A short tale about an arbitrarily-chosen subject from a list on deviantArt
or, It was all Caroline's idea I had nothing to do with it.

She clutched her head, grimacing to stave off the pain. She hoped nobody would come talk to her, and for once, her prayers were answered. The common room slowly emptied, leaving her alone. She looked across the table, and saw a swarm of black spots, forming a myriad of shapes. She blinked and the vision was gone. She would have shaken her head if it wasn't in such pain.

Why, she wondered, had she gone down there? No, the real question... why had she gone alone? It wasn't like her, she was a responsible person, she didn't have reckless tendencies (otherwise she wouldn't have been chosen to crew the ship!), so why that time? Either way, it was too late to change anything. The fact was, she had gone down there alone, ostensibly to test the atmosphere. It was breathable, so she had taken off her helmet in a moment of giddiness.

That moment was all that was necessary, she must have breathed in some impurity, something incompatible with human systems, because her head began to throb and she returned to the ship.

She stared down at her food, the same food she'd been eating for weeks on that damn ship, synth beef run through a synth grinder, shaped by synth hands, and topped with synth pickled cucumber, synth lettuce, synth mustard. She swept it away from her, and the tray clattered on the floor. The hamburger stayed intact. She looked at it, and hated its expression. Her arm smarted where it had struck the tray, and that only made her hate more. She threw up on the table in front of her, and blankly watched it drip into her lap. As it soaked into her jumpsuit, she felt her thighs twitch and tingle.

Her face flushed; was she really all that demented? Getting aroused from such a thing as that... but she realized, it must have been the acid content of her stomach, she was perfectly normal, otherwise she wouldn't have been chosen to crew the ship. The thought calmed her, and she remembered the tests she was subject to: stressful mental tests, grueling physical tests, traumatizing emotional tests. She passed all of them, garnering admiring comments from the administrators. We have never seen anybody so fit as you, they had said. They had never seen such emotional stability, or such an agile mind, and especially not in a woman. She smiled faintly with pride. She had been able to set foot on an alien planet, and even breathe its air.

Her pride was soon diminished when she looked back at the mocking stare of the hamburger. "Fuck you," she said, and wanted to step on it, but she couldn't summon the energy. She sighed, and put her head down in the pool of vomit on the table. Her tongue fell out of her mouth, and she tasted her bile.

In a moment of utmost clarity, she knew what had happened to her, and started to laugh. Even as the skin rapidly atrophied and sloughed off of her hands and face, she continued laughing.

They found her in the morning, soaked in her own fluids. Her body was intact, her mouth was twisted into a painful rictus. The administrators shook their heads and made notes, before leaving the testing facility.