They called me the Rouge Rider

Submitted into Contest #249 in response to: Write a story about a character driving and getting lost.... view prompt

0 comments

Suspense Fiction

Entry: 118. Time: 000589:34578ET. Currently: Passing by the exoplanet Sponsus291b. There isn’t much else after this, except the star it orbits.  

You know, now that I think of it the way that I put Entry, #, sounds so formal. Like a nurse’s log or a scientist’s last attempt on an experiment, praying for it to finally work. This is my diary. In fact, I don’t want anything I write to execute such formality. I’m done with formality. I have been done. For 118 days, when I got away from the CAW. 

CAW. The Constitutional Alliance of Worlds. I mention the name, in case I forget that too. I won’t let myself be fooled again. 

...for some reason, the numbers 1, 1 and 8 have a special meaning to me. I can’t freaking figure it out. I was at my desk in the hub as I tried to put the numbers in a way that made sense. I mention the hub, for I hope someday I’ll read this back and not be here. 

11-8? Was I once living in the 11th apartment of an eight-floor complex? With a mother and father? 

Did I like my mother? Did I know my father? 

1-18? Was I once a patient in a hospital, in bed 18? 

Was I visited by friends?  

1-1-8? Was this an emergency three-digit phone number, somewhere? 

Did I ever have to call it...? 

Numbers never bothered me. Numbers are my life. They’d never hurt me, till then. I wanted to bawl here in my chair, like a little boy away from home. But home. I have no home. I have a hub. But it’s not a home. 

When I re-learned what a home was, I stopped pretending that I had one here.  

It’s just a place to stay. 

It’s the little things, like the simple number of 118, that I feel, connect the dots- a scent in the wind, a particular flower or shrub, an outfit worn by someone walking by- but ultimately, I can never truly figure out my past. I just want to scream. 

WHO AM I?!?!?!  

I always want to scream. But no one can hear you in space. And I’m running out of water supply- even tears cannot be spared. 

Co- workers said I was a genius at CAW. I can remember that. Even after my accident. A case 041.  

Memory loss.  

Perhaps, the worst thing that could ever happen to you.  

You know you love something for a reason. You hear piano, but you can’t remember why you like it. You like the soft warm glow of a lamp, but you don’t know when you saw it. You see a mother holding her child, but.... 

But.... 

You 

Don’t  

Remember.  

You  

Can't  

Remember.  

 I’ve told myself I don’t need others, friends, even love to survive out here. Only my brain, which only remembered how to navigate and calculate. But that was a lie.   

But what’s knowing a lie if you don’t know the truth. The CAW knew that very well. I didn’t know the truth, and that’s how they got me. 

I’m getting closer to a gray cloud, 0700: 5300. Just falling deeper into darkness. But which darkness is darker? Which is scarier? This big dusty, thick nothing approaching or the fact that I am the equivalent of nothing. I could have everything, but how could you think that, when you have no memory, no ties, not knowing. A deep, drifting, awful void of loneliness.  

Lost. In space. But that’s nothing new. It’s worse.  

Lost, and alone. For the next 30 seconds, for forever? Clueless. Like falling off a cliff, I helplessly cannot do anything about it. 

. . .  

Then what can I do, what can I plan for? Was it possible for me to forget it all, my mystery, my trauma, and simply go on living as a new man, with the acceptance of not knowing who I was? But to grow hard-hearted is the price I’m not willing to pay. There is nothing I can buy to replace the hollowness inside. 

I only know one event from my past: when I was robbed of it. The CAW. I can’t let myself forget. I can’t, I can’t-  

THOSE BASTARDS!!! THOSE NO-GOOD LYING BASTARDS!! THEY LEFT ME!! 

...I left a dent in the left wall by my cot. That probably wasn’t a good idea.  

At least they left me with the ability to do, like I said. I know how to drive and navigate this hub, even if it's into a drifting gray nothing. I know how to write in this diary, even if there is no point in recording my thoughts anymore- four months of no memory, nothing.  

But I still know how to feel.  

Something tells me that it’s proof I still am human, inside. At this point, sometimes crying can make me feel hopeful about things. When I can’t cry, that’s when anger sets in.  

The CAW. Like a death ring. The death of a man’s heart. What’s the point anymore.  

A tear just splotched on my keyboard. Maybe there’s still hope for me. 

Goodnight.  

100792:34891ET. Hey. It’s been a couple hours.  

I’ve realized something. I’ve got to get out of here.  

I’m on my cot, still going through this- what- is it a black hole now? I don’t care. Black holes are no problem, as long as my teleportation still works. But there’s no place I could go that’d get my memory back, so anywhere else just saddens me. So, I haven’t cared.  

I’m sorry about the tangent I had before, though. I promise it’s not me...  

Am I getting more of a sense of who I am?  

I’ll reevaluate that later. I’m writing this in case it’s important. 

First, I was sleeping, and my noise cancellers weren’t working. This awful repetitive beeping was happening by the controls.  

Damn my head- it hurts like a cyborg's skull. I shouldn’t have run into the wall 72 hours ago. That was stupid. Like that would bring my memory back. Damn, it hurts. Let me focus.  

Okay so I’ve done some tests and apparently, I’m not drifting anymore. How am I not drifting. I’m supposed to be drifting. I have no destination course on my PathWay.  

Let me check something... I’m zooming in... My coordinates are 1.200038348PW and 35.43939552PT. The star of Sponsus is out of sight.  

It says I’m in orbit. Orbiting what? There’s nothing here. 

But there’s still a gravitational pull. Aw crap. Let me increase the throttle 35.  

36. Nothing. 37. 40? 50?  I’m stuck in this orbit. I’m not going any faster or slower.  What is going on.  

...It’s been half an hour now since I checked my watch.  This odd force is slowly taking me in circles- but more like in a swirl motion, not an orbit. I feel the hub getting closer to something and tilting, but to nothing. I’m still lost.  

   It’s been an hour since I awoke. The hub is tilted at 20 degrees. There’s gravity here. I can feel it tilt. 20 may not seem like much, but it’s scary.  

2 hours. The hub is going at 540 miles an hour on a 35-degree tilt- like the police movies when the car skids as it drives away. I can feel it tilt. This has never happened. But it’s not my fuel injector making it go like this, no. This is some sort of... I can only theorize... solar wind. But that’s impossible.  

3 hours. 5,004 miles. With every second there’s been tremendous exponential growth in speed, but I’m too panicked to try to figure it out. I was right about my swirl theory. Many of the controls have lost capacity, except the PathWay Finder.  I’m going towards something in circles, and the closer I get, the faster I spin. Like spiraling down the drain.  

10,450 miles. This isn’t what I wished for. 

4 hours. I finished the last of my coffee because I figured this was the end. I drank the last drop before the hub went on a complete 90-degree angle and my room was inhabitable. I’m locked into my controls seat. We’ve been going so fast that I can’t fathom it. I just want this to be over with. I’m simply writing for comfort. Like my lost memory, this could be for 30 more seconds, or forever. I’ll never know. 

Space is completely unpredictable.  

I only wish I could die knowing my own name.  

4 hours, 20 minutes, and I don't want to know how many miles.

Goodbye. 

Entry: 119 Time: 001795: 34395ES. Currently: Home. 

Hello diary... I’m alive, which is obvious I suppose. I bet you have a lot of questions. Well, allow me to end the mystery: 

I was sitting almost completely upside down, 180 degrees and 100,000 miles per hour. 1,000 miles more per ten seconds. 2k, 3k, 4k, 5k. Closer and closer was I getting to the “pit of the drain.” I’d clung to my seat belt and hopped for the best. There was nothing else I could hold, or do, or say. It’s impossible to move when everything around you is so fast paced it’s almost otherworldly... it was otherworldly. 

-Look, I really don’t know how I survived this. But one clue to why is because this was no naturally made force, a spurring energy I so happened to be caught in; In other terms, I was meant to fall into the spiral of nothingness... because it would take me home. I’ll explain in a moment, let me jot this down- 

Soon, the hub ‘fell’ into the ‘drain’ of this gray nothingness, and had me spinning upside down a torturous speed, so fast and awful I prepared myself to explode. 10 seconds of this spinning felt like a lifetime. But that was just my panic.

Suddenly, a peace. Miraculously, the vehicle seemed to slow as it accelerated close to 180,000mph. It sped a bit, then slowed. Sped, then slowed. A bit like a machine. Then slowed, and for good this time. 

Slower, slower. Soon, I was completely still. And then I saw it.  

...before I explain this, umm, let me ask you a question: 

Think of the most heavenly sound you’ve ever heard, along with the most beautiful scene you’ve ever witnessed. Now times it by a hundred, and add a hundred, a thousand million more of these scenes and sounds, piecing together all at once. Now think of your heavenly sound becoming its own images, and your images turning to heavenly sounds, becoming one...you see,  

At the speed of light, life is so clear. At the speed of light, there is only color. Only one color, but all of them. All at once, a tremendous beam struck me, a glorious bright light, that did not kill me, but pulled me. Then,  

(I’m going to start crying)...

Everything came back.  

The hub was still on it’s upside, but that didn’t matter. I crawled upon the ceiling towards the controls, gazing at the brilliance of a hundred, million stars out the portal window. Stars passing. Birthing. The very vastness of space, but within no time at all. Not the kind of time a human could grasp. All and at once together, and my once way of thinking seemed to disappear. The despair of time and weary death- seeming, gone. Instantly.  

Everything. Came back. Infinite. Like a push on my existence, filling a hollow man with love.  

Lost in space was nothing new. Traveling through all of creation from nothing, was

Traveling at the speed of light, was. Perhaps touching the very hand of God, yes.  

The stars zooming by resembled long stretched streaks, yawning from infinity to infinity. Each memory flashed by me with each star, each 000.1 second. I was a father, a husband, a son, a teacher, a scientist, a friend, a shoulder to lean on, a believer. My eyes were wide and big, and my jaw was on the floor. There was nothing else I could do, not even cry, anymore. But I couldn’t take it all in before I passed out, my heart beat expeditious. The streaks made little stars in the darkness behind my eyelids. And I woke up at home. 

And now I know the truth.  

Love will come to those who wait for it.  

...

The Constitutional Alliance of Worlds put me on a Private Mission; a softer way of describing a mission so incredibly important no one can know about it. Because it can NOT fail. The kind of mission that only has one chance to be accomplished, or... well, they’re always accomplished. At least that’s what they always told us.  

I was the guy on this private mission. And they erased my memory after completion, so that I could not even remember my tasks, any details at all.  

Of course, that’s when my curiosity sets in. And I write this to adhere to the fact that this does happen. This is part of the truth of the Alliance.  

And my four months of soul- sucking heartache was simply, procedure. It took four months for me to get home from wherever my starting point was. The way home, was the gray cloud of nothingness. I don’t yet understand how they did it. They set it up, somehow. The spiral of blackness was artificial. My thinking of being adrift, and lost, was artificial.  

But the travel home was so real.  

The beeping I heard was something I was never supposed to hear. It was because of the PathWay Finder, taking me on a secret route they’d set up, that would lead my hub during sleep hours, without my knowledge.  

My wife told me they called me “the Rouge Rider”.  

Four months of loneliness, desperation and despair. I’ll never forget it.  

But at least now, I can remember.  

Goodnight.  

PS: I was born the First day of the First month, of the earth year Three Thousand and Eight.  

1-1-8.  

May 11, 2024 03:36

You must sign up or log in to submit a comment.

0 comments

Reedsy | Default — Editors with Marker | 2024-05

Bring your publishing dreams to life

The world's best editors, designers, and marketers are on Reedsy. Come meet them.