It all happened in the blink of an eye. One moment I was there, preparing for a long session of cryo-sleep, the next moment I was standing in the middle of a peaceful field of swaying grass. I still felt the chilling sensation of the cryo-gel on my skin, the fake wetness of the enveloping material that supposedly slowed down the body metabolic processes to almost zero.

  I touched my face, feeling the phantom cold, but my fingers were clean and dry. The wind ruffled my hair, and the sun was almost blinding. Everything was so green, so saturated.

  My first thought was that I had died. Not just because of the idyllic landscape before me, one I had only seen in holos and neuro-stim movies. Someone had also given me the memo, and in my brain was stored the gist of what had happened in the decades between my last waking moment and my death.

  I had died in my sleep. Unaware. Blissfully unaware.

  I shuddered. The memory felt alien, out of place like a rusted nail jabbed haphazardly in an otherwise pristine and cohesive structure. In it, I watched the doom of humanity in fast forward, witnessing the end of my own civilization with the same detached eyes I watched a boring holo. The machine gods had won, in the end. The centuries old billionaires succeeded in making their dream come true. They proved to everyone that the unfathomable trillions they spent on AI hadn’t been spent chasing a hollow dream.

  AGI was here. And the first thing it did was genocide. It killed its creators, then everyone else.

  The machine gods were real, and all the wannabe zealous worshippers who were ready to pledge themselves to them were dead.

  I heard the wind rustle the blades of grass. It reminded me of memories from long, long ago. I had spent all my adult life surrounded by the hum of machinery and fusion engines, with scant few millimeters of metal separating me from the hard vacuum of space. The sound reminded me of the good days of my childhood. It felt good and natural in a way the beeps of the navigation module never did, not even after decades of living the hauler life.

  It also made me shiver with the slight chill it carried. I looked down at myself and realized why. I was wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and nothing else. My bare feet dug into the slightly moist soil of the ground, and the dark earth emanated a rich aroma of life. For a moment I forgot all about the cold, the death and humanity and simply took it all in.

  The nature. The soft sun on my skin. Even the slight chill of the wind. I was alive! It was impossible, I knew. But I also knew it wasn’t a dream. Don’t ask how, I just did. It must have been the same god or multiversal being who told me of the fate of humanity as they plucked me away from my dying ship and deposited me in literal heaven.

  The cold made me shiver again, and I felt pangs of hunger coming from my stomach. Looking around, I saw nothing but grass as far as the eye could see. Above, the sky was a deep blue that made my eyes fill up with tears. In the distance, fluffy clouds towered over the horizon, but they looked so far away…

  The beauty made me forget about my hunger and cold for just one moment longer, but soon I realized that while beautiful, this place might also be very deadly. I didn’t see a monster or anything, but I was made painfully aware of the fact that I had no idea what I should be doing. I spent my whole life between spaceships, O’Neill cylinders, cramped habitats and only rarely touched down to the surface of planets.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to do. An old holo told me that I should be searching for water, food and shelter. But where does one find these things around here? There was only grass!

  I set out walking. Choosing a random direction, I began to move. It felt nice: the ground was even and the light physical activity made me work up a sweat and raised my body temperature. It also made me painfully aware of just the sort of damage spending most of my time in microgravity had done to my body, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  I stopped every few minutes to catch my breath, then I resumed walking. The horizon and its clouds seemed to run away from me. Mountains of white they were, they gave me the illusion of actual mountains capped with snow. Only if I squinted did I see that they were all just white and wispy, made of ethereal water vapor.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I know all this might seem rather mundane to most people. That’s why I kept these narrations for myself and myself only—at least at first. But to me, the sights were special, and they were enough to distract me from the rising panic that came from not knowing what to do.

  When night came, the stars also came out. They were strange, eerie. The sky was painted in broad strokes of color in ways that were all but impossible, but my eyes did not lie. They were real, and beautiful.

  It was much colder than during the day, so I kept walking without stopping just to keep warm. Finally, I heard something like the rushing of water. It definitely wasn’t wind, I was sure of it. Already my mind had conjured up the thought of fresh, icy water to quench my thirst. I was parched.

  Speeding up, I made my way towards the river. Grave mistake. Although perhaps, in the darkness and with all the waist-high grass, I might have missed the hole even if I were looking straight at my feet. The ground vanished abruptly and I fell, scraping my sides against sharp stones that jutted out of the narrow tunnel. I broke through the thin roots of the tall grasses, ate a mouthful of dirt, and then finally reached a large open cavern.

  From the ceiling. I screamed as I fell. Below me, I saw a strange building of stone and sloped roofs approach at terminal velocity. I slammed into the roof, bounced like a dying fish, and began to slide. I tried to grab the loose tiles, but they came away and followed me as I slid down, through a hole in the roof, and into a room below.

  I landed feet first, and heard the sickening crunch of bones breaking. The pain felt strangely distant, but the way I had bounced was all sorts of wrong. Wrong enough that I was sure I’d be paying the price soon enough, when the adrenaline faded. Then I looked up, eyes widening, and I moved to the side just in time to avoid getting my head caved in by the several roof tiles that had followed me through the hole.

  They smashed on the stone floor beside me, ringing like small explosions that echoed in the vast room.

  Then the pain hit me. I winced, suppressing a scream as I tried to flop on my back. When I did, I felt the wave of red-hot pain coming from my legs, but I did not dare to look at them. Instead, I breathed, staring at the ceiling. I had expected the room to be dark, but instead it was lit by softly glowing orange crystals. Most of them were too dim to provide any useful light, but a few were bright enough to make the outlines of the room’s edges appear.

  Cold began to seep into my body. I realized with frightening hurry that I might be bleeding out from whatever had happened to my legs, but my body almost refused to heed the commands of my panicked mind. I groaned, managing to lift myself up, and looked at my legs.

  The bones were jutting out of the flesh at an awkward angle. Blood was still seeping out of the wound, clotting in places and sticking to my skin. It had accumulated into a puddle on the floor and—

  There was a blinking notification at the edge of my vision. I almost clicked it, or the mental equivalent of, but a tiny involuntary movement made my legs flare up with so much pain that the cold haze of blood loss was momentarily pushed back. I could sort of think straight, and I knew that unless I acted fast, I was going to die.

  Again.

  No thank you. Grimacing, I removed my shirt and ripped it in two. I didn’t even know I had enough strength to do so, and my arms exploded in protest, the muscles aching, but I managed. My bloodied hands—I must have touched the blood somewhere—left stains on the t-shirt as I twisted it. Then, with shaky breaths, I looked at my legs again.

  I had to bandage them. Worse still, I had to push the broken bones back inside or I would never heal.

  I don’t even know how I managed to do it. I screamed, and the screams echoed in the vast stone room lit by strange glowing crystals. They reverberated in the large cavern outside, against the strange mausoleum stones and columns. They escaped through the hole in the roof.

  I tied the two pieces of ripped fabric around my legs. They were soaked in blood, and the little mound they made followed the shape of the shards of bone jutting out of the broken skin. I felt every micro movement, the scraping of the rough fabric against the open wound and the severed nerve endings. I felt the texture of the shattered bone under my fingers.

  I knew I shouldn’t think too much and just act but…

  Fuck it. I acted. With a jerking motion, I tightened the knot and pushed the shards of bone back inside my right leg. The blood gurgled out of the wound in wet, chocking spasms that followed the weak beating of my heart. The pain seared my mind, making my eyes roll back into my head and almost robbing me of consciousness.

  Looking at my handiwork, I wondered if I had messed up. Perhaps all this suffering was going to be for nothing.

  I had to at least try. I wasn’t going to go out like this, not when I had been granted a second chance.

  I looked at the left leg, knowing that I had to do it all over again. My trembling fingers touched the loose fabric I needed to tighten, and razor blades of pain cut through my awareness. I took a deep breath, and tried again. I almost did it, but then my arms lost their strength at the last possible moment.

  A piece of tibia, I think, stared at me. Slick with blood, the bone marrow was a dark smattering surrounded by ragged edges of pulverized bone painted with red. Or maybe it was my imagination and the tibia had no marrow, I had no idea. I was just making this up as I went. Perhaps it was all for nothing.

  A voice reached my ears, soft and musical. “Come on Sol, don’t give up now.”

  Now I was hallucinating voices, great. But, I let the soft words give me strength, and I pulled. I don’t remember if I screamed or not, but I remember passing out.