Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

"Captain's Log"

Submitted by Elliot Avery - more stories at his blog!

Captain's log, mission time: 0Gs, 0Ms, 23ks, 551.34s

We've broken orbit without incident and are now on course for the edge of the system. With the nuclear drive it will take us a mere month to reach interstellar space. Of course, then it's another three centuries until we reach our final destination. To think that only a few years ago this mission would've been impossible, but with the new nanomachine treatments it's not as if we have to worry about dying of old age en route.

I would also like to state again, for the record, my categorical opposition to the President and the Minister of Science and Technology's proposed ideas about colonization of the new planet. Another life-bearing planet is an invaluable treasure and besides which I believe that studying the ways its native lifeforms have evolved to deal with the challenges of their environment will ultimately prove more useful to our civilization in terms of the scientific and practical knowlege gained than the additional living space of a single planet ever could.

The growing concerns about overpopulation caused by the longevity treatments would be much better addressed with terraforming and artificial space habitats, regardless of the lengthy construction times involved.

After all, what's a mere few centuries to a race of immortals?

...

Captain's log, mission time: 0Gs, 27Ms, 13ks, 522.00s

We've cleared the debris cloud at the ragged edge of the system and are now officially in deep space. We threw a bit of a celebration for the milestone, complete with drinks. Some kind of hard-hitting moonshine swill the lab boys cooked up using the ship's distillation systems. Smells like furniture polish and tastes even worse but it certainly does what it's meant to do.

On a more serious note, I'm a bit concerned about morale. Several crew members have complained about how the orbital path we took didn't get us close enough to any of the outer planets to do some sightseeing. If they're this bothered about the boredom of outer space after a month out, what are the next three hundred years going to be like? Hopefully the ship's library will be sufficient to keep everybody entertained.

...

Captain's log, mission time 2Gs, 75Ms, 999ks, 259.02s

I have now read every book, watched every movie and played every possible story option in every video game stored in the ship's computer. So have most of the crew.

We're not even a quarter of the way there yet. Hopefully we can think of something to keep ourselves occupied for the remainder of the voyage.

...

Captain's log, mission time 3Gs, 439Ms, 32ks, 9.03s

What have we become?

Or is it becoming? Is it simply revealing?

Has the boredom and isolation made us like this or is this what we all are deep down? Savage beasts camouflaged in clothes and words and gadgets just biding their time until they have the opportunity to pounce?

The worst part is I encouraged them. I was the one who said they should write their own stories, program their own games, share their imaginations with one another. I didn't know what it would turn into. I didn't know what was lurking inside.

It all started innocently enough. We'd make up derivative fantasies and amusing little toys and for a while it was enough to make everybody forget the boredom. Things got complicated when some of the men started using each other as characters. Often the stories and games ended... messily. Old feuds and animosities and pent up frustrations came to the fore. It wasn't long before things came to blows. Brawls became increasingly frequent and brutal.

I think it really got bad when somebody from the repair crew, I forget who now, drove a cutting laser into somebody's eye.

It was a nasty shock to everybody at first. But then his eye started growing back. The nanomachine implants. And anything they couldn't fix on their own could be patched up in sickbay. Those goddamn machines. They're the cause of all of this. If it weren't for them we wouldn't even be on this voyage of the damned in the first place.

You see, we'd never really thought about it before, feeling as smugly civilized as we did, but the regenerative nanotechnology we now possess meant not only that we didn't have to worry about aging, we didn't have to worry about being permanently injured. And with that things took a turn for the truly sick.

The men have all but abandoned the literary and electronic arts. Flesh is the medium of choice for their entertainment. Each other's and their own.

I don't like what's happening to us. The men still perform their duties when called upon, for however long that last shred of discipline holds out, but I don't like what's happening to the culture of this crew. The callousness, the perversion. I don't like what it's done to me.

I've felt a man's eye burst in the palm of my hand. Cold, black humors running between my fingers. I've cut deep into my own flesh and fondled my own internal organs as if they were secondary sex characteristics. I smashed every mirror in my quarters so I wouldn't have to look at the shameful creature staring back at me.

I should put a stop to it, tell them this sickness has gone on long enough, but I know the only possible result would be mutiny. Looking into the sea of hungry predators that await me every time I address my crew I have no doubt that if I so much as thought of depriving them of their vile amusements they'd be perfectly capable of inflicting every possible torture on me until I finally had the mercy of dying the true death.

I'm sorely tempted to do it anyway.

...

Captain's log, mission time: 4Gs, 52Ms, 334ks, 10.23s

I wonder what they'll think of us when we get there. If there's any sentient life on that watery planet in that still distant star's habitable zone, what will they say when they know what we're really like?

If it were me I'd be terrified. Not of what we could do to them with all our technology, but of how small and fragile the minds of even beings so advanced could be. How rudderless the universe truly is.

...

Captain's log, mission time: 4Gs, 989Ms, 9ks, 785.11s

On top of everything else it appears that some kind of new disease has broken out among the crew, one even the nanomachines can't seem to deal with. For no immediately apparent reason, several crew members have developed severe anterrograde amnesia. Their brains have stopped forming new memories. We're caring for them as best we can in sickbay but the doctors aren't sure of the cause yet and it's got everybody's scared.

On the plus side, maybe I can use that fear to my advantage. Tell the men it's these sadomasochistic games that're causing it and start whipping these degenerates back into shape again.

...

Captain's log, mission time: 4Gs, 995Ms, 344ks, 59.03s

I'm afraid.

The doctors think they know what's going on now. It has nothing to do with the crew's perveted flesh games, not directly. The ultimate cause, however, is the same. Those goddamn fools who created the nanomachines never thought to check for something like this. To think it could end up this way.

The patients are simply running out of memory. Like an old computer. Our brains evolved based on the premise that our lifespans would be limited to around a hundred years or less. And unlike a computer, it's not simply a matter of deleting unneeded files. You never truly forget anything. Not without catastrophic brain damage, anyway.

Unless the med team can figure out a way to clear more space in our brains without causing permanent cognitive damage, we're all going to fall prey to the amnesia one by one.

My god. To think that I might never see the wonders this new world has in store. That the last things I'll ever remember are vivisections and sodomy...

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 221ks, 459.03s

The Captain's dead. Suicide, looks like. Atomized himself in the main reactor. Guess he didn't want to take any chances with sickbay being able to revive him. He's not the only one. We've already had three other suicides and ten attempts. As First Officer, I'll be in command from here on out.

On a personal note, I can't say I'm particularly aggrieved for the loss of my predecessor. He was a smug, self-righteous blowhard with a messiah complex who won't be terribly missed. The rest of the crew felt similarly. I wouldn't be surprised if his apparent suicide turned out to be nothing of the kind, not that I'm very interested in finding out either way.

Never could figure out why the little shit was promoted ahead of me. I've got ten years seniority on him and all.

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 300ks, 99.08s

We're over half way there. We should throw some kind of party. Get the men's minds off everything that's been going on.

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 610ks, 4.18s

We're over half way there. We should throw some kind of party. Get the men's minds off everything that's been going on.

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 801ks, 233.82s

We're over half way there. We should throw some kind of party. Get the men's minds off everything that's been going on.

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 944ks, 500.02s

I just looked back over the previous entries. Oh god. Oh god, help me. It's happened to me too. Oh god.

...

Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 2Ms, 993ks, 332.33s

We're over half way there. We should throw some kind of party. Get the men's minds off everything that's been going on.

...

Second Acting Captain's log, mission time: 5Gs, 3Ms, 223ks, 999.21s

Well, the medical staff still haven't had much luck curing the amnesia cases, but they have come up with a stopgap. They say they should be able to put everybody into suspended animation until we reach the planet. Would've been nice if they'd been able to figure out how to do that at the beginning of the mission.

They say there's a 30% chance some of all of us won't wake up. We're no worse off.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time: ERROR

Not everybody survived the deplastinization process but we've made it. Some of the ship's systems have gone haywire since we left it on autopilot but we're all just so glad to finally be here.

It's a beautiful planet, far more fascinating than any of our artists' renditions dared hope, with several large, terrestrial continents surrounded by vast oceans in constant fluid motion due to the tidal forces generated by the planet's single moon, all of it teeming with life.

What we've seen of the native fauna has been amazing. The planet appears to have analogues of our own world's tetrapod vertebrate biology, including an apparently sentient, though primative species that greatly resembles ourselves. I wonder, is this simply convergent evolution at work or could the panspermia hypothesis be true after all? I suppose we'll know more after collecting some samples.

It's an exciting time to be alive. All that we've endured up to this point might just be worth it.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time since planetfall: 0Gs, 0Ms, 993ks, 88.08s

I know it's wrong for a biologist such as myself to feel genuine disgust toward any of nature's creatures, no matter how strange, but the closer I look at this world's life, the more a creeping sense of the truly uncanny overwhelms me.

Though carbon-based and having a similar gross bodily structure to us, the similarities between us and the aliens ends there. So far we have experimented on two creatures: one of the intelligent lifeforms, which we took from a nest it had made from the dessicated corpses of the large, sessile, photosynthesizing organisms that cover a large part of the continent and a much larger, quadrupedal vertebrate that is apparently some form of livestock domesticated by the smaller creatures.

The hides of both organisms had some sort of strange fibres growing from them in large quantities, moreso in the quadruped. The bipeds are covered more sparsely, though the naked portions of its hide excreted noxious, mildly corrosive oil that sent a man to sickbay with minor chemical burns when he accidentally got a sample on exposed skin. Molecular analysis showed that the chemical they use to store genetic information is highly acidic, something we didn't even think was possible, although in hindsight it's not all that unlikely, the reactiveness of chemicals on the either end of the ph scale working just as well for that purpose.

What strikes me most about the aliens, though, are the eyes. Their main photoreceptor organs are, again, not unlike ours in terms of gross physiology, but I find the coloration... disturbing. White. Unnerving, ghostly white with dark retina and pupil in the center like some small, haemovorous invertebrate floating in a drinking glass. I gather the color difference is due to the predominance of zinc in the occular humor, likely a consequence of the planet's osmium-poor geology.

As an aside, the biped's supernumerary fingers are also strange and disgusting to me. What do they need with five, anyway? Inefficient.

On another disturbing note, some of the men started... playing with the quadruped before sending it back. Things have gotten far more civilized on board since we got here, but old habits are hard to break. We've also had another crewman succumb to the anterrograde amnesia. I'm hoping the doctors can come up with something soon. Perhaps looking at the aliens' neural tissue will provide some answers. We'll need to collect more samples.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time since planetfall: 0Gs, 2Ms, 343ks, 28.77s

We're collecting another specimen today. Hopefully we'll be able to get all we need out of this one and throw it back soon, I don't like having those creepy-looking things on my ship.

Also, I really wish the crew would stop needlessly torturing the aliens' livestock.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time since planetfall: 0Gs, 44Ms, 422ks, 900.71s

We're collecting another specimen today. Hopefully we'll be able to get all we need out of this one and throw it back soon, I don't like having those creepy-looking things on my ship.

Also, I really wish the crew would stop needlessly torturing the aliens' livestock.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time since planetfall: 10Gs, 552Ms, 777ks, 12.08s

We're collecting another specimen today. Hopefully we'll be able to get all we need out of this one and throw it back soon, I don't like having those creepy-looking things on my ship.

Also, I really wish the crew would stop needlessly torturing the aliens' livestock.

...

Third Acting Captain's log, mission time since planetfall: 999Gs, 999Ms, 999ks, 999.99s

We're collecting another specimen today...