One Point Seven-Six Parsecs

It was dark. Blackness enshrouded the sleeping figure like a great, fuzzy, blanket, warm and still. The silence filled the space with a presence that was almost physical. He woke in stages, rising from the depths of unconsciousness like a diver ascending, then pausing, then ascending again, until, before he knew what had happened, he was awake, and he would not have been able to pinpoint an exact moment when he “woke up.”

“Tom…” he thought, scratching at the archives of his memory.

“Tommy… Matt… Tom Matt… Thomas…”

Thomas Mattheson. Like tugging a thread from a sweater, the whole name unravelled into his mind. He was Thomas Mattheson and he was in a…

“Ship,” he croaked into the blackness, and the words grated at his tender throat. He swallowed and tried to move his hands to warm the sore glands, but they didn’t move. In a rush of panic, Thomas yanked, shook, and battled to free his motionless limbs, but they lay by his sides as dead as meat in a deli window.

“I’m paralyzed. I’ve been buried alive. I’m dead. I’m–”

A pinprick of red light, blinding in the darkness, swelled into an ember half a foot from his face, a single, pulsing eye in the black eternity of the sky, and he squinted against it.

“Good morning, Thomas,” the kindly automated voice said, so softly, but, in ears that had heard nothing for years–decades–they rang out clear as a bell. All at once, Thomas remembered where he was.

“Ship,” he croaked again, and winced at the pain that gripped his throat. “What year is it?”

“According to my clock,” she informed, “it is the eleven-hundredth, thirty-fourth day, eighth hour, and sixth minute since departure from Earth. Did you sleep well?”

Thomas tried to respond, but thought better of it.

“Would you like some–” The computer paused, as if contemplating, then continued “coffee?”

“Yes please,” Thomas whispered. “Boot me up.”

There was a longer pause, a series of beeps, and more red lights swelled around him like an orderly celestial sphere. Then there was a whir of motion and Thomas felt his extremities begin to grow warm while his teeth simultaneously began to chatter, and he braced himself. The warmth grew to a burning as bad as the previous numbness, and his heart raced as the cocktail of drugs rushed through his system, activating muscles that had lain inert for fifty years. Fingers and toes curled and spasmed; muscles twitched bucked as if being electrocuted out of stasis—which, in a biological sense, was not so far off the mark.

The epinephrine was what gave it that panicky jolt that made his heart and head race and made it feel, against all of the evidence, like he was dying where he lay. He was used to it. It happened every so often to give the travelers a chance to sight-see, and the time between condensed into a black interim of nothing at all.

When it was over, and Thomas sat on the edge of his pod, still twitching with the aftershock of the experience and warming his fingers around a paper cup of decaf coffee, he had to keep his eyes shut against the light that inundated the chamber. Still, the soft glow of it filtered through his closed eyelids in a red haze. The room was quiet enough, despite the other travelers waking and milling about, and he sipped on the coffee, letting it warm him from the inside while an electric blanket warmed him from without.

Polarized goggles.

Earmuffs.

Lozenge for his throat that was already beginning to feel a little better.

Thomas got up and made his way to the bay window that overlooked…

Heaven.

Thomas never tired of the sight: the endless, velvety, blackness of space, pricked with stars surrounding, like the setting of a priceless gemstone–

“Mr. Mattheson,” the voice spoke from a speaker inside his earmuffs, and he spluttered on a mouthful of hot coffee, forgetting that the computer existed. “You are looking at the Helix Nebula, also known as ‘The Eye of God.’ The nebula is 650 light years from Earth’s sun, and is approximately five point seven-four light years–or one point seven-six parsecs–in diameter. It was discovered in 1824 by German astronomer–” Thomas clicked the button that muted the automated docent. She could tell him anything about the Nebula that he wanted to know. The only thing it couldn’t tell him was that it was…

Beautiful.