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.
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