Impulsive
On June 28^th^, a young man turned his back on the sun again, leaving for the outer darkness.
The young man had spent a time, times, and half a time away from the holy hills of earth and finally returned. Although enjoying peace for a time, he found himself discontented by the peace and beauty of mankind’s ancestral home.
Deep in his heart, he discovered that he wished to live away from such good things. Maybe he didn’t feel like he deserved them, maybe they alienated him, maybe deep down he just wanted to be punished for the things he had done.
On his way offworld, he passed a Protestant church mid service. The singing and hooting and hollering and revelry. It put him off, if that was what living in the light was about then it was meaningless. That was what he told himself on the way back out.
He left for Sheol, as they called it coming off of decades of propaganda. Previously it was, as the natives still referred to it, Freedom. It was a frozen world apart from a burning desert around its central ring, far away from earth, far away from any conventional civilization. At one point it was a distant beacon of liberty and culture in its own right apart from the conventional powers of that era, but it had finally crumbled. Now men came from the rest of the system to work questionably-moral questionably-legal tasks on the planet and the nearby, still wild, planets and stars. It was the life he had begun with and now returned to.
The local commanding officer judged the young man as being neither terribly smart nor too dull, not totally lacking in moral character yet still possessing a weak conscience, and having a fine record of previous work verified by the handful of his peers who had chosen to remain in the dark. He was impulsive and self destructive, but that described anyone who would remain on Freedom who wasn’t born there. He could have made a fine life for himself back in the band of civilization, but he returned anyway.
A drive out into the wilderness, down to one of many old industrial emplacements littered around Freedom from its golden age. Freshly fallen powdered snow tickling the young man’s face as he stepped out of his truck, feeling the wind through his thick woolen coat. He leaned down and thawed a frozen-shut panel with a blowtorch. Some fiddling, remembering the way his fingers used to glide across the machinery, and his work was done, the communications relay built into the plant was now performing a new function for a new employer. It wasn’t legal but that was alright, it would never be discovered, not if he was the one who placed it. Another job for his government done, the young man climbed back into his truck and returned to the base, driving through the night, or was it day? There was hardly any difference on this world.
Returning to base, he met someone on the street, a local. Locals, understandably, did not much like people like him. These people were born in the darkness and often couldn’t leave. The young man never wanted to leave. Recognizing this, the old man crossed the street, not looking him in the eye. It wasn’t like the young man would have hurt him, but a wise man won’t stand near someone impulsive and self destructive. He had his number.
The young man passed another church service, this one noticeably more solemn until the sign of peace. Through the open door, he spotted an ancient man with his wife next to him. He felt a deep agony in his heart. That could have never been him, he never was someone who could live in the light like that. That was what he told himself, anyway. He turned his back on the sun for the final time and left for the dark.
He drove out to another industrial installation. Unfortunately, this time, the local who operated it still happened to be there. As the young man knelt down to his work, the landowner trained his rifle on him and pulled the trigger, loosing the young man’s limbs. He was buried somewhere in the outer darkness and forgotten, never to be near the sun again.