In the Rouge

5 - Liam

Liam was prodded into consciousness by a bright white light filtering through his eyelids, gaining a reddish tinge at the edges. His eyes flickered open and the light lost the reddish tinge but gained a headache-inducing brightness. Well, at least he could see. Maybe. He raised his hands to his face. He could see them, so he wasn’t actually dead. Probably.

     He sat up, wincing as stiff muscles in his neck and back complained. He looked around, or at least he tried to. Either his eyes had not yet adjusted, or this was the whitest room he had ever seen. He couldn’t even make out the corners; light seemed to be emanating from all surfaces, leaving no shadows for contrast. Even the black and white patterned floor shone strangely.

     Liam wondered if he were in some sort of simulated purgatory. He dismissed the thought almost immediately, reasoning that, with the way his life was going, purgatory was too good for his luck. He briefly contemplated trying to find one of the walls in order to measure the size of the room, but instead, and quite probably more wisely, he sat and waited.

     After a few minutes, without preamble or warning, the white light vanished, replaced by a dull red glow from overhead. The walls turned a dull gray and began to flow like quicksilver, forming new shapes and textures. Suddenly, without quite realizing what happened, Liam found himself standing in the middle of a ship’s corridor.

     “Well, that was something,” said Liam to the universe in general. He shrugged his shoulders and wandered off down the hallway where, moments later, his eyes brought him to a stop in the middle of the corridor.

     Impossible, said his brain.

     I calls ’em like I sees ’em, said his eyes. It’s a bloody great wall of water.

     Exactly, said his brain. We’re in space. There are no giant walls of water in space. Impossible.

     Well, you just make sure and let the water know that. Now, let’s go!

     Impossible.

     Ah, to hell with this, said his eyes, deciding to bypass the brain and talk directly to the legs. Bloody middlemen.

     Liam ran.

###

It is a fact that many humans spend a great portion of their lives training their senses to communicate directly with their limbs. What they should be doing, is training their brains to interrupt this process more often or to at least provide a good amount of separation, like a chaperon at a school dance.

     Liam, for example, could have taken any of a dozen more intelligent and useful actions. He might have stopped and thought for a moment, possibly even calmly finding a room in which to seal himself. Instead, his legs simply ran while his brain tried to figure out why there would possibly be a giant wall of water on a spaceship, and why it would be used in training simulations. Surely, water was tightly rationed. They wouldn’t just waste it like this. It can’t be real, just another projection. Surely.

     These thoughts and other similarly useless ones left little brainpower to keep the senses in line. As a result, he made it only a short distance down the hallway before the world filled with a loud rushing noise. He looked down as a low tide of water rushed past his feet, running ahead, taunting him like a marathon runner at a local jogging track.

     Then there was a surge, and he was wading through knee-deep water. He stumbled and looked back just in time to be smashed full in the face. The water crashed into and over him, sweeping him along like so much used bath tissue. He fought for the surface, but soon gave up when he touched the ceiling and found no air. He felt the tingling again and then darkness.