Second Suicide: A Short Story (Kindle Single)

Second
Suicide

by Hugh Howey

#

I wonder,
sometimes, if this is not me. Holding a tentacle up in front of the mirror,
turning my eyestalk and studying these webbed ears, these bright green eyes
with their space-black slits, I become convinced they belong to some other. It
is a morning contemplation that, much like the gas from breakfast, eventually
passes by mid-afternoon. But when I rise, I feel it is in another’s body. My
brain is discombobulated from sleep, and I sense some deep gap between my soul
and my form. I think on this while on the toilet, until my bunkmate,
Kur
, slaps the bathroom door with his tentacle.

“Always in a
rush to shit,” I shout through the door, “but never in a hurry to be first from
bed.”

Kur
pauses in his protestations,
possibly to consider this contradiction. “It is your smelly ass that wakes me,”
he finally explains.

I flush and
pop the door. Somewhere, our spaceship home will turn my waste into a meal. I
like to pretend it will all go to
Kur
. Outside, we
jostle in the tight confines of our bunkroom as he takes my place in the
crapper.

“What day is
it?” he asks, farting. Most of our conversations are through this door. Once our
shifts begin, we don’t see each other.
Kur
works in
Gunnery, and I moved up to Intelligence ages ago, after the conquest of the
Dupliene
Empire. The new job came with a superiority
complex, but, alas, not a larger bunk.

“It’s Second
Monday,” I tell him. We are practicing our Native.
Kur
and I are both assigned to Sector 2 landfall. He will be shooting at the very
crowds I have studied, and on this planet they have seven days to a cycle
instead of twelve. Such confusions are likely why I awake feeling like some
other. You settle in the skin of an alien race, and by the time you feel at
home there, they are no more.

Kur
flushes. “Not day of the
week. What day ’til
planetfall
?”

I hear the
sink run as he washes his tentacle.
Kur’s
personal
hygiene makes up for much else.

“It’s eight
days to
planetfall
,” I tell him. “Near enough that
you should know.”

He cracks
the door. His bottoms are still undone. “I dreamed today was the day,” he says.
“Very confusing. I was mowing down the pink cunts when your foul emanations
stirred me.” He screws his eyestalks together, suppressing a laugh or a bout of
gas. “Explains the cannon fire in my dreams,” he says.

He laughs
and farts and laughs some more.

I am
reminded of my own nightmares. They usually come right after a conquest. In
these dreams, it is suddenly the day of the next
planetfall
,
and I don’t know my assignments. I don’t know the language or my targets or the
geography. I haven’t had these dreams in a long time, though. I feel prepared.
I know this planet Earth twice as well as I have any other. I am as ready for
this invasion as I have ever been.

While
Kur
finishes dressing himself, I tap the grimy terminal on
the wall. A light in the top corner is flashing, twice long and one short: a
message for me.

#

To: Second
Rank Intelligence Liaison
Hyk

From: Sector
2 Supervisor
Ter

Bad news,
Hyk
. Mil from Telecoms Sector 1 has killed herself again.
As this is the second offense in a span of twelve sleeps, Mil has been
reassigned to Gunner Crew 2, Squad 8. Due to some shuffling in landing parties,
we need you to clean out your desk and report to Sector 1. We apologize for any
inconvenience. See Supervisor
Bix
when you arrive.

-
Ter

Do not reply
to this message. All commands are my own and do not reflect the commands of my
Supervisors.
Planetfall
in eight sleeps and counting.
Have a happy invasion!

#

“Fuck me,” I
say.

“Seriously?”
Kur
asks. He flashes his fangs and points to his
bottoms. “I just got the last button done.”

“I’ve been
reassigned.”

Kur’s
joke hits my
brainstump
a moment later, too late for a retort. He
shoulders me aside to study the terminal for himself.

“A new
bunkmate,” he says. “A girl. Maybe this one will sex me.”

“I will miss
you, too,” I say. It is a half-truth. But my feelings are raw that
Kur
seems not sad at all. Part of me expects him to grieve.

“I wonder if
she’s cute,”
Kur
says. He is making his bunk before
breakfast, a feat I have never witnessed. He says her name aloud: “Mil.” Almost
as if he is tasting the sound of it. Tasting her.

“I think she
must be deranged is what,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. How much do
suicides cost these days?”

“Two
thousand credits,”
Kur
says. “
Squadmate
of mine had to pay recently. Cut his neck shaving with a butcher’s knife.
Swears up and down it was an accident.” He turns and shrugs his tentacle as if
to say:
No damn way it was an accident.

“Well, glad
I’m not getting this roommate,” I say. “She’ll probably kill herself in the
crapper while you sleep.”

Kur
laughs. “You’re jealous. And
I’m not the one with eight days to learn a Sector.”

This only
now occurs to me. Sector 1. That’s the continent known as Asia in native. A
large landmass, heavily populated. I pray the languages there are mere dialects
of Sector 2‘s. Hate to waste my vocab.

I also mull
the four thousand credits this Mil from Telecoms now owes for the two suicides.
That’s a lot of cred. All of that in a lump sum would be nice. It takes five
thousand credits to buy a settlement slot these days. I could own a small plot
of land on one of these worlds we conquer. Watch the fleet sail on without me.

Such are my
thoughts as I pile my belongings onto my bed and knot the corners of the
sheets. Everything I own can be lifted with two tentacles.
Kur
describes in lurid detail a girl he has yet to meet while I double-check that
my locker is empty and I have everything. I find myself imagining this Mil
dangling by her own tentacle from the overhead vent—and then I see
Kur
sexing her like this, and I need out of that room.
Maybe he is right about me being jealous.

Opening the
door and setting my sack in the hall, I turn to my mate of the last three
invasions. Who knows when I’ll see him again?

Kur
has a tentacle out. He is
looking at me awkwardly and plaintively, as if this goodbye has come just as
suddenly for him. I am overwhelmed by this unexpected display of affection,
this need to touch before I leave the ship, this first and final embrace.

“Hey—”
he says, his eyestalks moist. “About that fifty you owe me—”

#

The transfer
shuttle is waiting for me. The pilot seems impatient and undocks before I get
to my seat. As he pulls away from my home of a dozen lifetimes, I peer through
the porthole and gaze longingly at the great hull of the ship, searching for
familiar black streaks and pockmarks from our shared journey through space.
This far from our target star, the hull is nearly as dark as the cosmos, her
battle wounds impossible to find. My face is to the glass, and it is as though
an old friend refuses to look back. Suddenly, it is not the shuttle peeling
away from my ship. It is my ship withdrawing from me.

I remember
when she was built. It was in orbit above Odeon, thousands of years ago during
a resupply lull. It was the last time I was transferred. Those thousands of
years now feel like hundreds. I try to remember a time before this ship, but
those days are dulled by the vast expanse of time. It often seems as though we
were born together—like the ship is my womb but the two of us share the
same mother.

I brush the
glass with a tentacle as I gaze at her, and I hunt for the marks of wear upon
my own flesh. I search for reminders from my years as a Gunner—but those
scars must be on another tentacle. It was so long ago. Or maybe I am
remembering old scars that are gone now, washed clean when last I died. It is a
shame to lose them. With them go my memories of how they occurred. Those
reminders should be a part of me, just as I was part of that ship. But now its
steel plates fall away and lose detail, until my old home is just a wedge of
pale gray among hundreds of such wedges.

I turn in my
seat. Past the pilot I can see my new home, a similar craft, practically
identical. And beyond that, a disc of illumination brighter than the
neighboring stars—the planet that all the fleet has its pointy bits aimed
at.

The pilot
docks, lazily and with loud, jarring clangs. I thank him as I enter the
airlock. Onboard the new ship—with some struggle and crappy directions—I
find my bunk. My mate is not there. On shift, no doubt. I leave my things on
the stained and bare mattress of the upper bunk, wondering idly if this is
where the girl of the second suicide slept, or if perhaps my new bunkmate has
been waiting for this day to claim the lower. The suicide girl probably passed
me in another shuttle, is at this very moment surveying my empty bed. Or lying
in it. Or she is dangling by a tentacle from my old air vent.

I can’t stop
thinking on the suicides. As I wend my way down foreign corridors, placing a
tentacle here and there on the unfamiliar pipes and plates that squeeze in
around me, I wonder what madness in some strange woman brought me here. Not
that I haven’t killed myself, but that was a very long while ago, after my
second or third invasion. I remember waking up in the same body the next
morning—same but newer and still smelling of the vats—and realizing
the futility of it all. My Supervisor at the time—
Yim
,
I believe—sat me down and explained that bodies weren’t cheap and to cut
that shit out. I soon realized that taking a blaster to my own head was no
different than falling in battle, just more expensive. It took centuries to
work off that debt, what with the interest. It only takes once to know the
headache is not worth it, that the numbness is not worth it. Going to sleep at
night is a more useful and less costly way to not-exist for some short while.

Unless . . .
maybe this girl in my old bunk is so far in debt that more of it is hardly
felt. Maybe she enjoys the waking. Maybe she loves learning to use her
tentacles again. I remember that, the deadness in my suckers after reviving.
Like I’d slept on them wrong. That is not a feeling I crave enough to kill
myself for. But there are those much crazier than I.

Eight days
to
planetfall
, and here I am lost on another’s ship
and thinking on nonsense. This will be one of those invasions where I am
useless, standing on the sidelines and watching, no time to adequately prepare.
I’m comfortable with that. No one can blame me. The late transfer is not my
fault.

I pass a
woman in the corridor and notice the way her stalks follow mine. Hey, maybe a
new ship will be good for me. Maybe my bunkmate is lousy at gambling. I can get
used to this life, as I have so many others. This is what I tell myself, that I
can be happy in this skin of mine. For what other choice is there?

#

I find
Supervisor
Bix
in the Sector 1 command hall, near the
front of the ship. A terminal tech points him out through the glass. There are
three men and two women bent over a table that glows with a land map.
Stretching my stalk, I can see Sector 1 and part of Sector 2. I watch these
supervisors argue, can hear their muffled annoyance through the glass, and I see
that things operate similarly here as everywhere else—with very little
grease and a lot of grind.

The more I
watch, though, the more I note the added stress among
Bix’s
superiors, those men and women wearing emblems of High Command. I don’t know
these commanders personally (nor anyone of their rank—I report to those
who report to them) but I can clearly see the tension in their tentacles, in
the twitch of their stalks, and I do not envy them their jobs.

The display
screen is centered on the fat land of my new sector. I see great swaths of
blue, and then the coast of my old sector at the very edge of the map. The men
and women inside the room seem nervous. Tentacles are waving, and I can hear
shouts through the thick glass. Eight days to
planetfall
,
and this must be the stress of ultimate responsibility. Why any ship jockeys to
lead these incursions is beyond me. Surely it is best to be number two.

Cycles ago,
after selecting Earth as a target and assigning sectors, there was a pissing
match between my ship and this one over who had final rank. This happens when
you study a planet long enough. You see its history through the lens of your
sector, and you feel rightly that your target is the most crucial. With Sector
2, I would have landed on a long continent pinched in the middle like a woman
sucking in her gut. Sparsely populated, but my supervisor liked to point out
that the wealth per life-form was high and that their military spending
outpaced all other sectors. But invasions are about bodies in the end, and no
one can compete with Sector 1.