A Strange Awakening: Homecoming Aboard the Space-Time Ship Armageddon

A Rare and Unusual Birthday Gift Part III

Part I is here:

Part II here:

I awoke from sleep with a thud as I landed on my back on a smooth linoleum floor. I was disoriented. I couldn’t see a thing, blinded by the bright lights around me. I could make out the shadows of figures in the light moving towards me.

“We got ‘em!” said a female voice.

“Are you okay?” Another younger female spoke into my right ear as she embraced my arm. A second stronger grip took hold of my left arm. The two shadows lifted me up, placing me on my feet.

“I apologize for the rough landing. We are on a tight schedule,” said the first female voice.

My eyes began to adjust as my feet stabilized beneath me.

The shadows came into focus. The first thing I saw as my eyes started to function again was the large bright and friendly smile of a pudgy blonde girl standing to my right. She was wearing a blue uniform with yellow stripes over the shoulders. A single star adorned her uniform above her name tag on her breast.

“Lt. Wendy Lindsey,” I said , reading her name tag aloud.

“Yes sir, at your service,” Lieutenant Lindsey saluted me.

I looked around. There were about a dozen uniformed people sitting at various stations around the room.

“I can’t believe it! It is you. Do you know what you’ve done?” said the first female voice standing behind a podium near me. The woman came forward and threw her arms around my neck, hugging me tightly.

“No one has ever come back to reality this late in the game.”

I smiled and nodded, pretending to understand what she was talking about. I scanned her name tag. Her uniform had a larger gold leaf with a single star similar to the one on Lt .Lindsey’s uniform. Her name tag informed me I was speaking with Major Barbara Sherman.

“Where am I?” I asked, looking at each of the three nearest faces.

Major Sherman answered, “You don’t recognize your home? Well then, let me be the first to welcome you to the Fleet Command Space-Time Ship Armageddon.”

“Space-Time ship? Armageddon?” I repeated back.

My God, how long have you been gone? It may take some time before your memory comes back. We don’t know. No one has ever come back after such a,” Barbara paused searching for the right words, “after such an extended absence.”

I understood the words she was speaking, but had no idea how they applied to my situation. I ran the words through my head trying to piece together what was going on in my increasingly strange and confusing life. Just then, I felt immediately sick. I couldn’t control myself as I vomited all over the clean and bright linoleum floor I had landed on, from seemingly out of nowhere, just a moment ago.

“Let’s get you healed and get you to sick bay. You need some rest. You’ve had a rough few days. The time slip must’ve been as much as your system could handle in such a short time,” said Barbara.

Before I could begin to fathom what was happening to me, a bright light cut through the empty air in front of me, once again temporarily blinding me. I felt the most wise, judgement-free and loving sensation vibrate through my entire body as the light consumed me.

I passed out and went into a dream-like state.

“Do I know you?” asked the elderly man standing, looking at me.

“Why are you seeing me as a man? What is this?” he looked himself up and down. “Oh my. I look like that actor,” he chuckled, turning his attention back to me.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I felt compelled to answer, “I’m Gabriel. Are you not a man?”

“I appear as you imagine me to be. Most sentient beings in this galaxy imagine me as female.” He looked at me again. “ Gabriel who?” he said analyzing my face. “No, it can’t be. You can’t be,” he continued.

I could feel him penetrating my mind, looking into my soul, looking into memories that I couldn’t access, or events that had yet to happen.

“That’s impossible. Therefore, it must be true,” he spoke to himself out loud.

He closed his eyes, his form disappeared becoming a pure bright white light again. I could hear him summoning someone in my mind.

“Gabriel! Come here. I have a question for you,” the light commanded.

Out of thin air, a large being landed behind me. As he did, I could feel the wind on my neck as he folded his wings behind his back. I felt a sense of awe and fear like I had never felt before. I felt compelled to keep my eyes closed as I stood there shivering in the presence of who I knew to be the real Angel Gabriel.

“This little man says he’s you!” the light spoke to the angel, then turned to me, “Do you possess his power?” he questioned me as a wave of immense strength washed over me. It felt like a strength that could crush me in a split-second with no effort.

My mouth opened itself and started to speak. I had no control nor any idea what I was about to say. “Why do I not feel your presence near me, Lord?”

“You question me!?” The light returned to its human form. “Because I’m not here. I’m not anywhere. I’m everywhere and nowhere. I am a figment of your imagination,” the man said before transforming back into the light.

The angel placed his hand on my shoulder, covering my entire clavicle. “Have no fear, Foolish One” Gabriel said. As he spoke to me, a calm overtook me. Suddenly, I was no longer shivering.

“He speaks the Truth, my Lord,” Gabriel said to the light. “He is me. A much, much younger me, and much, much more foolish me, but still me nonetheless.”

The face of the elderly man emerged from the light, looking me directly in the eye. I closed my eyes as his gaze pierced to depths of my soul I never knew existed.”

“It is you! How long has it been? I didn’t even recognize you! You have changed. You will change again.,” said the Lord.

His voice turned warmer as he spoke to me once more, “Welcome home, General Gabriel. I must leave you now as I have other urgent business to attend to. Here, let me help you a bit with your memory. Only as much as you can handle in your weakened state.”

The light reached forward and lightly touched my forehead. Angel Gabriel and the light disappeared as I fell into a dream within the dream.

I saw myself from a time long ago. I wore the same blue and yellow uniform just like the ones I had seen prior. My emblem was adorned with 4 gold leaves. A 4-star General. I could feel that I was standing command on my bridge, on my space-time ship, the Armageddon. We were warping time and space, leaping towards the location of the enemy’s home world.

What I had known before came back to me intuitively as I watched myself from within myself going through the motions of a time long past.

The human race was engaged in a war for it’s survival. We were at war with what the human race called the Shadow. They sprung forth into life occupying the dark void of the universe. The Shadow’s people, the section of the universe they occupied, and their home planet were completely invisible to the human eye.

They were born, lived, and evolved in the darkness. The dark shadow creatures had declared war on all the creatures of the material universe, the universe of physicality and light. They were raised for generation after generation with the idea, the mythology, that the light and all physical matter was their eternal enemy.

They had discovered a way to cross the barrier between the eternal darkness they lived in and the eternal physical world of matter, the universe of light. This technology gave them a distinct advantage over the human race and the other beings of matter in the physical universe.

They could conduct raids on the physical words, impervious to our physical touch, plant their devices, convert their frequency causing them to materialize in our physical words. They would detonate these devices across all the known occupied planets of the physical universe. They had killed trillions of living beings. We were all powerless to stop them. None of the beings of the physical universe of light possessed the technology to enter the void, the nothingness of dark matter.

It was thousands of years before the Space-Time Ship Armageddon was commissioned. Thousands of years before the Angel Gabriel incarnated into the dense third-dimension physical world when they first conducted a raid on an unsuspecting Earth.

It took the human race hundreds of years, suffering death at the hands of these inter-dimensional terrorists before they realized what was going on. It took a hundred years more before the human race united against our common enemy.

The aptly named Armageddon was one of 12,000 ships which had set a course for an unknown, unexplored distant sector of the universe. A location where unusual blips had been consistently detected since the Shadow began their raids, invading our universe of matter, the universe of light.

As we still didn’t possess the technology to cross over into the Shadow realm, we were on what seemed to be a mission of certain suicide. A mission which, if it failed, would mean the extinction of the human race as well as all other beings that occupied the physical universe of matter and light.

Even folding space and time to jump from point to point, allowing the fleet to travel faster than light, it would still be a 7,000 year trip from Earth to the supposed location of the Shadow home world. It was our final Hail Mary, so to speak, as we were depending on discovering the technology necessary to cross over into the nothingness of the Shadow along the way.

I woke up from the dream in the sick bay of the Armageddon with a feeling of déjà vu. My soul intuitively knew that this wasn’t the first time I had woken up in the very same spot, at the very same time. I was repeating moments from a lifetime that some version of me had lived through before.

I had come a long way from the literal Hell where I had started my strange journey. It seemed like a burden beyond impossible had been given to me. I realized then just how much growth I had to go through to get anywhere near becoming myself.