Star Escapades

There is a saying that right before you die, you see your whole life flash before your eyes. This was one of those times.

As certain approached, you suddenly recalled vivid memories from your childhood growing up on Earth followed by events in high school including highlights like the first time you had sex and your graduation in 2218. After that came the college years which included some very enjoyable and highly memorable sexual encounters. Next was your acceptance into the Academy for Space Exploration (ASE), and the elation of learning you'd been picked as a member of a deep space mission to Alpha Tau Minor. Then were more recent memories of the ferry from Earth to the Orbital Docking Station, and finally the launch and being put into stasis before being awoken.

During your years in stasis, the ship had accelerated to twenty percent the speed of light, and in roughly 20 more years, after completing a long deceleration sequence, the ship should reach the Alpha Tau Minor system. In one year cycles, each member of the crew rotated from their stasis pod to being active to monitor the ship's functions and back to stasis. The work was mostly just baby-sitting autonomous systems which rarely needed any interaction. Roughly 6 months ago you began your active duty while the rest of the crew was in stasis. Besides eating and sleeping, you spent most of your time jacked into the virtual reality world provided on the ship to keep the awakened crew members from going crazy during such a long trip alone. While using the VR world, you thoroughly enjoyed virtually ravishing or being virtually ravished by notable figures spanning the past two centuries that are available in the database. You were just about to re-enter the simulation to check out some really old characters from the early 21st century when something went terribly wrong.

In mere seconds, your focus shifted from a set of anomalous sensor readings, to a set of cascading failure messages, followed by a loud explosion, and sudden depressurization of the Odyssey's main control deck. The artificial gravity was suddenly gone and the of the venting air instantly hurled you out through a rupture in the hull. On the way, your midsection struck something sharp and painful. Floating out into the black empty vacuum of space, your body instantly began to freeze in the near absolute zero temperature.

Between the cold and loss of air, should have been nearly instantaneous, yet it wasn't. The flash-freezing apparently staunched any bleeding, and the excruciating pain from your abdomen to your crotch was quickly replaced by numbing cold and loss of sensation in your extremities. Based on simple physics, you feared parts of your body like your eardrums, eyeballs or lungs would explode due to the pressure differential, but they didn't. Instead, all you could sense was the overwhelming numbness as it continued to spread into your torso and across your face and head.

Just before entirely losing consciousness, you detected an intense flash of light through your closed squinting eyes. There's also a saying that you see a tunnel of light just as you die, so maybe this was it.

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