End Another Way

"Wake up dammit!"

Sight. The first thing one notices when one snaps their eyes open, assuming one is not blind. Sometime after its creation, usually in very short order (excepting, of course, light created very far away), light encounters the lense of the eye and is focused onto some very specific biology that takes light as input and outputs electrical impulses that are hard-wired to the brain.
How delightful; I had forgotten what it was like to see.

"Get us the hell out of here!"

Processing. The combination of the images provided by each eye allow the brain to process depth, thankfully without conscious effort. About twenty-five images per eye are composited in the brain every second, allowing the brain to process depth with respect to time. The combination of stereo vision and sampling the light-translating biology in the eye at a certain rate allows one's higher processes to interpret the "world" at large, and make certain important decisions. One such decision is to forestall one's own demise by altering one's own course to avoid being in the same place, and at the same time, as a violently-unstable projectile who's current course was, apparently, chosen for the very purpose of collision.

I try to utter a mono-syllabic profanity, but it comes out as croak.

"Go! Go! Go!"

Truth be told, avoiding the projectile itself would not be the crux of our plan to forestall our demise. As it turns out, I am not looking at the real projectile, which is far too distant for my eyes to see, and in much too little light. Instead, I am looking at a simulated model that was designed for use by aviators and, upon interaction with this simulated model, I discover it would, quite helpfully, plot both the projectile's vector and our own. The model even adds user-friendly color-coding, indicating the past, therefore unalterable, course in dark gray, and a projection of both parties' current course. The coloring of the projected lines goes from a friendly green at our current coordinates to a dark red where the collision is scheduled to occur. Even as I take this in, the gray was slowly eating up the brightly colored lines. In a similarly helpful manner, the simulation provided me with relevant known data pertaining to the hurling projectile; in short, the projectile contained a certain mass of hydrogen, where each atom contains exactly one positively-charged proton, one negatively-charged electron, and a single neutral neutron, and a certain mass of anti-hydrogen, wherein each atom contains one negatively-charged proton, on positively-charged electron, and a neutron. The simulation also communicated that, though it was unable physically measure these things, certain other characteristics of the projectile's evident manufacture, as well as contextual information such as the class of the vehicle responsible for setting the course of the projectile and our relative location to the galactic core, made it quite likely that data reported was accurate. Indeed, avoiding the violent reaction that the projectile was designed to safely transport would be the far more difficult part of our self-preservation.

What a strange sensation, I knew how to do these things when I was alive, and they were flooding back to me now, even as I do them. Unfortunately, I am rather pressed for time at the moment, and the tickle at the back of my mind retains a minor role in the background buzz of my collective thoughts.