A Case of Time-Travelling Shorts

Not To Be [SFSD-X]

In the dark, empty hours of the night, my uncle's sins taunted me. I plotted against him; envisaging my revenge. Bloody throats danced upon my mind; the thought of ejecting his body into the unforgiving depths of space. His face would take on the most vile shade of purple when I wrapped my hands around his neck.

"But I can't live without you," Horatio pleads.

"You can, and you will. Now get to an escape pod." I strike him with my elbow and push myself towards the control room once more.

"Hologram system online." The flicking of a switch sounded and Horatio's face came back into focus. His face was gaunt, as if he hadn't eaten for days, and dark circles ringed his eyes. Relief broke across his features when he saw me, a reprieve from the mask of grief his face so often wore. The room around Horatio shocked me. For the first time in fifteen years, it was cluttered. Papers were strewn on the ground, strung up on walls, scattered haphazardly on workbenches.

He rested a hand against my face. I didn't move, not wanting to break the illusion of my solidity. I yearned for his warm touch, but felt nothing. Over many months, Horatio had slowly rebuilt me, creating a host of electronics that my neuro-scan could interact with. First vision, then speech, and now, a holographic form. Later, he took me to the Southern side of the ship, where a biological body was growing in translucent blue fluid. "Another seven months and you'll be in there," he told me. I moved my holographic hand up to the glass. A body that could touch. That could feel.

"I'm not leaving you!" His eyes are full of longing.

He wants a Hamlet who no longer exists; a Hamlet whose body floats as ash among the stars. This artificial body is no more myself that this decrepit mind is. I can feel myself rotting from the inside; what was once a facade of madness has seeped into the walls of existence. Better to die as what remains of myself than lose everything to the passage of time.

I have wasted too much time in thinking.

"I won't let you," Horatio lunges for me, punching my jaw as he does so. Fluid begins to leak out of my mouth. It's blood, though I cannot taste it. "You can't just decide to die!"

"You've always been undyingly loyal to me," I say softly. "To be or not to be has always been the question, and I've finally chosen an answer."

The holoscreen rewound, obediently playing my death for the twentieth time. Swirling galaxies set a dramatic backdrop on the bridge of the DenCorp research cruiser. All of the figures on the bridge were doomed. My mother, uncle - may he rot in hell, Laertes, and myself would all be dead before the recording ended. Only Horatio would survive. I saw myself fighting Laertes in an old fashioned phasor stand-off. His phasor beams were lethally irradiated; subjective radiation was another DenCorp invention. I should've known not to expect a fair fight from those cretins. A lone shot skimmed across the back of my hand. I began counting down my death as the radiation spread, destroying my body's cells.

There was a scuffle, and my onscreen self shot Laertes with his own foul phasor. In four minutes and seventeen seconds, there would be four lifeless bodies on the cold floor, ready for the Lord's judgement. Except my own. I watched as I delivered two fatal shots into my uncle's bulbous stomach and forced the remains of a poisonous concoction down his throat.

This recording was all the satisfaction I would ever get from his death. It felt detached. I didn't possess the memory. After all, the brain could only be scanned while it was alive and healthy. I'd been deprived of my own revenge. "Play it again," I said. The holoscreen rewound obediently.

The solar system signal headline arrived on the holoscreen this morning: "CEO survives shock poisoning. Humankind's victory over death." The news that he has avoided his fate fills me with rage. One of the only consolations of my death is that I took my traitorous uncle down with me. It made my existence and the pain of recuperation almost worth it; now even that has been stolen from me.

"I've watched myself kill him so many times. You showed me the recordings!"

"We knew NorTech was working on a similar project," Horatio says, "We just didn't know who their subject was." Sympathy fills his dark eyes. "I'm sorry."

"I'm going to blow that bastard out of existence!" I shout. "Even if I have to go down with him. Claudius murdered my father! He married my mother. He sold his neuro-scans and DenCorp shares to NorTech in secret. Horatio, he's the reason DenCorp is being liquidated; the reason you've lost your job. They summoned this ship for return and refurbishment a month ago, what are you going to do when they take it all? This ship is their property. And everything on it; the memory banks, the technology," I gesture to myself, "Even this body is their property. I'm inseparably meshed to this ship. Even now."

He glowers at me. "We'll think of something. We always do."

"This is it, Horatio. Those NorTech bastards want our ship back? Let's go deliver it to them personally."

He looks at me with dark eyes that I used to get lost in. To my surprise he nods.

The hyperspace drive guns into action, propelling us towards the NorTech cruiser where my treacherous uncle has recently been resurrected. I program a course for collision that will breach its hull from end to end. Even a thin hole will be deadly; the thought of my uncle being sucked into the void of space is very satisfying. Like Ophelia, when she jumped... I don't possess that memory either, but I've seen the recordings. Her eyeballs explode with such detail, the bouquet of flowers she held scattered into the endless void; frozen, eternally free.

I shake my head to clear it. What I've heard, I don't want to think about. Not anymore. As we withdraw from hyperspace, the NorTech cruiser looms ahead of us. I grip Horatio's hand tightly as our ship is hailed, warning us to change course. But we are going much too fast to stop. Even if they were to gun us down, the debris would still shred the NorTech vessel in a violent meteorite shower of debris.

I look to Horatio just before impact. "The rest is silence."