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his fight or flight response, to which he could do
neither. Through this passage of pain as if reborn, some semblance of consciousness began to leach through thefog that had
restrained him. Soon his senses would follow.
There bathed in the aqua tinted glow of emergency lights, but
for the dull ache that played in his head, he lay unrestrained by
sleep for the first time in a very long time. He looked up and
recognized that some of these now familiar controls had become
a victim of oxidation. Time and exposure to the elements had
taken their toll as the inevitable corrosion had rendered the display and most of the sensor mechanisms no longer operational.
This could be he imagined a serious challenge to his survival
chances. He would have to now depend on his training and instincts if he were to make it out alive. He somehow remembered
the contingency plans that he was made to painstakingly practice over and over again during what he imagined to be some far
off cadet training. In the escape maneuver the cadets learned to
use the mechanics tools of old to unhinge the faceplate of this
floating casket. He looked through the storage compartments
until he found there a conveniently marked packet labeled in
hieroglyphics, "Emergency escape tools." As he gathered the
tools together he could not help but to be puzzled at the extent
of the damage. It was far worse that he would have anticipated it
to be. The rate of decay for these materials should have endured
well past the length of his stay within his capsule. The extent of
the damage would lead him then to suspect he had in fact overslept well beyond the technologies expected shelf life, which
was a very long time indeed. He recalled the long ago day to
which he and his wife Samantha had said their tearful goodbyes
and how they hoped they would meet again on the appointed
day. He knew now this was not to be, for evidence was accumulating that he had slept far beyond the slotted moment. "It
was only yesterday," he said to himself, but the evidence was
stark and undeniable. He had held a fuzzy memory of how he
had participated in an experiment where five hundred years into
the future a group of elite sleepers would travel forward in time.
Slowly the memory unfolded. Along with several dozen others
he had volunteered to act as human seeds for the future. His
mind reeled as he pondered the possibilities. He asked himself,
"Where had they all gone? What had become of the experiment?
Had it succeeded?" To what kind of world he would emerge
into? He could not know. There however would be no way to
answer these questions or to tell for how long he had been adrift
until his capsule had reached the surface and he could manually
measure his coordinates.
The emergency escape mechanism by necessity possessed a rudimentary design and could be operated manually by turning a
sealed valve. Once turned, an exchange of gasses filled a metallic
mesh balloon which would be deploying automatically from beneath. He grasped the wheel tightly and with all his remaining
energy slowly rotated the wheel. The balloon, woven from a finely spun gold alloy began to fill and the casket then began to slowly rise. Leaving the murky depths behind, the automatic system
atmospherically adjusted to the changing pressures outside and
the once coffin became then a vessel, slowly guided itself upwards. After a tense thirty some odd minutes his vessel, approached the surface.
    Like some bizarre creature the craft had breached the surface in a
tumult of roiling water. For a moment it rocked then stabilized.
Automatically a few of the working on board sensorsbegan to
measure and calculate its surroundings. By measuring the Earth's
magnetic field and the relevant depth of the surrounding ocean
the on board systems attempted to match its current location readings to charts loaded onto it's on board dataset. For several
minutes the mechanism attempted to calculate a location based on
known coordinates but was unable to make a