Eroding Sanityby Allison K. East
Solitary confinement can do strange things to a man. It can break the spirit, which is why it's used in penetentiary systems (although to varying degrees of success). Being lost in the middle of nowhere with no viable means of escape and fading hopes of being rescued somehow made the solitude worse. Now technically he wasn't alone, he did have the Pilot of Elac, the Leviathan who rescued him, for company. But the slightly demented Pilot of an aged and dying Leviathan really did not make for stimulating conversation. If he didn't have his wormhole equations to work on, he would really go insane. At least, that was his theory. In reality, insanity can creep up on a person without them realising; and an aging Pilot who had only recently become an acquaintance really isn't the best judge of sanity. And a man simply could not work on wormhole theory 24-7. There were still plenty of hours in the day to ruminate on Aeryn and her actions. To ponder on her possible reasons for leaving and not telling him about her baby. If she was indeed pregnant—a subliminal message planted in his mind by a deranged little old granny was hardly conclusive proof. But even knowing that logically didn't keep him from obsessing on that point. More and more, during the time he wasn't working on wormhole equations, he would reflect on the woman he, for better or worse, loved. He began to have conversations with Aeryn in his mind, like he did with Harvey; asking her the questions he had a burning desire to know the answer to. It began innocently enough, just thinking, wondering. Thinking gave way to fantasising, imagining he was on an Earth beach somewhere with a heavily-pregnant Aeryn, rubbing her child-swollen belly, feeling the baby kick. He knew this was pure fantasy—even if he managed to find his way back to Earth and somehow convinced Aeryn to go with him, it would be a fair while before she was that pregnant. Yet the fantasy was satisfying on some level, a relief from the loneliness of having no one but an aging, not-quite-all-there, Pilot to talk to; and it gave him something to focus on other than endless wormhole theory. The problem was, it became increasingly addictive. It was a haven when he was stuck on a point and he needed a break. And it wasn't a simple fantasy anymore. In between rubbing Aeryn's swollen belly (and wondering who the father was—he guessed it was the "other" Crichton, but it could just as easily be Crais, Stark, or Rygel, if less probable), he would grill Aeryn: why did you leave? Over and over again he asked her this, because her reply of "Because" was hardly satisfying. He was hoping for a different answer, forgetting that this Aeryn he was questioning didn't exist. She wasn't there—just a figment of his imagination. When Elac's Pilot called him on the fact that he had essentially been talking to himself (he hadn't realised he'd been talking aloud), he made an effort to pull himself together. Instead of spending all his spare time fantasising about Aeryn, he endeavoured to spend it more productively: brewing a type of "wine" (more like moonshine) and programming one of Elac's DRD's to "play" Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture'. But it wasn't enough to lure him from "Aeryn" completely. It was frightening how close his descent into madness was. Only the arrival of Sikozu, and the reappearance of Chiana and Rygel in the middle of a crisis made him see just how far he had gone. With an effort, he closed his mind to the fantasy Aeryn. He had realised that the addictive nature of the fantasy covered the fact that he felt bereft, sad, when he returned to reality; and the only way to move past it was to stop. He wasn't going to get answers or closure from a fantasy Aeryn anyway. Only the real Aeryn could give him that.
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