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Osiris Was Slain on This Icy Shore - @JosephArmstead - AcidPunk + Immortality SF

Osiris Was Slain on This Icy Shore

An AcidPunk + Immortality SF story by JosephArmstead

"Beware the wrath of a patient adversary." 

-- John C. Calhoun

"There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals."

-- Herman Melville

"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air -- there's the rub, the task."

-- Virgil

"The universe is an intelligence test."

-- Timothy Leary

The Man was, in every way, an inelegant impossibility. He was dressed in tattered layers that floated off his gaunt, battered body, the form of a human scarecrow given frightful animation, that appeared to be the remnants of a Virtua-Synk Augmentor exo-suit. The Augmentor exo-suit was badly ripped and the torn, the ribbons of its outermost skin presenting a writhing, serpentine corona resembling the many tentacles of a mythical hydra. His flesh, which was laid bare and exposed to the harsh atmospheric elements, was the pallid hue of ancient stone.

The world was the color of an old cemetery headstone and everything was enwrapped in a rime of graphite-hued frost. More, the ebony sky draped the horizon of a rugged landscape so polar-cold it was nearly crystalline in its iciness. The thin and wispy atmosphere, so insubstantial it barely qualified as such, was bitterly glacial and left across everything it touched a sloughy, poisonous coating of triple-bonded cyanides.

Nothing made of flesh could live there. 

He stumbled uphill, mouth gaping open and hands clawing the open air as if reaching for some variety of physical purchase through which he could pull himself along, towards the topmost ridge of the crater's inner wall. He moved with a dogged persistence that dramatically accentuated his disjointed awkwardness, as though he were again becoming acquainted with gravity after a long period wherein he'd been divorced from it.

And the glowing stars that were his widened eyes burned like volcanic coals...

He shouldn't have been there. There was no sane way he could have existed at all where they'd found him. And there certainly wasn't any way that he could have still been alive... even though he hadn't remained so for very long after the Infrastructure Assets Works-crew had chanced upon him. They risked exiting their Sno-Cat variant, tank-treaded, arctic-transport vehicle to rescue him when they saw him. Encased in protective, locomotion-articulated anthropomorphic climate suits, they ventured out into the hostile climate on a mission of mercy... only to belatedly realize they'd exposed themselves to a danger of the likes they'd never before seen or heard. When they reached him, he managed to painfully croak out a handful of words, actual human speech, past a ravaged throat that shouldn't have been able to produce audible sound of any variety -- after all, the landscape through which he'd been shuffling was on the airless surface of an ice-bound, four-hundred-kilometer-wide, heavily cratered, irregular polyhedronal moon that flew around the planet Neptune, eighth planet out from the star "Sol", the sun of planet Earth. That moon, with the astronomical provisional designation of "S/1989 N 1" and later scientifically classified as "Neptune VIII", was more popularly referred to as "Proteus". Proteus was the second largest of Neptune's fourteen moons and it orbited the planet in a nearly equatorial path.