Which brings me to the third
morning of my life, possibly the last, just over thirty five minutes ago.
I remember an image of fish,
swimming in a large school, in a green and blue ocean. They were rolling
together in a massive ball, when suddenly there was a splash and all of them
scattered. I woke up again, to my eye being pulled open roughly, and a blue light
being waved around.
The difference that dragged me to
full consciousness was the amount of external sounds. I wasn’t sure if this was
meant to be some kind of experiment, but a loud off beat drumming rang back and
forth across the room, accompanied by sharp metallic staccato strikes, and
different levels of electric bursts. I could hear a radio somewhere spitting
loud angry static mixed with angrier people screaming at each other. Even more
different was the doctor’s beside manner.
Directly in front of my face, Tran
was shouting at me. Loud angry cursing shouts, in a few languages that didn’t
seem to take any time to understand. He was so close I could smell the
chemically reproduced Coffea Arabica seeds he had eaten earlier. “Come'on, wake up, you have to wake-“ He looked startled when he realized that I had in fact opened my eyes, and took a moment before asking. “Finally, can you
move?” I almost didn’t hear the question as the irregular drumbeat seemed to
pass directly over us and the light flickered on and off.
We were in a hallway, similar beige
as the last room, but lined with tall black oval windows spaced in between with
small metallic circles. The smaller circles seemed to be information panels,
though they only displayed ‘status within normal range’, and a series of
numbers. I was on another gurney, but this time free of tubes, though my arms
still had fresh puncture wounds. I wasn’t familiar with what model or even
class of ship we were on but I felt sure that Tran had been pushing me.
“We need to move,” he started
pushing again, though his face was clearly red and strained with the effort. “I
had to drag you across half the goddamn ship.” The black ovals, stretching from
floor to ceiling were some kind of doorway, though they were all reflective and
gave no clue as to what was on the other side. If we hadn’t been ignoring them,
and the signs of battle going on outside I’d have assumed they were escape
pods. I was mostly right.
We passed through a door way
concealed in the beige wall at the end of the long corridor. On the other side
of was plain boxy room, equipped with several obvious and at least two not so
obvious cameras. I could feel a strange prickling on my skin, that my mind
identified as radiation from somewhere in the wall, probably another imaging
device. With a swipe of his hand Tran opened a similar door, set next to the
one we had just left. Surprising me, the room on the other side was actually
quite small, much too tiny for my gurney to fit inside. “You have to get up. We
have to hurry.”
I sat up for only the second time,
unimpeded by needles or throbbing pain in the back of my head, trying to make
sense of what Tran was doing or where he was taking me. The ringing staccato
grew quickly louder and then softer, as something strafed across the hull of
our ship. I wanted to ask what was happening, or what they wanted from me, but
I could only manage a dry cough, ‘what?” An inauspicious first word.
“Lazris is dead. It had to be done.
They can’t get their hands on our research” Tran already had an arm under my
shoulder, and with a grunt started heaving me to my feet. I don’t know what I
had expected, but my legs took my weight easily. I guess I had expected to fall
from the way they had been carting me around. The unexpected confidence was
lost as I took my first step ever and realized I had almost no balance. I
leaned into Tran, unable to hold me as well as he had thought, who then leaned
hard into the frame of the elevator. “The ship is set to self-destruct in three
minutes. We have to leave now.”
With another heave Tran pushed me
into the smaller compartment. I had assumed it was an elevator at first, and
for a second all of the buttons by the door convinced me I was correct. But
there were too many buttons, and screens, and even a lever behind glass.
Then, as I took a step backwards
and reached out for something to balance on, I found purchase on the side of a strangely
padded object with a metal frame. I took a moment to take in the compartment. A
single medical station built into the solid looking wall, some kind of
emergency release. My brain screamed to life as it finally shook off the last
of whatever they had been doing to it, and added everything together.
The doctors were taking me and my
‘family’ to some kind of warzone. We were under attack. Tran was planning to destroy
the ship, leaving everyone to die, and had just thrown me into my own personal
escape pod.
I expected part of myself to be
hissing in anger, but this time I didn’t feel any strange jolt of emotion. Instead
my brain was showing me pictures. The word family was surging out of the ocean
of information dormant at the back of my mind. Pictures of animals, plants,
people of every race and specie. All united by ties of genetics, purpose, or
friendship. Three minutes would have to be enough to save them.
Tran made a tiny squeak as I jerked
the back of his collar toward me. Before he could fall onto his rear I grabbed
the back of his head and pivoted him face first into the wall. The motion felt
natural, and it took a second before I realized my hands had ended in a
flourish, wrists together, palms up and down, but with my fingers bent.
As Tran rolled whimpering onto his
back, hands clamped over his mouth, I grabbed the front of his collar and
pulled him off the ground. I found I was easily able to lift him one handed, my
balance fine this time. His hands fell limply to his side, and I saw that he
had bitten his lip, though only slightly.
“My family,” the words sounded
strange to me, but much more clear and confident than my first attempt, “can
you release them?” I knew there wasn’t enough room in this single pod, but
there must have been others.
Tran’s eyes rolled back in his
head, it was a gesture, not injury. I let go of his shirt and he dropped to the
floor, head bouncing forward into his chest. I placed my foot on his stomach
and he groaned.
“They could be captured.” His eyes
were suddenly angry. “Do you want them tortured, dissected?” Tran looked at me
accusingly, but his eyes weren’t entirely focused. I began to let more of my
apparently substantial weight press onto him.
“You can seed them,” he gasped. I
let up and he sucked in a wet mouthful of air, his thin cheeks sweating, “like
we were in orbit.” I started to lift my foot up, but his eyes rolled again. “It
won’t do any good, they’ll just drift in space. You’d need a miracle.”
My brain scrabbled for a second,
digging deep to find ‘a miracle’. Images, words, sounds of people speaking
hundreds of languages, only half of which I understood. The idea was improbability.
That story’s were made up using convenient coincidence or divine intercession
to explain unlikely phenomena. I didn’t quite understand. I looked for more,
but didn’t want to give Tran an impression that I was lost. “Tell me how.” I
stepped next to his head, straddling him.
Finally, he seemed resigned, I
think he realized that time was passing, and the ship had been set to explode.
“In the antechamber.” He rolled his eyes, apparently I was wrong. “All of those
doors lead to hallways like the one I brought you out of. Holding bays.” He
giggled. “Bomb bays.” I saw images of titanic warships, packed to the brim with
armament. “There is a console in the antechamber that will initiate seeding.”
I understood, and had about two
minutes left. I turned and walked backed toward the antechamber. Behind me Tran
sat up. “It won’t do anything. They’ll just float in space until they run out
of oxygen or get captured.” I could hear his limbs creaks as he started to
rise.
The antechamber had one large
obvious panel set into the wall. I stepped over to it and used the motion I had
seen the nurse use. It came to life, and suddenly so did the cold deep ocean in
my head. Apparently it liked computers. For a moment I stared at the screen,
and then nature took over again. My hands began to fly, and images, text, and
line after line of code started popping up on the screen and running through my
mind. The images flickered for a second as I fought the wave pressing against
the back of my head. I was overtaken, and the images turned into a stream of
light.
Then my head lit up with hundreds
of thousands of alarms bells. I was aware of the state of the ship, the crew,
and more importantly the 782 remaining members of my family. 731, as the stream
of information told me another rocket had hit home, taking out one of the bays
and part of our navigational system. The short of situation appeared to be a
pirate had yanked our ship out of mass flight, using some kind of weapon to
destroy our astrometrics array, because the ship had never established where it
was. It had only picked up a single electronic signal from some sort of
perimeter mine, that had then started to attack us.
The ship was telling me that it had
the fire power to handle the small station, but that there were now only 1:21
seconds remaining before the ship exploded. I told it not to explode. It told
me I didn’t have authorization. I started to weave my way into the ship core
systems, but it was distracted with trying to fight the station and it was
processing too slowly. I let it go, 1:02 seconds remaining. A positive ping
sounded through the garbled of information flowing back and forth. The station
had been struck in a shield generator, it would soon go down, not in less than
a minute.
I didn’t want to admit it but I was
running out of options, the seed command had been present and available since I
had logged on. I asked the ship if Tran had access to stop the self destruct.
He did.
For what seemed like too long, I
untangled my mind from the computers. It last told me I had 58 seconds. My mind
picked p the countdown like a mantra as I turned to face Tran.
In front of me was a tall black
glassy oval, stretching from floor to ceiling where Tran had been. Then
suddenly a puff of decompression and the oval was gone revealing a disappearing
pod, and a vast empty field of stars. I didn’t let my mind start trying to take
it all in. Tran had left the ship.
The computer and the seed command
sat there. I turned back to the console and
began typing again, quickly, but not the same as before. I asked the
ship if it had detected a planet. It told me it had seen one while in mass
flight, but could not detect any signals, and could not estimate range. I tried
to bring up information on how mass flight worked but the ocean was moving
slower than before, or maybe I was growing tired. If I could look at the stars,
and estimate the light distortions maybe I could estimate a direction toward a
known system.
The computer and my brain told me
in unison that I had 45 seconds until the ship exploded. I ran another
calculation, how long did the pods have to clear the detonation. I couldn’t
guess at the size of the explosion, but only knew I didn’t have long enough. I
made up my mind.
I told the computer to face the
last known reading from the planet. The computer told me it had only been a
gravity signature indicating large oceans. I didn’t have time to wonder if that
meant the planet was so far away electronic communication didn’t reach this
far. Then I told the computer to open the nearest escape pod in the corridor I
had been wheeled out of, and set launch for 10 second, only 21 seconds before
the ship detonated.
I left the computer console with my
new 10 second countdown feeling like the wrong number too short and too long.
The corridor seemed further away when I actually had to walk down it, but as
the door opened I saw that a pod had opened for me. It was very similar to the
pod that Doctor Tran had tried to shove me in except that this pod was already
occupied.
Strapped into the strange wall
contraption, feet just barely touching the floor was a human girl. Or at least
it appeared to be female human no older than ten. Images in my head started to
flash in my head as my mind tried to guess at planet of origin. I shook those
thought away and stepped inside, for some reason breathing deep, as though I
might bring extra air with me. It felt strangely childish.
The panel on the wall was the same
as the one Tran had been fooling with. I wondered if his pod had a destination.
Then I wondered if I should have looked for its destination. The time hit 2 and
I pressed the button indicating the door. Walls folded up in front of me as one
of the black ovals slide down sealing of the ship. It was time to launch.
I barely felt anything as the pod
ejected, but the ocean in my mind spoke up just enough to let me know we were
moving. The doorway had been replaced with what look liked more wall with a
small viewport, just wider than my hand. At first I only saw the black oval,
but that soon turned into a row of black ovals then five rows of black ovals. I
saw the bay was made of ten rows, two by five arranged at angles to maximize
spread. There was a portion of the lower right bay that was burnt and twisted,
and I could make out the camouflaged ridges that disguised unjettisoned pods. The
last count had been 623 life signs on the same registry as me. More pods had
launched than that, though their life supports damaged or their occupants dead.
The ship came into view, though
from below its shape was difficult to make out. The computer had told me it was
a Sand Tiger Assault Drop Ship. My brain gurgled up an image up a strange flat
creature, with its mouth and eyes on tops of it and strange paddles for moving
around. The ship was certainly wide, and another image brought up a profile of
the ship, only seven decks tall but very wide, with nearly three deck devoted
to laboratory space. There was also an entire level stocked with weapons,
explosives, chemicals, and ammunition. I imagined hundreds of us like eggs
floating out into the ocean of space, searching for a chance to survive. A
miracle.
Then the ship exploded.
***
Now the
only thing left out my little window was a field of stars, spinning incredibly
slowly. I tried to see more, maybe the other pods, some sign that I wasn’t
alone. No matter how hard I pressed my face to the glass all I could see was pin
points of light and some nebula in the distance.
Another
snuffle from behind me and I remember that I wasn’t alone. I turned to face my
companion. She looked like she was asleep, just breathing peacefully. The image
was offset by the dozens of tubes in her wrists, and the large white electrode
patches on her arms and legs.
I
looked around the cabin, and tried to spot some obvious vents. Oxygen was
coming from somewhere, but I couldn’t find any gauges, which wasn’t reassuring.
I started to feel bad.
The Doctor said we only had enough
air to last so long, just enough to be picked up by the enemy. And simply
because I had ducked into this pod I halved this poor girl’s chance at
surviving. There was only dim light in the pod, just the glow from the green screen
above the medical apparatus.
If the girl was ten then I had to
be older. I felt my cheeks, collar bones, and the cartilage in my throat. My
brain brought up diagrams of anatomy, and somehow I decided that I had to be
twelve. My brain ocean hadn’t been able to come up with a point of origin for
her. It had too many hits from too many places, and couldn’t make itself up.
She looked peaceful, something felt
right about that. I thought the blue glow turned her face the most beautiful
silver. I looked at her for almost another minute before I realized what I was
missing.
It was only the fact that the glow
seemed to be growing brighter that clued me in at all. The medical screen’s dim
green glow was being dwarfed by blue light coming through the window. I moved
so fast I felt the pod rock as I collided with the wall.
A planet, a huge blue and green
curve of earth was beginning to creep across the window. It was so close we
were being pulled toward it. I just stared, and as I continued to spin the
world grew larger. Streaks of atmosphere heated up outside my window, starting
as small streaks and growing larger. Vibrations ran through the ship, shaking
us more gently than I would have thought, but reassuring me that it wasn’t a
dream, or at least it was a very convincing hallucination.
And then in the corner of the
window I saw a flare of white heat, that grew larger, but not nearly as huge as
the planet. It was another pod. One of my six hundred brothers and sisters.
I finally stopped staring and
turned to look at my companion, still sleeping. I thought about how long I had
been I had been awake. My brain insisted it had already been an entire hour, so
it wasn’t that hard. And now I’d have a chance to show her how try.
No comments:
Post a Comment