Pac-Man

The trip was all on schedule and everything had gone just as according to plan. Ben, Peter, Isaac, Cameron, and Paul all sat at the control deck of the ship, looking over the controls to check that all was normal. It was only a few weeks until they were scheduled to make contact on Alpha Centauri. As the ship's computer told them that all systems ran well, the 5 went to the dining area and got their dinners.

About midway through, a low buzz could be heard in the back of the ship, the kind that usually meant power failure to one of the many components. A simple fix in the day and age so Paul got out of his seat to check it out. As he stood up his head banged against a low lamp, creating a great sound and hurting a great deal. Paul grabbed a bottle of pills as he was leaving.

The buzz became stronger and stronger as Paul got farther to the ship, higher and higher in pitch and more frequently. By the time Paul realized what component the failure had been in, it was too late to fix. The main airlock had failed.

A tempest of sound and wind formed in the ship as all the air was being violently sucked out. It was a miracle that Paul was so near to the emergency Personal Assistance Capsule, or PAC as it was usually called, a sort of spacesuit which delivered all necessary substances to the human body in case they are needed for very long amounts of time.

Paul grabbed it and forced his way into the emergency cabinet which had its own airlock. He got into the spacesuit quite slowly. It slowly dawned on him that he was now alone, there was no way that the others were still alive. He decided to take the spacesuit off and open the bottle of pills.

Over the next few hours he stayed alive with the PAC's food sacks which could be opened from outside if needed. When he had taken the last of the pills (which he was taking far in excess of needed, trying to dull his senses) a sense of mania began to set in. He wanted pills. He NEEDED pills.

Paul slowly donned his suit and opened the door.

The main lights had failed and the whole ship was now illuminated by the eerie Krypton-Neon lights, which glowed a deep, rich blue. In his mania, Paul could not remember his way around the ship. All of the medicine (largely in the form of various pills) were kept securely in baskets around the ship however the caps had been ripped off and the contents spilled out, a good portion of them stayed in the halls rather than flying out of the airlock.

Paul first worked his way to the airlock, occasionally seeing something out of the corner of his eye. He found that the manual airlock closed quite easily, sliding shut securely, not that it mattered anyway. As he turned around he witnessed a gruesome sight. The others, all halfway into their PACs which hung near the dining area (there were many sets all over the ship). They were quite near death but somehow kept alive by the PACs. They all approached Paul and he ran, in search of more pills.