Josh Roseman: Writer, Voice Guy, Dad, Human

I’ve been working on and off on a sci-fi choose your own adventure story where the main character dies horribly in pretty much every ending you can find. There’s a couple of good ones in there somewhere, but they’re hard to find. It’s very much like I imagine the future to be: dangerous and full of ways to die.

Still, I wrote about 3000 words on it yesterday, so that’s something, right?

Here’s page 107. The first draft of it, anyway.

There’s no way you’re getting anywhere near the engineering compartment. Instead, you head for the escape pods, just in case. It’s not easy to get there, but you manage it, and just in time; you hear a soft booming noise, and then the ship jolts to one side as the gravity goes out completely. There’s nothing to hang onto and you bounce back and forth in the corridor until you manage to catch yourself on your hands, but you’re covered in new bruises and your head aches from where you hit it before.

Then the alarms change. “Abandon ship!” the captain shouts into the intercom. “All hands, abandon ship!”

Lucy and Patel are the first to arrive at the pods; you help them into one of the two-person units. Lucy shares a long look with you, and then pulls the door closed; the interior door closes as well, and there’s a poof of thrust, and their pod is gone.

Then Candace comes around the corner. “Come on,” you say, opening another pod. “Let’s go!”

She flies gracefully through the zero-gravity environment and into the open pod; you clamber in behind her, closing the door. There are two seats; you take one, and she takes the other, and you both strap in. She doesn’t count down; she just hits the launch button and the two of you are pressed back into your seats as the pod ejects.

“What happened?”

“The reaction mass overloaded.” She hits a few buttons on the control console, and the small viewer shows Isoneph receding in the background. “The radiation will poison everyone who doesn’t get off the ship.”

The screen suddenly goes white, and when we can see again there’s nothing there at all. “Was… was that supposed to happen?”

Candace shakes her head slowly. “I don’t know. But we’re on our own.”

“Where even are we?”

She pulls up the star map, and zooms it out. “Middle of nowhere. Literally. And without interstellar energy, we can’t send the SOS out at a high enough speed. We’re probably going to die out here.”

“Then why did we leave the ship in the first place?”

“Which would you rather die from,” she asks, trying to sound kind, “radiation poisoning or oxygen deprivation? I know which one hurts less.”

“That’s fair.” You reach for her hand. “I’m glad you’re here with me. Even if we are going to die.”

“Well,” she says, “we don’t both have to.”

“What do you mean?”

Candace brings up a different menu on the screen. “There’s a cryo pod,” she says. “It’s supposed to be used for medical reasons only, but it can keep one of us alive pretty much indefinitely.”

“Only one?”

“Only one.” She taps the screen and the floor opens behind you, revealing the pod in question.

“Who gets it?”