He felt trapped. The darkness like a heavy blanket over him, weighed down by iron ingots, and the suffocation of a vacuum. He seemed awake, yet couldn’t tell. Consciousness coming and going, small snippets of a reality merely passing by like a broken film. There was a small glimmer of a memory in the back of his mind. A brightly lit chamber, with a clinical feeling to it, lots of cold, hard steel.

Was that a voice I remembered?

He wasn’t quite sure, but that was the last of what could constitute a resemblance of a memory. After that, darkness.

Until recently.

In his sleep, he started having visions of fires burning away into cosmic dust. The air heavy, a pale mist draping over everything, suffocating it all. The feeling from his heart was always daunting and anxious, his heartbeats coming so fast it felt his heart might burst suddenly from his chest. The visions came and went, like a signal interrupted with brief intervals of lucidity. It was always the same; a jolting brilliance of light, confusion, desperation, followed by a profound feeling of sadness. The screams he heard in the dreams were abhorrent, and primal. There was a feeling of having been stuck in this routine for ages.

He awoke with a startled breath caught between his ribcage.

Am I truly awake? There was that dream again, it felt so real. Fire and lightning, chaos everywhere. Large objects raining down from above, and the screaming, much screaming. It felt like daylight, yet a grim pale hung over the air, pungent and heavy.
This time, however, the dream managed to startle him out of sleep.

He looked around, and tried to focus on his breath; from head to toe, he ran an imaginary scan through his body, trying his best to feel every extremity, any tickling, or throbbing, any general feeling that came associated with being alive. There was that familiar ache behind his shoulder blade, and the tingling on his knee from an old surgery.

Ok, definitely awake, and more importantly, alive.

It felt like he had been stuck in a limbo of darkness and hellish dreams, trying to focus on remembering something, but it was mostly blank. He could not find an explanation for where he was. Only vague personal details came to mind, but otherwise it was a blank slate.

Taking a deep breath, he tried to stretch out his legs and arms trying to swing around to get off the surface he was laying on; something held him in place. A mild frenzy started to take over him. Glancing around, he took in the details of his surroundings.

He was laying inside a small enclosure of sorts, top portion glass-encased.

A glass tomb

He pushed that thought out of his head. Outside the enclosure, the area was small, dark, with smooth, curved walls and a low ceiling. It could not be more than 10 feet across, perhaps double that in length.

He started feeling around for a way to pop the glass open, each second that passed by brought along a wave of frantic energy. His eyes had adjusted briefly to the darkness, and he could see a minuscule crack of light to his left side, a tiny sliver coming through the wall. He noticed thin, IV lines running out of his hands and chest, poking out from multiple orifices. They looked like skinny snakes sucking the life out of him. His heart accelerated, a mild panic set in place.

I’m in a medical facility? What happened to me?

Finally, he felt rubbery clasps on each side of the glass, close to his hands. As best he could with his limited mobility, he gripped each clasp tightly, pushed forward, back, and felt a whoosh of air escaping. The curved glass portion of the chamber popping up smoothly. His mind had a heavy drape of fog over it, thoughts and memories jumbled, racing to make sense of his predicament. He tried lifting his head but something held it mostly in place, with limited mobility, he could twist around a bit, and lift a fraction, but not much more.

He focused on his breath again, carefully inching his left hand out of the enclosure, reaching for the crack of light coming from the smooth wall. The surface of the wall felt ice cold, and smooth as glass. A shiver ran up his spine, jolting his brain alert, a much needed feeling at the moment. It looked like a small window was behind the crack. Gripping the edge, he felt around and suddenly, the crack grew wider, an aperture of sorts was opening revealing the full window. His heart fluttered with excitement, perhaps he could try and figure out where he was, and more importantly, why.

A memory flashed by his mind.

I was setting sail to a faraway land. There was a jumble of feelings; excitement, fear, anxiety, and regret. Suddenly interrupted by screams and anguish.

Light punched its way through the window with magnificent fury, blinding his eyes momentarily. He looked away briefly, letting his vision adjust to the sudden brilliance. After adjusting to the light, he looked out the window with expectation and hope, his heart fluttering with anticipation. His brain immediately lit up with a million astonishing questions.

Something was not right.

He gasped with what he saw, his mind completely out of loop, mind racing with thoughts run amok. He felt unhinged.

I’m still dreaming, it has to be!

No, he was awake. What he was seeing was something he never thought could provoke such panic, confusion, and fear.

Have I gone completely berserk?

Whatever signal his eyes were sending to the brain, it had to be faulty, the complex wiring within his skull short circuited, struggling itself to make sense of the signals received.

But no, there it was, a vision of solitude that was hard to grasp.

Framed perfectly through the porthole sized window, as if it was a picture-frame hanging on a museum wall, was the planet Earth along with its moon.

Exactly where he thought he was until a few precious seconds ago.

There they were, the lonely pair; Earth and moon, floating amongst a dark abyss. Earth looked about the size of a large marble, the planets blue oceans and landmasses barely discernible. The moon, off to the far right of the frame, barely a noticeable round speck.

The utter confusion that set in his mind was terrifying. Suddenly, glimpses of memories floated back in.

Frantic goodbyes, a fiery explosion, and a LightSail ship cast off. There are frantic voices, and feelings of anguish. Malfunctions, accidents, extended darkness; and a loop of screams that seemed eternal.

His heart beats faster with the flood of thoughts coming through. Panic sets in exponentially.

I’ve been here before. Something feels oddly familiar, like I’m trapped in a coil of bewilderment.

Just fragments of a shattered mind, and a body stuck in limbo.

How on Earth was this possible?

His mind raced, his heart beating wildly, panic started to engulf his being. He was teetering on the edges of madness.

Wake up! Wake up you damn fool!

He screamed, a guttural shriek, from deep within him.

This can’t be true!

Before he could try and claw his way out of the tomb he was in, the glass top lit up with holographic screens, warning alarms ringing in his ears, lights glaring all around the small chamber.

“Warning! Warning! Pod Escape Mechanism improperly activated!”, shouted the robotic voice.

His mind came alive with hope, perhaps someone was on the way to help, explaining the astonishing circumstances he found himself in.

Hope lay dormant that day.

His vision started to darken around the edges of his vision and his extremities started going numb. A shout tried to escape his lips, but it came out as a gurgle of foam and desperation.

Unit Operations reset for Cryo-Hibernation, please remain calm, murmured the robotic voice.

He was trapped. Trapped in a loop of time, and human malfunction. He would be kept alive in a nightmare of desperation, and amnesia.

His mind, barely comprehending what he felt, saw and heard, tried to grasp this situation. Barely holding on to consciousness, another memory abruptly popped into his mind, a vague, foggy, and far-away vision.

A teenager sitting by a mighty oak tree, reading a tattered book. A brief flash of a line in the writings passed in front of his heavy eyes: “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity”.

He felt like laughing, if he could, to cackle out loud on the irony of that fleeting memory. As darkness threatened to fully engulf him, he glimpsed a small digital readout over to his left side, right below the window with the nightmarish view of a far away placed he once called home. The screen had lines of writing, and numbers. His mind heavy with drowsiness, pulled the last reserve of energy and focused on what it read:

“Emergency Escape Capsule Lazarus 1 - Approximately at 3 million miles - 4.8 million kilometers from Earth”.

He cast off into darkness.

Image captured from the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx, 3 million miles away. (Image Credit: NASA)