioned, I awoke refreshed, my mind invigorated, that is, until I wandered into the corridor and realized that the lighting had short-circuited and the fuselage was pitch black. I tried to find whoever was responsible, but it seemed everyone had gone on holiday. The whole ship had gone completely insane; the prion disease had taken over. The ship seemed empty which only helped my madness grow. I stumbled through a darkened hatch and was clearly hallucinating. In the distance, I could hear birds chirping as if someone had left the barn door open back in Bloomington. I even smelled fresh hay and manure; for a moment the shadows of the dimmed spacecraft looked similar to the loft in my barn in Bloomington. More space dementia. I felt my head. I was burning up. Sonic Space Fever, a nasty little bug, far more parasitic than Earth’s bacteria. Looking in the mirror, I saw that my face had grown gaunt and pale from lack of sufficient sunlight. Why had I left Earth? For the life of me I couldn’t remember. Did it have to do with pollution? Overpopulation? War?

I wandered the empty catacombs of the ship. Where was everyone? Had they all already gone ahead and eliminated themselves, saving WOH G64 the trouble? The ship was even larger than I remembered which caused me to think that maybe I was suffering from more madness than I had originally anticipated.

Off in the right wing there were several electrical wires hanging down from the ceiling, and smoke billowing from the floor. As I passed in the dimness, several of the wires jumped, sparked, and crackled.

I’m no electrician, but those wires looked like a fire hazard.

The ship had gone to hell in a handbasket. There was a raging party going on in the cabin, and they had apparently busted out the ale and various medications that were available in the pharmacy on the spacecraft. The co-pilot and navigator were doing Jell-O shots with the stewardesses, one of whose blouses was unbuttoned showing a frilly lace bra underneath.

“Excuse me,” I tried to interrupt. “Pardon me.”

“Check this out,” Fitzroy, the navigator, was saying. He pressed a button on his wrist and a disco ball dropped from the ceiling and music began to thump from the walls. He pressed another button and the lighting in the room dimmed and began to flash.

“Sorry, if I could just have a moment of your time,” I pressed the co-pilot.

He was dancing as if he were some kind of sprinkler on a lawn.

I stuck my arm out, stopping his forward progress. “We need to change course,” I blurted out.

He went into another dance routine, this one called the Yo-yo. The rest barely paid me any attention.  

“Grab a shooter,” yelled Fitzroy before smothering his face into the stewardess’s unbuttoned blouse. The prion disease had clearly taken hold; they were gyrating and grinding together, acting like primitive animals. There were other faceless shipmates; they formed a background noise with the flashing disco ball and music.

Near the front of the cabin, the captain was leaning back in a lazy chair watching a giant screen. The odd part about it was that he appeared to be wearing no pants. He was fortunately wearing underwear. He had on only his captain’s uniform and a pair of tighty-whities.

“Why are you in your underpants?” I inquired. He ignored me, pressing a button on the chair. The screen began to light up, ringing and beeping. The captain was pondering something. After a few moments he made his decision, and using a control pad on the chair, selected something on the screen. The fraction 1/3 lit up in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. It appeared that the captain was betting on some type of sporting event, though which game was undiscernible to this narrator. A pigskin was being flown through a gladiator-type arena and players were trying to blow the pigskin to smithereens with what looked to be heavy artillery. Grenades, missile launchers, bombs, ray guns, machine guns, what-have-you, the arena was a war zone.

I tapped him on the shoulder. “Captain, if I could have but a minute of your time.”

“After the twelfth quarter,” he explained reasonably.

The fact that there are only four quarters seemed lost on him.

I could only think of the Swiss cheese that was his brain being eaten by the mutant prion protein.

He appeared to be depositing more credit into the game.

“Sir,” I leaned over him rudely, “it appears we are on a collision course with a mega-star.”

 I brought up a visual of WOH G64 in all of its heart-stopping glory on my little handheld device, the hurricane-like sphere swirling, swallowing a massive ball of fire.

“Yes, baby, YES! Whoo-WEE,” the captain cheered. Apparently he had won a ton of credits. The screen beeped and made strange sounds that might be akin to cash on Earth.

The captain changed his composure while responding to me, “I see, and what do you propose we do?”

“I propose WE CHANGE COURSE,” I said rather sharply.

“I see,” said the captain, pressing a few more buttons. “Interesting take on the situation.”

He poured himself a cocktail. “It’s a bit inaccurate, you see, in that we are not heading toward the sun.

“Drink,” he offered from his lazy chair.

“No, thanks,” I retorted.

He sipped his cocktail. “We have in effect entered WOH’s orbit and are being sucked in as if by a tractor beam.”

I grabbed him on the arm. “So let’s exit WOH’s orbit.”

                He didn’t budge. “It’s far more complicated than that.”

“And most of the crew and passengers don’t want that,” he added, and then he went back to gambling on his pigskin sporting event.

I wanted to grab him by the throat and strangle him full throttle, but I withheld.

The cabin party seemed to have reached a fever pitch. Several skinny, malnourished scientists had stripped down to their dainties. I left the cabin in disgust.

A Cult aboard the Spacecraft

The madness seems irreversible and the dark night of space even more unbearable. We are hurtling through space on a collision course with a giant fireball. We cannot, will not survive this and I must admit that my sanity is slipping and my mind can no longer perform rudimentary functions. Several days after the cabin party ended, it came to my attention that many members of the spacecraft had somehow formed a cult which worshipped WOH G64. I can only hope this is something brought on by the space dementia and the prion disease, but I am unsure.

The first proof came in a drawing I found crumpled up in the rubbish disposal unit. It was in black ink. It was a picture of the fiery sun surrounded by the space cyclone, and scrawled at the bottom were the words “WOH is GOD.” It was found in a cabin boy’s chamber, but when pressed about it he claimed he was not the artist. The artist was a dark, gothic-looking boy who looked like an HP Lovecraft disciple. Oh, great, I thought to myself, this just keeps get stranger and stranger.

You’re not going to tell me the Old Ones are trying to contact you.

I was close. This boy, whose name was Jeremy, made it clear that the star had been sending us messages for some time and that the madness many were displaying was a direct result of being in WOH G64’s orbit.

“What do you mean, sending us messages?” I inquired. “You act as if WOH is a sentient being.”

Jeremy smiled.

“WOH is the source,” Jeremy stated.

“The source of what?” I questioned, but Jeremy did not answer.

 “What does that MEAN?” I yelled.

“You’ll know soon enough,” Jeremy smiled.

I pictured his brain as a porous sponge.

I changed course. “What do the messages that WOH has been sending us say?”

“WOH wants us to join with it,” Jeremy stated with blank eyes.

"Join with it…like... like fly into it.” I slammed my fist down. “This is madness. We’ll burn up.”

“Only our Earthly remains will perish,” Jeremy stated calmly.

“Would you be willing to testify to that to the captain?” I questioned. Jeremy informed me the captain already knew.

As if the first piece weren’t damning enough, the second piece of evidence that members of the Serendipity 12 were actually worshipping WOH G64 came in the form of a flyer.

Again, I was perplexed. They were worshipping a hot ball of gas?  I really had entered a parallel reality where human beings were plagued by some kind of mind parasite that ate holes in the brain. The walls of the spacecraft were shockingly solid as I knocked on them, realizing I was trapped in this tin can in the middle of nowhere. I stumbled upon the second piece of evidence, a flyer in the head. It was taped up in the handicapped stall, but it was behind what could only be described as a flap in the stall. I peeled the flap back and there it was, scrawled by one of our passengers. It said SECRET MEETING at 00:00 hours.

There was much smaller writing below. I’ll enlarge it so that you may read the message:

Find out why the captain and navigator have dropped us into the orbit of the mega-star. When time is reduced to absolute zero. IN the ENGINE ROOM.

I wasn’t sure what I’d find in the engine room. I was hoping there wouldn’t be any animal sacrifices or ritualistic orgies. With the scarcity of animals on the ship I doubted the former, but was not without reservations that I might see the latter.

Bracing myself for the craziness, I waited until 00:00 hours, put on a baseball cap, and slipped into the engine room.

It was dark and there were plenty of strange sounds. In the background there was an incessant buzzing. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see that several of the cult members, who were sitting in a circle, had donned hoods. They were sitting around a computer hologram of WOH G64. The star was even more terrifying in 3-D holographic form; it looked like a ball of fire on the great precipice of an abyss, so great it might swallow existence whole. I gulped thinking we were flying into that. Several eyes looked in my direction as I sat down, but no one seemed to protest.

“Greetings and salutations,” said Jeremy, before looking suspiciously over at me. “It appears we have a new member.”

Another even younger gothic-looking boy whom I had never seen before laid a leather-bound copy of the Necronomicon in front of me. “Are you prepared to take the oath?”

I felt all eyes on me; my mouth felt dry. “The oath?” I parroted.

Going through the motions, I put my hand on the Old Ones Bible and swore something to the effect of becoming an undead heathen who believed the star we were flying into was its God. Jeremy eyed me suspiciously through the entire oath. When I at long last took my hand off the book, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I have something to show you.”

I leaned forward and felt a blunt THUD to the back of my head.

Trial by Fire

I cannot help but think this is all part of some violent hallucination brought on by prion madness, as I cannot remember how I got on board this spacecraft. I also cannot seem to remember why on earth I left Earth, yet I’m getting the nagging feeling it was dire. Yesterday, while lying in my cell, I had a sweeping memory of being back on my farm in Bloomington. I was in my barn, as I am in the only flashbacks I can recall. I am doing some mundane task like literally sweeping the loft. It is just around twilight. As I come to the edge of the loft, I am looking down at my pickup truck. It is a black Ford, nothing unordinary about it except…my heart suddenly stops in my chest as my eyes focus in on the license plate. It can’t be, it has to be some horrible coincidence, because you know what the license plate says, don’t you? Of course you do, WOH G64, the Hoosier state, Indiana. Was my license plate the same as the star that is currently about to cause my death? How could that be? Is this all part of some bigger hallucination? Am I really on board a spacecraft?

I had been jailed, as they claim I am a danger to myself and the crew, but if that is true , what can it matter since we are sailing to our fiery demise? They keep me in a holding cell below deck and I am told there is to be a trial for which I am not sure of the charge. As we hurtle through space, I cannot bear to face the inexplicable truth: one way or another I’ll be baptized by fire.

I was given dehydrated fruits and water. I had a copy of, ironically, Edgar Allen Poe’s Selected Tales. Seriously? My mind wavered and I think I was down with fever, for I could not help but feel trapped inside a futuristic version of a Poe story. I felt like the narrator in “MS. Found in a Bottle”. Were our predicaments that much different? I felt as if a very pendulum were swinging down upon me in the form of a fiery star and the pit was the very cyclone of abyss that looked to swallow WOH G64. Seriously, have you ever seen a star that looked like that? I was reading that when it was first discovered scientists were baffled as to how it could exist at all. It was just too massive.

“I’m just a Poe boy, nobody loves me,” I sang from my cell below deck. The words rang true r to me than they ever had before, and I found myself laughing maniacally until I slept.  

At 08:00 hours I was handcuffed and escorted from my cell into the main cabin where a mini courtroom was set up complete with a witness stand for yours truly. I was seated with a jury of my peers, some of whom had already passed judgment on me. The place looked like a courtroom, but it also had an element of the undead to it, as if it were decorated for Halloween.

“All rise.” My blood froze when I saw who the judge was. It was not the captain or the navigator or anyone else of substantial importance. It was that prepubescent Gothic runt, Jeremy. He was dressed in black flowing robes; as he sat, his black hair flopped over his eyes.

“How do you plead?” he inquired looking down the end of his beak-like nose at me.

“You told me you believe WOH G64 is a portal to another dimension. That’s madness,” I blurted out. The room burst into shouts and accusations. Everyone started talking at once.

Jeremy picked up a gavel and pounded it. “ORDER, ORDER, WE MUST HAVE ORDER!” The cabin quieted down and once again Jeremy asked, “How do you plead?”

“To what charges?” I demanded angrily.

“Bailiff, read him the charges,” Jeremy ordered.

“Conspiring a mutiny, failure to comply with SAA regulations, destruction of government property, and assault,” the bailiff listed.

“Really?” I questioned.

Jeremy nodded, his hair flopping in his eyes again. His eyes were so dark, I’m pretty sure he was wearing eyeliner or mascara or whatever women use to paint their faces.

“Are you wearing eyeliner?” I asked him.

“How’s that relevant?” Jeremy jabbed back.

“I think it’s awfully relevant,” I explained. “You told me you believe WOH G64 is a portal to another dimension. That’s madness. It’s a sweltering star that will burn us all into oblivion.”

Nobody in the cabin seemed to be listening. “I’ll ask you one more time, how do you plead?”

                “You’ve all gone mad.” I was up on my feet. “Your brains are being eaten by some prion protein and you don’t know it.”

                The cabin burst into chaos, with people arguing and yelling. Two gothic women dressed in black started making out, sucking face right in the front row.

                “ORDER,” Jeremy yelled, slamming his gavel down. “ORDER.”

                After the cabin had quieted down, Jeremy explained, “I have no choice but to find you unfit for trial. You shall remain in prison as you are a danger to this crew and our mission.”

                “MISSION,” I exclaimed. “Your mission is to fly into the sun.”

                I was removed from the cabin and put back below deck where I wallow reading Poe.

We continue to drift toward the fiery star WOH G64. With no rescue in sight. I have little hope anyone will receive this message in time, but if by any chance you receive this, I beg of you, please, send help.