Compression

Chapter 1 BREATHE [[Next->1.1]]

You wake with a pounding headache, groaning in pain. But the groan sounds strange. You’re immediately aware of two things. The first is that you’re wearing a space suit, the sound of your breathing filling the helmet around your head, the thickly padded material making your movement sluggish and difficult. The second thing you’re aware of is that something is blocking the visor of your helmet, something big and square in the center of your vision. You groan as you try to move, but the thing moves with you, like it’s stuck to the helmet. As your vision clears, you see that this obstructing object is… a sticky note? “What…?” you murmur, reaching up with a gloved hand to pull it off. As your eyes struggle to focus on the words written on the note, you are again disturbed by the sound of your own voice, as if it’s entirely unfamiliar to you, yet you don’t know how you think it’s supposed to sound. Finally, your space suit hand gets a grip on the note and peels it off of the helmet. [[Read the Note]]

There, on the note, written in large, shaky letters, are the words: DON’T REMOVE SUIT THE AIR KILLS And your blood turns to ice. [[Panic]]

You start to panic, breathing faster, not at all helped by the fact that your own voice still sounds strange to you, which only makes you breathe harder. Your heart skips a beat as you glance down and to the right, though you’re not sure why—it’s as if on instinct. Your eyes focus on the indicator in the corner of your vision, a part of the display illuminated on the inside of your helmet like a screen. Shown there in bright blue is a little bar, about 20% depleted, and beside that is the label “O2”. Yet somehow, before you even saw it, you knew this indicator was for your oxygen, showing how much air you have left. You stop and close your eyes, relaxing and controlling your breathing. You don’t know how you know to do this; like the oxygen indicator, it feels like instinct, embedded into you. Right now, you focus on what’s in front of you, clear your mind of distractions, forget about what you can’t answer and think about what you can. What you know is this: You can’t remove your suit, because apparently the air outside will kill you. So, conserving your breath is everything. [[Breathe]]

You know based on your oxygen indicator that you have about 20 hours of air left in your suit, and that you’ve spent four. But *how do you know that?* How do you know the air capacity of your space suit and yet you don’t know why you’re wearing it or even where you are? You take a deep breath and look around, checking your surroundings. You realize you’re in some kind of medical bay, a small clinic. There are comfortable if somewhat modest cots, various instruments you can’t identify on the tables. You try to turn, but something stops you, pulling on the back of your suit. You reach back behind you—something you’re surprised you can do with your less-than-flexible arms, but you’re starting to realize this suit isn’t quite as bulky as, say, a 1960s NASA suit. It’s sleeker, thinner, and has a yellow and black color scheme. Reaching back, you feel a few heavy-duty wires leading into the back of your suit. You yank at them and they pull right out, unplugging from the ports in your space suit’s back. Somehow, you knew it was safe to do that. But how…? [[Proceed->What You Know]]

You try to think for a moment, think about this bizarre and somewhat terrifying situation you’ve found yourself in. Evidently, you’re an astronaut—you know how to use your space suit, after all—but you don’t know much else. You know you’re in a potentially life-threatening situation, with the air in this… place, wherever that is, being contaminated. You know that even with as far as space travel technology has come, it’s still relatively easy for a space station or base to be compromised if an airborne contaminant leaks into the air supply. Yet… you also know that none of the emergency indicator lights in the upper corners of the room are illuminated to indicate such a contamination. You have all this knowledge, but you don’t know how you got here. You don’t know where you are. You try to think, back to what you were doing before… But you come up empty. There is no “before.” Your mind is blank. You start to panic again, scrambling to remember who you are, why you’re here, your own name, *anything*. But nothing comes. Your past is empty. “What the hell… what…” you gasp, and it hits you now why your voice sounds strange to you, the truth sinking in with a horrible gut-wrenching feeling as you realize *you don’t know the sound of your own voice.* Your oxygen indicator blinks red and a small beep alerts you to the little downward pointing arrow next to the O2 gauge, warning you that you’re using up your air at an increased rate, which only makes you panic more. Just then, something else blips, a sound you recognize as the alert tone of an automated message a half second before it appears in the top right corner of your screen. “Reminder: PRESS PLAY” it reads. [[What…?]]

You stare at the message for a moment, hoping maybe it will clarify or elaborate, but it simply disappears after a few seconds. You sit forward, realizing you were in a chair, and here you see a pair of monitors resting just below your vision, obscured by the borders of your helmet. Each monitor is apparently attached to the chair you rest in by an adjustable arm. On the left monitor is an image of a human brain, with certain areas highlighted. Yours, you’d guess. On the right monitor is a mostly blank screen, bordered neatly with a graphic in the top right showing the word “Asterus” with a stylized letter A, which immediately clicks in your brain not unlike the things you’ve remembered about your space suit—Asterus is a space agency. Below that is a header reading, “Voice Memos”, and below that, a single message with a length of three minutes and nine seconds, a play button beside it, labeled, “Before I Forget”. [[Press Play->Before I Forget]]

“I have to make this quick. Don’t have a lot of time.” As soon as you hit the play button, your head spins as you hear the sound of your own voice. It’s still strangely unfamiliar to you. The recorded voice sounds ragged, shaken, exhausted, almost on the verge of tears or as if you had already been crying. “If the procedure worked, hopefully that will mean you don’t remember anything about your life or the people in it. Because all of them are dead.” You can’t help but take in a shaky gasp of air as this settles in. But the message hardly gives you time to process. “We don’t know what happened, but the Earth is gone. “About two weeks ago, we received an SOS from Asterus MC, saying that an unexplained phenomenon was causing mass deaths and disappearances in the mid-western United States. They had theories; at first they thought maybe it was some kind of virulent pathogen, but the spread pattern was closer to radioactive fallout carried on the air, yet there was no trace of radiation. They determined whatever it was *was* spreading through the air. Then they stopped transmitting. By the time the first response team got to Earth—or, um… got to where Earth should have been… there was nothing. No Earth. Then they went dark, too. “We know this: No one who has ever tried to find the Earth has returned. Notably, traveling to where the planet would be if it were still in orbit around the sun simply reveals empty space. But anyone who goes to that last known position loses contact. So, whatever the threat is that killed the planet is still there, and it kills anyone who gets too close. “Furthermore, we know that this threat is communicable via long-range interstellar comms systems and radio. Those who travel to the last known position of Earth usually send out distress signals—not the kind that’s manually sent by an operator, but the ones sent out automatically by a ship that’s suffered critical damage. We also know… that anyone who attempts to open these SOS messages disappears in the same way, and that anyone who travels to those last known locations meets the same fate. This has created what I’ve dubbed ‘Red Zones’—No Fly Zones, Exclusion Zones, what have you—areas in space where the threat has spread to. “So, before I forget, the rules: 1: *Do not* answer any urgent messages or distress calls. 2: *Do not*, under any circumstances, visit the Red Zones. 3: *Do not return to Earth*.” The message ends. [[Next Chapter->Chapter 2]]

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Unfortunately, that's all of this game I have written so far. Feel free to support me if you want to see more! [[Restart->START]]

COMPRESSION [[Next->Chapter 1]]