In the beginning, there was darkness, interspersed by flashes of blinding white light. After a time, colors began to appear, slowly resolving into shapes that flashed by at an incomprehensibly fast pace.

Oliver Grace opened his eyes, then closed them again when realizing it made no difference. What he was seeing wasn't real, in the traditional sense of being a construction of his brain derived from photons bouncing off of his retinas.

Finally, after what might have been ten minutes or might have been an hour (time was hard to tell in the absence of familiar cues), the wild riot of seething colors and shapes in front of him began to fade, and the dizziness that had gripped him abated somewhat.

When the color, light, and general disorientation had died away, Oliver opened his eyes to find himself in an entirely different place than he had been standing before.

Really, it was no surprise; his inner ear had been going crazy for a while and it was some time since he'd been standing on the solid earth of his back lawn, weed whacker buzzing away.

The interminable period of silent insanity had given himself time to reflect on what was happening, so that when the visual assault ceased he needed only a moment to get his bearings.

He was standing in the middle of a glade in a forest, warm sunlight beaming down upon his head. Tall, deciduous trees hemmed in the small, open area of grass.

Oliver looked up, noting with a detached calm that there were two suns in the sky, one larger and one smaller. He was on another planet. One with a carbon dioxide and oxygen-rich atmosphere, as evident from the fact that he hadn't yet collapsed of asphyxiation.

He was having trouble accurately modeling the normal mental state of a person that had been unexpectedly and unintentionally displaced in the time-space continuum, but he was pretty sure that he should be freaking out right now.

He wasn't.

The peaceful, quiet, and familiar atmosphere of the forest — he was from New England — complete with the somnolent buzz of cicadas in the distance and the chirps of birds in the trees, was probably contributing to a sense of false security that would erode as the unfamiliarity of his environment made itself known.

For the time being, complete and overwhelming curiosity was his dictating emotion. How, and why, had he ended up here, in flagrant violation of all known laws of causality, thermodynamics, and really everything everyone knew about physics?

Yes, the shock would probably come soon, he reflected.

Oliver looked down, taking an inventory of himself. The lawn care clothes he had been wearing, check. Weed whacker still in his hand, check. Ear muffs, lawn care gloves, and sunglasses, check. He took the ear muffs off and hung them around his neck, still damp with sweat. He kept the sunglasses down.

First priority: determine location in the universe. Second priority: find civilization and acquire means of contacting home.

Strike that, second priority: determine if there are threats to wellbeing in immediate vicinity. Aliens? No, on a foreign planet he was the alien. Natives, then.

The trees seemed to be roughly the same size as the ones back home, the sky the same shade of blue (any primarily carbon-based environment planet with an oxygen atmosphere capable of supporting human life would have a similar appearance overall, basic physics made sure of that), but for all that the two suns could not be overlooked.

Were those really birds he was hearing in the distance, and were those really cicadas?

He would need to find a stream and follow it; that was the only way to make progress. He also needed to determine if the there was anything to eat here that wouldn't be harmful to his physiology.

Frankly, everything here would probably kill him. Going swimming at the lake house he owned two hours' drive away, he'd get an upset stomach from the unfamiliar microorganisms in the water.

There was no telling where he was in the universe, but he was pretty sure it was further than a two hours' drive, and the microorganisms would be commensurately unfamiliar.

The best thing to do was find intelligent life before he had to eat, assuming — assuming there even was any at all. There were ways to test whether or not the vegetation was edible, and he'd have to eat eventually, but he'd wait until he had no other options first. That gave him a couple of weeks, at least. A healthy adult human could survive up to thirty days without eating, but he didn't want to push himself to the edge unless absolutely necessary.

The mental conditioning of a decade spent in the marines began to kick in after a moment. Survival, evasion, recovery. First priority, assess the situation. He scanned his environment again, noting that though he was surrounded by the familiar sounds of a New England forest, complete with normal-looking trees and undergrowth, there was no guarantee of safety.

The undergrowth could be hiding a bear or a ticked-off moose, the air could be permeated with alien spores that would burrow into his vulnerable lungs and — he cut that thought off. Not useful.

Nothing immediately dangerous was in the area. He took the bandana around his neck and raised it over his mouth. If the air was hostile, this was the only thing he could do for the time being, and if it was there probably wasn't much that would help, but it would keep him on his feet for a moment longer, hopefully. A moment which could be the difference between life and death.

He took a knee in the clearing, thinking fast. His heart rate began to accelerate. He could feel the panic beginning to rise, but kept it in check.

First, he'd need to find a shelter. From there he could think through the situation more thoroughly, maybe allow himself the luxury of freaking out.

He stood and paced to the edge of the clearing, listening closely. The vegetation underfoot, not grass but something that looked like small ferns, came to his knees. Thankfully he was wearing good boots, long pants, and knee-high socks for protection from ticks. He'd examine himself later from shelter.

The trees appeared very familiar to Earth trees as he drew near, complete with bark and a typical branch structure. In fact, if not for the two suns above, he'd not have presumed to be on another planet at all.

That meant that one source of shelter would be a fallen tree. A cave would do too, but there was a chance it would already have an occupant. Reaching the edge of the glade, he peered into the undergrowth. The crowns of the trees above were dense with leaves, casting the floor of the forest into shadow.

He proceeded into the forest down a shallow slope, looking around carefully and listening for trouble. Pacing between the tree trunks, he adjusted his bandana around his mouth. The humid, warm air smelled musty and faintly metallic to his nose.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of movement and whirled, nerves on a razor edge. A brightly colored avian creature, startled, flew into the air and disappeared above the trees too fast for his eyes to track.

He needed an understanding of the area around him, an understanding that could be had from a higher altitude. He adjusted the lawn care gloves he was wearing to be tighter, then started for the nearest tree. There were some branches at head height that were thin enough for him to pull himself up on.

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As he got to the tree, he froze. Think before you act. The mantra stopped him in his tracks. There could be a hostile creature on the tree, or he might fall while climbing. Better to get to safety and think through a plan first. Even if it did involve him climbing a tree, he wanted to do it after thinking things through.

He resumed walking.

After a tense twenty or so minutes, he found it: a fallen tree had pulled up a dense network of large roots, the thickest of which rivaled his waist in girth. There were gaps large enough for him to get through, but overall the root structure was quite dense, and the trunk of the tree provided sturdy overhead shelter. It was as secure of a place as a man could ask for.

He got down on hands and knees carefully, the sandy and loamy ground proving to be light and crumbly as he half crawled, half pulled himself into the network of roots. Once he was in, he turned and grabbed the weed whacker, pulling it in after him.

Within the thicket, light was filtered out even further, leaving him in a localized dusk. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, taking one glove off to turn on the flashlight. The light revealed that there was nothing under the tree but himself. It looked to have fallen a while ago and was likely stable.

He searched the area and, seeing no other signs of habitation, concluded it was probably safe. The roots formed an effective deterrence for larger predators, and smaller ones would not prove as much of a threat. He was sheltered from wind and rain, and fairly well out of sight at the base of the tree, where the roots were thickest.

He turned the flashlight of the phone off, pausing for a moment to look at the picture of his wife smiling at him from his lock screen. He also noted the the icon at the top of his screen; wherever he was, he didn't have reception. Then he powered down the phone and put it in his pocket, zipping the pocket closed. Distractions could come later.

He settled with his back against a root, with his knees out in front of him and his eyes on the biggest gap. The serene forest afternoon seemed to be almost mocking him.

He wasn't just in a bad situation. This was terrible. He couldn't think of a way for it to get worse. That wasn't a useful thought, though, so he put it in the back of its mind and moved on.

The important thing was getting his mind straight. If he panicked, acted rashly, there was a good chance he'd do himself in before the environmental hazards had a chance to.

He sat and thought there for about fifteen minutes, sitting there, chewing on his lip and watching the entrance to the ball of roots tensely. Nothing happened in the interim.

Fact: he was on another planet. Fact: it was similar enough to Earth to support human life for a little while at least. Fact: he was lost in the wilderness with no signal on his phone (not that that was surprising).

Implication: he would not be able to contact civilization as he knew it, assuming any sort of civilization existed on this planet. Assuming it supported sentient life at all.

Even if there was an intelligent race living on this planet, there was no guarantee that he ended up anywhere near any of them. He had no idea how big it was, how densely populated it was (if at all), or even whether or not the natives would be friendly if they existed and he did manage to find them.

In short: he was totally screwed. He was farther from home than perhaps any human had ever been, surrounded by surroundings completely unfamiliar and in a situation for which he'd never been trained. He had no food, no water, perhaps not even fully breathable air. There was nobody coming to get him, or even anybody who knew where he was.

He began to hyperventilate, and when he noticed he forcibly brought his body under control, taking deep breaths in through his nose.

It all came down to mindset. He resolved, then and there, that wherever in the world — or in *any* world — he was, that he would come home. He'd come home to Joanna, to the daughter they hadn't named yet. He would come home. His children would not grow up without a father.

With that resolution, the trembling in his hands subsided and the fog began to recede. After a moment, he began to methodically consider the facts he was aware of so far.

There was a chance that he wasn't on another planet. That what he'd seen in the sky was not another sun, but some sort of… solar event? An unknown technology test? No, it was almost certainly originating from an extraterrestrial body of some kind. There was nothing he knew of that could shine as brightly at mid-day as the sun except another star, and a close one at that.

Still, that he was on another planet was a pretty far-fetched theory. It was possible he was hallucinating, or drugged somehow. Maybe this was all part of a test and he was suffering from short-term retrograde amnesia.

Then there was the matter of how he'd arrived. He'd been standing in his yard weed whacking. It had been Tuesday back home. His stomach rumbled then, to remind him he'd… left? just before dinner time. Joanna had been grilling burgers out back.

That was the last thing he remembered of home. Next, a bright light had dazzled his eyes and when he'd closed them reflexively it hadn't gone away. The colors, the loss of balance, and then he'd just been here. No sense of movement or falling: just, there one moment, here the next.

And if this truly was another planet, then it was a miracle that he wasn't dead already.

Gravity felt, if not normal, then close to it. He waved his hand around in front of him, looking at it curiously. His gloves did indeed look as though they were simply covered in dirt, the alien substrate appearing indistinguishable from the real McCoy back home.

Was there a way to prove where he was? It came to him a moment later. Of course there was: he'd simply have to wait until nightfall. The stars would tell him where in the universe he was.

With that mystery temporarily put on hold, he turned his attention to more practical matters, the foremost of which was water. He'd have to leave this shelter sooner or later to find some, and he might as well get that over with sooner, rather than later. Without water, he would succumb within three days.

Ideally he'd have some sort of camouflage, but he didn't trust that, if he truly was on another planet, the dirt wouldn't contain microbes harmful to his skin. His mowing outfit — long tan cargo pants, dark polo, dark Bruins cover, and sunglasses, would have to do for now. He'd have to ditch the bright orange gloves — keep them in a pocket. He did so.

Preparations made and a plan established, he ventured from the ball of roots, emerging once more into the forest. He set off in search of running water of some kind — a stream, a river. His boots served him well, and he reflected on the fact that he'd been transported from his home while mowing with gratitude. It could've been worse after all; he could've been showering.

The trees around him looked old. Moss draped from branches, hanging down like Spanish moss; old man's beard. Common in the South, not so common in New England.

As he hiked through the forest he became more and more disoriented; it really didn't look all that different from the average mid-summer deciduous forest. A dense layer of fallen leaves crackled underfoot, and fallen trees and branches broke up the monotony. The terrain rose and fell in gentle waves, making the hiking fairly easy-going. The odd boulder broke the ground as he hiked along, remnants perhaps of an ancient glacier.

What he didn't see, however, was water. After nearly two hours of hiking, he finally found a stream trickling down a fairly steep hill, bordered on both sides by rocks exposed by the wearing away of soil.

He followed the path of the stream for some time, until finally, just as the suns fell in the sky and an early dusk overtook the forest, he found a suitable shelter: a tree fallen against a boulder, backed up against a larger rock and covered over with fallen branches and leaves. It was barely enough room for him to fit, and there was a lot of rotten wood and dirt within, but it too proved unoccupied to the illuminating light of his phone's flashlight.

After having found a spot to camp, he methodically combed the area for dry branches, stopping when he had several pieces.

Grass was not to be had anywhere in the area, but further searching revealed growing by the water a plant which very much resembled the cattails of New England. The plant consisted of long stalks, the ends of which were shaped like a corn dog and contained a fist-sized white puff of material which was fine enough that it ought to catch fire quickly.

Next, he disassembled his trusty weed whacker with the help of a couple of rocks and managed to finesse a crude fire starter together. With sparing use of the remaining gasoline in the tank, which proved to be about half-full, he was able to get a fire going pretty quickly.

By now, darkness had fallen around him, cloaking the forest in mystery and threat. Strange noises entirely unfamiliar to him began to echo out across the night, distorted strangely by the trees and sounding like no creature he'd ever heard before. Above him, the dense canopy of trees blocked the night sky from sight.

His stomach growled again, reminding him that he hadn't eaten anything since he arrived. It wouldn't do to search for food in the darkness, so he resigned himself to going to sleep without dinner.

Before that, though, he planned to have a look at the night sky. The glade that he'd been in before seemed to have been a rare occurrence. He hadn't found another one in the time that he'd been walking, and he didn't trust himself to find his way back to the original one either, especially not in this darkness.

He looked up and around his makeshift camp, the fire now blazing merrily near the entrance to his shelter. The dry wood he'd been able to find sent up very little smoke, not that anybody would be able to pick it out in the darkness anyway.

There were a few trees nearby with low enough branches that he'd be able to climb them with a sufficient degree of safety.

He picked one and walked over to it, unzipping his pocket, removing his phone and powering it on. He turned on its flashlight and clenched the body of his phone in his teeth, light pointing down. He angled his head up and began to climb, testing each branch for strength and grip.