The lights dimmed and rose as before, with the black material shifting along the walls. It must have been softening or liquifying and then resolidifying. The strands processed toward us, changing orientation each time the lights strobed. One strand pulled down across our shins, another across our laps. A biomechanical seatbelt?

“Just like a rollercoaster! Wee!” Patton crowed, shooting his arms up in amusement park form, only to have one of the strands force them back down against his sides. “Ow.”

Several others swayed into position at about chest height, then pulled across our chests and foreheads, effectively sealing us to the structure of the voidscull. I couldn’t turn my neck. “Rollercoaster, huh?”

I held Pickles with my thighs. Inhaled, exhaled. “Breathe. I think we’re supposed to–”

And then it was like we were catapulted, launched. Shot from a gun. Fast. Like skin-of-face-stretching-backward kind of fast.

Acceleration can kill, you know. The human body can only handle about nine longitudinal g’s – nine times Earth’s gravity – before the heart can’t pump blood to your brain. Fourteen lateral g’s will tear your organs loose. Naturally, this is the type of information I am privy to as an expert in the watches worn by pilots experiencing heavy forces during maneuvers. Swiss watchmaker IWC,⁶⁵ for instance, builds its best timepieces to withstand around seven sustained g’s.

Point being, the g’s were getting up there and even though the voidscull was dark again, I guessed that if the lights came up, we’d be seeing them through a rapidly constricting tunnel as we struggled to stay awake. Our mass was pressed into the wall and floor. The acceleration was unrelenting. Patton made some gurgling noises just as my own throat constricted. Exhalations hissed out in short bursts through my teeth. We had reached the human limit.⁶⁶ The darkness in the scull merged with the darkness in my head. And after that, there was nothing.

My senses were numb – or, actually, absent. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. “Patton?”

No answer.

“Patton!” The strands of material were still present but had loosened enough for me to shift. I put my arm out, able only to reach his wrist. I grabbed it and shook. He mumbled. Thank god. I squeezed Pickles and placed my hand on top, reassuringly, as if it were the head of a small dog. I traced about the edge of the lid with my finger pads, feeling the dimples that would mock would-be pickle jar openers. “Patton?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“I think,” he mumbled. “Hungry.”

“Same.”

“Pickle me.”

My mouth flooded with saliva. “Yeah, of course,” I answered. It felt like days since the last bit of space pemmican. I visualized the act of opening the pickle jar and the great reward and briny snap of that first juicy bite. I whispered an apology to Pickles. Its time had come to do what pickles must do.

The lid might as well have been welded on. I wrenched at it from beneath my restraints to no avail, then leaned to the side and tried to tap the edge of the lid on the floor. My hands felt insubstantial and weak, against which Pickles easily resisted. My situation strained the absurd: trapped inside a space-laxative while wearing a repurposed body bag, and unable to access our only food source. I was the punchline to somebody’s joke. Here lies Ben Sullivan. Died in space. Couldn’t open the pickles.