I float. But not like ordinary people float: I suppose I’d rather have to say I’m walking underwater. But then again it’s not exactly walking, because my feet don’t touch the bottom, so that’s why I said I float. But somehow I move through the water as if walking. Maybe I should invent a new verb… floaking?

I see bubbles form around me… Isn’t that strange? Fish don’t make bubbles, do they? And amphibians? I don’t think I have gills, but I cannot be sure. But it’s obvious I can breathe, or I wouldn’t be here. Oh, perhaps my skin filters the oxygen in water and then I exhale the carbon dioxide, and that’s why I make bubbles.

Sharks attack bubbles. I’m pretty sure of that. I read it somewhere.

No sharks here. This is not salt water… this looks like a river or lake. I can see the tall trees… But they are odd as well. I don’t recall ever having seen underwater forests like this before. Aren’t algae supposed to be different? Small water plants, drifting in the currents. Maybe the occasional tree trunk here and there, where the river has overflowed into the adjacent lands. But not large trees that grow out from within the riverbed. I cannot recall any of that.

What, indeed, can I recall? Why is it important? Why shouldn’t it be?

I am alone. That is weird as well. This looks like a thriving environment, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t there be more… fish? Anything but the trees? And me?

I don’t get it. I keep walking round and observing the underwater forest, the impenetrable mass of trees that thickens in the distance. I just have a trickle of light coming from above… and all I can do is have questions pop in my head.

The light from above. The light from above.

The light.

I walk up. Not swim, this is not swimming, remember? I somehow wish me up and I just go up, up, past the purple tree trunks with green moss on their moist barks and the small limbs that branch out at their tops.

I get close to the surface, and I see.

There’s no one light. Not one sun.

I see two circles of light. A white one and an orangish one.

Two suns.

What is this? Where am I? Can I surface to see the suns? Will I be able to breathe? Or will I die?

A dream. Must be a dream.

But I pinch myself, and I’m still here. And I see and I hear and I feel and I breathe and I fear.

I pull myself up, and break the water surface.

And the world is ablaze with colours I’ve never seen, and full of eerie sounds and smells and there are red clouds and how can the clouds be red and it’s because the orange sun is behind them and then it appears and yes there is another white sun over there how can that be what is that soaring down from the second sun it’s a bird oh no no no not a bird that beak is too huge and full of teeth…

***

I come back. I can hear a voice calling my name from afar, and I follow it, as I have been taught. It gets easier every time, but it hurts.

Drat, I’m going to have a nice headache for a week.

As I open my eyes, the chief doctor engineer is already apologizing for this last neural interface breakdown. Damn her and her careless team.

~~~~

This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: September 19–25, 2016 on the Writer’s Discussion Group in Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.

In short: this week I came up with at least four or five ideas, or seeds of ideas, of stories for this prompt. But I wasn’t satisfied with any of them. In the end I decided to take a different approach for once , so I just sat down on Saturday morning and started writing. And this piece more or less wrote itself.