The Sound of Silence

Earth as seen by the Mars Rover Spirit from the surface of the planet in 2004.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/Texas A&M

The following is a piece I wrote for a prompt called "Silence." Feel free to leave your thoughts, questions, and comments below!

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At Orfield Labs, in Minneapolis, there exists the world's most quiet room. With a sound level of -9 decibels, well below the average sound level of 30 decibels for "quiet rooms", you can easily hear your heartbeat, the stomach churning, even your own ears in it. Before the Mars One mission, the longest anyone could stay in there was around 45 minutes, before they started to suffer hallucinations. After the Mars One mission? 3 hours.

3 hours was the required amount one had to stay inside that room, both with and without lights, for a total of 6 hours. There was intense training involved in getting people who could last in that room for so long. Starting out with small intervals, and making their time spent longer and longer. One would say it was a cruel test, as noiselevels below 80 decibels cause hearing loss. But when you are setting up a colony on Mars, you need to make sure that no one will crack if there is any cause for the sound levels to reflect that of space. There will be constant fan noises being heard, with sound levels being at 50 decibels in sleeping areas and 60 decibels in working areas, almost exact to what NASA uses for their standard. But if there is any cause for these sounds to stop, you needed to be ready. With the first ever colonization mission off the planet of Earth, you need to be prepared for every angle.

None of this prepared Raphael for what it really was like. The power had been down for over an hour. The team was scrambling to return power. No one had expected a storm to break out on Mars. No one expected that maybe, just maybe, the storm would knock out the power lines they had set up. No one expected that the storm would cover the cables they had laid with thick dust, burying them. The fact that the cables were buried made it even harder to locate the issue, because they had to dig out the cables.

The silence was already affecting Raphael's mind. He was starting to hallucinate. He would see structures of Earth, children playing, and even his family and friends he had on Earth. Some of them were crying. They approached him and asked him, "Why did you leave, Raphael? Why did you abandon your home here, and go to another planet?"

Raphael looked up at the sky, hoping that he could see Earth and that it would lift his spirits. He looked in the area of the sky where Earth was, as was instructed. He could not differentiate any of the planets. They all looked the same. For all he knew, he was looking right at Earth, but the naked eye could not tell, as they were far away from home. So far, that Earth is out of view.

"Funny", Raphael thought to himself, "You go through life being told that you are important. That you are significant. Yet, Earth is out of view. It is small in comparison to the rest of the galaxy. In reality, we were insignificant. Paling in comparision to the rest of the world."

Suddenly, a whirring sound was heard. Power was restored. But it was too late. This "Earth-out-of-view" phenomenon, had driven Raphael to madness. Insanity had taken over Raphael's brain, and it's name was "Silence."