Tartarus

A short snippet of isolation...

               The planet was far different than Max had thought. He wiped the blood from forehead as it began to dip onto his eyelids. He had seen the satellite photographs and radar imaging. He had read all the reports and watched all the government programs about the new world on which he now stood.

 Max pulled off his flight suit and gravity-resistant boots. He’d been wearing them for the better part of twenty years and wasn’t sad to see them go. He tore off a sleeve from the suit and manufactured a long, thin bandage for the cut above his left eye. He had been asleep, cryogenically speaking, for almost two decades and allowed the softness of the alien grass to caress is sensitive feet as he stretched his arms and back. The headache from the roaring explosion was beginning to subside.

 

 Tartarus is what the United Human Confederation called it, a planet so far away from the solar system of man’s origin that they dubbed it Hell’s Dungeon around the launch facility. The government stooges that ran the space exploration program liked to stick with the standard when naming space-born objects; According to the myth from which it came, if a hammer fell from heaven it would take nine days to reach earth and another nine days to reach Tartarus, a place of torture and pain far below Hades. This is not far from what it was intended to be for Max. The government couldn’t very well execute him because of his popularity on Earth, but more so because of his intellect. Praised by many as the third coming of Einstein, and the second coming of Gandhi,  Max’s rebellious and criminal nature was over-looked, or, as Max liked to think, emphasized and well-considered when it came to his sentencing. He stood naked, enjoying the freshest air he had breathed in twenty-years to fill his lungs.  

Tartarus was an ironic name for the simple fact that the planet was a spitting image of how scientist thought earth looked long before man was born out dividing cells living in pond scum. More than seventy-five percent of the planet is covered by vast oceans and the dry land was covered by uncloven forests like a moss-covered boulder. Its single moon, named Zeus, hung approximately the same distance from Tartarus’ surface as Luna did from Earth. It was ironic in this vain, but not in truth of things.

 

The facts are that Max, the former head of the New American Movement on Earth, an anti-government army that fought against the fascist UHC rule, was banished to Tartarus like a martyred titan. The facts are that Max, strong-willed and intelligent, was sent to this Australia-inspired prison in order to “study” Tartarus first hand on a fully-stocked and life-sustaining ship. The facts are that the ship that carried Max and the other intellectual and scientific prisoners of the UHC malfunctioned once it hit the planet’s atmosphere, sending the carrier hurdling towards the surface and the fact is that Max was jettisoned by the burning computer mind minutes before the ship made contact with the planet’s surface. Max stood on the top of the pod which saved his life, naked and staring over vast tree tops at the pillar of thick, oily smoke rising in the far, far distance, allowing realization to wash over him. The fact is that Max is alone; the sole survivor of the crash, on a planet over 20 light years from home, and whose name, Tartarus, is no longer an irony for its only inhabitant.

 

             

Author's Note

This was written quickly and needs to be flushed out. This is merely an idea that I decided to jot down. I would like to eventually extend this idea into a full story.