Exoskeletal

The man stepped out of the shimmering gate onto the outlandish island. He inspected the scenery in admiration and bewilderment, the island looked nothing similar to Earth. In fact it was hard to tell if he was even in the same universe. Standing on a world so foreign dismantled all sense of what he knew to be true, disassociated him from all connection to reality. He checked the meters on his space suit and opened up his recorder system.

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"All systems operational so far. Atmospheric levels report no oxygen to sustain life, and there are new molecules here that are unknowable by my spectrometers. The readings are unlike anything I have ever seen. Delving further into the terrain now."

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The cosmonaut traversed through the alien foliage, wary of what creatures could possibly lurk here. The mission was vague: search for sentient life, find clues about the nature of reality, come home alive. He felt uneasy, the distance traveled seem to stretch his psyche thin, the air itself seemed to shatter his sense of identity. No amount of knowledge acquired in all of his lectures and training programs had prepared him for this disorientation.

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"Still no signs of conscious life, not even animals. This place is barely inhabited by plant life. Beginning to gather samples from the environment now."

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He reached into his tech-pack to grab his tools and set up a station for sampling. This was the first time he noticed trouble moving his limbs. Pulling the kit out was more of a burden than he anticipated.

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"Gravity seems to be much stronger here. Somehow it affects my biological structure differently, the evidence isn't quite clear yet. Where exactly did the warp portal take me?"

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The kit was placed firmly into the ground and a field spectrometer was raised out and assembled. The cosmonaut bent down and scooped dirt out of the ground with his hands. The mud was not quite wet, but not quite solid. It was clumpy and sandy yet ran across his fingers like mercury or blood, and it was tinged a wicked green and purple hue. He dropped the otherworldly terrain into the chemical demogrifier and waited.

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"What the hell is this place? Very perplexing, the readings are going haywire. The machine cant even pick up the four basic blocks of life, C.H.O.N., every molecule it finds seems to have unreadable bonding formations, with electromagnetic and chromatic measurements dissimilar to any known substance on Earth. I'll have to send this data back to command for further analysis, I can't make any conclusions on it."

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He walked away from the machine to collect some organic life to sample. Time was running out, who knew exactly how long he had been there in Earth time? The relativistic constants were unknown for the region of space he was in. This warp portal was one of the very first, an experimental means to send adventurous cadets onto distant territories. Barely anything was known about this world, only that somehow when the portal was opened Earth-side, this is where it landed.

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He tried to stand up from harvesting a bizarre bush he had found, but his muscles had begun to strain and his body seemed to be working against him. Moving his limbs through the air felt like swimming in water back home. Mobility was failing. Looking around he noticed his eyesight was going crazy, light seemed to shimmer through spacetime as it pierced his pupils. No object had a solid appearance anymore, every border danced in a wave like fashion, every color seemed to mush together in an intricate web of slime and worms. His spacesuit was sending chaotic and distorted frequency buzzes into his earpiece, as if the suit itself was screaming for help. The lights on all of his sensors and meters were blinking in arrhythmic fashion, turning colors he could have never described before in his life. The cosmonaut began to panic and switched on his S.O.S. beacon.

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"MAYDAY MAYDAY, REPORT, CAN YOU HEAR ME? I'm struggling over here, I don't think I'll be able to make it back to the gate. Oh god, can this channel even reach you guys? Where am I? Requesting assistance asap! Send somewhaacccchhh ugghccchhh...."

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His vocal cords refused to respond to his will. He looked at his arm and noticed the material of his spacesuit was unraveling itself, loosening its grip on the manmade structure and floating off into the air atom by atom. Vision was completely distorted now, light waves seemed to twist through a tornado before reaching his eyes. Thoughts were misfiring, chaotic, his brain was short circuiting. His skin was pixelating off of his bones. Earth's molecules were failing.

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Oh... I get it now... This must be a different universe... Gravity is stronger here, so intermolecular forces grew weaker to balance the equation. The physical laws themselves are completely different. Heh, if only Feynman could see this. I wish I could.. say.... bye......
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Ego death began to set in, and consciousness began to fleet away from his form. The foundation of his body was extremely fragile compared to the large demands of this universe's electromagnetic and gravitational fields. The subatomic links held no hope, his body was one giant mound of highly volatile material to the simple atmosphere of the planet. The man was no longer, his body and every organ within had separated from the other's knowledge. The cells and tissues dissipated, slowly wisping away into the atmosphere, stretching across time as if he was a universe itself in expansion. The life that was the cosmonaut slipped into space and turned into dust. A gust of wind came and merely swept it all away, a glimpse of Earth's last breath.