For Laksh, Earth was a sensory overload he wasn’t prepared for. Every footstep felt heavy, as if the gravity was personally offended by his return. He had been given one year of mandatory leave to "re-acclimate" to human life—NASA’s polite way of saying his mind needed to unfreeze from the isolation of space.

He spent his mornings at gym but at night he kept staring at the stars and remembering the memories from space, from oxford, the memories that kept him going. His world was still trapped in a silence that began three years ago in an Oxford quad.