It’s not possible… nothing about this should be possible.
Angela stared at what seemed to be her childhood handheld mirror lying on the ground, with its floral design around the edges and its pink handle, the paint slightly chipped at the end from years of use. But it’s not the mirror itself that was impossible.
It was the fact that she was light years away from home, on the surface of a completely unexplored planet, staring at a childhood possession that should not be here.
Angela wished she could rub her eyes or pinch herself, but the astronaut suit she was wearing made that quite impossible. So many impossible things, she thought to herself.
Angela’s heart pounded as she stepped carefully towards the mirror. Her feet felt heavy, as if they were trying to cement themselves to the surface of the planet. Gravity here was different than on Earth. They had warned her about it. For that reason Angela had spent months training her body to endure long distances with atleast fifty pounds of additional weight strapped to her chest. She’d endured it, and she’d excelled, so it was only a matter of time before she’d finally been approved for this next mission.
Now, after ten years of cryosleep and space travel, Angela was glad for the additional training and the doctors who’d kept her body from deteriorating. She’d only been surface walking for about ten minutes and her body was already feeling the effect of this planet’s heavy gravity.
Panting, Angela stopped next to the childhood mirror and stared. Shaking slightly, she bent down to grab the mirror but as her fingers reached for it the mirror suddenly flickered and winked out of existence.
Angela gasped in shock. She’d never heard of a planet’s gravity causing hallucinations but it must be the case. It was either that, or she was more tired than she realized. Her fingertips skimmed the ground lightly where the mirror had just been to assure herself that nothing was there before standing up slowly. Hallucinations, she thought. That’s all it is. You’re just tired.
Angela skimmed the landscape before her and once more gasped in shock. About twenty feet ahead of her lay the same mirror. And ten feet to her left, another mirror. She spun slowly, awe turning to fear as she spotted more and more of the same mirror lying before her, surrounding her.
“What is this? What’s happening?” She whispered. Angela squeezed her eyes shut, observing the back of her eyelids until mini fireworks protruded through the black. She opened her eyes again only to see the same field of mirrors spread out before her like some sort of childhood dream. Or nightmare. No one knew what that mirror had meant to Angela as she had never told a single soul. And the only person who would know was dead.
The day she threw that mirror into the river was the day she had liberated herself from her past. She had never looked back.
“Okay okay, easy Angela,” she said to herself. “You’re just hallucinating because you’re exhausted. This is the first time you’ve been surface side, you’re over excited and your brain just needs to rest. That’s it.” She took a deep breath, in and out, letting the inside of her helmet fog with the release.
The mission couldn’t know about this. Earth couldn’t know about this. She had been the one person in the entire world chosen to explore the viability of this new planet, something she knew Earth desperately needed if the environment continued to deteriorate in the way scientists were predicting.
Angela felt the weight of that burden and responsibility that had been laid across her shoulders; it was heavier than the gravity she currently walked through. She couldn’t imagine what the world would think if they knew that within her first few minutes, Earth’s First Planet Walker was defeated by her own mind.
Well she wouldn’t let it, and they would never know.
So Angela took a deep breath as she marched slowly on, wading through a field of memories that she refused to remember.
