31_days | [22 OCTOBER] [ORIGINAL] [THE VIVARIUM ENDING]

Title: The Vivarium Ending
Day/Theme: 22nd October 2010; other worlds than these
Series: Original
Rating / warnings: T. Transformation and suicide.

Herbertson mashed the manual door release button on the screen of the scrolli as he ran. Behind him, doors clanged shut all along the corridor, hand-thick spans of steel and smart plastic sealing off the ship into neat little sections.

As each door closed, the lights behind them dimmed. Herbertson wasn’t doing that.

He watched it happen, though, when he reached the vivarium at last and turned to watch the way he’d come, left hand knuckling the tight stitch in his side, breath coming like a rope from a rusty pulley. Every door had a square clear window in the centre, so he could see the darkness coming, shutting out the lights right down the line.

For a moment, looking down the row of windows, curving gently up with the swell of the ship, was like standing between the two wide mirrors back in the academy bathrooms, cadets splashing their faces after long afternoon’s of working in the invisible cities, the outlines of the sim goggles still outlining their eyes, the reflections spooning away into glassy green distance.

Then the lights started going out.

Herbertson checked the readings on the ship’s layout one more time. The scrolli was moulded in soft pink plastic, waterproof and safe for teething; its screen default was large, rounded letters, a companion like ball of pink fuzz bobbing in the corner of the screen. He had managed to shrink the font, but the companion was still there, jagging and blurring every so often as Herbertson asked the scrolli to run heavier programs than it had ever been intended for.

He didn’t dare activate his headspace. He had seen what had happened to everyone else, feeling bored and stuffed-away in the sick bay while Dr Schonberg fiddled with his firewalls and critiqued his sword-play, Herbertson’s portion of invisible city spooling past on the banks of monitors, a matter of common courtesy while his implants were offline.

Then Dr Schonberg had jerked and turned to him, her eyes gelid black. Glossolalia had spilled from her mouth with spit and blood, and she had smiled, just a little. The ship went quiet. You could feel it, like snow outside the curtains.

Then sounds crept in again, sounds, not noise. Soft thumps, the sound of people walking up against glass doors, sliding their tongues in and out with their breath. Smiling, wider than they should.

Herbertson had borrowed the scrolli that morning, to keep him company through the check-up. His daughter didn’t use it any more: she was seven, more than old enough for implants. He had seen her, among the soft, groping, milling masses. He had tried to reach her, but the doors had not opened for him then.

He looked around at the vivarium, its green fronds and downy young tomatoes, the black sky and the soft hiss of irrigation. He was almost as far as he could get from the escape pods, here, but the scrolli told him they’d been the first thing they jettisoned. They were sending other things out through the airlock, as well. Organic material, anything containing certain specific plastics. They had set the ship’s course for home, but with a wide detour through an uninhabited sector. There were not enough supplies to sustain the crew for the whole journey, but Herbertson presumed they were going to make a stop, somewhere out in the dark. If they needed food, now. When they had opened their mouths, it had shown dark and stringy inside, like wet black natto.

They were jettisoning organic material, everything from the kitchens, from the labs. He stabbed at the scrolli absently; as he had expected, they had overridden the control systems on the vivarium. The air was quietening, the irrigation systems powering down. There was the smell of green tomatoes, smooth and hard as the back of a silver spoon. There were procedures in place, Herbertson knew, for opening the vivarium roof, in case of widespread contamination or other exceptional circumstances. He sat down on the damp plastic matting amongst the tomato plants, and waited to be set loose.