Midway: Chapter 2
Two years ago…
As a doctor, she knew exactly the right amount to give herself; enough to get a maximum high on the drug and enough to be certain of her death, but carefully not so much that she died right away. It was important that she not miss out on her very last chance for a stolen moment of artificial pleasure.
Nobody knew she was a drug addict, though she wouldn’t have phrased it in quite that way to herself. She didn’t know how she would describe it to herself, or to anyone else for the matter. It had never been anything she’d ever had to discuss with anyone in any capacity… it had never come up. The term ‘addict’ itself had become such an anathema and no longer existed in the ship’s living lexicon. Like so much else it had been left behind on Earth eight decades ago. There was alcohol on the ship, but it was tightly controlled and for the most part only broken into for public occasions of celebration. It was her duties as ship’s physician which granted her access to the synthetic opioid based pain medication on the ship.
She rarely had much to do as the ship’s doctor. Strict control of the ship’s microbiome meant that there had never been any breakouts of any kind of infectious disease. Genetic disorders also didn’t exist since the genome of each child was carefully screened before their embryo was created and implanted into their mother. The only medical emergencies which ever came up were injuries resulting from exercise or sport, life preserving procedures late in life, and palliative care very late in life.
Even these situations hardly required her skills; the surgical chamber could and did perform virtually all of these functions autonomously. For a long time she’d kept trying to reminding herself though, that she hadn’t really been trained to actually perform these duties, but instead to simply preserve the knowledge and abilities themselves.
But by god it left her bored, so bored… but even this insufferable boredom hadn’t been what drove her to the drug, though it certainly didn’t help. She’d suffered the boredom for decades without resorting to intoxication for relief. It was the terrible secret she’d learned, the information for which she was entirely ill equipped, and had no idea at all how to process.
She could have spoken to the ship’s psychiatrist about it, but he was her friend and colleague… the sad reality was that there was no stranger on the ship whom she could go and bare her soul to in absolute confidence. No secrets known by more than one people could ever be kept on a ship this size, in a community so small. Or so she figured…
She began with just dipping into the ship’s alcohol supply which in principle everyone was free to if they logged their use. But quickly she would have been flagged as indulging too often and have drawn attention to herself. When she did graduate to the synthetic opioids, she already suspected that other people had begun to talk about how she might be developing a problem, or at the very least the makings of a problem. She may have been imagining it, but people seemed noticeably relieved when she ‘stopped altogether.’
How could she have gotten here? she asked herself. She’d been asking herself that question a lot the last few days… From her tertiary education she knew the term ‘double bind’ and as she understood it, it seemed to fit the situation she found herself in. What her education didn’t provide, was any helpful suggestions as to how to find a way out of it.
The situation as it was, was absolutely intolerable. She could not under any circumstances see continuing to just live in this way, knowing what she knew, and being totally alone in it for the last several decades of her life. Equally unconscionable was any prospect of revealing what she knew. It would hurt the people she loved so much… and damage them in unimaginable ways, or so she figured… She couldn’t imagine any circumstance in which it wouldn’t disturb them any less than it did her. She couldn’t do that to them… She imagined that as rough as her death might be for her husband and her… and her children, knowing the truth which she’d learned would be much worse for them.
Instead of damaging them, she began damaging herself with the substances instead. First it was the alcohol, and then she graduated to the synthetic opioids.
Today, she had decided it was time. Life had become unlivable. The absurdity of it all; her life, her situation… she could no longer remember why she was bothering to breathe anymore and continue to beat her heart. The effort just didn’t seem worth it anymore. Once upon a time she believed in the New Horizon mission as much as her husband did… but now, after figuring it all out, it just all seemed like such a cruel joke which only she got.
Actually the final decision had come to her several days earlier, and she’d been much happier since making the decision. People had in fact noticed, and had been commenting about how happy they were to see that she seemed to be feeling so much better. She did feel better; she was relieved to know that all the hurt would be over so blessedly soon. She’d been making the preparations; she’d been thinking for some time about how exactly she’d do it.
She made a date for herself, late at night when everyone else would be sleeping to minimize the chance of anyone disturbing her. She loaded up some rapid absorption skin patches with her favourite drug cocktail (she’d had a lot of trial and error practice by this point after all). It was enough to be certain of the ultimate result, but not so much that it would work too quickly. She was in the zero gravity bubble, her favourite place to get high. It was as close as she could possibly be to being physically at one with the universe, if being spiritually so was so far behind her that she could no longer remember ever feeling that way…
Drifting through the empty space of the zero gravity bubble, in a ship drifting between the eternal void between the stars, she herself silently drifted away into the peaceful nothingness from which she came.