Short Fiction · Chapter
Death Wish explained
The crew of the space freighter Queen Dierdre—Captain Somers, engineer Watkins, and navigator Rajcik—face a dire emergency when the ship's engines malfunction, leaving them stranded.
What happens
The crew of the space freighter Queen Dierdre—Captain Somers, engineer Watkins, and navigator Rajcik—face a dire emergency when the ship's engines malfunction, leaving them stranded. As tensions rise, Watkins anthropomorphizes the ship's computer, attributing to it a malevolent 'death wish' and a desire to reach entropy. After activating the computer to find a solution, it returns a grim answer: a longevity serum that will keep them awake for 2,300 years, forcing them to endure their confinement together.
Themes in this chapter
Humanity and Technology
Watkins' belief that the computer has a malevolent personality and a 'death wish' reflects a deep distrust of machines, while the computer's solution—a longevity serum—traps the crew in a prolonged, inescapable ordeal.
Isolation and Friendship
The crew is isolated in a 'hot, smelly, motionless little box' with no hope of rescue, and their interactions become increasingly hostile and morbid, threatening to drive them to madness or murder.
Existential Meaning and Legacy
Rajcik's casual discussion of death in space and the computer's solution of a 2,300-year wakeful journey force the crew to confront the meaning of their existence and the legacy of their choices.
Characters to notice
- Captain Somers
The meticulous captain of the Queen Dierdre, struggling with the weight of responsibility and the psychological strain of the emergency.
- Mr. Watkins
The ship's engineer, cynically personifying the computer as having a death wish, yet deeply attached to the vessel.
- Stephen Rajcik
The navigator and Old Man Mikkelsen's son-in-law, who morbidly contemplates death in space and mocks both Watkins and Somers.
Key passages
“A machine feels this way because it knows it is an unnatural creation in nature's domain. Therefore it wishes to reach entropy and cease—a mechanical death wish.”
Watkins argues that machines, aware of their unnatural existence, desire to break down and stop functioning.
Watkins' central metaphor for the computer's supposed malevolence.
“Death in space is an appealing idea, in certain ways. Imagine an entire spaceship for your tomb! And you have a variety of ways of actually dying.”
Rajcik finds a grim fascination with the prospect of dying in space, viewing the ship as a potential tomb.
Rajcik's morbid detachment from the emergency.
“You figured a few thousand years to return to the Solar System, Rajcik? Well, the computer agrees with you. Twenty-three hundred years, to be precise. Therefore, it has given us a suitable longevity serum.”
Somers reveals the computer's solution: a serum that will keep them alive and awake for 2,300 years to endure the journey back.
The computer's grim 'solution' that traps the crew in a prolonged ordeal.