[IC] Space Oddity

[Rosenrot]

Silence. Silence and darkness stretched in every direction, interrupted only by the occasional point of light made by a distant star. All that existed in this void were barren masses of rock and metal, asteroids and exoplanets, expelled from their home systems by cosmic forces and left adrift. These, and one tiny craft moving along through the endless black. It maintained a steady pace but the movement seemed almost irrelevant in comparison to the vastness of space.

Inside the craft, the pervasive silence had seeped through the hull. It hung especially heavy in one room, like the silence that comes before a great storm, when all things that can have fled in fear and all that remains is what will soon be swept up in the approaching chaos.

This room was dark except for six tiny lights, five blue and one green. The blue lights glowed on the open doors of empty stasis pods. Their sleek surfaces were barely illuminated by the status lights. Only one pod was closed, the green light indicating that stasis was being successfully maintained within it. Then, with a singular tone that brushed aside the perturbing silence like so much dust, the green light became yellow.

The process of reanimation had begun.

Faded images and sluggish figures drifted in and out of mnemonic fog as Emilia lay dreaming, if one could even call such undeveloped fragments “dreams”. Her brain was just beginning to resume higher functions. The stasis process had used a series of chemical solutions to force her body into complete metabolic cessation, right down to the cellular level. Now, it was restarting her with a different set of injections delivered by the intravenous line connected to her right arm. Her eyelids quivered and her fingers twitched as the second round of stimulants was moved through her veins by the sluggish beating of her heart.

Finally, her pale-green eyes slowly opened. It was dim at first within the pod but the lights were growing brighter by the second. Her pupils failed to contract at the same rate, though, and the light began to sting. It took several seconds for her groggy mind to think to simply close her eyes.

There was a soft hiss and the sound of liquid flowing. Emilia's eyes snapped open. With a final dose, reanimation was complete. Her reflexes were fully restored now so the crisp, bright light filling the pod was no longer blinding. Another hiss accompanied the opening of the pod doors opened and Emilia felt her body begin to float away from her pod. There was no artificial gravity in the stark white room, nor anywhere else on the ship. Her self-awareness returned piece by piece. The tension of her hair on her scalp, tied back tightly with an elastic band, the squeeze of a neoprene uniform against her skin from neck to ankle, the chill air prickling the hairs on her bare arms, the softness of the socks on her feet and the boots over them.

There was a tug on her arm that quickly became painful. The I.V. line was pulled taught, keeping her tethered to the pod and shifting the needle in her vein. She winced as she pulled the thin steel from her arm. Drops of blood floated away in tiny crimson bubbles until the smallest of scabs formed over the wound.

Her mind felt clearer with every passing moment. Her eyes followed the disconnected I.V. line as it was autonomously reeled back into the pod. A stab of terror reached into her chest when she saw that the other five pods were empty. Where was the rest of the crew? Was she completely alone here? What happened? What had gone so wrong? Her heart raced and her head throbbed as she tried to remember but stasis was not without its side effects. She could remember her name, her profession, even departing Earth for this mission, which had clearly not gone as planned. The memories of everything thereafter were increasingly incomplete, though, as she unsuccessfully tried to retrace the events that had led to her entering the stasis pod. She closed her eyes in an effort to concentrate better.

Her back brushed against the ceiling as she continued to drift weightlessly through the room. The sensation struck a familiar chord somewhere in her mind. She opened her eyes to see that the sterile, calm white of the stasis room had been replaced by stainless steel and emergency lights flashing red all around her. A different place, a different ship. She was weightless still, but looking down a hallway that was somehow both familiar and foreign at once. Her back brushed against something. She began to turn. Her blood became ice and time seemed to slow as she started to scream and then...

White.

Emilia stared up at the paneled ceiling of the stasis room. Her eyes were wide and her heart continued to pound. The scream was still stuck in her throat as she floated, paralyzed by a fear of something she couldn't remember. She tried to calm herself to no avail. Her mind was overwhelmed by the primordial urge to flee, but from what?

Elsewhere on the ship, a message flashed on a computer screen:

Stasis terminated...
Reanimation successful...
Pod 6 vacated.

[pugbutter]

When he awoke it was dark, damp, and just slightly tepid. He was floating. Amniotic. His brain sprung to that conclusion before all others: that he was in a dream, because only in dreams could men age backwards, shrinking into fat little cherubs and crawling up into the warm, safe womb. Or if not a dream, then he was in a coma, or even in death. One of the three, surely, explained why he could blink and squint but see nothing; why his ears worked, but why only a faint buzz, deep and quivering, was audible. Then he realized he had limbs, and that they were not so small and pudgy as those of a fœtus; no, he was an adult creature—a specimen—tied down and sealed inside.

He realized he must have been sleeping because as his circumstances sharpened all around him, as the heat of dawn brushed away the fog which shrouded his senses, he wished to be sleeping again. As he acquired more clarity and more control of his body he terribly resented both, for if he was buried alive somewhere then it was his good fortune to have fallen asleep! He preferred blindness over having nothing there to see; he preferred to be an embryo, floating helplessly in his fluid, over sporting adult limbs which were tacked and saddled to never again boast of strength or swiftness. Forgetting for a moment that he was restrained, he cried for help, and attempted to beat his fist against the strange glass before him, obsidian-dark but reflecting back at him a vague phantom who was gaunt and pale as a clean bone. That could not be him; that monster he beheld in the glass must have been his captor, his torturer demon returning to brandish his hellish instruments a second or fifth or ten-ten-thousandth time. He scrunched up his face and waited for the demon to continue staring at him with those smooth ivory features. Instead he, too, scrunched his face, so they screamed together.

He'd never known before that he was claustrophobic, but then, never had he known a hell like this, being conscious yet deprived of all the universe around him, everything which a man is meant to smell, taste, devour, caress, adore! Although he knew not what he yearned for, what he wanted to miss, oh, how he missed it all the same—!

"Warning: cryo-capsule 17 unlock sequence activated," she said. It was a she. "Cryo-capsule 17 unlock sequence activating in 30 seconds."

She seemed to know what was happening; to anticipate it. He looked frantically around his little chrysalis, unsure whether he wanted to have imagined this voice. Was she a friend? Could this world which awaited him beyond the walls of the steel and glass cocoon be worse than the little existence held within?

"Twenty seconds."

He cried out to her, but he should have known that she would not reply; her voice, so sterile like the edge of a scalpel, stinking of formaldehyde in his ears, could not be human. It was a creation of humanity, conjured in the Ouijas of his mind; or it was born of the inhuman, a nightmare given flesh. The droning cadence, the suffocating formality of her language; no, in her chest she did not carry a heart thrusting with red blood. She had no kidneys flowing with bile, no sinuses stuffed with mucus. She was a cleaner thing than her little lab-rat, and twice as obscene for it.

"Sequence active in ten. Nine." With each number a little eternity was whittled away, and with a great hiss at the seams, the atmospheric seal was broken. The air within the capsule repressurized. The cap lifted, and though he tried to keep his frightened eyes wide, they rebelled, clamping shut like clams protecting their oysters, absconding from the lights and the bright white walls. And as if he too was maritime, held under til the bubbles stopped, he gasped for air. Only vaguely was he aware that his harnesses had shrunken away into the bowels of the cruel devourer-machine, the thing which had eaten him whole. He did not notice the woman near him at first, her hair fanning and flaring; nor the fact that she floated, and he floated, and they floated subtly in the direction of themselves. He felt clammy and hot although he did not sweat, and starved for oxygen although the air was crisp and clean and tinny on the tongue. Only many moments later had he calmed enough to realize what queer things surrounded him, and although he had no porthole to gaze out, he must have realized, somewhere deep in the core of his vile thrashing innards, that he was in some sort of ship; a spaceship, swimming through endless black.

She was pretty, or at least the prettiest thing he'd seen yet in this bizarre sequence. Was it her voice he heard? Why then would she seem as futile as he? She looked brittle, like dry grass and burnt sugar. He could very nearly imagine the heartbeat thrashing against her ribcage, oozing between the individual bones, stretching the skin above, for how gaunt she was.

A wall of stupidity had been built around his brain—the poor organ was drugged, or rotting, or some such—though it seemed some things oozed through the cracks between the bricks: how did he know what he knew? The mechanics of inertia, the vacuum of space; knowing that if he were to go searching for her pulse, he would find it with two fingers pressed either to her neck or her wrist. What other wealths of knowledge, then, were squirreled away in his brain? He knew that he was not from this place, but that he belonged here, even if he knew not who put him there, or if he had come by choice. Any answer at all, a proper one, one which didn't raise more questions than it solved, would soothe the terrifying doubts and mysteries, he reckoned.

[Rosenrot]

As her terror subsided and her heartbeat began to slow, Emilia could think clearly again, or at least relatively so. She wanted, no, needed, to know what had transpired between her departure from Earth and her entry into stasis. The ship's computer... She thought. That was her only hope for piecing events together until her memory returned. There should be an interface somewhere nearby... She pressed her hand to the frigid ceiling to turn herself. In her earlier cognitive fog, she hadn't noticed how emaciated she had become. The tendons in her hand moved and flexed visibly beneath the skin as she pushed away. Fixated on the bulges of her wrist bones and the stick-like arms they were connected to, she didn't immediately notice the figure in her field of vision. How did this happen? A malfunction in the stasis pod? Or was she already this malnourished when before she'd entered the pod?

The questions in Emilia's mind were accumulating rapidly, which only deepened her need for answers. If the rest of her body had been this severely damaged, what if her brain was equally atrophied? What if my memory never recovers? Then it was only more imperative that she learn as much as she could from the computer. She pulled her mind away from her horrified fascination with her own anatomy to re-focus on finding the nearest interface. Before she could move, though, her eyes found something much more interesting.

At the sight of him, she reflexively jerked away in momentary shock. She had thought all of the other pods were empty. Was he another hallucination, like her vision of the steel-walled hallway? She stared at him for a handful of seconds that seemed like minutes. Skepticism was evident on her features. She expected him to vanish at any time. When he didn't disappear with a blink of her eyes, Emilia decided he must be real. “Who... Who are you?” She asked tentatively, continuing to stare.“Do you remember anything?” He was just as gaunt as she and from that she surmised that whatever had caused her condition had affected him as well. Dishearteningly, she realized he was probably afflicted with the same lack of anamnesis that she was experiencing.

[pugbutter]

"With a friend your sorrows are halved, your joys doubled." One of the Greek philosophers had said that. Greek—togas, laurels, something called a gyro. But for the life of him Symon could not remember the man's name. He could not even remember which letter it started with, nor the way of speaking that letter. Did he even know the full alphabet? Or had some of the symbols fallen through the grating? Let's see: Ay Bee See; A Be Ve Ge...

Well, it didn't matter what his name was, or even if the quote was misattributed to him. Somehow Symon remembered it; because it was a platitude perhaps, repeated time and again until the shapes of the sentence's aesthetics were stamped into the grey of his brain. And more importantly, it was true, as already he felt relieved of a great slice of his burdens. He didn't particularly care whether she was another patient or victim (then their captor's wrath would not be inflicted on him every day of the week), nor even if she, herself, was that captor (then he knew at least what she looked like, where her eyes were located, so that he could plead into them). Although the latter seemed less likely; she looked as helpless as he felt, wriggling about in zero-g with her hair, wild and overgrown, tangling over her face.

He opened his mouth to speak. A single syllable emerged, something like "bug" or "gum" or "shuck," but his insides churned, and he realized he was to vomit. The fumes reached his tongue before any liquids did, and he tasted their sourness such that his lips puckered together, his tongue pressing itself to the roof of his palate, desperate to do away with the foul sensation. It surged up, but his seal was tight, and it went back down. Another surge. Another. His body insisted that it needed to do away with something toxic in his gut. Symon believed his body, and trusted it, but he didn't want to swim in his own innards. It would not be so convenient as a puddle of the stuff pooling at his feet, smattering his calves. It would fill the air and surround them; the smell, the smell would not desist. While struggling to breathe between heaves, he took in his whereabouts, and reached for the hatch of the crypod, away from which he drifted like plankton near the sea floor. He steadied himself against the pod, thinking that if he stopped tilting and twisting across the room, he might be less dizzy.

Why him? He could not remember the last time he ate anything. He felt totally empty except for the vile fluids trying to escape him; too much so, in fact, as his organs screamed for food and water all the while. Eventually, when he felt weak in the abdomen, when he was reduced to a panting dog in the rhythm of his lungs, he had stopped retching, and looked not too much worse off for it. Beads of sweat clung to his face, the water tension sticking them there, such that none escaped his gravity.