A crash landing was necessary, the New Manchester to Io City transport shuttle pilots had informed us over the intercom system. Why the crash landing was necessary is another matter entirely. The explanation they provided was so vague, that I half-suspected that they didn't have a clue as to why we were losing orbit.

As if this information didn't panic us enough, the shuttle attendants had then taken it upon themselves to plaster utterly unconvincing smiles across their faces and circulated the shuttle, attempting to assure everyone that there was nothing to worry about. I presume their intentions were to calm us down, but invariably they had the complete opposite effect.

They were blatantly lying to us. How could there be nothing to worry about if the shuttle was about to lose its orbit and crash? They were obviously just as scared as us. They were only doing what they were trained to do under the circumstances, but the other passengers and I saw through their fa?ade almost immediately. The fear embedded within their eyes was as fluorescent as a neon casino sign on the main strip of Io City. They know what is going to happen. They know that we are all going to die.

And it was just absurd, you know? To be sat there, with men, women and children alike, screaming, crying, begging for their gods to save them, and then noticing the man sat next to me with his eyes closed, leant to one side, with an almost blissful look casually spread across his face. I couldn't believe my eyes.

When I first regarded the man, I genuinely believed he was dead. I idly wondered whether he'd had an unnoticed heart attack amidst the chaos. It would be a terrible thing to happen, but at least it would make some kind of sense. However, after a minute or two, he opened his eyes and yawned. He'd been asleep. Asleep. How the hell could you sleep through this?

He appeared to be an old timer, nearing the end of his sixth decade perhaps. However, from some angles he appeared to be much younger. His face was heavily dented and in some places scared, which managed to mask his true age from my normally reliable eyes. His clothes made him look like a throw back from the early twenty-first century. He wore a light blue checked shirt, with the top two buttons flamboyantly undone, adequately advertising his overly tanned chest. Over the shirt, he wore a sporting navy blue jacket, accompanied by torn light blue jeans. His attire was topped off by severely worn white sports shoes.

"Let me guess," the man said, startling me a little. He'd probably caught me staring at him. Under the circumstances, who wouldn't be staring? "You're wondering why I'm not panicking like all of the other sheep, right?"

Ah, so at least he knew what was going on. That was comforting to know. At first I thought I was sitting next to a moron, instead I find I'm sitting next to a lunatic.

Just great, that's all I need.

"Under the circumstances," I answered, "yeah."

His lips formulated to produce a rather thin smile. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

He's got me hooked and knows it. "Try me."

The man turned to me and looked into my eyes. I figured he's probably trying to decide upon the most appropriate method of explaining it to me. Ultimately, he elected the direct, yet simplistic, approach. "I'm invincible."

For the longest time, I just stared at him, unsure of what to do or to say. I mean, how are you supposed to react to something like that?

"You're...what?" I replied, wondering whether I'd heard him right.

Before the man could answer, however, the shuttle bone-jarringly lurched, turning my stomach upside down and leaving me with a seemingly unshakable queasiness. Most of the other passengers were looking at each other, in panic, wondering what the hell had just happened, but it didn't take a genius to figure it out. The shuttle had lost its orbit and we were beginning our final descent.

When I'd recovered enough to continue my conversation with the lunatic next to me, I found that he'd crossed his legs and had leant closer toward me. I got the distinct impression that he was more than eager to provide me with intricate details into his thoughts.

What better way to spend the last moments of my life? Yeah, right.

"Invincible," he said. "I've known for quite some time that I cannot die. It's quite exhilarating."

I sat there silently, unsure of how to respond to a statement like that. Apparently, my silence made it obvious to him that I was having trouble accepting his tale. So he, rather angrily, dismissed me with his hand.

"Listen, you wanted to know, so I told you. It doesn't matter to me whether you believe it or not," he snapped.

I still thought the guy was the biggest lunatic to have ever worn trousers, but I couldn't escape the fact that I wanted to hear what he had to say. No matter how deranged his story was.

"You're right," I admitted, "I'm sorry. I do want to know more."

"Don't worry about it," he said, a lot calmer now. "You're scared. I understand what you're going through."

"How did you find out you were...invincible?" I asked him, feeling slightly idiotic just asking the question.

"I first realised it back in '63 when I was in a terraform crew working Titan. Boy, that was a job...know much about terraforming, son?"

"Not really," I replied.

"Terraforming is an incredibly dangerous job, you know. One tiny mistake and you're dead. It's well paid, I'll grant you, but incredibly dangerous all the same," He explained. "Whilst doing the job I came face to face with death on an almost regular basis, surviving each incident without even a scratch. It seemed to happen too often to be put down to sheer luck..."

Before he could continue his story, the g-force increased dramatically, firmly pushing me further back into my seat. It wouldn't be long now. We had a couple of minutes at best and the whole shuttle realised it too. The screams grew a little more hysterical, but were ultimately drowned out by various sobs and whimpers here and there. The rest of the passengers were slowly beginning to accept their fate.

The thought did occur to me that I could do exactly what all of the other 'sheep', as the man sat next to me had called them, were doing: pray to some random god I didn't really believe in before today and beg him for my life. But I decided against the idea. I mean, what good would it do? The situation isn't change on the strength of it. I'm still going to die.

Instead, I decided to maintain the conversation with the man sitting next me. And at least I'll be marginally entertained before I die, besides he seemed to have some sort of calming affect upon me. I wasn't panicking like the other passengers and I wasn't hysterical either. Something had to be the cause of it...right?

"If it wasn't luck that kept you alive," I began, "then how did you survive?"

"At first I wasn't sure," he admitted, "but the more times I survived, the clearer the answer became. It was positive thought. My survival was due to a state of mind."

I wasn't sure whether the lunatic intended to provide a full explanation of what that last cryptic statement meant, so I pushed him for one.

We didn't have a hell of a lot of time left.

"A state of mind?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "Whenever I found myself in a life or death situation, I simply believed that I would survive. I told myself over and over again that I would walk out of it in one piece, probably more out of fear than anything else. Each time I did it, I survived.

"The human body has a strong survival instinct, you know. I believe what I can do is just a logical extension of that."

"It could just be a coincidence, you know."

The man shook his head and smiled. "I don't believe in coincidences."

"And I take it you have that same feeling now? You believe that you're not going to die in this shuttle crash?"

"Of course," he replied, "otherwise I wouldn't be so calm...would I?"

Either I was going crazy or his explanation kinda made sense. And he had point too, as a fire fighter I often found myself in life or death situations and I'd managed to survive them all. Granted, I'd had good training, but perhaps on more than one occasion after I'd had a near miss, I often wondered whether it was more than that? You didn't have the time to stop and start telling yourself that you were going to pull through, you had to act, but maybe there was something on the subconscious level that kept me alive?

I'd analysed the argument in my head a number of times and I have yet to come up with a definitive answer. I doubt I ever will. However, here and now, the shuttle is going to crash and if I don't do something, I will die. I had to at least try to survive. I decided to give it a shot, what harm could it do?

Wilbraham, you are not going to die, I told myself. You will survive this ordeal because you are invincible. Yes, in-vin-ci-ble. You cannot be killed and you cannot be hurt. You're going to live a long and fulfilled life. Accept it, deal with it and move on.

Then, in a heartbeat, the g-force increased substantially, to the point of agony. Breathing was next to impossible and moving, even a millimetre, was totally out of the question. I felt as though all of my internal organs were being mercilessly crushed, one by one and it probably wasn't far from the truth. Before I could suffer any further, the g-force became too much and I, thankfully, lost consciousness.

The darkness quickly, yet with great care, dissipated all around me and was replaced by the comforting, reassurance of light. I was conscious again and as soon as all my systems came back online, a number of sensations hit me at once, overwhelming my senses and almost sending me back to the darkness. I resisted urge to lose consciousness, managing somehow to adapt to these sensations with considerable difficulty.

Once I had finally adapted and ultimately won the battle to remain conscious, something to the left of me grabbed my attention. At first, my senses refused to register it, but with great concentration I managed to translate and ultimately remember why it had grabbed my attention. It was the familiar feeling of untamed heat brushing haphazardly up against my face.

I tried to move, to get out the way of the flame, but I couldn't budge an inch. In fact, I couldn't feel anything from the neck down. That was a worrying sign. All that I could do was to turn my head away from the heat and hope that the flames do not get any worse.

But before I could submit myself to panic, a horrible stench struck me, akin to a well-placed punch to the stomach, something else that I found disturbingly familiar. This time, however, it was much worse that untamed heat; it was the unmistakable smell of chard human flesh.

After moments of fierce concentration I fought the urge to retch and forced the smell to settle down into a reluctant familiarity, a technique that I'd managed to master over the years as a fire fighter. My impulse to retch slowly subsided into a slight sensation of nausea at the pit of my stomach. At least now it was slightly bearable.

My view was severely limited due to the brightness of the sun, which presumably was getting to me through a hole in the shuttles hull, hell, for all I knew the shuttle had been torn apart completely in the crash. I did manage to make out a silhouetted figure in the distance, breaching the very centre of the brightness, but I quickly assumed that I was imagining it. However, when the figured began to draw closer to me, I decided that the figure was real.

"Don't try to move," the oddly familiar voiced warned, seemingly unaware that I was completely paralysed from the neck down. The man knelt beside me and I recognised the face immediately.

It was him. The man who had sat next to me on the shuttle just before it crashed. And he didn't even have a scratch on him, not even a hair out of place or a tear in his suit.

I couldn't believe it.

He grabbed a blanket from somewhere around me (I couldn't quite see where) and doused the spot fire out by the side of my head. "I thought I'd got all of these earlier."

Once the fire was out, he hurled the blanket away and smiled at me. "How long have you been awake?"

"A couple of minutes, I guess," I replied.

"Good," he said, with a distinct sigh of relief. "I've been out trying to find higher ground to get a decent signal to communicate with the rescue teams in New Manchester for the last hour now. I didn't want to leave you alone, but I didn't really have much of a choice."

"Are they coming?" I asked, hopefully.

The man nodded. "Should be here within the hour."

He then took a look at my forehead. "You've got a nasty head wound and signs of internal bleeding, but the rescue team should be here long before we need to worry about that."

"I can't feel anything," I told him, fearing the worst.

The man appeared uncomfortable by my statement, providing me the distinct impression that not only were my fears accurate, but he knew about my paralysis all along.

"During the crash," he began, "a large section of the ships hull buckled, and you were caught underneath. I'm no doctor, but I think you may have some kind of spinal damage."

My first reaction was denial, I didn't to believe a word the man told me, despite knowing what he said was correct. So I did what any normal person would do under the circumstances. I panicked.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god."

"Don't worry, it's going to be okay," The man tried to assure me.

"Okay?" I interrupted. "How is it going to be okay? The majority of my body is crushed under a piece of the shuttles hull!"

"I know, but once the rescue team comes and gets you back to New Manchester, they can repair the damage to your spine."

"But what if the damage is irreparable? I'll never walk again. I'll never be able to move again."

"At least you're alive," he told me, "the others weren't so lucky."

"You mean," I started, interrupted by a bubble of blood spurting out of my mouth. I noted the concern on his face at this. Probably had something to do with the internal bleeding he'd informed me of earlier. "We're the only two survivors?"

The man nodded silently. "You're the only other person I've found alive."

"We should be dead too," I told him. "Nobody should've been able to survive this."

"But, we did survive."

"It's not possible..."

"Like I said," the man replied with a smile, "invincibility is a state of mind."