███████, Skarkon II
A camera drone activates. It’s in the mess hall, and Mahazkei is sitting by himself with only a glass filled with a translucent cherry-colored liquid. He’s dressed down as he was in the last message, with the brighter ambient lighting better illuminating the second pattern over his “Crusher” arm. It looks like a leopard print mottle, but the prints are not parallel, being rotated and placed at random all over the arm. He sets it down, having looked at it for under a minute, and then picks up the glass with the liquid, and makes it circle in the glass.
“Just had a few thoughts, symptoms of a larger problem from being stuck out here. Just felt like jawing a while about stuff. Better for me, that way. Also keeps the post from sinking because I got busy contemplating infinity and death in ways I didn’t when I was a kid.”
He swirls the glass a little more before holding it up to the light. “Cherry-flavored electrolite supplement. Used to- no, still is one of my favorite drinks. Couldn’t get enough as a kid. Literally.” He sets it down. “Few months after I was born, not much older than a year, I had a seizure.”
He sits still, oddly subdued. “No spasms, thrashes, nothing like that. Just stopped breathing. Like I died on the spot.” He brightens, a little. “Then I woke up. Scared the hell out of my parents. Took me to see a neurologist, told them the news. Perscribed this really horrible medicine that I rarely took unless they made me. Didn’t know how bad it was until I was old enough to speak. I was eight when the next one hit. I was standing up, reciting something when I fell unconcious and hit my head on the back of a shelf on the way down.”
He chuckles, remembering something. “Woke up with a headache and a bunch of suction cups wired across my newly shaved head and my chest. I was recessitated on the spot, and unconcious all the way to the emergency room. They monitored me for a week, with nothing to do but sit quietly in a dark room and obey directions from the doctors who were monitoring me. Answer questions about what I was thinking. They learned I had epilepsy brought on by a sodium deficiency, so their solution was to give me stuff with salt. Anything. This drink, pretzels, you name it. I even learned my grandfather lightly salted fruit slices before eating them, so I adopted the behavior.”
He shakes his head with a fond smile. “Got a craving for the stuff to this day. Limited the attacks to once a year or every two years. Last one I remember was when my mother was trying to give me a haircut and… ah, nah.”
His expression quiets again. “But all those times I could remember. The ones I probably could, anyway. Each time, it started like a numbness. Started at the fingertips, my toes. Crawled up, under my skin. Made me feel weak. My vision clouded like I was being gassed, rolled over everything I could see but the only one it took out was me. Then. Nothing. By this time my brain had lost connection, any kind of sensory input or feedback, and I was entirely senseless and rendered unconcious, my autonomic functions having temporarily shut off entirely without any passive feedback from the CNS. But I wasn’t asleep. Felt like it, when you wake from a deep sleep, and you don’t want to move because you can’t much anyway. I was awake. I could see. Feel phantom sensations of my eyes moving in their sockets, looking upon an endless shroud of… nothing, really. I can’t sense anything. But it “looked” like a cloud of smoke, churning and roiling with stuff I couldn’t sense.”
His eyes stare out, without focus. “When I was ten they told me that when it happens it stops my heart. Stopped. A few years on and I concluded that every time that happens- happened, I died. And saw what comes after.”
He snaps out of his dour mood, and waves his hands. “Now you can argue that maybe since I hadn’t completely died, kicked the bucket, that it’s more of a “waiting room”, or that you need to be dead for a day or something, longer than I was out, or that because I don’t believe in one faith or another, or I believe in something or nothing that that’s all I see, or that because I don’t have an active imagination that I saw ■■■■ all when my time would have come but ultimately didn’t- nah.” He is gesticulating the whole time, dismissing the thoughts as he names them. “To that last one, I have to say you’d be wrong since here I am in the belly of a vehicle the size of a firebase. It takes imagination to conceive of it, and more to make it work. And as to the others, I’m not going to argue what you should or shouldn’t believe based on the oxygen deprivated halucinations of a thirty-something year old capsuleer from when he was a child. That, that’s stupid.”
He lifts the glass and drinks from it, setting it down with a solid thunk. “But what isn’t, least not to me, I don’t care how crap the crew calls this drink. I think it’s wonderful.”
He finishes the drink, and then reaches over to turn the camera off.