Floating Through the Pillars of Creation

It begins with leaving, gently and with no effort at all: the ground letting go, the roof opening quietly like a book, the lights below drawing together into a soft scatter. Then the curve of the whole world with a thin blue line along its edge where the air runs out, and then the air is gone.

The ending, given away now: you arrive, you drift through columns of cold gas taller than the gap between our sun and its nearest neighbour, and you come home. The columns may already have been gone for a thousand years; the light hasn't finished telling us yet. Nobody is in danger at any point.

The first minute

We begin by leaving. Gently, and with no effort at all. Imagine the ground letting go of you. Imagine the roof above you opening quietly, like a book. And imagine yourself rising, without sound, into the dark over your town. The lights below draw together into a soft scatter. The coastline appears, dark against dark. Then the curve of the whole world, with a thin blue line along its edge where the air runs out. And then the air is gone. There is no sound now. There will not be any again on this journey…

Why this one works at night

Scale, told slowly, is a sedative. The story spends its first ten minutes on distance alone — light takes eight minutes to reach us from the sun, four hours to reach Neptune, and somewhere between five and seven thousand years to arrive from the Pillars — and by the time the numbers stop meaning anything, so has the day you had. This is the story playing on the app's player screen on the homepage.

“…there is no sound now. There will not be any again on this journey. Out here there is nothing to carry—”

The kind of sentence people fall asleep during