With one small tug, using what feels like the last bit of energy I could manage, I was gliding toward the port, my limbs reaching through mylar, moving five layers thick. It’s unclear how much time has passed. I don’t dare look at the clock. I just squint my eyes and let them lose their focus as the burnished gray hull scrolls down beneath my eyes, the transparent green HUD text now an ambient glow scrolling up. I try to imagine I’m sinking, into sleep, into sheets, try to recover.
A notification startles me awake and my nerves are seemingly filled with an electric current. I’m almost at the port. Each layer of mylar touching each, making no sound I can hear, I reach out as I it comes closer. The slowness of my approach gives me a good deal of time to lift, open the stiff fingers on my glove, and aim the position of my hand. Now craning my neck upwards, trying to breathe slowly, I force my eyes to focus on the entry handle. In this attempt my feebleness becomes more apparent than ever. I feel as if my limbs want to sink to my sides, as if some phantom gravity pushes them down against the trajectory of my body. Still I force my arm to stay straight, aimed toward its target, as I progress forward by slow degrees, occasionally tensing and releasing my face to stay awake, dreading at once the possibility of passing out before I arrive and of altering my trajectory with too violent a shake in the attempt to wake myself.
As my eyelids are about to close under their own weight, as if with the encouragement of the silence surrounding me, the only sound my breath against the faceplate, I feel contact through the gloves. Before I can close my right hand around the entry handle, my body begins to pivot. Gripping with all the energy I could command, my torso contracts and my legs retain their momentum, swinging above my head. My helmet strikes the port’s rim and my forehead violently hits the faceplate, the brightness of the unfocused green HUD text temporarily blinding me.
Just tug, I think, one tug. In my weak state of both mind and body, I focus on that thought alone. I tense the three fingers I have wrapped around the handle, and it’s enough to counteract the momentum of my legs, their dead weight wanting to pull me out into the void. The door dilates just in time as it senses my presence and my helmet clears the port. My knees bang cruelly against its side, sending me into a slow spin. But that doesn’t matter now.
I pull my legs up into my chest, wrap my arms around them, and remain there. My back hits an I-beam and I bounce off in a new direction, but I don’t even feel it. I close my eyes and insensibly wait, floating inside the hold.
