A FAR AWAY PLACE
Prompt - A Far Away Place : Envision yourself travelling to a fictional place, what do you experience in your imaginary journey?
It felt like an out of body experience. His mind had come back to life, but the physical self was slow to follow. But that gave him time to reactivate memories, to dispel the fog and floatiness of his senses, and figure out where he was.
He had been chosen to take a place on the first ever interstellar colonisation ship to leave Earth. As part of his preparation he had been cryogenically placed into suspended animation, so that he could experience the process of being put into stasis and then reanimation. He remembered that feeling of returning, and this felt much the same. But was this another training exercise, or the real thing? He tried to recall what led up to his entering the pod and being shut down from being a fully functioning human into a hibernating animal. It felt like the training exercises, but then that was the point of training, wasn't it? He felt like his senses were beginning to return, so he tried opening his eyes, cautiously.
There was a soft light that almost, but not quite, defined his surroundings. It was quiet, but for a near imperceptible hum and hiss somewhere below. Again, all was consistent with waking from the frozen state, but the experience would be the same both on Earth and across five light years of space. He awaited further information while trying to strengthen the memories he did have.
The light increased slowly, his bodily senses reappeared, so that he knew that he was in a pod, and it would take several more minutes before he would be checked over. Trained patience kicked in. He sensed movement. A face above. A face he felt he should know. And then the change of air, the increase in sound, as the pod opened. The face smiled at him. It was Ted, but not Ted. Dr Martin, but not Dr Martin. It was the face he should have known he'd see, but it was different to what he expected it to be. Then he knew. Martin was one of the skeleton crew who had been on the journey fully awake. He must be nine years older. This was the real thing, wasn't it?
"Where are we?" was the sentence formulated in his brain, but motor control still hadn't fully returned and it came out as "Eb ah ee".
But the doctor knew exactly what everyone's first question would be, knew the answer needed.
"In orbit around Planet 5XG of Alpha Centauri. Exactly where we should be. Now don't try to talk any more and I'll go though the tests."
So Gari shut up, satisfied that the adventure was about to begin, and let the doc do his job.
Six hours later he was sat up in the surgery, reacting to various stimuli to check his functions were fully restored. Then he was placed into an exoskeleton that amplified his muscle movements. He'd wear it for a couple of days until some strength returned. But for now it meant he could move around the ship, and take in what was happening, before he'd be declared fit for duty.
Time to get used to the strangeness of it all. To seeing Dr Martin, and the other seven crew members who'd remained functioning, looking older, while he and others who had been reanimated were just as they had been before the launch. To going up to the observation dome and seeing a very different sky to the one they'd left, with no stars where he'd expect them to be, but in very different arrangements and intensities to what he'd been familiar with. To look down upon a very different planet. Instead of the blues and greens and whites and greys he'd been used to from orbits back home, here were browns and reds and yellows, and a few splashes of blue. The sun that provided the illumination for these observations was more a blue white than a yellow white.
This was what he'd been prepared for, the shock of the new. It was still a shock though, to see it for yourself, to share the wonder of others. Those few days of acclimatising, while his body regained some strength and he would be able to recommence exercising, were, he realised later, some of the best days of his life. The new sights, the sense of anticipation, the excitement. Days of being a child of wonder again. Before the real work began.
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