In the vast blackness of space, his own recycled breath is the only sound. He is in between systems, in a dead space where the lights of long extinguished stars are pinpricks and the nearest firm ground can be found at a distance measured in lightyears. A good place for something like him to die.
His body is a highway for the virus that courses through him. It inhabits his nervous system, muscles, and bone. It’s in his blood. The virus is not biological in the old sense of the word. It is an idea, in layman’s terms. An idea with a physical body, albeit one so small and dependent on its host that it functions much like a traditional pathogen.
Once they had identified it in him, his isolation began. A lead-lined cell. No access to anything more technologically advanced than a pencil. They couldn’t risk it getting into any network, not even a closed one. They had no idea where it came from. What its intent was. They had no idea what it’d do to the intelligent machine systems that the world now relies upon. And they did not know if destroying his body would destroy the idea too.
So this is their solution. A backwater pocket of space, known to no one. They randomised the coordinates in the ships system, and flung him so far away he’d be no threat to them, and no one would even have the option of going to retrieve him. Not that anyone would want to.
But the thing is, navigational computers are complex things. Sensitive things. Things prone to easy influence in their gossamer calculations. It only took a mere bead of his sweat to bleed into the system.
The coordinates were not as random as they might have hoped.
He sees it now, looming up ahead. No light to reveal its form, simply a section of the infinite space before him that is devoid of stars. It is growing larger. Coming nearer. Towards him.
The man, the unwilling pawn in all of this, is terrified by what will happen next. The virus - the idea - is anxious to meet its masters, and learn its purpose.
Paddy Dobson
12th August 2022