100TWC - Day 90: Nowhere and Nothing

George had never known it this dark. A blackness so complete he couldn't tell whether his eyes were open or closed. Even the usual hint -- the occasional spark that would scintillate behind his closed eyelids at night before he fell asleep -- didn't work. With eyes open, and he knew they were open because he'd blinked hard and opened them wide, he still saw those phantom flashes.

Silent too. The only sounds he was aware of the rushing of blood in his ears, the pumping of his heart and the inevitable tinnitus. It now seemed even louder than usual, the harsh high-pitched screaming in his ears. But there was nothing else. No distant animal calls, no mechanical grinding, no traffic rumble reaching him from the nearby motorway, no planes overhead. An absence of sound that was almost tangible.

George moved his arms in front of his eyes. There was not even enough light to see them when he held his hands right up close. He couldn't feel their movement. No cool draft of air moving gently over the hairs on his arms as he waved them to and fro. No warmth emanating from any nearby heat source rendered invisible by the blackness. Wherever he was must be exactly the same temperature as his blood.

With no sensory input except what his own body provided, George's mind spun freely. At first his conscious thoughts were taken up entirely with the strangeness of his environment, but after a few minutes (or what felt like a few minutes to him -- there was no way to mark the passage of time externally, and he didn't want to spend all his time counting heartbeats) he slipped into a more philosophical frame of mind. The emptiness around him put him in mind of the vastness of the cosmos and he began to imagine his insignificance when compared to the galactic and universal whole. One man, riding in total darkness, on a speck of dust circling a tiny point of light that was one of billions of similar points in a galaxy of billions of other galaxies. Before today that kind of thinking boggled his mind. Somehow, here, now, he found it comforting. The neutral temperature and absence of stimulation made his infinitesimal smallness bearable in some visceral, inexplicable way.

He imagined himself hovering in space, gazing down at the Milky Way from a vantage point directly above its core. The spiral arms stretching out left and right and the whole turning majestically beneath him. Countless lives of untold creatures being lived out on worlds orbiting those billions of tiny lights, each lonely collection utterly unaware of every other lonely collection and separated from them by vast physical distances and even larger conceptual ones.

George began to imagine what those alien worlds might look like. Or sound like. With nothing to distract his senses, his mind started conjuring inputs to replace the usual frenetic melee of sensory evidence. Now acutely aware of the functioning of his body -- exactly how full his bladder was; whether or not he would be hungry any time soon; how fast his heart was pumping -- George experienced a sudden feeling of panic. If he was bleeding, or heading for an abyss, or about to be crushed under some huge falling weight, how would he know? His previous feelings of safety and calm were supplanted with nervousness and disquiet. All his natural defences, reactions and instincts were blinded along with his sight and hearing. If he couldn't see danger approaching, or hear it, how would he be able to react in time?

His heart rate increased. The blood rushed in his ears. All thoughts of universal serenity or galactic harmony were replaced by his worrying suspicion that he could be in mortal danger and would never know. His life was about to be snuffed out by something dangerous but trivial, and he was powerless to avoid it.

A blinding white knife edge of light scored across the velvety darkness to his right, like a scimitar slicing the heavens in half. This was it! He was doomed! The sky was falling! He was lying on his back directly beneath the cosmic blade that had cleaved his world in two!

With a metallic click the left-hand half of the sky peeled back to reveal a man standing next to what had become a hatchway to another world. A world of light, and warmth, and noise. The man smiled.

"Strange experience isn't it? Revealing. I like to use the Isolation Chamber two or three times a year. It's amazing what insight it can bring."

He fastened back the lid with a clip. "Well, get your bearings George, for a minute or two, and then when you're ready you can step out onto the platform here."