Talk:Descent/@comment-7706473-20131002144534

Hmn, what an interesting story - I'll start with something a little off-topic, so bear with me!.. Any astronaut who can't bear a year or two of complete isolation shouldn't be allowed to become an astronaut. Indeed, Vince's reaction to Alice's 'betrayal' was hilarious to my sensibilities. Vince is likely a military man, and knows how bad things get on-planet; he might have wanted to consider the ramifications of being in deep-space, no?

... The reason I say all this is that I wouldn't mind such isolation, so...

Anyway, where to start? There's a lot to cover - this reminded me a lot of the hard sci-fi movie Moon, down to the importance of video calls and the decreasing health (physical and mental) of the protaganist. Vince was a bit of a stooge, a bit unlikable, and a bit lost - and that made me like him a lot, hehehehe! You captured the feeling of being alone and adrift in a fantastic way, and watching the transmissions grow less frequenty and Vince grow less certain was a delight.

Vince never found out what the ostensible purpose of the flowers was - privately, I was hoping they'd give him new life and help him adapt to deep space, but it looks as if he didn't like their terribly itchy gift. Poor flowers, being rejected after they were just trying to give Vince some rebound... ;) Such is the suffering of the floral kingdom. But this - as a device - was absolutely fantastic; it kept the story scary, in a real-world way - the kind I think most readers love dearly.

There was nothing to be done to fight back, no-one to alert; it was quite possible the experiment really would've helped people on Earth do all sorts of wonderful things. But that didn't matter at the end, now did it..? Vince's anger and anguish and pain was so believable that the ending was perfect. You knew something was going to break - and it turned out to be him. There was something so lamentable in his last minutes, but if I may answer a demifictional narrator:

V: Are you happy now, people?

Quite. There is nothing like the suffering of a third party, the wonderful wistful sadness of someone I don't know, to make my morning start off great. A flowering reed - for the confidances that never reached the people our astronaut wished they would. Fantastic work, extremely enjoyable - good luck in CPoTM!