Everyone’s claustrophobic.
   Different people react with varying degrees of intensity, but no one is truly immune to being enclosed. It is the human spirit that drives it; freedom, liberty, control and power; these are the desires that propel people to action, the desires to take flight, to flap ones arms knowing that one’s fingertips won’t brush any boundaries, to think forward in time and know with clockwork precision what plans you have for tomorrow; and when these things are out of reach then frustration and terror overtakes the soul.
   The enclosures that steal these things need not be iron grips. One need not be ensnared in straight-jackets and jail cells, or in stone rooms no bigger than one’s figure. My enclosure was a tropical island, and I was its population of one. I fell and awoke there, and everything but my broken body was destroyed. I crash-landed on the unknown island with no means of escape, and I was bound to it for three years.
   Thus was my freedom swept away like the charred skeleton of the plane across the waves. I was trapped with no control of environment or life; survival was my dictator. It was a claustrophobia of strange, cumulative intensity as the months passed by and I struggled to live, only in the hope that one day my incarceration would end.
   Every night I lit a fire on the pearl-white shores and stared out to the massive expanse of black-water ocean before me. It was endless, such a massive horizon, yet despite its abundance it was beyond my failing reach. The walls of my prison were the shores of my island: like a transparent cell, I was tormented with being able to see every bit of freedom and self-dependence that I could not have.
   Then one day I was saved. In the third year a rich tourist sped by in a yacht not far from my beach-line. I made fires from the most volatile of the palm leaves, I waved, I screamed till my throat bled, and then at last the boat turned. It cruised towards me with leisurely ease, moving like a graceful swan in an boastful arc.
   Saved at last, I left my prison behind. Free and no longer constrained, I had my life back.
   Later I discovered that the rich tourist had been returning home in his yacht. He had isolated himself on a desert island not too far from mine; it had been his holiday, he’d wanted to get away from society. He’d been there for three years, and was now returning home to say his last goodbye.

The world beckoned to me.
   I lived in a dreary Western country, where buildings rise haphazard as if dripping upwards from the ground, and factories puff soot whilst traffic-jams hoot and screech across grid-locked concrete. All of my land is made of the same monochrome and monotone, made of newspaper-coloured bricks built by engineers into even bigger bricks with brick-shaped windows and brick-shaped doors, and lifeless receptionists inside every brick-shaped lobby.
   I had to get out. Imagine a prison cell with four doors on each of the four walls. Imagine that every time you walked through a door, you merely emerged into another prison cell exactly like the one before: an empty room with four doors. In such a way, large as my city was, I was confined to it, for every street and city-block was the same, again and again, mirror-images upon mirror-images. The endless repetition locked me in a kaleidoscopic reflection.
   I knew of what lay through the looking glass. Vast tumbling landscapes of leaf-cushioned mountains, pure-cool flowing rivers nestled at the heart of heart-stopping valleys, Chinese temples displaying architecture of epic intricacy, Roman ruins still standing like gods in decaying glory, Egyptian catacombs embellished with ancient hieroglyphs. An Earth six billion years in the making, all beyond my sight and reach.
   I never made success in my city. I delivered papers, worked through countless grease-fests of grey pizzas, even got a job counting foggy banknotes at a well-to-do institution, but my dog-eared postcards in my dog-eared apartment had their colours steam-washed from them to be blown into the polluted metropolitan air.
   Then one day I was saved. Beneath the tin-foil of a scratch-card was a banner painted in primary colours exclaiming that I’d won a ticket for a once-in-a-lifetime world-cruise. I took the chance and I found myself following out a pre-plotted route passing between every coastal capital of the globe. The Coliseum came before my eyes, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids. I decided that I’d live like this forever – constantly travelling, until my feet had touched every inch of the Earth.
   It was on my travels that I met a poor family in a remote highland who made a living harvesting from their tea-plantation. From what I’d managed to learn of the local dialect, I told them how inspired I was by the beauty of their homeland, but their reply took me by surprise. They had been saving since their child was young, and now they had enough money to send him to the West, where skyscrapers touch the sky in all the magnificence of the modern achievements of man. Taken aback by this response, I stared into the distance. But I did not long for home.

The giant leap of mankind was yet to be made.
   People used to believe the Earth was flat, which led to three questions. Firstly, did this mean it was infinitely large? Or if not, what was beyond the edge? And lastly, if the world was flat, what, pray tell, was above and below it?
   These were questions that I had considered as a child. I wanted to be the first to have travelled to the edge of the world, and then I would have made a plane and travelled even further, not even allowing the interminable drop of the world’s edge stop me. Or I’d have dug down till I hit solid rock, and blasted through that as well, or I’d have soared upwards until my head bumped against the highest point of the firmament.
   The day I was told that the Earth was spherical was the day I began to feel confined to it. When I was educated in the workings of gravity, and discovered that there was a force constantly dragging me towards the centre of this mud-ball, my sense of entrapment skyrocketed. My dreams were shattered: no longer could I walk and walk and at last come to the end, to the boundary that I could cross; no longer, because now I knew that it was pointless to walk anywhere whilst on the Earth, because if you walked far enough, you’d only finish where you’d started.
   It was then that I appreciated the true direction that was not pointless: upwards. The Earth was my prison; movement on it led me nowhere, but up and above was the unknown, and the immensity of the diamond-sparkling cosmos.
   So I enlisted for training, and I became an astronaut. My first mission into space became the most exhilarating feeling I was ever to experience: the feeling of absolute freedom and liberty, and the power to control every force on the shuttle that moved me through the glittering darkness of the universe. I immediately broke orbit with Earth. Finally I touched down on the Moon-base at Clavius, and floated in simulated zero-gravity through its training domes, centres quite unlike anything that can be reproduced on Earth.
   It was the best time of my life, until I met a ‘lunatic’ (a name affectionately given to humans born and living on the Moon) who casually told me that he couldn’t wait for his first trip up to the Earth; a bit of gravity would be quite nice. Suddenly, I didn’t know which way was upwards anymore.

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, and then… what’s next in this sequence?
   I was the first man to ever set eyes on Pluto after the advent of the Fusion-Engine. These days, now that space-travel is a banal commodity, what truly is man’s boundary? Driven all my life by the urge to be free, to escape, unable to bear any kind of chain whatsoever, I have travelled to the edge of the Solar System.
   But there is still a constraint on me. Even under my current propulsion, a life-span would not be enough to span the galaxy. My bonds are two-fold and one: clamped between the dates of my birth and death, I only have enough time to travel a certain distance; the question is, is that distance enough for me?
   Nothing is enough. Ten years after my death, another engine will be designed and men will travel further and further into space. The clamps of time will drift apart as technology grows, and the boundary of death will grow ever the more distant, pushing further and further away the impassable girdle that encircles the Earth.
   The impassable barrier that surrounds the Earth is the radial distance that it is possible to travel in ninety years.
   This is the ultimate enclosure, the final frontier, as they say. This distance forms an imaginary bubble around the Earth that is man’s true prison. Only by building better spacecraft and better engines can this bubble be inflated, but will it ever burst? Some tell me that such a feat is impossible, but it has been my life’s work to burst that bubble, to finally break all boundaries, to finally liberate total freedom and end the bane of man’s existence: cosmic claustrophobia.
   And I have achieved it. Now with the Event-Horizon-class vessel, a wormhole can lead to any point in the universe, and the passage takes less than a second.
   My breakthrough has altered human history. We now live in a world of science-fact. Distance no longer means a thing. I have torn open the infinite vault of the universe, and every galaxy, every star, is now a mere hair’s-breadth away.
   I have travelled the known universe, conquered every boundary of space and time, wandered freely through tens of thousands of millions of light-years. I have even passed beyond the ultimate end: the very edge of matter, after which there is nothing more but empty blackness. I have travelled out beyond the forefront of the big bang, then turned and looked back, and in one eye-glance beheld every single particle of the universe, a glorious spheroid of shining stars. I have beheld the entire universe from such a distance that it appears as a pinprick of light, and my mind has trembled as it tried to grasp the magnitude of the sight before it, such an enormity of space.
   But even now that I have conquered time and obliterated distance, I am not content. I know that far out there in that blackness there is nothing more to be found. I could travel a trillion more light-years, and a trillion after that, and the universe would be far behind me, and all I’d find would be the void of eternal space. I could hold down the ‘9’ key on my hyper-drive interface for fifty years, then copy it and paste it for another fifty, and then finally initiate the wormhole. I’d travel the distance in four milliseconds, and I’d still be presented with the same empty blackness: the nothing that may never be filled: pure space.
   It was then that I realised: although I had broken every boundary possible, at the same time I had not truly conquered any boundary at all. Death was still my ultimate border in time, and infinity was still my ultimate border in space. Nothing can conquer infinity, and yet I felt frustrated: still I wanted to breach the edge, to break from a prison of infinite size.
   There was only one thing I knew of that was capable of escaping infinity. God. I questioned myself: was my desire to be totally free equal to a desire to supplant God? I never answered my question, finite creature that I am.
   But maybe then I realised: I spent a lifetime trying to break free, to permeate that final tar-black resin, to push through and poke my head out the other side, to breath the air of absolute liberty; but did it ever matter? Look what it’s come to, now that I have achieved it:
   Quite literally, nothing.