My teeth chattered. That was odd… when was the last time I had even felt cold? Lethargically, I stretched, arching my back. I strained my eyelids, trying to force them open, and it took a moment longer to do so than I had anticipated. When they did, they came apart with a painful sensation, like pulling off an ice cube that had gotten stuck to your tongue.

Flashing red lights assaulted my eyes as they opened, and I squinted dumbly for a moment, watching ice crystals reflect the pulses of light as they floated away from my face. My breath came out in great billows of white mist.

Something is wrong.

The thought was a gentle, niggling thing. It took a full two seconds after having it for the adrenaline to kick in.

I flailed, limbs lashing out in all directions and being met with nothing. The gravity was off. The heating was off. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

“System! Suit on!” I yelled the words, but the voice command fell on deaf sensors. The flashing red lights made it difficult to gauge my surroundings—an oversight in the design of the emergency lights, but in all fairness, their designer had never anticipated they would actually ever see real use. After all, I’d been so careful, building all this.

But now my very creation turned on me. Unfathomable distances away from anything, in the depths of an interstellar darkness that I had been the first, the only human to lay eyes upon, I now flailed in a tomb of my own making.

Crack!

Stars filled my vision as my head made contact with the bulkhead. My arms flew up to the point of contact, reacting before I had even totally processed the pain. It was by sheer providence that my right arm happened to snake through one of the mobility rails on its way there. My body lurched as my elbow hooked around the rail and it stopped my tumbling, sideways momentum. I scrabbled for purchase, pulling myself in close towards the bulkhead, my legs curled up to make myself a smaller target in case there was any loose debris in my room.

As soon as I had my wits about me, I double-tapped one of the square panels that made up the bulkhead where the mobility rails were bolted down.

“Agh!” The bulkhead was freezing cold—it had taken a piece of my skin with it as I had tapped its surface. To add insult to injury, the panel only flickered once, then failed to light up, denying me access to the ships internal programming and system diagnostics.

The cold was insidious. The ship had never been built for insulation—it hadn’t needed to be. Not when I could control every aspect of the environment with a little bit of programming and nudging of molecular properties.

My head whipped around, my eyes straining in the periodically dark, periodically blood-bathed interior of my room. My bed was anchored to the floor, but my sheets and pillows were floating through the air. The book I’d been reading thunked against the “ceiling,” pages bending as the book rebounded in another direction, bumping something small and rectangular in my direction.

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My phone. I’d been using the little device as a bookmark—just something to stick between the pages and make it easy for me to hook my thumb inside and find my place again. I hadn’t actually turned it on in… well, it had been a while.

I released one of my hands, grimacing as my skin threatened to peel off—the railing itself was becoming increasingly chilled. As I stretched out my hand towards that little rectangle—my final hope—I also glimpsed something outside in the starry black beyond my room’s floor-to-ceiling window.

A massive shadow loomed in the endless starfield. There was no way to make out its true shape, and it did not appear to be emitting any kind of light. Yet, even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it saw me.

My phone finally came within reach, and I gently scooped it up, my eyes darting between it and the thing outside. The stars at its periphery were disappearing. There one moment, gone the next. It was almost like they were winking out of existence.

But that wasn’t possible—I knew better. The disappearing stars meant something worse.

Finally, I had the phone in my hand. My raw fingers found the power button and held it down. Blessedly, the screen came to life, the logo of a consumer electronics company from a previous life causing a tiny strain of hope to grow within me.

Even so, the bootup sequence seemed to take minutes to complete. More stars went out in my peripheral vision. I did my best not to look, but I could still feel the oily gaze upon me.

Finally, it started up. With one raw hand—the other thoroughly welded to the now-freezing railing—I put in the password and navigated to the app that had started it all.

As I opened it, the ship’s lights flickered on and off sporadically, and the air seemed to warm up a few, halting degrees. My knees slammed hard into the deck, lifted up a few inches, then slammed back down again as gravity struggled to reassert itself. I grimaced in pain, using my grip on the railing to hold myself against the floor, and my eyes went to the corner of the screen where it showed my data connection. It flickered from a full five bars to “No Service” in time with the flickering systems of my ship.

My eyes were pulled to the window again. The stars had all gone out. Not dead—but occluded. The object, the thing that was looking at me… it had gotten close enough to block them all out.

No time to waste. I navigated through a couple of menus and found the button I’d hoped I’d never have to use. “Backup and Self-destruct”

I waited until I was sure I had the pattern down—lights on, then off, then on, then off, then… on!

My finger hit the button just as I saw some pulsing, fleshy thing attach itself to the window and begin to drill its way in with a tongue-like appendage.

The ship around me vanished as if it had never existed, and I had just enough time to feel the saliva on my tongue and the liquid on my eyeballs begin to boil off into the vacuum of space before my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach.

The last message on the screen of my phone before it died was, “Backup data corrupted; incomplete backup.”

A sucking sensation. All went dark. Then the true pain began, and it never stopped.

***

I gasped, as if my lungs were attempting to bring the whole of the atmosphere into themselves. Red lights flashed and an alarm blared as my legs bucked and kicked in blind terror and my arms flailed to draw some suffocating mass off of me. I rolled to the side—

—And found myself lying on the floor, the wind knocked out of me. My alarm clock was beeping incessantly and the red flash of the displayed time—6:30 AM—periodically lit my room.

I struggled to my feet, disentangling myself from my sheets and blankets, flicked my alarm off, and drew the curtains.

Sunlight and birdsong flooded my room, dispelling the last dregs of whatever strange night terror had befallen me. I shook my head as the sensations of freezing cold and boiling bodily fluids fell away. I glanced over my shoulder. Nobody there. Nothing watching me.

Just my room. Just another morning. Just another scene in the looping film reel my life had become.

I sighed. Time to get ready for school.