The Lost Astronaut

Major Tom drifted in the belly of the night—“The Nautilio,” a shell suspended in an obsidian ocean that sought its heartbeat, was his vessel. From the hatch there were no stars, only wounds of light flickering like half-spoken secrets. Space was not pitch black, but a ravaged canvas where colors had fragmented, leaving only the memory of a glimmer once called home.

Tom had left Earth the way one tears off an old skin in a single motion. In the distance, the notes of a Space Odyssey seemed to rise from some unknown corner of his memory, a resonance that was not his own, yet flooded every part of him. He wondered whether the void was an answer or a mirage—perhaps a refuge?

The ship contracted and expanded step by step. It was a living creature, a labyrinth that shifted with his thoughts, with the air that filled his body and vanished into the metallic arteries of his vessel. Corridors branched into strange paths; doors, once opened, dissolved, leaving behind rooms where the laws of physics seemed to have been forgotten.

He decided to enter one of those spaces and found his own image—not in a mirror: he saw his face blurred on the surface of a river of mercury stretching toward the horizon. The liquid trembled, and with every ripple it returned a different face—one he knew, and another he had rejected. The river spoke in his own voice:

—What were you searching for here? Eternity? Exile? Death?

He remained silent, because his own voice was a question he could not answer.

In another room, the walls exhaled a glow. They were constellations carved into his mind, maps dissolving into an endless play of light and shadow. There he saw planets that did not exist beyond the Nautilio, worlds that did not orbit stars, but his fears.

One of those colossi was a desert covered in ash, where crystal towers collapsed at the faintest whisper of wind. It was the echo of the days when glory had turned him to glass and then to dust—a silent reflection on the ruins he himself had sown, like an Ozymandias in the black desert of his own being. Another planet was a circus of mirrors, a labyrinth of light and neon where all forms shattered before they could be completed. There he understood that arrogance was a lamp that devours its own light.

But the final planet left him motionless. A white sphere, infinite in its silence, without forms or names, without night or stars. There was no trace of memory or future, no sign of life. And yet, it contained everything that will never be.

—Are you the truth? he asked. But the words dissolved before touching its surface.

The ship was spinning—or perhaps it was he who had begun to orbit himself. In his rotations, he wove fragments of his life into imaginary constellations, like those invisible lines that trace figures that exist only for a moment, like those that mark the path between human heartbeats or the notches in one’s hands. They were not messages, but lost gestures, as if the stars did not wish to be understood.

And then he fell.

The void of the Nautilio shattered like a broken mirror. When Tom opened his eyes, he found himself surrounded by an ocean of faces, each lit by a fire not of this world. From every direction, voices began to rise:

“Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie! Bowie!”

It was a cry in unison, almost a reverberating plea. Tom felt the weight of that name pass through him—a light echo unfolding across time and space, transforming every dark star in his memory into a reflection of himself.

An epiphany overwhelmed him: Major Tom was not a lost man, but the guide of all who ever have been—or ever will be.

He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and when he opened them, he let the first phrase cross his lips:

“Ground control to Major Tom…”

Then the darkness lit up, and everything that had been lost revealed itself in a chord.