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.

“Give ‘em here,” said Patton. “Bigger hands.”

Happy to surrender the task, I lifted Pickles over my lap, which was tough with my wrists barely mobile, and set them down between us. I edged them toward Patton with a finger, while he simultaneously tried to reach them. Eventually, they came to rest at a point of limbo between us, a quarter inch from anyone’s fingertips in snack food purgatory. Taunting us.

Patton lurched toward them only to gag himself on a restraint.

The strand of whatever that ran across my lap pressed painfully against my bladder. Distraction over other things had blunted the sensation, but now it was coming through full strength. This was going to be a problem.67 “Hey!” I cried out to no one. “I need to pee!”