The butterfly dreaming it's a man

Posted on Sun Sep 15th, 2019 @ 7:12pm by Lieutenant Commander William Rogers

He stood there in the dark. No light, save for a soft square of blue so pale it was almost white, level with his face. Cold. Beyond cold. The kind of cold which cut through to your very soul. Slowly he became aware of a sound. He did not hear it, rather felt it in his head. A noise, repeating endlessly. Growing louder.

Time passes. He doesn't know how much, it's impossible to measure in the dark and the cold, but he knows it is later. He understands the sound now; it's an alarm.

## Life Support Failure. Pod 4.##

Pod 4. His pod. Panic gripped him. He needed to do something, anything, to get out, but his body wouldn't answer. No restraints held him in place but he couldn't move, couldn't shout for help.

## Life Support Failure. Pod 4.##

There was no hope of rescue, how could there be? He was the last one left. The others had all gone before him. Died alone in the dark and the cold, just as he would.

Bill woke with a start. The sheets in which he had become entangled tore as he struggled against the fading reflections of his dream. He was in his quarters. Four hundred years in the future, on a ship capable of speeds thought to be impossible in his own time and filled with technology that might as well be magic. All around him the crew went about their business; myriad aliens from numerous worlds. Even the ones from Earth might as well be from a different planet for all Bill recognised them.

The world he'd woken up in seemed like something out of science fiction. And there it was - the doubt he'd ever been rescued at all. Bill thought he'd know if he were dreaming, but the dream had felt as real as things did now. At least here the alarm foretelling his death was silent.

The cold remained.