It always takes an extra moment or two to orient yourself when you wake up in a strange place, like in a hotel room along the highway, or a cabin on the beach, or a tent by a mountain lake. Then after a few unfamiliar seconds you remember crawling under the covers, or into your sleeping bag the night before. Ah yes, it’s good to be away. Enjoy it. You’ll be home soon enough.
Today Phillip’s morning began with the first streaking lights of dawn refracting through a crystal window in the top of an egg-white dome about six feet above his head. He awoke lying on his back looking for a familiar ceiling, but instead saw only a pinkish-blue sky through the clear round window. As he continued to look up, the window wavered around unsteadily in the top of the dome. He tried to remember going to sleep, but those first unfamiliar seconds didn’t pass. He couldn’t remember the last time he laid down to sleep.
He sat up and looked to the curved wall which seemed to surround him, but the window moved down exactly as he looked down. It seemed to cut through the wall, and the wall appeared to heal immediately behind it. He found that he couldn’t look directly at the inside of the strange room he had just awoken in because the window followed his gaze quickly and perfectly. As fast as he could turn his head the crystal would slice through the wall in front of him. Instead of seeing what he was inside of, all he could see was the outside world: black cliffs to one side, tall yellow grasses to the other, and beyond a down-sloping terrain of various small plants was a sea of grey-green water stretching to the horizon ahead.
Looking down, Phillip could see that he was sitting on a white floor in a small round cell about seven feet in diameter. The window waited at the base of the wall as he studied the floor, pressing against it with his hands. It felt warm and smooth and soft; soft like Jell-O, or the white of a hard boiled egg. He looked up and reached forward to press against the wall, but the window jumped up in front of his hand. Cool and hard and shifting as his eyes moved, it prevented him from touching the wall at first, but moving closer he found that he could reach the wall to either side of the window and observe peripherally that it was white like the floor, but any closer visual inspection seemed impossible.
The wall felt very firm to the touch, as opposed to the soft floor, but every bit as smooth. The seam between the window and wall was also perfectly smooth. Phillip passed his hand back and forth between the two and only the temperature difference indicated a change in surfaces. He soon learned however that keeping his hands off the wall entirely would serve him best. His first lesson came as he tried to stand up on the soft floor by using his hands to steady himself against the wall. A simple glance in the wrong direction caused the window to jerk his hands aside and sent him tumbling back to the floor. The second lesson came moments later when he thought he saw something move in the tall yellow grass outside. As his eyes darted toward it, the crystal window quickly slid under his palm leaving a painful friction burn.
Shaking off his stinging hand Phillip refocused on the area of the grass outside where he thought he saw movement. Maybe it was just a breeze he thought. Then as he studied the distant patch of yellow the round white thing that contained him began to move. At first it tipped forward and lurched ahead a few feet. Then it steadied itself and seemed to drive along toward whatever Phillip was focusing on. Studying the terrain to his left and right and back again, he was soon zigzagging toward the grassy field ahead.
Gaining perspective as he moved, Phillip guessed that the floor he was now kneeling on was riding about two feet above the ground, at speeds ranging from a brisk jog to a world class sprint. He also noticed that the Jello-O like floor made an excellent shock absorber, as he bounced over rocks and bumps along the way. Then as the grass grew closer and taller Phillip suddenly realized that he no longer had any idea where the movement, or imagined movement that sent him bounding off in this direction had originated from. At that realization, the strange white thing turned vehicle slowly coasted to a stop, leaving Phillip submerged in a sea of tall yellow grass, that he could not see above.
To be continued:
