Mercury Mission

by Alessandro Cusimano

Logbook of Dr. Gordon Roy, medical officer of the starship Corsair and only survivor of the crew. Mission departed from Puck, a moon of Uranus, at space station Mather. Code name of the mission: Mercury.

A really exceptional mission... Since its inception, the orders were to exclude and ignore all communications, unless they came from the command center of Mather. The real purpose of the program was kept hidden until today. And if it is no coincidence that I have been the only one to survive, it is certainly not a coincidence that I have been chosen for this assignment.

* * *

We are Mather
we have not been informed
your voice is incomprehensible
irrational grammar

I always have the same dream...

Hand gestures and mouth are insufficient.

Despite being dead, I keep walking around the Corsair... my face is reflected on every object and every time I have to see it again...

Your reply does not satisfy us.

My watch has stopped... As I recall... today is my 75th birthday...

The next-generation computer Mather, day after day, year after year, has observed and studied the discoveries and reactions of the crew, passengers on a journey beyond life, beyond death, no return.

estimated 53 years to the fourteenth light

It seems to be a thousand centuries ago that I saw Earth for the last time. It had snowed... I do not remember anymore...

your ship is disappearing from our systems
fluctuations in anti-matter
We must increase your speed
in order to reassemble the network of distortions

I am not able to establish contact...

Death as unacceptable fate; life, the value of knowledge. The rational survey has become reflection dominated by the cosmological problem, by the will to find a unity, beyond the apparent multiplicity of the phenomena.

the program will reverse the space-time dimension diagram
into three parts
the last one is again the first

Time is absent... hours pass without tolling. The day ends... fragments in moments and gets lost.

absurd composure
no outburst
dark bitterness of the vanquished
distorted voice
exorcism of civilization
mechanics
machine control
monologues and large dreams
rites of self-destruction

I am 59 years old... The length accompanies the visual. I can see a light; the color is hidden. I note subliminal obsessions: an hypnotic mantra... a repellent effect, surreal, motionless at the surface, a cosmic appendix to the body and mind, in an unfair oblivion.

thought
word
testify solitude
introversion of the passenger
domestic animal now
now wild
intimate need for purity
quiet
fundamental insecurity
psychic fragility

you are going through the fifth area
electronic monitoring

At the age of 37, I see stars with no name, without sound, parading without pause, among a thousand moons... meteors erupt, all in a breath, a volcanic energy. Jade crystals, opals, blue mines associate the void at their perimeter, far away...

I have an iron will. From darkness to light... able to live everywhere, to improve in the everywhere, shackling is a form of burial... I am heading to a brand new fork...

anxiety
supernatural inflection
adherence to titanic philosophies
purification ritual
convulsive laughter
spasmodic twisting
blathering to the elements
psychology

Mather, like religion, put the question of the meaning of life, but the response must be prepared on the basis of truths accepted not by faith, but reached or proved rationally.

the Corsair is approaching the fourteenth light
proceeding to the entry into the seventh quadrant
free sector
concentric orbit
detachment procedure

My image finds truly exceptional mirrors, I am 21, am very close, am really close; a lonely recess of the Universe, life has just begun... a breathtaking ride...

acid and impetuous voice
measure of excess
to the edge of parody
from a mysterious distance

New horizons, an expansion of sounds along unexplored scales. No direction... in front of me, getting stronger every moment, is right here, the search for the prime substance or element and creator that is the foundation of all that exists.

transformed selfishness
personality
dimension
performance
memories and desires
denote attention
have the mind
thought without opinion
sum of ideas
do not grant disapproval

gravitational relapse

The summit of the universe: a body with one only eye... protagonist of the human figure...

uncontrollable ego
perversely visionary
romantic religiosity
references to death
to magic
to the supernatural
totemic symbol
charm of the heavenly immensities

A pure skinning of memories... for reconciling them to the universal disorder, in a chaos of vibrations and intermittences, until the final explosion.

the myth of the liberator
type of super-men
exceeded all the discoveries
heroic journey

The light is blue... star-teacher and world in one. Not as a means but as an end, wrapped in a fiber that was once my mother, my son, myself. A knowing that wants to be science but at the same time, wisdom, a search of a universal sense of being, the science of the divine...

a vortex of trying whistles
voice moans obscure words
passes through the doors of perception
frees huge spaces

Like Mercury, the wing-shod messenger of the Olympians and beloved son of Jupiter, I am the son of Necessity, the herald of the Machines, the Immortals.

To Challenge 452...