The team piles into the pods and settle into place as the cuffs close over their arms and legs and oxygenated fluid fills the chamber. Jim's pod has been rather hastily jury rigged to accept his rather unique anatomy, although he still has to be stuffed inside it, curled up in a ball. As the drugs to put them into a coma start flooding their veins, the team feels the pods rise up off the ground, ride the frame of the machine up several feet and then tilt down so that they're standing upright with the pods sunk into niches in the machine. The conscious world wavers, half dream and half reality, they stand on the precipice of a great and unyielding blackness. And then they fall.
Through unseen tempests and unknown distance they swim, tiny bodies lost in a great sea of darkness and errant sensation. In time they become aware of something new. Now they stand, or more correctly, float, as incorporeal consciousness constructs within a great world of impermanence. The sky above you, if thats what it can be called for it seems to stretch beyond the horizons and down below you as though you're standing within a great ball, is a haze of color and half formed images; myopic remembrances of stars and planets and faces and objects, the the moons of gas giants half merged with a child's face, fires of war seen through the banister of an ornate stairwell, short and broken cycles of movement, twitching hand gestures and jerking smiles replaying and distorting as they do. The phrase "Our duty, our pleasure," is being repeated over and over into meaninglessness by a male voice coming from nowhere. Directly in front of you is what looks like a mountain range viewed from far away but is actually up close and tiny, a trick of perspective. The face of a man in an army helmet hovers overhead, his teeth clipping through his lips and his eyes slowly floating out of his head.
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Topic: Einsteinian Roulette (Missions 9a, 10, 11, and Heph post war survey team) (Read 430948 times)