Suma Mandalapu

“The will of man is the strongest known force; once this will is lost, so is lost the meaning of life.”

He quietly looked ahead, outside the see-through glass. There was a void ahead of him, one behind him, one surrounding him and there was one inside him— engulfing him, scourging him.

What is the point? He thought.

There did not seem to be any. He was lost. In all sense. It was driving him insane, corrupting his soul, making him vulnerable and weak.

He came back to the inner shell of his spaceship. There were times once, when he thought he was peaceful and content. There used to be days, when he was alone, as he was now but then something was different back then. He was not in an automated spaceship on a quest for planets. He was at home. Home sweet home. That he missed, or he thought he missed. He was never sure of his thoughts or his feelings. To him they were vague and most times, non-existent. But that did not stop the unrest he felt or the upheaval that tormented him relentlessly.

He was methodical. If there was a consequence, there had to be a source for it. If he was perturbed, there ought to be a reason. But he found none. This was his dream, exploring the outer realms of the universe. He should have been ecstatic. All he knew was something was dying inside him. Something important.

He walked slowly through the concentric circles in the shell. The quad was empty and unfurnished. The metallic walls that spaced it mirrored his image creating an infinite loop of him. He stopped and looked at himself. He was a handsome man. Tall, fair skinned, blue eyed and dark haired. His hair kept falling into his sapphire eyes, which were crystal clear but somehow inexplicably sad. He came near one of the walls and softly slid his hand on his image. He felt numb touching the cold object. And revulsion at its perfection and his own. He was beautiful, an immaculate being, the finest product of élan and intelligence. The only one chosen out of the seven thousand eight hundred seventy six adeptly trained space personnel. He was in all sense perfect. He hated himself for that. There was beauty in imperfection; imperfections made reality real and believable. But this whole thing he got himself into, it did not seem so. Something was very wrong about it. Rationally perfect and emotionally incomplete.

Did perfection mean a sense of completion? If you were perfect, would you feel content? He wanted to know. He felt devoid. This sense of missing something always irked him. He knew he had to know something, a something which he did not know now but somehow would know if he had seen it or was near it, he would then be able to correlate and comprehend. And be at peace again.

His memory always beguiled him. Sometimes, random flashes of distant lands and dreams entailed him into endless reveries, where he hoped he would escape this ghastly loneliness and desolateness. And some days, sometimes many days in a row, he felt no hunger, no thirst, no sleep and no feeling. He would just sit and stare blankly into space. He had a theory that technology might have been the cause. The basics of human requirements were missing, which to him seemed necessary but to the system were abstract and distracting. They would even be categorized as an indulgence. The system never indulges you, it enslaves you. He longed for the most simplest of things, a breath of fresh air. But that’s a luxury in space. Good hot food but he only had to have a pill a day and that would be enough to sustain his system. Nothing beyond was needed and nothing beyond was supplied. Everything was optimized. Every issue accounted for and taken care of.

There was contempt. There was dissatisfaction. There was self-loathing and then there was embitterment.

“Planet 2736, Alpha Renouri System,” a voice echoed from nowhere. The mainframe of the spaceship burst awake with the announcement and there was chaos for a moment. Many panels and monitors sprung out from the metallic walls and displayed numerous information of the planet named before. There were images, graphs and numbers all over. He slowly got himself to one of them and perused over.

He froze. An image flickered in his mind. He remembered her voice though not who she was. It seemed faint, soft, too good to be true but definitely alive whispering three words she said long ago. There were enough. He felt somehow light as he looked at the massive planet ahead of him. A red monolithic planet.

“Wait and hope.”