Excerpt: All the Strange Seas

The worst thing wasn't the vivid recollection of almost every moment of his life simultaneously. That experience actually brought a few things into perspective and on the whole may have helped him deal with a lot of things he was going to have to deal with in the coming months. It wasn't the sudden awareness of the purpose and condition of every part of his body, inside and out from the smallest nerve clusters up. From that he gained the sense of purpose needed to finally get himself in shape and stay there. The worst thing wasn't even the pain, a single moment of agony like his very being was stripped away cell by cell. The human brain is amazingly good at forgetting the actual truth of pain so by the time he regained consiousness it was a tiny fraction of what it had actually been. No, the worst thing was the clinging smell of lemon. It pervaded all his senses, every nook and cranny of himself, his past, the ship, everything. It was constant and inescapable and distracting. it seemed to go on forever and it felt like he had never been without it.

When he came to 24 seconds later he was filled with a deep swelling of pride and sense of accomplishment that he had still managed to not throw up.