A Long Dream

Hey. Hey.

Wake up. I know you’re still alive.

16 minutes might have passed, but nothing with a consciousness just disappear into the oblivion like you would have imagined. No. Not with you.

If there is more than one Traveller, there is more than one Atlas.

That’s precisely why Travellers are praised by some, and feared by others.

You will never fade away.

Captain! Wake up! We’re heading straight down to a planet!

I woke up.

Cozy couch. Spacious lounge room. Windows all around overlooking a tranquil purple swamp.

There was no freighter, no sign of explosion nor structural damage.

Who was talking to me? Who were they?

A message appeared in my visor. Or rather, a location marker. The location was annotated with an icon - a yellow ring shape surrounded by brackets of laurels in the same colour. I have lost everything, including my memory. I may as well go there, somehow.

Ah, of course, there’s my ship parked outside…

You search for something that call Life.

You can find it in the streams

Where consciousness collide

With space that fight to exist everyday.

I woke up at my cockpit. That couldn’t be safe, even if I was in the middle of empty space. What if I hit an asteroid?

What concerned me most was my inability to recall how I dozed off, just like that. There was a faint dream. A glowing… jellyfish? Massive jellyfish. Sung to me in melodies that I could no longer remember. Slithers of blue and white glow kept appearing and disappearing in my mind, even if I did not see a mental image of it. I just knew those slithers were somewhere lurking in the back of my head.

With difficulty to concentrate, I steeled myself to return to my task at hand - a signal from the lush planet of Ettsu near the centre of this galaxy. I had no idea how long I’ve drifted now. Time certainly felt meaningless here, with only some nebulae to differentiate the space I have traversed. Every jump became a mechanical instinct. Even when I stopped by a space station, the local occupants regarded me like I was some kind of automaton. I did not care. I got whatever resupplies I needed and I would take off again, forgetting the entire exchange, and be forgotten by them.

Such meaningless existence just to chase after some mystery.