The wandering soul

The ancient ship drifted silently through the dark void, many times she has passed through alien galaxy's but so far other than a slight deviation caused by the gravitation that altered her heading the helpless vessel had continued onward.

From without she looked almost like a rock so ancient and battered but as you got closer in the dim light of distant stars you began to notice that though buckled, pitted, bent and battered the outside of the ship was actually made of beaten and bruised metallic plates one atop another.

To all intent's and purposes she appeared dead but in fact was merely sleeping though crippled since her engines had long ago been destroyed in a catastrophic accident, within she still had power as an ancient power source still output enough energy to keep the cryogenic suspension chambers active and the hull despite the massive damage the ship had suffered on a voyage that had lasted ten thousand times longer than it was ever meant to had somehow still managed to protect the interior of the vessel from the deadly radiation of the cosmos.



The sleeper looked almost human but you could not tell as you looked at the thick translucent crystal of the sleeping sarcophagi like pod, it was not possible to tell if it was male or female and the thick crystal occluded any real detail from being visible.

As the traveller looked at the sleep chamber unable to help the occupant he wondered why he had been brought here, he had projected himself out of his own body back in the secret facility were the out of body experiments funded by one of the more classified agency's were conducted, he had expected to come back to his body but felt the tenuous link to his own body snap and had tried to get back fearing that something had gone wrong, maybe he was even dead but then he had felt it, a feint tug it was so feint and was almost lost by the call of the living world he had always known but he had forced himself anyway back to his body only to find it was no longer visible to him, just a dark mass surrounded by a dark cloud of something horrible, it was like a parasite that fed on souls and he felt instant revulsion and terror which were usually absent in his astral form, for many years he had spied for the US using his ability but now something had gone wrong.

He did not know but the Agency had decided to shut the operation down and tie up loose end's, while in his trance he had been given a lethal injection and then the Shadow being's the parasites that circled like vultures ready to tear apart any soul they could in there own mindless hunger for life had come.

He dared not go back to his body so had followed the feint tug wondering why he could not go back to his body, why the monsters were guarding it and before they saw him he slipped away following the thread, it seemed like forever as he flew through the etheric world and he barely noticed as the earth the sun and the dead worlds grew ever more distant behind him though the loud rushing of life he had never noticed before dimmed behind him.

So long it seemed until in the darkness he felt it, saw it a feint almost intangible aura of life or rather the absence of life yet there was something, he had already forgotten the name that once he had held, the person he had been only a few moment's or was it countless eternity's before and already forgotten the life he had lived on earth when he finally drifted into the hulking ruin between the galaxy's and entered one of thousands of endless sleep chambers filled with identical crystal pod's, there it was no different to any other but it felt familiar, he stared for a while wondering at the vaguely humanoid shape and then finally followed the gossamer like thread back into his own ancient body and back through what in a human would be the crown of it's head.


He could not align, could not rest and felt the hunger, the need for life the despair and reached out in a silent scream at the universe, somewhere he felt it, living worlds, so warm, so full of life and so he went to the nearest again as he had countless times over the endless ages of terminal sleep, a sleep that exiled a soul from it's own body, a sleep that forced it to seek to live again some other way but never truly allowed it to pass to the other worlds beyond.



On a distant world the thin wraith like invisible mist of the wandering soul drifted down onto a pair of human like being's, they were different but so too was humanity but they were close enough, soon a child would be born and he would live never knowing who and what he really was except for his odd gift that allowed him to travel outside his body, never remembering the countless lives his dreaming soul had lived while his true body lay never truly dead and never truly alive drifting in the endless void of space.

a reply to: LABTECH767


Edger Allen Poe became Privy to something unintended by friends from Fordham University.

a reply to: LABTECH767

That was really good.
I enjoyed the read

Felt deja vu reading it

a reply to: CrazyBlueCat

Just a bit of sloppy sci fi I was just in the mood and noticed no one has been writing any short story's for ages, maybe someone will read my rubbish and do something better.

a reply to: LABTECH767

It wasn’t rubbish at all. Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’ve only written one story recently and I’m working on another but it doesn’t feel right, ha.

I like the sci-fi feel of it. It’s one of my fave genres.