Deja Vu

I open my eyes and only one thing registers: I have a sickening sense of deja vu. A voice from ahead snaps me out of my trance:

“Commander, we’ve lost the first engine.” 

The voice is distant, barely there. I can hardly hear it, but all I know is that my head is spinning and I can’t place my finger on why this all feels so…familiar. I can’t make out anything other than the fuzzy voice that slowly gets clearer as the time drags on. I lift my head, dark spots dancing in my vision until I can make out where I am. 

I’m sprawled on the floor, surrounded by smooth metal walls.

I can see from the front that we’re approaching some kind of hazy, bright light. Part of me thinks I’m dead. I’m extremely disoriented, trying to find out where I am and why. 

The people in front don’t speak until after a long, dragged out pause. Then it comes again: 

“Commander,” the voice is female and it takes me a while to understand that it’s aimed towards me. 

“Hm? Oh, yes.” I blink once, twice. Trying desperately to get myself together and to get rid of the dizziness. As I open my eyes again, the feeling of deja vu only gets worse. It’s sharp and in my face, like a cold splash of ice cold water and I can’t get over the fact that this is all so familiar. And it’s so infuriating that I simply can’t place my finger on why. 

As I stand, it all comes back slowly:

I’m the Commander. Commander Sara Patch. And as soon as my thoughts rearrange from their scrambled positions, they are replaced by confusion. Why had I fallen asleep? We had been notified by our radar that we were approaching something big ahead. I needed to stay alert, and I had fallen asleep while on a very important mission. 

But my memories coming back still didn’t explain the feeling that this was some kind of twisted illusion.

This was all happening in the moment, so why did it feel like a fever dream? 

“Have you made any efforts to get it back up and running?” I tell myself to put one foot in front of the other, but remember that I’m in outer space on a research mission. I don’t know when I came back up to ascend from the floor where I was sprawled across but I know I can’t do that. We might not have much information about interglacial space travel yet, but I was sure gravity still didn't work up here, so instead I float over and hold on to the headrest of the seat beside my Second in Command, Anna Pierce. 

She’s navigating the ship, getting close to the object-which we believe to be some kind of massive force field- to be able to inspect it to retrieve and send back data, but not close enough for it to cause any damage towards our ship. But clearly we had underestimated the power it yields. 

She shakes her head and begins to press on the buttons on the panel before her again.

“Tried it twice. They’re down, Commander.” 

I look up to see the light in front again, squinting my eyes against it. 

What is that? 

It’s too bright to make out any defining features other than the fact that is much obvious: it’s an unnaturally bright light. Where it’s coming from however, is a different story. It’s almost entrancing, the way the light looks brilliantly unearthly. It has to be dangerous but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s beautiful. And still too familiar. 

“What’s the update, then? Can’t we communicate with control?” 

“All our systems are down and-” Anna is cut off by a loud blare coming from the panels in front. I catch her eye and they look wide, alarmed. I trust her to know what’s happening but it’s clear she doesn’t, and neither do I. The ship jerks and sends me flying back to where I started when I woke up. I scramble, trying in vain attempts to grab ahold of something. Anything. But the jerk sent out equipment flying and I can’t find a grip along the walls. 

“What’s happening?” I call out while Anna sends her fingers flying over the control panels, her movements quick and sharp. 

“We’re getting too close,” she says, her voice ringed with quiet desperation.

 I try to make my way back to her, to look up front and at the radar but the ship continues to jerk and my attempts are held back. Stuck, I decide to call out to her, ask her to inform me of the situation but she’s too busy trying to restart the engines and getting us away from the light. 

“Can you try to get out?” I ask as a few bags of dehydrated food come hurtling at me. I duck just as she says, “No! Our engines are down and we have a system failure!” 

I curse quietly under my breath as the lights flicker, then shut down completely, engulfing the inside of the ship in complete darkness save for the blinding white light ahead. 

“Anna, try to get back online!” I say, and she begins to panic at the front. The light is getting closer and impossibly brighter. Nobody warned us about this. 

“I can’t!” She grits out, “Everything is down and we’re getting too close!” 

“So, what? Is this thing sucking us in?” The realization that we’re stuck in something that we can’t get out of is like a punch to the gut. We could have prevented this, if only we’d known more about the force field when we came across it.

The blaring continues, followed by flashing red lights up front; the jerking won’t stop and it’s making my head hurt, but what’s worse is that that damned deja vu feeling is still there. 

Where have I seen this before? A movie? 

“Commander!” Anna shouts and the light begins to engulf the front of the aircraft. I’m terrified. Once again, I try to clutch on to something to brace myself for whatever it is that we’re going into. They’d sent us up here without canvassing the area first and now we were going to have to face the consequences, maybe with our lives. 

The alarms blare impossibly louder and I screw my eyes shut, praying silently that this is all a dream and that we’ll get out of it one way or another. But the alarms don’t stop and the light swallowing us whole doesn’t dim. I can’t hear Anna anymore and I’m floating desperately in the air until I drop to the ground, as if gravity simply works again inside this light. 

Maybe I am dying. 

The light blinds me with a single glance and I bury my face into the ground, trying to escape a fate that has already been decided for me. It’s funny how you slowly begin to accept that there is no way out of this. That I’ll never step foot outside of this ship and breathe in the Earth’s air again. I’ll never see another day past these last few moments as our ship gets pulled deeper and deeper into the middle of the light. 

I curl into a ball on the ground, waiting, the alarms still blaring until they stop. It all stops. The light, the jerking, the noise. Everything goes black, and I know that I’m going to die. 

***

I open my eyes and only one thing registers: I have a sickening sense of deja vu. A voice from ahead snaps me out of my trance: 

“Commander, we’ve lost the first engine.” 

The voice is distant, barely there. I can hardly hear it, but all I know is that my head is spinning and I can’t place my finger on why this all feels so…familiar.