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Several Roth’s later, Hannah was in an unusually good mood. She decided that what she really needed now was some loud music. It turned out that the dispensary contained an embedded full system interface, so she was able to access all her personal files. She would even be able to review her own recordings; maybe even in edit mode, though she didn’t feel like playing around with that right now. Instead she selected an old playlist she had made shortly after arriving on Ventas-341, it was all neoprot and jar-core, the perfect styles for drowning out the world behind a wall of hard beats and grinding noise.
Loud neoprot had always been a bodily catalyst for Hannah. Something about its beats and structure caused her to falsely believe that she could gracefully move her body in a way that aligned visually with the sound patterns. This idea had been proven dead wrong on numerous occasions, as witnessed and attested to by both Suzzanne and Cherise, but in this hollow mess hall pounding with ripping and sizzling crashes at nearly deafening levels, and with Roth’s reverberating in her brain, the normally repressed instinct took over, and without remembering a beginning or a decision, Hannah found herself whirling, gyrating, and flailing in mock synchronicity with the music. For a moment, she forgot about everything, and the mess hall and the ship itself and the events and pain and fear and loneliness of the past few months faded away into a pale grey that was overcome by the brilliant light of motion and rhythm.
Then she tripped over a bloated epoxy coated corpse stuck to the floor, and her momentary illusion came to a grinding halt. Her drunken attempt to stop her fall resulted only in making it worse. She had contacted the carapace hard with her right foot, then attempted to balance her momentum with her left foot, but in her drunken state she lacked the accuracy to correctly pull off the save, and instead her left ankle twisted under her in a flash of pain, and she fell to the deck, banging her hip and head.
The room seemed to swim around her, and she felt that it was pawing at her attention, bluntly but steadily like a cat with a ball of yarn. She was unwilling to let the fuzzy unreality escape her, and felt an anger toward the room for trying to distract her from her brilliant escapism.
“No! You can’t!” she screamed toward the emptiness of the mess hall, “I won’t let you!” Her eyes darted frantically around her, searching for a non-existent point of focus for her rage. They landed momentarily on that small dark spot on the grey wall, that so often captivated her. Then she noticed something new, and in a moment of clarity that can come only after several Roth’s, she saw the solution. Of course, it had been there all along, and it was so obvious now. Just below and to the left of that small dark spot, an air duct stared at her like a grinning know-it-all - “ESSSSCAPE!” it whispered through bared teeth. It was a snake. Its body held the way out, the end of all her problems. She would crawl into the snake and let it absorb her into its own body. She would be eaten and digested and taken from this dark, barren world, to emerge as a greater being in another existence.
She scrambled through cupboards and found some type of nondescript cooking utensil, which she used as a hammer against the teeth of the monster, then clawed at it with her own hands until its mouth fell away from the wall, dripping with blood. In a moment of foresight, she stuffed her clothing full of Omega Bars, surely a worthy fuel of the gods in the afterlife. Then she entered the mystical portal head first and clawed her way forward inch by inch into the dark unknown.
From inside a metallic serpent, the beats and squeals of the music seemed to run together into an indiscernible rainbow of meaningless echo. Even the tempo itself seemed to slow to a crawl, each moment stretching out as if to extend down the length of the snaking gullet. The snake spun her over onto her back, unable to progress forward, but it didn’t matter. She was already in the gut. She had penetrated the mind of the snake. She now inhabited its thoughts, saw only through its eyes. She floated above the grey carapace laden mess hall floor and could only laugh at its insignificance, its smallness. She laughed and laughed and laughed, with a menacing laughter reserved only for comic book villains; a laughter built upon a familiar neoprot beat.