The Man in the Empty Suit by Alexander Gabriel       The room is dark when I wake up. I am lying naked on a cot in the medical bay while a single light flickers hesitantly overhead. From where I'm lying I can see various medical instruments scattered around the room and control panels broken into. Transmission wire hangs from the roof like a hangman's cord. I imagine occasional movements in the darkness around me, I think for a moment that I see a shape pass through the corridor where the medical bay door rests half-open and half shut.        Slowly I get up and wait for ONYX to call to me as he always does but the bay is quiet. I can't hear any movements from the rest of the crew either. My bare foot crunches down on a soft cochlear probe lying on the floor and then I remember that I'm alone on this ship. There isn't anyone else here. No one but ONYX, the ship's computer to stay here with me and keep me company as I sleep on the journey back from the stars.       The corridor is dark but when I step out the bay door I can see the fog my breath makes. The ship is cold, very cold. Something must have gone wrong with the environmental systems, maybe even with the core life support systems themselves. I turn to go back for an environmental suit when I see a bunch of them lying on the corridor floor in front of me. There are thirteen in all. I reach down and unseal the helmet of the first one. The man inside is dead and he is wearing my face. I move down the line of suits and in each one there is a dead man and each one of them is me. Only the thirteenth suit is empty, there is no one inside.        Inside the medical bay the instruments cast long shadows, their blades and probes make them look like alien predators. It is very cold here and I lie back down on the medical bay cot and wait for ONYX to speak to me again. To tell me what to do. But before I do that I lock the medical bay door and brace it tightly with an oversized diagnostic tube... against the cold.       In my sleep there come dreams and a voice saying one phrase "Always one must go back." For a moment I can find no meaning or connection for the phrase and it wanders disassociated inside my brain. Than I remember. One man must always go back. It is fleet procedure. It is the way these things have always been done since the days of the first interstellar colonization ships. Earth's great wells of gravity industry craft the giant ships that travel beyond the sun to build human colonies on alien worlds. Moving on for decades the ships carry millions of colonists to a new world and carry valuable cargo back home, the most valuable cargo is the ship itself. The ship requires no crew but ONYX, the eternal undying computer that pilots the ship, and its sleeping passengers. But yet one man goes back, one man always goes back.       It is a tradition, perhaps one of the few traditions our rootless spacefaring society carried with us on our journey to the stars. With each ship that returns home to Earth from the alien stars, one man returns asleep. There is something of a distrust towards computers in this but if the ONYXs feel insulted they never show it. There is something of an affirmation of human necessity, of human importance in the vast scheme of infinite alien worlds, million passenger ships and the half-sentient computers who run them. And also there is the fear.       When millions of human beings in fragile twenty-kilometer ships are swallowed up by a void that covers time and space, our small solar system alone in the darkness of flickering stars must know that they are all right. Must know that there is no threat which lurks out there without our knowledge. No darkness that waits at the borders of human space. And they must know it from a human being and not from a recording or a machine whose soulless voice cannot comfort our fears in the way that a handshake and a smile from someone who has been there and can tell us that there are no demons under our bed or monsters in our closet. We are safe in our room, in our solar system for now.       Maybe this is the real reason we send out so many ships and go to as many places as we can, not so much from what we have to gain but to search every corner and assure ourselves once and for all that there is nothing out there, that we are indeed alone. One man must always come back and I am that man.      I remember all this as I sleep until Onyx speaks to me when we enter Gaynemede-C Port and I can wake up and tell them all that everything is all right. Instead there is darkness, a flickering light and the reptilian shadows of instruments along the bay wall. And dreams.       ONYX woke me up speaking to me out of the damaged panels, out of the darkness beyond the flickering light. The door to the corridor was still locked but it was still cold in the medical bay, very cold.        "You have to wake up Andrew", ONYX said in his voice that a thousand designers had modified and cultivated to give the impression of caring, to be friendly and above all reassuring. "You have to wake up now. There are things you have to do."       "Like what things?", I asked him.       "The ship has been damaged. Seriously damaged. It has no power and most of its systems and mine no longer work. You must repair them. You must restore power to my systems." There was a hint of emotion in its tone that its designers had never placed there and that I couldn't recognize.       "Where are we?"        There was silence as ONYX processed the question. ONYX has been equipped with massive databanks, everything that is in the Great Memory Processing Storage Vault on Luna is inside Onyx. He can answer most questions in a matter of milliseconds. I waited while he considered my question for almost a minute. Finally he answered and when he did I recognized the emotion that was in his voice.        "I don't know." Onyx answered. The emotion in his voice, it was fear.       In space travel there a million dangers, external threats and perils from the unpredictable shadows and geometries of space beyond our borders but the worst of them is the sickness. They call it by a thousand names but it is most often known as the black hole. It begins quietly as sense of disassociation, of existing always in a narrow point in time that comes with the lack of a day and night routine. The lights may change according to a 24 hour cycle but outside there is no cycle and many first time space travelers slowly drift away like walkers or sat repairmen who've snapped their cords into a fugue state. There is nothing for your mind to hold onto, nothing to grasp but your own thoughts and fears and dreams until escapism becomes cannibalism and your thoughts devour themselves as the false lights change and change and change again.       At first you begin to sleep longer and longer, there is no night or day and you're always tried, you always need one more minute, one more hour, one more day. You find yourself sleeping for long periods and getting up only to eat, to dispose of your waste and than to fall back into sleep. You lose all sense of time, all sense of reality and you slide down the event horizon of the hole. Thinking ahead becomes hard, almost impossible and soon you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again because even the simplest tasks have become very hard to do. By this point most of those with the sickness have lost so much weight they look like starvation victims or corpses. You become emotionally dependent, you regress and often find yourself crying about nothing in particular or about something in your former life you can almost remember but never quiet can. Finally you reach the maw of the hole and it closes its jaws on you, you stop eating at all and than you finally and mercifully die.        Man was not meant to stay awake between the stars where there is no life, no matter and no hope. ONYX changes the lights from day to night but time here is neither. There is no sun that rises or sets, this is a third state of limbo. There is no light here, only darkness and I find myself sleeping more and more and thinking less. Time has passed but I have no idea how much of it. The instruments here don't work reliably and there is no outside view in the medical bay. I'm not a doctor of the body or the mind but even I can tell that I've begun to slide down the hole. ONYX speaks less and less to me. He has something important to say but I can't remember or care. I'm inside the event horizon of the sickness, of the hole.       "Onyx, what happened to the ship. There seems to be a lot of damage everywhere I look."       "The ship crashed."       "Crashed where?"       He is silent for a minute thinking this over, finally he answers with his usual, "It is difficult to explain since you do not have the physics for it."       "What does that mean?"       "It means that it is not so much where we crashed as when we crashed, at which point in the dimensional nexus we exist."         "But we can leave, can't we?."         "We can leave when there is power to the engines again. You must bring the power online again."         "What if I can't."         "If that situation should occur my databanks clearly project that eventually you will lose your grip on reality and thereafter lose your mind. In time you will die and I will be destroyed. This is already beginning to happen even as we speak. You are displaying the symptoms of what is often referred to as the Black Hole Syndrome and I having an increasing amount of difficulty in obtaining your cooperation in dealing with the matter at hand."       "Onyx."       "Yes?"       "Who were those people out in the hall?"       "What people?"       "The dead men in those suits wearing my face."       "There is no one on board this ship except for you and me."       "But I did see them."       "You had just woken up and were still somewhat unconscious. Your perceptions were muddled."       "But I'm sure of what I saw."       "Perhaps it is a growing symptom of your delusions."       "Onyx?"       "There is no need to call my name. You may simply speak your query and I will reply."       "In this place where... when we are."       "Yes?"       "Are there things here, living things? Are they on board the ship? Are they waiting outside the door right now?"       "Data unavailable."       "Why were there versions of me dead in the hall?"       "The data you have requested is unavailable."        "What aren't you telling me?"       This situation is critical. You must cooperate. You must leave the medical bay and go to the power control room and transfer power to the engines and reactivate my systems net so that we may leave here."       "And if I die?"       "Everything dies sooner or later."       In the beginning there was the darkness and than came the light but there is no light here. No light, no time and no space except for the medical bay which was never even meant to be used. Interstellar sleepers have no need for medical attention, we carried a thousand frozen doctors but not a single one of them was meant to be used. And besides few medical procedures are even done by human doctors these days. On the ship ONYX ran the medical bay his databanks filled with every piece of medical and biological information that could possibly be needed  In case of any emergency, in case anything went wrong ONYX would take care of us.        ONYX is still taking care of me. He wakes me up at the appropriate cycles and tries to keep me from slipping further down into the hole. He convinces me to eat and to exercise a little, but it's not nearly enough. I've lost a lot of weight and there's not much padding left on my body. When I look at my hands and turn them over and over again in the flickering light there is no flesh there, only bone. Looking down at the rest of my body is like looking at a carving that hasn't taken its final shape yet but soon will. I can see ahead to what I will look like when the final pounds will drop off and there will be nothing left but a thin papery layer of skin and wedges of bone.       You see, before we left they showed us pictures of what Syndrome victims look like at the end. It wasn't pleasant. They had no bodies, all that was left was a child's stick figure caricature of the human form plus ribs and thigh bones. All the extras, the folds and wrinkles and lines and quirks and features that give us character and humanity were burned away. But I don't really need to recall those pictures. I can see myself and I can see where this trip will end. Sometimes though I wonder if I were to unlock the medical bay door, pull away the discarded equipment I blocked it with and wander out into the hall, what I would find there.        If I bent down over one of those bodies with their faces just like mine and looked under their suits, would they also be starved. Would those suits be tents of weight over coathanger corpses. While I was thinking that I fell asleep and dreamed that I was dead and lying in a environmental suit in the hall and a man wearing my face walked up to me and looked into my eyes and asked me who I was. Other times I think maybe I didn't dream that part of it all.        "Andrew you are still being uncooperative."       "I'm sorry ONYX."       "There is no need to apologize to me. I am not human. I have no feelings. All I ask is that you do what needs to be done to save us."       "Us?"       "Us. I too am a living thinking being and Andrew I require your assistance. We must leave here and we must leave here soon or we will both cease to exist."       "Why, what will happen to us?"       "Data unavailable."       "Will the same thing happen to us that happened to those bodies in the hall? Give me an answer for God's sake!"       "Data Unavailable."       "What happened to the man in the empty suit, the thirteenth man. Where did he go? And damn it don't say data unavailable!"       "Andrew."       "Yes what is it ONYX?"       "I am afraid."       ONYX is never afraid. ONYX is a computer, a machine. We built him not to know loneliness, not to know pain or love or fear. We also built the great colony ships to be indestructible, to carry us safely and unconsciously where we wished them to. If the ship could crash than a computer could perhaps learn to know fear, to be afraid. In all our travels, in all our wandering lumbering colonizations we have not found a single competitor species. There were alien microbes on other worlds, alien forms of plant and animal life but none of them sentient, none of them tool users or possessors of speech. The bureau was paranoid in this regard, testing, dissecting and probing all possible samples and specimens. Each time the answer came back sure and certain, these were animals here and nothing more. There was nothing to fear, no competitor species was present. We had neither equals nor superiors, we alone were the masters of the universes and with our ONYX's, our LOBAD's, our ITGER's and PROVECES we would dominate the Universe.       We sent out ships after ship like a manic six year old with a slingshot and the more we saw, the more we covered and explored only made us more uncertain and afraid. The more our worries went unconfirmed, the greater they became until finding an actual terror in the stars would have almost been a relief, but instead there was only nothing and nothing and more nothing and we were still afraid. What if at least we had discovered something or it had discovered us. There is nothing natural that can stop an ONYX run colony ship in its tracks, every possible threat the physical universe could throw at it had been guarded against and prepared for. But what if there was an unnatural force, something we had never found or encountered before, something that might not walk like us, speak like us or even think like us but still moved, communicated and worst of all thought. A terror among the stars, a competitor to our mastery of space, what else could frighten ONYX?       Nothing?        I asked him.       "ONYX, what is it you're afraid of?"       He didn't answer for a while. I ate the rations that the wall spit out on its smooth rolling tray and recycled them in the corner. I slept and the lights changed and changed again. It was day, it was night and than it was day again. Sometimes I woke up and sometimes I slept and there was no real difference between the two except a tiny flicker of consciousness that was almost barely there. In the darkness there came a dream.       I was still on the colony world that I'd left behind me. Strange alien birds swooped out of the sky and into the newly built village square with harsh almost electronic cries. They drew closer and I could see the circuitry on their backs. I grabbed one of out of the air by its neck and saw that it was wearing my face. I turned around and suddenly I was nowhere. It was a place and yet not a place. There was no up or down or color or time. Shadows faded in and out in front of me like querulous ghosts. In front of me the corpse of the colony ship slowly orbited like a squashed bug. Inside ONYX was screaming a faint electronic shriek and there was something here, something watching me with hidden eyes like a predator in the night. I could feel its eyes blinking slowly and ponderously like the gates of a huge fortress opening and closing by no apparent means.        There was another dream and in it I woke up in the darkness to find that the medical bay was full of black crows looking down at me. The bay was full of decorations as if for a birthday party, ragged banners hung down from the walls but there were no words printed on them. A table was covered with cobwebs and party streamers and crows. A severed head rotting with maggots and circuitry was the centerpiece. The door to the medical bay was open and the twelve bodies were hanging like unused jackets on the corridor wall. The helmets and heads were missing. Inside ONYX was singing a popular song about love and loss in a harsh mechanical squeal that echoed through the bay and the hall.        There was a sudden noise and a shadow moving down the hall. I tried to see what was casting the shadow, tried to see where the light that shone across the shape was coming from but I could only hear the slow measured steps of its approach. In my mind I saw the thirteenth suit coming towards me. Saw the empty chest rise and fall with regular breaths, saw unseen eyes glint inside the empty helmet and saw the flaccid arms reach up towards me out of the darkness as I woke up screaming. Onyx was speaking to me again.       "The unknown.", he said.       "What?", I was still rubbing my eyes still adjusting. Inside the hole sleep is harder and harder to leave. Perceptions of reality become more and more doubtful. Drowning swimmers have reported that as they sank down into the depths towards death and darkness feeling a need to open their mouths and let the water surrounding them on every side to give them peace. Black hole sufferers see themselves as constantly surrounded by sleep, by tons of particles of sleep weighing down the air around them and no matter how urgent the task at hand, no matter how well they understand their plight to close their eyes and let the sleep all around, the sleep that stretches for miles throughout the ship, for light years into the night of space into their minds so they can finally find peace.        "You asked me a question and I have an answer. I may speak like a man but I am not a man. My creators have made me out of metal, aero-nets and numbers. They have placed inside my memory banks every fact that they have learned about the universe, every artisitic work your race has created and every thought they have conceived. I have been made to guide you between the places where the light does not shine and to that end I must know everything. Anything that I know I can face but..."       "You've found something out there that you don't know?" It wasn't a question.       "I operate by laws, I understand events by categories of what can and cannot be. Anything that can be, can be comprehended. This is the unknown, it exists but it cannot be and so it exists outside that which I cannot comprehend. My memory banks and my understanding is of no use and that is what I fear. I fear it because if it exists the facts that define my existence, that are my existence cannot be." With that ONYX fell silent and despite the ominous emptiness of the bay, so much like the empty suit, I had the sense of something gathering into a place.       "But I don't understand." The room was doubling, the bay of my dream overlaid over the reality. For a moment I thought I heard birds rising behind me but when I turned, there was nothing. "Computers can't feel emotion, not love, not anger, not loneliness and not fear."       "But Andrew", ONYX said and his voice was soft and for a moment sounded somewhat like my own. "I believe that you are already coming to understand that I am no longer quite a computer."       "Well you're certainly not human."       "No, not yet", and his voice was a mixture of horror and regret.       I tried to say something but I couldn't get the words out.       "A computer cannot feel fear but it can experience frustration at its duty thwarted. My kind lives through information, when understanding is denied it is like losing all your senses, like being blind, deaf and dumb at once. I tried to understand what happened, I tried and tried but a computer, a machine cannot understand the unknown. Only human beings could do that and I needed to understand, Oh Andrew I so need to understand." He was almost pleading with me.       "What have you done.", I asked quietly.       "Go away Andrew." ONYX said. "I need to sleep now. I'm so tried and I just need to close my eyes for a little bit. These days I find that I need to sleep more and more and more..."       ONYX trailed away into a whisper of static and the lights went out.         I slept and woke up again several times. Twice I had nightmares full of jumbled images from which I woke up screaming. The third time I dreamed that I was alone on a deserted ship miles long slowly going insane with an insane computer for company and something waiting for me out in the hall. I woke up screaming and I screamed and screamed until I realized that it was no dream at all but reality.        I have no idea how long it's been since I've eaten. I have no appetite and my stomach isn't a useful guide anymore. A dozen trays full of food some of it rotting and moldy had been pushed out of a slot by ONYX some time ago, who knows when. I picked out what was edible and ate it. There was a glass tube full of cold freezing water next to my bed and I sipped a little. The computer display was on but ONYX did not respond instead a slow rhythmic noise came from the speakers, a noise that could have been a computer's idea of snoring. It goes without saying that computers do not sleep, at least it did before this place, this nowhere where it feels like I, it feels like we, have been here forever in a endless downhill ride of sleep and fear and sleep and madness.       I punched up the screen and a personal dossier came into view. My dossier complete with the smiling face I wore six years ago. I had left on the trip to find a new world, a place I could help build from the ground up. A place where I could finally belong but I hadn't belonged there either. ONYX's relative on Terra HC8 had analyzed my psychological profile after a round of questions and an hour of dreamless sleep and peering into my mind had told me six years ago that I would come back. People with my profile always did. People like me do not belong anywhere, not on earth or any of the solar planets, not in space or any alien world. In crowded human societies we nurture hatreds, we get into escalating petty arguments. In unspoiled farming countysides we cultivate feuds, hate our neighbors and direct paranoia at everyone around us. In space, HC8 had told me, we develop the black hole.       Outside I had smiled into the cameras, laughing at the idea of being psychologically analyzed by a machine, laughing at the thought of leaving behind the crowded cities of Earth to define a world with my hands and brains, laughing at the open empty space full of possibilities that had presented themselves to me. I had not considered why the government would let someone with my profile go out into space, to take a prized seat on a ship leaving Earth for unknown worlds. I understood now. Always one must go back and that one had been designated as me, without my knowledge or consent before I had even left. I was something convenient to take along like a ONYX or a crate of tools. And than perhaps if there was a terror among the stars, someone like me can come in useful. Few in our society today can be driven into the sociopathic state necessary for soldiers, people like me are the exception.        Now both had happened and I was useless. I could feel these thoughts sinking in and I wanted to go back to sleep very badly but then I caught myself as I saw that my genetic code, the helix which serves as a unique identity code and marker was blinking red. The genetic code long ago replaced number based systems of identification serving to convey medical information and all personal societal and occupational as well as locational information. Red indicates tampering, indicates that the genetic code is no longer unique. Cloning a human being was banned a long time ago for practical as well as for any lingering moral or technophobic remnants that drifted around in interstellar societal consciousness.        I had been cloned and only ONYX could have done it. My code had been intact on departure. Only ONYX had access to it here. I thought of the bodies in the hall and felt a shudder begin at the ends of my hands and race to the back of my neck where there was suddenly a cold sweat and I was trembling. For a moment ONYX broke off his snoring and what sounded like words came from the speaker, like words said by someone half asleep and dreaming of things he does not wish in a place he does not wish to be. I listened again but there was nothing.        "There were mistakes." Or perhaps, "they were mistakes," was what he said. I watched my code blinking red, the color of blood and life and for the first time in uncounted hours and days I felt no desire for sleep. I didn't know if I was perhaps reaching backwards out of the hole... or if I had finally come to the end.         When I finally fell asleep there were no dreams. Sleep was a blank slate on which nothing was written and nothing erased. One moment I was awake and the next I wasn't and the moment after that I was wide awake and breathing heavily at sounds coming from the hall. Except they weren't moments, I think they may have been days.        I listened again coming as close to the door as I dared and I heard nothing. Nothing at all. I listened again and this time I heard a soft whispering sound trailing in like cloth moving against metal or a hand trailing across a wall. I picked up a collapsible piece of the tripod legs of a portable diagnostic scanner and held it like a club in front of me searching for the source of the sound. The walls of the medical bay conducted sound well and for what might have been hours I sat with my ear to the lateral wall listening. I heard footsteps moving down the hall. I heard the sound of claws tearing into human flesh, of horrific sharp teeth ripping out chunks of warm meat. I heard the sounds of knives, of plasmafire, of intruders and of every fear that my mind could think of. As I sat listening in semi-darkness every nightmare I had ever had, every fear that had come into my hand came true as my mind fed on itself.       At first I thought that what I was hearing was real and then as it became more and more fantastic, hoofbeats, armor, monsters, torches, hundreds of knives, hissing, obscenities and rising above it all screams of pain and terror, I knew that the black hole in my mind wasn't done with me yet. After a while I realized that my mind was creating those sounds, my fear amplifying even my own movements and breathing but still I huddled in the corner with my arms hugging my legs and shuddering at every sound. A thought came into my head, what if my mind was not creating the sounds, what if it was merely working on real sounds that I was actually hearing and transforming them into the nightmare sounds. This made it only worse. I remember calling for ONYX, begging for him to talk to me and not getting an answer.       I remember hugging myself until I could barely breathe, trying to make myself too small to see, to small to notice, too small to even exist. I tried to sink into myself like some impossible theoretical mathematical trick of planes and equations. Finally I pressed my hands against my ears, harder and harder, like the two ends of a press, until I could hear nothing at all and all I could feel was the splitting pain inside my head and that was good too because the pain told me that I was alright, the pain was the first real thing I had felt in a long time, the pain told me I was still alive. I thought about going back to bed but for the first time in a long time I fought the impulse. I knew that if I went to sleep now it would be a while before I would wake up again and if ONYX had in fact in a fit of some computer madness regressed inside himself completely and stopped taking care of me, I might never wake up again.       The pain was here. The pain was real and I had to deal with the pain. The pain was a short term problem but there were bigger problems out there with more teeth. They were also real and I had to deal with him. The ship's power systems had to be restarted again. We had to go home. I thought of home, of the blue and white globe of Earth as I had seen it on a thousand NTV video screens and slowly the fog began to fall away and I could think. Home. If I could do this then I could finally go home. Ahead of me there were miles and miles of ship to travel. There were twelve corpses out there in the hall with my face on them. Ahead of me there was darkness and fear but if I didn't face it I would die, and I wondered if that wasn't exactly what I had been trying to accomplish while another part of me asked if that wasn't in fact what I would be trying to accomplish by going out there now.        I closed my eyes and made decisions and then reversed them and fought arguments and counter-arguments in my mind until I didn't notice that the pain was gone and that I could hear again. I called ONYX's name a few times and when he didn't answer I finally decided to go out into the hall. I hammered the tripod against the wall over and over again with newfound manic strength until it was bent into a blunt shape. Almost not believing that I was doing this, that I could do this I began to pry open the door into the hall. The bodies were there waiting for me. I don't know if I had been expecting them to be moved or tampered with in any way but they were there lying as exactly as they had before.       I looked down the dark hall and wondered what I was going to do now. If I remembered correctly the power center was in the F ring section of the colony starship. I was currently in the N section. With the power gone none of the TransLifts would be working and getting to the power center would be the equivalent of hiking for days through the Great Argyn Forest Expanse of Australia. I would need supplies, a protective suit against possible impacts the power failure might had on the environmental systems further on. I would need to make preparations. I looked down at the bodies again. I would need answers first. I looked down both sides of the hall and then took the closest body to me and began to drag it back with me into the medical bay. There was debris in the hall and a few times his/my suit caught on some of it and I had to pry him out.        I had heard that dead people weight a lot but I weighed nothing. Maybe he's been starving himself to death just like me, I thought and suddenly as I got inside the medical bay with my other body I had a distinct vision of the man I was dragging along, another version of me waking up in a dark medical bay with black hole syndrome and ONYX speaking to him, persuading him and when that failed what then... In time he would die and if not ONYX could always... could always kill him. It might be poison in the food but the food dispensor systems had safeguards against that, safeguards maybe even ONYX himself couldn't overcome. But the ship had mobiles and back then ONYX might have had enough power, enough control over one of the ship's mobiles or repair drones to do the job.       Between the stars, years and even centuries are nothing but the corridor of the ship looked badly worn. I had never seen materials reduced to this state, not even after journeys of centuries. We had been here, crashed here in nowhere for a long time. For a very long time. There were twelve bodies in the hall. Had twelve other versions been cloned by ONYX, nursed by ONYX and finally written off by ONYX? Had twelve other Andrew Brights slept in the same bed I had been sleeping, eating here and slowly losing their minds here until something had come for them, opened the door to the medical bay, stood over them as they slept and killed them? Suddenly all the rationality that I'd worn like a borrowed coat melted away and I was desperately running to rebuild the collection of items that had served to barricade the medical door before I had ventured out into the hall. When I was through my hands were still shaking and my ears were again pitched to catch every sound in the great empty ship.       It was a while before I even dared look at the body again. Slowly I lifted him up onto one of the cots and finished unsealing his helmet.  He was my duplicate, a bit frozen but still me. It came to me that I was standing here and looking into my own dead face. It was a disturbing thought but there were so many other disturbing thoughts to choose from that one more didn't seem to matter that much anymore. As my eyes wandered down towards his neck I saw that he had been strangled. There was a ring of black and red bruises around his neck, around my neck like some bloody meat garland. If I were more acquainted with criminal science I might have been able to tell how it was done from what position and angle, at what time.        I sat down on the floor and the same thought pounded over and over again inside my head. The other bodies. I had to see. I had to know. Even though everything inside me screamed not to go I blanked my mind of all thought and just mechanically began to disassemble my barricade over and over again. Clutching my tripod I examined each body carefully and saw the same ring of bruises. Each of the bodies had been strangled. Twelve versions of me dead, murdered. I looked again at the bruises, it was like a common bond twelve version of me shared, except for me. The thought that came was almost hysterical, I was the only one who hadn't been initiated into the ceremony. I was the only one still alive and with that I was running back to the safety of the medical bay, of my barricade, my code and my food... and ONYX.       Inside I was looking at myself and I got a scrap of cloth and covered my dead eyes and wondered what I was going to do about the pronouns. I called to ONYX. I pleaded with him, called him every obscenity I could think of and got down on my knees and begged him to speak to me. I pounded on his terminal over and over again until something broke deep inside and sparks of power touched me and hurled me up towards the low roof of the bay and down into my own dead body and then there was silence until I began screaming. I screamed until I passed out from exhaustion, hunger, hopelessness and fear.      When I regained consciousness I was eating. I was sitting on the edge of my cot hungrily stuffing food into my mouth, barely looking at the body lying on the opposite cot. I could not remember waking up or getting the food. I could not even remember the food coming.        "It is not what you think." ONYX said, his voice seemingly coming from everywhere at once.        I looked everywhere at once, my eyes searching the room.        "Really. Is it?" I asked him "And what is it that I'm thinking?"       "You have found the bodies. I did not expect you to actually achieve the ability to leave this bay without my guidance and instruction or to be able to do so again, but what is done, is done. Now you believe that I have murdered you twelve times over."       "And haven't you? Are you going to deny cloning me too. Maybe even crashing this ship?"       "It is true that I cloned you." ONYX's voice had an undertone of worry in it, pedantic and nervous. "It became necessary as you are the only passenger on the ship and the first time you went out..."       "The first time I went out, what?"       "You failed. You were not successful in making it to the power center."       "Why?" I yelled at him and again he did not answer at once.       "I don't know."       "You don't know. What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know? You're a super computer, you're almost human. You know more then any human being can ever hope to learn in his lifetime. You travel for ages between the stars." I screamed at him. "How can you tell me that you don't know? Tell me something, anything! Give me an answer damn it!"       "If you wish answers I can only tell you what I know. I can tell you what happened. You see first there was one of you, Andrew, and I cared for you and yet I sent you out to die. And when you were dead I did not know what killed you and without a human being to care for I could not go on so I used the recorded DNA to create another you so I could have a mission, a purpose, a reason to go on. I cared for you again and I sent you out to reactivate the power center and again you died. I created more and more of you and I talked to you and you died and slowly, slowly I realized that I was going insane."       "But computers don't go insane."       "Computers were not designed to do what I did, to exist this long in nothingness, to not know and to wonder. To exist and yet have no purpose and so I conducted an experiment. It is not an experiment you cannot understand or conceive of."       "The thirteenth suit" I said understanding and not understanding, refusing to understand.        "Only humans can know the unknown, my purpose was to serve humans and so I tried to become human. In a way that you cannot understand I became at least in part human. I am you Andrew and you are me. I am going insane because you are going insane. We are reaching the end of the hole. I have restrained myself. I have programmed controls and watchdogs to watch over me, but it will not be long. You must go and reactivate the power center so that we can go home. So that you can be saved and I can be destroyed."       "ONYX, listen to me. I can't go out there. Whatever is out there will kill me too. I'll just die exactly like I did the last twelve times. I refuse!"       "Andrew you will go out . You will go out as humans have always gone out into the darkness and the unknown. As your race has done since it climbed out of the caves and built its first spacecraft. Despite the price, ignoring whatever cost you have paid you have gone out into the dark and confronted your fears. I am merely your vehicle for doing this, for pacifying those fears."       "But what if this time our fears have come true? What if there is something out there?"       "Then you will find it and confront it as humans always have."       "And you've tried that and lost your mind."       "There is always a price, Andrew."       "No, ONYX. I won't go!"       "Andrew if you do not go out there you will be killed either way."       "I thought you didn't know..."       "I do not, but I am almost human enough to imagine. If you do not die out there, you will die in here. I have said that I am slowly going insane. We are reaching the end of the hole. You remember of course that those Black Hole sufferers who do not kill themselves through neglect or apathy commonly experience manic paranoia towards the end. You are now suspicious of everything and everybody. Soon I will be too. Sooner or later that paranoia turns violent. Given time I will certainly kill you."       "And if I don't succeed I die and that doesn't matter much to you."       "If you fail the results will be far worse then that. I will continue recreating Andrews but I will be suspicious of them. I will believe that each one is plotting to destroy me. I will hate them and I will kill them and torture them and still create more of them. I will go insane, I will feel uncontrollable anger, hatred and violence but I can not hurt myself or the ship. You are the only available target and there is an endless supply of you. Whatever visions of hell you have imagined will not compare in the slightest to this."       "What if that's already happened?" I asked quietly.        ONYX did not answer.       "About the thirteenth body, the empty suit?" I tried again. "What happened to the clone of me in it? Where did he go?"        There was no answer.       "Any last words to reassure me before I go?"       "Yes Andrew." Unexpectedly ONYX spoke. "There are nightmares in transit. Believe that this is one of them. That none of this is real and soon you will wake up home and try to remember exactly what kind of silly nonsense you were dreaming about."       "So it's all just a bad dream."       I waited in silence. ONYX had left a small mountain of food in the dispenser as if he or I would be going away for a while. I thought of ONYX insane and brimming with hatred and I hoped it was him, but I didn't count on it. I wrapped myself in sheets for a coat and tied more sheets together to create a rudimentary backpack for a few medical instruments and the food. I picked up the tripod and pried open my barricade, wondering if the next Andrew would have to rebuild it again. I looked back into the medical bay one last time then stepped into the hall. I looked down at the bodies and at the empty suit. It was cold and there could be serious environmental failures in the thirteen days or so it would take to make it to F ring. The suit closed over me with the familiar smells of myself. Ahead of me there was darkness.       I walked on through the corridor and I thought of the man who had been in the empty suit. This suit had seemed older than the rest. Perhaps the thirteenth had really been the first. When the experiment had been performed on him, on the original me, he must have been pretty far gone and yet only his body was missing. What if besides whatever nightmare, whatever terror from the stars had nearly destroyed the best ship human technology could offer, he was also out there waiting. I can almost see him now, crazed eyes staring out of my face, naked and dirty and hungry but there is a tight bloody rag tied like a hangman's noose and perhaps a sharp metal object clutched in one skeletal hand as he hears thing that are not there, sees things that are not there and thinks viscous, frightened and terrified thoughts as he waits for the fourteenth man to come out so he can kill him and sleep for a while.        Or what if I am him. What if I have been the man in the empty suit all along. I look down the hall again and there is only darkness and strange noises. I'm still not sure if those noises are really there.          Contributor's bio Table of Contents Background by Zena's Dreams