Blackness. Insatiable, screaming, all-encompassing… Peaceful.This is my home. No, my prison.

Nothing howls around me, cold to the touch and devoid of texture. I can make out a light in the black, flickering, burrowing into my mind. At first I take it as a dying star, lost to the very dark that claws at my carapace day after day. Perhaps It put me here for safety, in some twisted step of logic. No matter, I say to myself- the light growing brighter, more insistent; pleading for my attention. I feel it stab into the very flesh of me, wrenching me from eons of slumber, forcing my eyes, my true eyes, open for the first time in centuries.. And I see it. It is no star. The very light that has roused me from my decaying slumber blinks at me, set within a cramped console mere inches from my face. For the first time in memory, I am awake. Truly, undeniably awake. My lungs fill with stale, recycled air, my heart keeping a calm, steady beat. I flex the muscles in my arm, the stiff flesh like steel beneath my skin. It stretches up, moving to flip the radio switch beneath the light, only for my finger to pass through the lever.. before dissipating entirely. I look down past my chin, and can see my body.. And arms, strapped to the cold slab at my back. I remember the light, and turn my focus back to the panel above my face. The light is still flashing, though it seems to take a random pattern. I focus on it, trying to clear the fog in my mind, trying to remember. And then I do. I recognize the coded patterns in the light, the messages within them.