Chapter Text
“Eye movement detected.”
The voice sounds strange. It sounds feminine, its tone is dry, and robotic. It’s a robot. I try to open my eyes but can’t. Everything’s heavy. I try to move literally anything, nothing. I’m tired. I fall back asleep, not much else I CAN do at the movement…
I wake up again.
“Eye movement detected.”
I try to open my eyes again, this time it works. About a foot away from my face is this weird robot arm with many other arms branching off from it, all ending with something different and a few too many ending in something a bit too sharp looking for comfort. I try to scream.
“Mmmphh…”
Wow, me, great job. Totally gonna scare away danger with that. I manage to squirm a bit.
“Body movement detected, please remain still for your own safety.”
Screw that! I flop out of whatever cot I was on… and directly on to the cold, hard floor. Ouch. I can’t move around my limbs quite enough to actually move around so I just sort of flop around like a sad, pathetic, sore all over fish. I hadn’t noticed before, but I’m in some kind of plastic, zip up body bag and I’m covered in electrodes.
After a few minutes I manage to get up and get a better look of my area… there are three cots around me, each with a person inside. One is in a plastic bag like mine… and the other two with sheets draped over them. I walk over to one and pull the sheet back, expecting the worst.
Lying in the cot is a mummified woman. She’s thin and her skin has gone grey. Her eyes and cheeks are sunken. She has no electrodes or tubes or IVs. A small screen on the side of her cot reads “Ilyunkhina : Deceased”. I’m with a corpse… TWO corpses, actually, if the other draped over person is the same as she is…
Where even are we? Is it some kind of hospital? There are no nurses around but I think I just woke up from a coma, why was I in a coma? I feel around my body… no glaring injuries I can find. Huh. We have to be in some kind of quarantine… or else there would be nurses. Maybe we all have some rare disease? Is the disease we have contagious or would we be at too much of a risk from being by others? Why didn’t the robot get rid of the two corpses? They don’t smell or anything, both are probably so well preserved and dried out that they haven’t rotted at all. Still seems like something you wouldn’t want hanging around two coma patients.
There’s a ladder on the far side of the room that leads up to a hatch, which probably opens up to the rest of wherever it is we are. I climb up and into a corridor.
There's a window… and outside I see what looks to be a beautiful nightsky. How many stories high is this? I walk up closer and look down… I’m in outer space. This is a spaceship.
I am so cooked…
Cooked? Really? I’m looking out into the endless void of space and my first thought is “cooked’? I’m a grown man, where did I… WHAT KIND OF PHRASE IS THAT???