Emily could not recall how she found herself standing at the glass wall, looking over the city into the orange sunset. Golden hour, remembering from art class. She was sitting on the couch with Claire, Kate, and Lori. Then, a compulsion to come to the window and get as close to the sun as she could. Her left hand was warm from the sun and braced the glass to say she could get no closer.

The suntrance was upon her, robbing control of her body, feeding her imagination. Emily saw light waves, quantum packets of energy, as they left the sun eight minutes earlier to weightlessly impact her eyes. Quadrillions of waves collapsed into protons as they struck her eyes. Trillions more travelled just a little farther to pass through her pupils, activating her retinas to see reddish-white light. The suntrance fully took over and Emily gazed at the sun, unblinking.

Emily felt as if she was standing on one of the old Concorde jets as it flew over a thousand miles per hour. A tiny, defiant part of her mind mused that she should be flayed at this speed, her limbs pulled from their sockets. The trance rolled over her and the thought evaporated. She stood on one of the wings, arms outstretched, head tracking the sun. Then she began to accelerate and ascend. She left the Concorde behind as it honked and craned its swanlike neck toward her. Metal wings flapped as it tried to catch up and failed. Emily arose into space, far above Earth.

Emily shivered uncontrollably in the cold vacuum of space. The trance fed her mind the idea of solar radiation ripping through her body, skin peeling and tearing away, then muscles and viscera. Her mind’s eye saw a collection of bones floating in space, spinal column and exposed nervous system floating about her. Somehow, her eyes and brain remained instact inside her skull. Her unlidded eyes gazed fixedly on the sun. The shriek of the solar wind overwhelmed her auditory nerves so she went deaf. Other exposed nerve endings could not decide if they were burning or freezing. Her brain perceived unescapable agony.

The collection of bones and tortured nervous system began to fly through space toward the sun. In Emily’s subjective time, it was an eternity of thirty minutes, an impossible third of the speed of light. Nerves continued to burn or freeze. Exposed eyes never looked away from the sun. Emily flew in deaf silence toward the sun, the fastest matter in the solar system and unable to scream.

The trance told Emily’s mind she finally slowed down and stopped close, very close, to the sun. Sol. If her frayed nerves were confused before, they were no longer: all were in agreement and burning as the sun’s plasma surface boiled below her. A piece of plasma, a coronal loop, passed through the remains of her body. The skeleton turned to ash and was blown away by solar wind. Eyes liquified and brain sizzled like bacon before evaporating. The trance found Emily’s brain waves and quanta. Communicating directly, the trance showed her the nothingness of her body, a collection of waveforms floating by the sun. The scattered collection of “Emily” was blind, deaf, dumb, and unable to perceive, drifting in space next to our life-giving and life-taking star.

A different kind of darkness, no longer the blackness of nothing but the familiar darkness of closed eyes, brought Emily back into her body standing in a rooftop conservatory, one hand on glass. The suntrance collapsed and darkness encroached as cool hands covered her eyes and gently but firmly turned her head away from the sun. Claire stood behind Emily, guiding her head away and down to force her body into a kneeling position. Emily’s trance-compliant body turned and began to kneel of its own accord, taking the least resistance to comply with the body’s demands. Her knees landed on a pillow placed on the floor. Sight retuned as Claire’s hands retreated. Emily stared unblinkingly ahead. Pressure on her back, Claire’s hand, pressed her toward the floor. Emily’s mind was slowly returning to her control, and she knew what was coming because Claire had prematurely broken the trance.

A large white bowl slid into Emily’s vision as vertigo took her. She felt the Earth’s rotation, her head spinning, a nausea no drug could stop. Her stomach began to pulse and her esophagus undulated, preparing. The pressure on her back relented yet she stayed in place, complant, a robot with no need to move. She felt her long hair gathered and held behind her. Claire’s hand returned to hold her in place.

The pulsing and undulating synchronized. Emily felt gateways inside open and she vomited into the bowl. Again. And again. Finally, only water came out. She began to shiver from exertion and weakness. Claire, now with Lori’s assistance, maneuvered Emily onto her back, head in Claire’s lap. Claire positioned her own body to shield Emily from the setting sun. Emily felt a warm cloth wipe her mouth and chin, then a cool cloth against her forehead. Claire stroked her hair as Emily sweated and shivered, beginning to regain control of her body.

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