The horror of silence
06 Jul 2018Birdnose
As an experienced pilot, the sound that scares me the most isn’t the overheat alarm, or the sound of weapons fire on the hull, or even the sound of a fracturing canopy. The sound that scares me most is silence.When you spend most of your time on spacecraft, you get used to the array of noisy equipment that literally keeps you alive. You fall asleep to it at night, it permeates your dreams, you wake up to it in the morning, you hear it all day. Its absence triggers a deep-seated fear, because while cannon slugs might kill you fast, silence will kill you just as surely -- and slowly enough to give you time to think about it.
I don’t know any spacer that sleeps in a quiet room when they’re planetside. Every one of us uses some kind of noise generator. We all need that background drone to lull us to sleep and keep us from waking up in a panic.