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+--- Thread: Sisyphean, indeed. (/showthread.php?tid=115724)
Sisyphean, indeed. - Petitioner - 05-23-2014
I.N.D.E.N.TJimmy woke up. He found himself in the same dark room he had fallen asleep in, with a faint orange-yellow bulb dead-center the ceiling the only source of illumination. He wished he would have woken up in another room instead. But where else ought Jimmy have awoken if not where he fell asleep? His bunk was comfortable enough. He had, after all, gotten middle bunk, and Jimmy had always liked small spaces. He shifted around a little, before leaning his head over the small barrier that prevented him from rolling down onto the floor in his sleep – or at any other time, for that matter – and looked around in the dim light.
I.N.D.E.N.TChad was still there, in the lower left bunk right across the way. Chad was a pretty light sleeper, but Jimmy sure thought it seemed like he was out like a light this cycle. Immediately above Chad lay no one. Jimmy briefly wondered where Rutger had gotten to – perhaps he had changed his schedule? – before deciding he didn’t particularly care, as long as he wasn’t sick down in medical or something like that. Content that he wasn’t the only one in the room, Jimmy laid back in his bunk and pulled the covers over his head, wishing that he would have woken up in another room than the same dark one he had fallen asleep in, with its faint orange-yellow bulb dead-center the ceiling as its only source of illumination.
Monotony. - Petitioner - 05-23-2014
I.N.D.E.N.T And there he lay, awake, for several minutes, the company-issue fiber blanket slowly making breathing more challenging. He was trying to make himself hotter in hopes of becoming sleepy and leaving the dark room with himself as the destination, but all he really succeeded in doing was becoming uncomfortable. He kicked the blanket off to the side, against the wall immediately to his right, baring his skin and skivvies to the lukewarm, recycled air of bunk G7.
I.N.D.E.N.TJimmy sighed to himself, begrudgingly rubbing the sand from his eyes and stretching out of habit. He turned and hung his legs over the edge of the bunk, and stared at them for a moment, taking in their familiarity without any particular purpose. They looked almost like carrots in the dim lighting, and Jimmy drank in the strange-but-now-familiar sight with all the eagerness of a farmer signing a mortgage. After some amount of time probably between twenty and seventy-five seconds, Jimmy dropped off the bunk soundlessly onto the steel floor.
I.N.D.E.N.THe shivered a bit as the pads of his feet came into contact with the cold metal, a brief chill running up his spine, clothed only in the skin of his back, which also looked strikingly carrot-like under the conditions in the bunk. Orienting himself to face the direction opposite the one all the bunks in the room faced, he bent down and pulled from his bed-chest the first pair of clothes that made themselves commonplace. A simple gray uniform, distributed to all the off-duty Interspace escort pilots on Fujisawa. He dressed quickly, having had quite a lot of practice at it by now. Once clothed, he one-eighty’d and made his way to the door of the bunk, not bothering to close his locker - everyone’s had about the same things in them, anyway. Jim pressed his foot down on the pedal at the center of the steel door, and it opened before him.
RE: Sisyphean, indeed. - Petitioner - 05-16-2016
I.N.D.E.N.T The quiet buzzing of the white fluorescent lights lining the ring-shaped hallway that was Level G was a familiar sound. It occurred briefly to Jimmy that, at one point, it had almost been comforting to hear the audible result of enough UV rays to give a genetically-engineered, test-tube-grown mammoth seventeen kinds of cancer processed into a form usable to humans and fed into mercury vapor wrapped in a glass-and-plastic tube; that all that was done solely for his convenience, so he didn't trip and fall on Chad's crumpled flightsuit that was, for some reason, lying in the middle of the hall.
I.N.D.E.N.TToday, though – today? tonight? cycles in space were weird and still nobody could agree on the technically-correct terminology – Jimmy took no comfort in it. The quiet buzzing of the white fluorescent lights, naught but a dim part of the background to anyone else who might be awake at the time, were, to Jimmy, overwhelming. He stumbled forward out of the bunk, and the metal door closed behind him, abandoning him to the ceaseless monotone screaming of the lamps lining the ring-shaped hallway that was Level G.
RE: Sisyphean, indeed. - Petitioner - 12-26-2016
I.N.D.E.N.T The gentle pneumatic hissing of the machinery, hidden in the walls, that operated the bunk door closing the portal behind him sounded, to Jimmy, like a gunshot aimed at his head mixing in with the malevolent screams of the uncaring lights. The repetitively criss-crossing X patterns of the rug looked for all the world like prison bars. Metal wall in front of him, metal door behind him, no windows out to space, no escape. Although there was more in his life, right now, all that Jimmy could even feint at remembering was every single stuffy hour, every monotonous minute, every miserable, oppressive second of his life spent in the halls of Level G.
I.N.D.E.N.T He staggered forward, nearly bumping his head against the sterile-white hallway wall a good couple feet in front of where he just stood. One hand reached out, reflexively, through the blinding familiarity of recycled air breathed a million times over already, and propped the rest of Jimmy's body up just before his forehead would've made the same collision. Worse than a thousand nights staring at that dim orange bulb dead center the ceiling, more jarring than the highest-realism-graded simulations of a cockpit cracking, was the sudden onset of nausea. Jimmy heaved all over the floor, and faintly considered maybe his body was warning him against leaving too much of himself in this place – parts of himself that janitors couldn't clean up, and parts that couldn't be replaced.
RE: Sisyphean, indeed. - Petitioner - 09-13-2018
I.N.D.E.N.T There was so much that couldn't be replaced. Jimmy felt like everywhere he went, every house he'd lived in, every station he'd been transferred to, every port he'd spent the night at, he'd always lost something. A rolling stone gathers no moss, and he certainly had none. He felt like a stone stuck in a river, with every jump sequence and every docking procedure the water wearing him down, eroding him so fast he couldn't even hope to fathom how jumbled this metaphor had gotten. That was okay, though, because the ringing in his head gave way to the ringing of the lights in his ears, blinding his eyes, and the scent of vomit reminding him that he was flesh and blood, not igneous or sedimentary.
I.N.D.E.N.T Jimmy fell to his knees, and the feeling of - what was it, even? The feeling of the things. All this unconscionable nonsense was drowning Jimmy in himself, and every second he felt a gasp of air, a single instant's lucidity, all he could think was how he chose this, how it didn't matter that this wave of whatever it was crashed over him and it was his fault, and he didn't cry but started drowning himself again. It wasn't Level G that was his prison - the whole galaxy wasn't wide enough to let him find the escape that he really needed.
RE: Sisyphean, indeed. - Petitioner - 12-27-2019
I.N.D.E.N.T He chose this. He chose this. He chose this. Nobody made him. Everybody had their struggles, Jimmy included, but his life was what he had made of it, and even if the rug he stood on had been made in a factory on Honshu by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Kishiro Technologies, the repetitively criss-crossing prison bars on it were of his own design. Jimmy tried desperately to forget that. Let the smell of vomit fill his nostrils. Let the barely-audible buzzing of the lights overwhelm his ears. Let the sterile-white hallway wall occupy the entirety of his vision and force his optical nerves to transmit the same picture to his brain nearly seventy-seven times per second. Think about how he chose this, how flawed he is, how many sins he committed every day, no, think about the smell of vomit, think about the barely-audible buzzing of the lights, think about the sterile-white hallway, think about...
I.N.D.E.N.T No. Think about all the hurt. Think about all the irresponsibility. Think about all the burdens he agreed to shoulder and then dumped into the bin when he thought nobody was looking. Think about all his flaws. Think about how he deserved to be followed by himself no matter how many light years he flew. This was only a prison because Jimmy was a criminal and he made it one, because he couldn't think about those things. Jimmy wondered if he could ever think about them. He wondered who he should call about the pile of vomit he'd just made. Could he even speak over the intercom, or would the guilt catch in his throat and make that pile on the floor the last thing to ever come out of his mouth?