In a metal box drifting through space, there slept a man. It was not a large box, not much bigger than a coffin. A resting place for the dead was not the purpose the box was advertised for, but it was usually the resulting function. It was a Rynolx industries lifepod+. One of 300 that had once belonged to the starship Farseer.
At one time the box was coated with gleaming white Cerami-tanium. On top of the polished and sparkling surface, were safety instructions for recovering the pod and hopefully its inhabitant. In much larger print was the logo of Rynolx Industries: a large red stylized "R". Below that sat the text "lifepod+ the safest place to be in any emergency".
The box was still in that condition on the day it was jettisoned from the Farseer. It and two hundred ninty nine others like it, were pushed into space twenty minutes before the ship core exploded.
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The box was pushed away by that explosion, far from all the other boxes. It fell through space on a course that left it battered by the surprising amount of dust, rocks and ice that can be found in what is supposed to be nothing.
Six hundred three years after its expulsion from the ship, the box had entered a decaying orbit around a red dwarf star. In twenty days the box would end its long journey in a fire blaze of glory.
The man inside the box knew none of this.
As the box got closer to the star, a song, that was old long before men launched the first rockets into space, began to intrude on the black nothing of medical stasis. Inside the mans head, instruments played and a woman's voice sang "Somewhere..."