Alien Impulses

We emerged. We were whole. The pressure lifted at once, the crushing sensation ceased, my heart resumed beating and I managed to gasp a few breaths, in then out, and then take a deep, nourishing breath. As my eyes came back into focus, the readouts became clear. Everything seemed fine. The engines had actually ceased thrust as we passed through, so we were idling along at the 12-C we had reached before entry. I clicked the navigation panel and the ship tilted sharply, centring on our route home, out of the centre of the galaxy and towards its outer edge, the reaching spiral shape within which resided my home, my sun and my Earth.

The next sequence of events was actually unscheduled and could begin whenever I wanted. Right now, I was just happy to be alive. Chronological data, gathered from the location of the constellations, revealed that we had arrived on March 19th, 1967 as we were supposed to. All of the advice from the technicians, Bassar and Cyto, was to enter stasis first, and then have the computer begin the lightspeed sequence. The unpleasant sensations would only be magnified in this small craft. Once lightspeed was reached, the engines could power up further, burning up the vast majority of our hydrogen, and push the ship to 3.2c, our planned cruise speed. This would get me home in July 2008, a few days shy of my abduction date. I spent half an hour with the computer, checking this data, and everything seemed fine.

After a relaxed meal produced by the replicators, I was ready to think about stasis. The procedure was simple. I would finish programming the computer, drop the tiny probe which would let the Holdrian scientists know that I had made it through, and climb into the stasis chamber. Over the period of three hours, it would render me unconscious, slow down all of my biological systems to a crawl, lower my core temperature to within a degree or two of freezing and begin feeding me nutrients in a tiny stream through an IV drip. I would stay there for 41 years and three months, give or take. This depended on the speed we were able to reach, and the precision of the orbital calculations which had placed me on a path with my home planet.

I decided to get it over with. There was little to do except play the computer at chess, and that could have only one, rather frustrating, result. I undressed, placing my clothes tidily in a storage locker, and visited the bathroom one last time. I put the ship into a brief 1-G rotation and sat, daydreaming for a while. I was reminded of Stephen Baxter's character in his marvellous novel Titan, which I had read back home about a year before all of this happened. Paula, our hero, is left alone and stranded on Saturn's weird, frozen moon and decides to commit suicide by jumping into a lake of liquid hydrocarbons. But not before she has a 'long, slow, luxurious dump'. Mine was not dissimilar.

The computer was certain of its job and I would be awakened if anything really serious happened. What the computer didn't mention was that 'anything really serious' would almost certainly destroy the ship, particularly as we were about to accelerate to three times the speed of light and remain at that velocity for four decades. A high-speed run of this type had only been tried once before over such a distance. I had been the passenger on that occasion also.

Getting into the stasis chamber was a lot like putting on a suit of armour, except everything was white and extremely comfortable. I leaned back, into the cradle of the chamber, which mimicked my shape. It was cosy, perhaps even tight, but not uncomfortable, like being wrapped in cotton wool. There were various straps and tubes to engage. I had trouble getting the IV drip into my arm, but slid it into a vein on the third attempt. I taped the drip in place, took a few deep breaths, and pushed the button which closed the chamber door and started the stasis process. I wasn't nervous. In some ways I was looking forward to the experience. But the strangeness of this act, and all the others of the last weeks, remained.

Inside, I was relieved to find that there was almost complete silence. I had expected to hear the ship's own noises -- fans, pumps and the like -- but there was only the very faint whirr of a fan behind my head, which I knew was actually part of the ventilation system which would help me to breath in stasis. There was nothing to feel, either, save the warm, comforting surroundings of the white capsule. It smelled kind of new, like a new car, but not strongly.

Before I had the chance to dwell on this any further, I could feel the process begin. My eyes became heavy and closed almost of their own accord. My whole body seemed to relax, as one is advised to during hypnosis, from my forehead down to my neck muscles, my pecs, my stomach and legs, all the way down to the ends of my toes. This took a few minutes and was wonderful to experience, like being gradually anaesthetised from the top down.

I then entered an even deeper state of relaxation. There was no way I could move a muscle now, even if the Cruiser caught fire. There was not just the complete absence of muscle movement, there was also the absence of pain of any kind. You know, those odd little aches or pinpricks one feels from time to time, in the hands or back or a stiffness of the neck. They had all gone. I felt amazingly calm.

Finally, my mind entered the same relaxed state. Up until now it had been an interested observer of all these changes, conveying enjoyment and sensations to whichever parts of my brain were responsible for them. But now, even these cares, these simple observations, the very act of observing myself, seemed to fall away, to become unimportant. And then to become quite impossible, even undesirable. The mind finally rested. All those hours of preparation and the intense madness of the past few weeks had left me tired, I realised. Dog tired, tired as the dead, exhausted beyond movement or thought. And so completely comfortable. I summoned a final thought before everything closed down -- this is what it must be like to die, in peace, alone in the quiet. A gradual closing of the last door.

Goodnight.

The Phoenix, as I had named her at Holdrian, carried out her tasks flawlessly. An hour after the last pulses of thought had left my mind and there was complete stillness on the ship, the computer began the sequence which would accelerate us through lightspeed and up to our cruise velocity. Fuel pumps were pressurised once more, the engines awoke and began consuming hydrogen, and the familiar blue trail emerged from each of the twin engines and began to propel us towards Earth. Phoenix weathered the storm of lightspeed entry without a hitch, pushing past 1C and into that strange hinterland occupied by so few particles in the universe -- faster than light travel. Achieving 2C was easier, and then the engines kept on thrusting at their maximum to give us 3C.

Oblivious to the stresses imposed upon the laws of physics, or to the insane speed we had reached, the engines worked even better than their designers could have hoped. When our hydrogen reached its critical level, with only 52% remaining in the tanks, the twin engines closed down as their fuel flow ceased. Had I been around to see it, I would have observed that the readout showed a cruise speed just in excess of 3.4C, that is 340% the speed of light. We were the fastest object in the history of the known Universe.

Then, there was stillness. The Holdrian scientists had plotted a course which avoided any known collections of inter-stellar hydrogen, comets, stars or asteroid belts. The ride was smooth. Belying the outrageous speed, the ship was still. Computers which were not required powered themselves down to conserve battery power. The lights went out. Readouts turned themselves off. The environmental controls which had kept the ship warm and comfortable reduced their power needs, so that the temperature dropped to 1.5C, warm enough to prevent ice from forming inside the ship but cold enough to save plenty of power. The ship became quiet, cold and to an observer, dead.

In the stasis chamber, I was alive and deeply asleep. My own systems, in a curious echo of the general shutdown onboard the Phoenix, were resting at a fraction of their normal output or consumption. My heartbeat slowed to about one pulse every 90 seconds. Calorie consumption was around two per day and these were replaced by the tireless IV drip. Antibiotics, injected prophylactically, would stop infections before they could start. There was a basic medical scan, every four months, which would spot serious trouble such as cancerous cells and inject the proper medication. Only a cardiac arrest was untreatable, and I showed no signs of that. Slow as it was, my heart remained strong. I was hibernating, like an animal in winter, only for many times longer.

Phoenix progressed through the inner part of the galaxy, where the stars are at their densest, but had been placed in a plain higher than the ecliptic. This meant that we avoided both the stars themselves and even their gravitational influence. Nothing would perturb our path that had not been plotted by the Holdrian team. In five years, we crossed the centre of the galaxy and began making our way towards the edge. Only one close encounter, with a nebula, was noted by the computer. We flew past it at a distance of less than two light-years, a near-miss in galactic terms, but neither felt the effects of the other.

Fifteen years later we were in the less crowded space between the galactic core and its spiral arm. For thousands of days, nothing happened. There were no interactions, no thruster firings, no emergencies for the computer to deal with. I continued to receive my IV, my heart continued to beat. We pressed on.

In the 40th year of the trip, we finally encountered the star clusters of the spiral and, were anything visible at this speed, I could have seen a spectacular display of stars, planets and comets as the system became more crowded. Three light years away, as 2006 turned to 2007, a small, rocky planet was consumed by its star, tearing it apart with unimaginable forces even before its blasted, boiled rock reached the star's atmosphere.

We continued. We were perhaps a week from Earth when the automatic systems which were to alert me upon our arrival began to stir. The process of awaking from stasis was not a short one. My body temperature had to be slowly raised and heart-rate increased in a way which wouldn't cause too many shocks to my fragile systems. Final medical checks were made, assuring against serious damage or recommending medications to take after waking. IV fluids were increased to provide more energy for the awakening process, and the computer began to power up the onboard systems, so that the ship would look like it did when I had lost consciousness. Some other, simple steps had been taken to assist in my initial reorientation after such a long period in stasis.

Three days from Earth, I began to swim back to the surface of consciousness from the depths where I had stayed for so long. The first thing of which I was aware was the sound. Waves. Some birdsongs, tropical birds, crickets or cicadas. Then music. I had requested this, knowing it was the perfect way to reintroduce me to the land of the living. As the volume slowly increased, wary of my fragile ears, I heard the sonorous, woody string tones of Bach's 3rd Brandenburg Concerto, one of the most familiar collections of melodies and harmonies. It asserted itself over the background noises, which gradually ceased and allowed this glorious music to fill the cabin. As the three groups of strings communicated, sending fragments of music to and fro, the plastic sheet which had insulated me from the cabin's dim lighting began to become opaque, and then slowly clear.

This prompted my eyes to begin opening. In an odd way, Bach seemed to want them to, as if simply listening wasn't enough. As objects began to come very slowly into focus, I could make out the three black suitcases on the equipment racks opposite the stasis chamber. Behind me, the white, cottony fabric which had held me in place for forty years began to soften and yield. This was done extremely slowly, over a couple of hours, and encouraged me to very gradually begin flexing my muscles. I felt weak, as though I would fall in a heap if the chamber were not restraining me. Had I remembered that we were still in Zero-G, I wouldn't have worried. The first area to relinquish its hold on me was around my hands. I began by making small movements, curling a finger slightly, and within ten minutes I was making a basic fist.

My knees were next, allowing them to shift from side to side, unlocking after decades. Then my feet. The sensation of wiggling my toes was quite wonderful. My shoulders were released and after two hours of this gradual freeing of my body, I was making circles with my shoulders, tilting my head fro side to side and turning my hands palm-up, then palm-down. There were still straps across my chest and upper legs which were keeping me inside the chamber, and these began to loosen very slightly. I knew that, soon, I would be expected to put a foot forward or simply float out into the cabin.

It took three more hours. The very idea of putting weight on such fragile limbs seemed absurd, even in microgravity. But I made repeated motions forward, planting my toes, then my whole foot on the floor. The ship's computer, perhaps sensing this struggle (was there anything it didn't sense,? I wondered), lowered a set of grab handles from the ceiling. I reached for one and tested its feel in my grip. I was able to turn my head enough to see the cockpit, which was were I seemed destined to go. I wasn't really sure.

A gentle pull on the grab handle and a push with my foot on the floor and I was away. Weightless, free of the chamber, I was gently nudged up into the cabin's ceiling. I placed both palms on it and pushed back down, evening out gradually in the centre of the cabin. It felt absolutely wonderful, like a chick breaking out of its egg and breathing real air, seeing the world for the first time. Slowly bringing my knees up into my chest, I formed myself into a ball and rotated merrily through a complete circle. Free at last. Every cell of my body was happy. I seized other handles in my feeble grip and pulled myself steadily along to the cockpit, only a few meters away. Once there, I cast my eyes over the readouts, found most of them blurry and indistinct, and slid into the pilot's seat.

It felt quite insane to now strap myself in, but I knew that my flailing limbs might catch something important and, besides, I needed to check the readouts and communicate with the ship's computer. That might be difficult. There was no way I could type, and my hands weren't yet co-ordinated enough to push a button or flick a switch without serious effort. Thankfully, I knew the process would have given me plenty of time to get used to my environment once more before anything demanding was required of me.

I opened my mouth to speak. "C..." I tried. "Co..." A light blinked on and a soft, feminine voice emerged from the panel.

"Welcome back. You have just awoken from stasis. Are you able to communicate?"

I tried nodding but nothing seemed to happen. I said, '"yes". My voice was horrendously broken and hoarse, like I'd been yelling all day, only much worse. My throat ached like it had been rasped with a cheese grater.

"Please go to the primary replicator. There is a beverage there which will help." I unbuckled from my seat and allowed myself to rise, given just a little nudge on the seat from my fingers. In four minutes, I had reached the replicator without damaging myself or anything. First mission accomplished.

There was a clear, plastic packet filled with a light yellow liquid. I popped open the plastic cap and held it to my mouth. Any drops which escaped, I knew, would splat against the walls somewhere and cause mess. This was a nice, clean spacecraft and I intended to keep it that way. I painfully swallowed half of the packet, and very quickly the soreness in my throat receded, then vanished. My vocal chords felt more relaxed and I wondered if I was now able to speak.

"Thanks", I croaked. Much better. "That was... good." Sounds made at the front of my mouth seemed easier, the hard consonants and fricatives, but sounds from the back were still a little painful and awkward, like the 'g'. I tried it again. "That was good." Better still. I spent a few minutes talking to myself, listening to the strange sound of my own voice, the vibrations and sensations of speech. Another of the yellow packets appeared and I gulped it down.

"Computer?"

"I am here to serve." Nice reply, I thought. I wondered if I have programmed that.

"Status report, please." I stayed around the replicator, in the hopes of being served further packets of sweet, yellow liquid. It had an anaesthetic effect on my throat and seemed to nourish every fibre of me.

"We are two point seven light-days from planet Earth. Our speed is 3.3988C and has been for the majority of the mission. All systems are nominal. Hydrogen fuel levels are stable at 51.87% of capacity. Our burn to begin decelerating from lightspeed will begin in twenty-three hours, eight minutes. The passenger is alive and in a stable condition, having awoken from stasis exactly on schedule. Nourishment and bodily stabilisation program will begin at once."

I was relieved that 'the passenger' was in such good condition. I felt shaky, very hungry and unbelievably thirsty, but I was most definitely alive.

"Begin the nourishment process", I ordered simply.

"Do you wish to begin a 1-G roll at this time?" the computer asked.

That sounded like a pretty good idea. Sitting down to a proper meal or three would be far more commodious in 1-G, rather than having things float around the cabin. The down-side was that 1-G was going to make me feel absolutely horrible after so long in weightlessness. I knew there would be nausea, and a strong sensation of being pulled down, pummelled by invisible forces. But I felt I could handle it.

"Yes, please. Increase the rotation as gradually as you can, so that it takes at least three hours to reach 1-G. In the meantime, continue serving beverages."

"Certainly", it replied, rather cheerfully, I thought. "Our beverage program is lengthy and consists of seven different varieties of beverage. This will begin now."

A third package of the yellow liquid emerged and I drank it down like a dehydration victim. Each gulp filled my cells with further nourishment and vital fluids. The next package was darker, and was a sweet, malty drink which felt even better. There were several of these. Then came a purple, fruity drink which was deliciously sweet, and a sugarcane concept which was so good I ordered the Computer to interrupt the programmed sequence and just keep giving me those. In two hours I had taken on eight litres of liquid and felt fabulous. Only totally starving.

The resumption of gravity was an odd set of sensations, but the very gradual increase in the Cruiser's roll meant that I was pretty comfortable, given the circumstances. I only really noticed it, I was grateful to find, when the last drinks packet seemed to make its way to the floor rather than simply hang in the air. I policed up the various containers and slid them into the replicator's waste slot.

"We have achieved 1-G. How do you feel?"

I received this news while standing in the ship's bathroom, accepting the inevitable result of my rehydration program. "Fine, thanks. How about some food?"

"Certainly. Return to the replicator when you are ready." I finished the longest, most satisfying piss of my life and returned to the cabin. While I had been away, a small table had slid out of the wall near the stasis chamber, and another protuberance beneath it would serve as a chair.