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Death can be a terrifying concept at times. The uncertainty of what lies beyond the end that equalizes all things is more than enough to drive people to madness or fear. Most people, that is.

Victoria, in a way, wasn’t like most people when she was alive. She remembers living a fairly standard childhood. A missing father, a hard-working mother, and a bright younger sibling that encompassed all she could never truly be. Where Victoria’s grades were a little above average, her grades were top of the class. Where Victoria could not keep up with her peers in PE, she broke every record at school.

Despite the genuine sensation of envy and jealousy that assaulted her mind at times, Victoria remembers that she loved her sister. 

She remembers she loved her family, and they loved her.

Why else would they cry like that when they looked at her every time they visited the hospital after all? Why else would they try their best to show off her sister’s accomplishments to her? Why else would they sit by her side and read her stories from her beloved comic books and see movies with her until she finally managed to sleep away the pain?

Victoria remembers her childhood. She remembers those sunny days she spent running around her grandmother’s fields alongside her little sister. She remembers her smile and her cheerful eyes. But she can’t remember her name.

As she slowly blinks her tired eyes open, she sees the blurry figures of two people. An older woman, in her fifties at least, grey hairs gently tainting her otherwise pristine chestnut hair. The other was a smaller version of the woman, with black hair and sharp features, a golden ring on her hand.

They were crying.

Victoria didn’t understand why, they knew she didn’t have much time left. After ten years fighting off whatever her disease was, her body was failing to even breathe some days, the fact she could even see her loved ones so far beyond death’s doors was basically a miracle.

She wanted to tell them it was fine, that she had long since accepted her fate, that there was no helping it now, and that they should just enjoy their time together while it lasts. But she could not push air through her vocal cords anymore, so she did the next best thing. Slowly, gently, and with an amount of very considerable effort, she moved her frail hands and put them over the hands of her two most important people ever.

They looked down at her, tears still falling down their faces, and she used all the strength left in her dying body to smile.

As she did so, she felt a familiar cold sensation invading her senses. Not violently, not quickly, slowly, and with a kindness she was certain belonged to whatever entity held power over death. Victoria had never been much of a spiritual person, but believing that there was something beyond her unfortunate end put her mind at ease. Even if it wasn’t the eternal rest so many of her world’s religions promised, she would be happy as long as her family lived a good life with the time they had.

The time she didn’t have.

And so, Victoria died at age twenty-eight after battling against a recessive genetic disease that had a cure. One that was created shortly after her passing, one that she could not live long enough to see, but one that she unknowingly helped create.

What lay beyond death for Victoria was indeed not paradise, nor eternal rest. The cold reality of the universe flooded into her mind, and she could do nothing but accept that after death there was just that. Cold, harsh, nothing.

Until, eventually, she blinked her tired eyes open once more and found herself floating inside some kind of tube filled with a green liquid. Cables, tubes, syringes, and all sorts of “Medical” artifacts were connected directly to her arms, chest, back, and neck. Around her mouth and nose, a breathing mask was firmly attached to her with some sort of leather strap.

Her first reaction, normally, would’ve been to panic and thrash around, but for some reason, her mind felt clear, not overwhelmed or tired as it usually did, but calm and collected. It was a strange sensation, but her rationale told her she should be worrying about figuring out where was she at the moment.

Blinking a few more times to get rid of the weird green jelly that had covered her eyelids, she was able to see more clearly some sort of laboratory. All incredibly futuristic, and seemingly covered in all sorts of instruments like computers, tablets, and other weird artifacts she had no idea what they were for. 

But what drew most of her attention weren’t the weird computers or even the lumps of meat some of them had instead of proper keyboards, but rather the scientists that were walking all around. They were, for the lack of a better term, lizard people. Anthropomorphic lizards that wore lab coats and some weird clothes made from what she thought was some kind of polymer, probably.

They were odd. They didn’t blink much so it felt like they were always wary of everything around them, and the fact they hadn’t even thrown a single glance her way made her feel a little suspicious of her current situation.

Had her body been sold to some sort of future research project? Last time she checked lizard people weren’t a thing, but then again, she was dead so this might as well be the actual afterlife.

Who would’ve known that the simulation theories were right? Certainly not her, not when she was just now feeling oddly healthy and strong. Unlike the usual frailness she was used to, something deep inside her mind was telling her she would be fine even if the laboratory was bombarded for one reason or another, and that was a very weird thought to have!

Victoria looked around her some more and found a few windows in the far distance. Beyond them she saw the night sky, no, it wasn’t the night sky she was used to, those were very different stars and nebulas. Wait, she could see nebulas now? That’s neat.

In any case, that sight alone gave her enough information to figure out she was either in some sort of spaceship or a space station, and both possibilities gave her a bit of an idea of just how screwed she was if she truly had become some sort of weird experiment.

So she looked down at herself, and noticed her body was…Larger? Then before, not that she could move her neck much, the green liquid mostly kept her in place like some kind of gelatin.

Eventually one of the lizards did give her a passing glance, and she looked straight at their eyes and tried to make a few expressions with her face. Very few were available to her, so it mostly looked like she was glaring at the poor scientist. 

This caused said lizard to almost have a heart attack by the looks of it, something that got most of the lizards’ attention until it pointed in her direction, and their reactions varied from that point onwards. They looked like they had just seen a ghost, something that wasn’t possible, something that shouldn’t exist, and yet there it was.

 

Victoria didn't understand what those looks meant, until she was left all alone in that metallic coffin.

 

---

 

Taking notes of the passage of time as your consciousness drifts in an out of hibernation is a strange feeling, as Victoria would come to know. Four months awake she counted, not being able to fully embrace slumber or full consciousness. By the fact the windows had been sealed, she figured the spaceship theory was more than confirmed, and that her temporary stasis periods were the ship jumping around the galaxy.

Between jumps, she saw more of those lizards coming in and out of the laboratory, taking samples, computers, vials of blood,, and whatever they could carry with them only to never return. She started to really worry when she didn’t see them anymore, and by the time the fourth month officially came to a close, she was almost certain she had been left behind, forgotten and forsaken.

Victoria had the time to try moving around, but her body didn’t respond well, and she knew the reason why because she was very familiar with the sensation. Anesthesia. She figured either the liquid or the air she was breathing was causing the effect, so she decided to try and hold her breath for as long as she could.

Keeping a calm mind and going over what little she remembered, holding tightly onto the memories of who she had once been, she held her breath for what felt like an eternity. An abandoned computer marked the local system hour for the spaceship’s location, and she kept her eyes glued to it for the entire ordeal.

 

For three days.

 

For three days she held her breath until her body stopped feeling sluggish, confirming the fact that the air she had been breathing was causing the anesthetic effect. Now free from the drug’s influence, she tried to move, and when she felt the jelly slowly making way, she used all the strength she could muster to break free.

One moment she was floating inside the tube, and the next she was lying on top of broken glass and spilled green gelatin. Weirdly enough, the glass didn’t cut her a single time even as she supported her entire weight on her arms to rip off the tubes and cables attached to her body, or when she threw away the mask.

“Where….am I?” She asked herself, her voice coming out way more clearly than she was used to.

What used to be grunts and weak whispers turned into a healthy, and somewhat commanding voice. Was it truly her own? Maybe it was part of whatever experiments were being done on her. No matter, she stood up and took a moment to breath to calm down. Her entire body felt…Different. Stronger, tougher, judging by the lack of any injuries, and strangely enough, taller as she stood to her full height.

She wasn’t certain how big she was right now, but she was certain she was taller than she had been before dying, and the difference was odd. Not weird, just odd. Not that big of a detail when compared to spawning inside an abandoned wreckage of a spaceship.

“Okay, first things first. Survival.” Victoria reminded herself, looking around for anything that may resemble clothes.

Much to her surprise, she found a small closet that held a few lab coats of different sizes. None of them fit her well enough to wear normally, so she simply wrapped one of them around her chest, another around her groin, and put on a third one over her shoulders. With minimal clothing acquired, she kept moving.

First of all, if the ship had been abandoned, then she would need to evacuate as well if she was still in time to do so, the windows remaining sealed could mean two things. One: Whatever caused the lizards to escape had been locked inside so it couldn’t escape, Two: the ship was still floating around in deep space, and as soon as she walked out the door she would die of depressurization.

With no time to hesitate, Victoria walked straight for the exit door, which automatically opened upon detecting motion, the metal shifting upwards to let her through. Fortunately enough, the door was big enough for her to go through, and so she did. Not dying right away was a good sign, but as soon as she turned left she saw something that caused her heart to skip a few beats and her stomach to drop.

Although the front of the hallway had seemed untouched from the doorframe, as soon as she turned her head she noticed that a good chunk of the ship was missing. Debris was floating around at random speeds, though none too high to be an actual threat, along with a few lizard corpses that looked to be in a clear state of panic. At least before they died.

Immediately Victoria thought she would be meeting Lady Death for a second time, but strangely enough, she didn’t. For some reason, the empty void of space only felt…Chilly. Like going outside in the fall wearing a t-shirt, for comparison, or those days when the heating wasn’t turned up high enough in the hospital room if going by her newest memories.

‘How am I not dead?’ She couldn’t help asking herself, and as she tried to speak, no air escaped her lungs.

So her body was able to seal itself off automatically? Neat. She had at least three days' worth of oxygen then! And even that felt like a short time of holding her breath, so she most likely had even more time left before dying of asphyxiation.

‘Well, should check out if I can scavenge anything here to see where I a-” But before she could finish, she saw it.

A very familiar sun off in the far, very far distance, with a very familiar planet orbiting around it at seemingly a snail’s pace, with a moon that looked a tiny bit too close for comfort. She wouldn’t even need to check out her location, she knew this place, she had been born in it after all!

‘So on orbit around Earth? Convenient.’ She thought, seeing how the moon grew larger as the ship seemed to be slowly pulled towards it. ‘And I guess I should prepare for impact.’

Victoria looked around, no other real separate complex section was left as unharmed as the lab had been so she decided to lock herself inside and wait to see if she could survive the crash landing. Floating inside, she noticed that the motion felt familiar for some reason, maybe it was her time floating around in the tube? She wasn’t sure, but as she started to move without pushing against anything else, she figured out why.

‘I can fly???!!’ The thought reverberated through her mind at such a volume she might’ve caused herself a migraine if she wasn’t careful.

But knowing she could fly and the fact that she was floating inside the equivalent of a highly technological asteroid, she figured out that making her approach with flight would be a better idea than letting the ship crash on the moon’s surface. Might make less of a mess that way.

‘Alright, first mission: Secure the moon landing!’ She silently chuckled at her little joke as she floated out the door again, positioning herself against the brunt of the ship and slowly trying her luck at pushing against the ship’s inertia.

At first, she barely made progress, but as she focused and concentrated on her landing efforts, the ship started to actually slow down, until her feet touched the grainy surface of the moon and the remains of the spaceship were safely pulled down as well, bouncing a little but other than that remaining in place. Corpses and debris were thrown away rather violently though, but no can do.

As she stood up straight and looked around, she noticed the earth moving closer bit by bit. So she was more or less halfway around the orbit’s trajectory. Seeing how she could fly, Victoria thought that maybe she would be able to go down all on her own. Not that she had much of a choice, not knowing how to fix the ship or how to secure oxygen on the moon and all that.

‘Alright, let’s hope I can aim correctly. Let’s see….Let’s go with the States for now. Should fit the stereotype after all.’ She chuckled and pushed off the moon’s surface, floating straight for Earth.

As she kept floating, she noticed she wasn’t really closing the distance as fast as she could, so she tightened her fists and took a mental deep breath, preparing herself to speed up.

‘Alright, here we go!’ And with that, she started moving faster. And faster. And faster.

 

‘Wait, how do I slow down again?’ 

 

It was safe to say, that the lab coats did not survive re-entry temperatures as she came crashing down through the atmosphere and straight through the storm clouds covering whatever part of North America she had stumbled upon.

The good news though, she technically didn’t miss!

 

By much.

 

Probably.

 

The fall would hurt really bad though.