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J. Joseph

Exile


Rules require consistency. Consistency requires commitment to adherence. Adherence requires a structure to adhere to. It’s a circle with no beginning and ending only when one finds themselves deficient. But Quinn held no deficiency. It had been removed forcibly from him. He had the scars across his body to prove that. His alarm went off. Getting out of his small bed, he began to run. It didn’t matter which direction. The comet he was on was small enough that his thirty-minute run would lap the place several times over. No, the run was the important part. A light jog to start the day. It was the only way to live. He’d known this since he and the others had been in the program.

The comet itself wasn’t particularly large or memorable. It had no atmosphere to speak of, no food whatsoever, and was somehow simultaneously burning hot and freezing cold. That was, of course, the reason he’d exiled himself to this rock. It hurt, but he could deal with the pain. The important reason was that it kept his entire system focused on survival, not combat. That, and it would be near another thousand years before he was close to any inhabited planets. The only people who ran the risk of coming into contact were explorers and smugglers, one of whom would know better, the other of whom wouldn’t care about a wandering comet. At least, that was the intention. In the decades of self-imposed exile, his rock had passed a smuggling vessel on five occasions. Two of those vessels didn’t know the threat and grew closer than ideal. His internal companion, who he’d fought so hard to keep in check and stay quiet, lashed out against them and vented the ships, killing everyone aboard both times then activating their bombs to erase the ships from the galaxy.

As the run ended, he walked over to his lander and turned on the shower as hot as it would go. As he stripped off his skintight jumpsuit, he admired his scars. He knew his old friends. They would by now have put forth their best effort, had the most expensive cosmetic work done, tried to hide the scars of their past however they could manage. Here in exile, however, Quinn didn’t care. His scars remained fresh as they ever were, stark reminders of what he was running from. Of why he had to be here and not out there. Actions, he knew, have consequences. It doesn’t matter whether or not those actions are intentional or incidental.

The shower binged as he was thinking, so Quinn turned back around and entered the scalding water. The water rushing over his body, his muscles, his scars, it felt good to him. Felt right. He showered the proper length of time and, at exactly nine and a half minutes, he pressed the finish shower button. The water rapidly cooled from forty-five down to the chilly fifteen. He was used to such stark temperature differences, it happened whenever his rock passed a star.

After thirty seconds, the chilly waters had theoretically closed off the pores of the showerer, and so the shower automatically shut off. Quinn stood only a heartbeat in the shower stall, letting the last vestiges of the cold-water drip from his head down his body. Then, with a deep breath, he stepped out into the main room and flipped the switch for the dehydrator unit. It was a model from a decade ago, and being so, it took a minute to wick all the water from the air and additional ten seconds to dry his mostly hairless body. He flipped the switch back and knew would take another ten minutes before it was back to normal hydration in the capsule. Quinn didn’t plan on remaining inside for that.

Stepping out of the lander, he made his way to a small spot at what he’d arbitrarily decided was the northern pole of the comet. It had been the spot furthest from the first star that he’d boarded the rock near. Sitting on the section of ice which he’d flattened and evened out into his chair, Quinn began his breathing exercises. The fact that there was no air to breathe didn’t stop him. It was a matter of focus, and he could muster a near infinite amount of that. He breathed deeply in the air that his internal components pumped out into his surrounding space, taking as much of it in as he could, trying to touch the emptiness of space. He knew that his companion wouldn’t allow that, even in standby, but that was the purpose of the exercise. Too keep that little monster busy and keep it from developing any more.

Then, as he finished breathing in, he let all of that air out of his body, hoping to overwhelm the system the other way, by having it overcommit to any mode of air production. That was all that mattered, the commitment of the machine inside him. This was his routine, his attempt to pacify the most dangerously aggressive and pugnacious machine in the known universe. He’d lost the battle with it once, he’d teach it to stop fighting, no matter how many millennia he had to spend sitting on a chunk of ice hurtling through space. He continued to breathe deeply. In. Then, out.

He did so for the exact amount of time scheduled, precisely two hours of meditation. Not a second more, not a second less. Then, as the time concluded, he stood up and walked to the other side of the ice-ball, his arbitrary south pole. Where the north pole was for self-control, for showing that violence wasn’t necessary for keeping one safe, the south was for examining the beauty of space. For plotting where they were in the galaxies and figuring out how the elements all worked together to paint such a beautiful picture. The easel was standing there, a blank canvas stretched across it. Gazing up to the stars above him, Quinn picked up the painting materials and began to paint the stars, the nebulae, everything he could see with his enhanced eyes. The galaxies had so much beauty to reveal to one who payed attention, and he hoped his daily paintings would help his compatriot see that as well.

Quinn hadn’t been a great painter at the beginning of this journey. He hadn’t even been a good one. Spending two hours a day, every single day, for ten years painting such similar skyscapes did wonders for his skill, especially at painting the universe at large. The development day to day, if he’d looked back through the painting, would be miniscule, but such constant development meant that the paintings now were near masterpieces by comparison. Had he spent more than two hours on them, they might well become masterpieces, but that wasn’t the point. The morning was not about creation, but instead about preventing destruction, showing the worth of pacifism. Soon enough, his two hours were finished, and he lay back down the painting tools and took the canvas from the easel.

Walking back across the comet with canvas in hand, Quinn stopped at his small shelter. In the back room, he carefully placed the canvas on top of the others, the beginning of the fifth pile of a thousand. He didn’t give the others a second glance as he shut the shed’s doors and walked into the shelter, to his makeshift workroom. This was all constructed from scratch, from elements of his lander that he didn’t need, from debris he passed on his flight, from the ice he was living on top of, at times. He grabbed a jumpsuit off the wall and pulled it on. Then, sitting down at a tablet he’d set up like a proper terminal, he began his review of everything that went wrong when he gave up control.

The tablet flickered with the security video as he watched the worst thirty minutes of his life back in slow motion, pausing at marked instances to inform himself of critical mistakes made by his companion when it was in control. The process had started as an hour-long process, but now took three full hours to complete, as he paused the video so frequently. On the positive side, he’d stopped adding new breaks three years into the exile, so in all likelihood, it would never exceed three hours.

He watched through the mission review, as the lifeless force behind his eyes stalked through the Hadrian facility, murdering soldier and scientist alike. It seemed more a slasher movie than security footage, but that mattered little. This video session was the conclusion of the ‘do not destroy’ portion of his day. He didn’t know whether it was effective at dissuading his companion or not, but that mattered little. It was the routine of the matter, and eventually his strict set of rules would change its viewpoint.

As the video came to a close, he walked out of the workroom and into the main area of his makeshift shelter. It was massive, despite being cobbled together out of random materials. Today, he thought with a smile, he was going to continue his work on the coffee table that he’d started the day before. He knew he wouldn’t be hosting anyone on this rock for a thousand years, at least, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want the shelter to be as homey as possible. He had two hours and fifteen minutes to construct it. Getting down on his knees, Quinn began to solder the metal together with the laser in his arm. He used his tools of destruction for creation to show his companion that it was possible. It needed to understand that fact.

Quinn, however, was not the handiest of individuals, as the cobbled together nature of his shelter showed, and though he finished the coffee table, it had a slight lean to it. A slope that would only be noticeable if someone put something that could roll on it, but a slope nonetheless. Content that it was good enough, he stood up and walked out to the lander, to the database access unit. Every night, he spent three hours standing before that unit, reading up on the fundamentals of art, of science, of theology, of economics, of philosophy, of everything bit of data that he took from passing ships which wasn’t about war and death. Settling in for a rousing read on existential nihilism, he began to read.

It wasn’t rousing at all. In fact, by the end of his regulated three-hour long education on the topic, he’d grown somehow more disillusioned in the universe than before. He’d been fascinated by existentialism, and intrigued by nihilism, but combining the two was nothing like them separated. It was downright depressing.

With a sigh, Quinn returned to his shelter’s workroom, and began the newest entry in his journal. This entry, tinged unfortunately by the research on the pointlessness of life he’d just finished, was not particularly uplifting. It accounted his emotions during the meditation matter-of-factly, the pain, the strain, and the repetitive nature of life. It went on to complain about the majesty of the universe, stating that, despite its beauty, how massive and intricate it is shows just how pointless his own life was in the greater scheme of things. Moving on to his construction project, he realized that he was proud to have finished it, despite the imperfections, because it wasn’t as though anyone would care about his imperfection. Then finally, about his research, he simply put down that it was a waste of three hours which did nothing but bring him down.

As he finished his hour of journaling, Quinn shut off his tablet, and walked over to the storage closet. Taking a new sheet of canvas, he stretched it over a frame, and walked it out to the easel, setting it carefully on top of it, preparing himself for the next day. Taking in the universe one last time, he returned to the small cot in his shelter, and fell asleep.

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