Another day at the beach. As mentioned previously, planets out here in the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy tend to be cold, and icy. But there are a few with liquid water. Baker 103b is one of those. Bigger than earth, but lighter. Rotating around a real yellow sun but a dimmer one, and a little closer. Not tidally locked but with long days, sixty hours. And like a lot of planets out here, very light. All silicon and oxygen and aluminum with just a little bit iron thrown in. And of course, almost no actinides or radioactives in the core, so no plate tectonics. Just a big solid piece of quartz, with a kilometer of ocean covering the surface. No moon, so no tides. And no continents and no river, so whatever minerals are present have just sorted down to the bottom. More or less fresh water. I could drink it if I had a body.
So this is a featureless planet made of boring rock and covered by water, orbiting around a dimmish yellow sun way out in the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. Sixty hour days with like 3 or 4 degrees of axial tilt, so not even any weather. All that water, but barely any evaporation or precipitation. But somewhere in the northern hemisphere (by convention, we say "northern hemisphere" for the hemisphere with more landmass), there is a feature. A big crater. Sometime relatively recently, within the past million years or so, a big ol' iron asteroid hit the ocean and threw up a ring of metallic debris, a mixture of the asteroid itself and whatever it churned up on impact. Not that gigantic, the crater, a broken circular ridge of rocks and debris a couple hundred meters tall at most, is only a few kilometers in diameter. On a planet with weather or tectonics, it might be gone by now. But it just sits there in the middle of the northern ocean, giving some break to the monotony of the planet's waters. And giving me a place to rest. Of course, I could rest on the water, just like how I don't need to breathe air but feel better on a planet with an atmosphere--even a non-breathable carbon dioxide and nitrogen one like this. So I come here and sit down by the water and just watch it. The smallest of wavelets lapping at the shore.
There is no life here. Probably because there is no moon and no plate tectonics and limited heavy elements. But right around this crater ring, there is some type of imitation life. That meteor brought in polyaromatics and heavy elements and iron, and there are places where there are little "tide pools", minus the tides. And sometimes all those oils and minerals will form sheens across the rocks, multicolored assemblies of oils and ions from the rocks joining together. Bubbles of scum forming into a lipid bilayer. And each time, they have a different color, I guess based on how the oily layer orients itself. Sometimes, one from one end, all greasy and purple, will form from one end, and a lighter green skin will form on the other end, and then they will meet, and "fight" in the middle, molecules forming into optimal orientations. Not life, just pattern. And then one of the planets "big waves" a foot or two tall, or a light sprinkle of rain, will destroy the order and the whole thing will start again.
I can watch it for days, sitting on the beach, rewinding and fast-forwarding it. This is the reason I come out here.
And that is what I do when I see a shadow moving in the water, outside the crater rim, somewhere in the deep, unmoving sea. And I am alarmed, and curious. I can feel my heart that isn't there jump a beat. I jump into the water and start following where I saw the shadow, not sure if it is tracking just out of range of my vision or if it is just shadows playing across my sight. And I wonder if it is a vampire, they don't look like they actually swimming, just moving. I am still swimming, even though I am not physically there, and then I realize I am lost, deep in the ocean. Even a shallow ocean of a thousand meters is totally dark at the bottom, and there I am, in the abyss, not knowing how I got there and so far from home, and whatever motion beckoned me out here is of course invisible. And I start panicking and thinking I am trapped here, all that weight of water crushing down on me, and no way to find my way home, and then I remember I don't have a body and I have found my way here through light years of space, and I can zip up to orbit overhead or even just wake up back on earth, and its like waking up from a bad dream as I find myself back on the shores of the crater, and see the purple and green films fight their battle at a time elapsed speed.