She fidgeted with the metal, but couldn’t find any clasp or button to open it. “Okay, so you can hear me, whatever you are. Are you some kinda restraint?”
‹No.›
“Then why can’t I take this thing off?” Her breath fogged. She scooted as far as she could to the foot end to get away from the air conditioning.
More text scrolled across the small screen. ‹Tracking and monitoring device mandatory for all minors aged twelve to seventeen. Sima Nuvari, DOB 08/22/2391. Omnicomputer bracelet security will disengage in 01Y 11M 20D 09H 13M›
Sima scowled. “Hey I was asleep for two years! I’m at least eighteen now.”
The screen blanked for a second. ‹Nice try. All biological function paused in stasis. Sima Nuvari remains as status ‘minor’ legal age: 016 years.›
Her exasperated sigh broke into stutters as she shivered. “Hey, open this thing.” She slapped her hand on the clear barrier overhead.
Digital tapping noises made her look at more text appearing on the insubstantial screen.
‹Stasis pod 0137C-1 should be open.›
“Well, it isn’t. I’m stuck in here.” She moved to all fours, pushing her back against the icy lid, which wobbled, but refused to open. Frigid air from the vent above the headrest washed over her backside and thighs.
‹That is abnormal.›
Sima glared at the floating hologram along her forearm. “Yeah, thanks. If I don’t suffocate in this thing, I’m going to freeze.” She rolled onto her back and kicked at the clear plastic, screaming. “Help! Is anyone there? Someone let me out!”
Her shouting in the confined space rang in her ears over the thumps and thuds of her feet on the thick transparent plastic. A similar tantrum when the technicians sealed her in hadn’t accomplished anything either. She attacked the barrier until her body refused to move. Shivers took her as she lay coated in a layer of sweat that made the air conditioning ten times colder. Huddled with her hands over her mouth, she tried to warm her fingers with her breath.
I’m locked in a coffin. The escape pod jettisoned me on who-knows-what planet. Tears streamed hot out of the corners of her eyes, slid down the sides of her head, and collected in her ears. She sniveled like a child. Standing in the street surrounded by nutri-packs watching police shoot other Outcasts back home hadn’t been half as frightening as being locked in a transparent death trap.
Sima sobbed, banging her hands on the clear panel to her right while yelling, “Please, someone help me… I don’t wanna die. I didn’t even do anything wrong.” She scowled up at the lid, fogged opaque except where foot and handprints from her futile battle remained.
The bracelet shocked her.
“Ow!” The brief jolt of pain halted her tears. “What was that for?”
‹You couldn’t hear me beeping.›
Sima glared at the text. “Why were you beeping?”
‹I am reading a malfunction in the pod.›
“No crap. Really? Thanks.” She growled. “Go to hell.”
Text deleted and retyped. ‹Pull the pillow up.›
After a glance back and forth between the patch of blue light above her arm and a crummy box-shaped pillow that looked more like a pad from a baseball diamond, Sima forced herself to crawl into the stream of frigid air. Hair fluttering in the blast of icy air, she grabbed the cloth-covered foam tile with shaking hands, and pulled. With a Velcro rip, the ‘pillow’ peeled up from the cushion around it, revealing a small control panel. Next to status monitors for the cryonic system, vital sign readouts, and power levels, sat a two-inch button labeled ‘Emergency Open.’
Sima didn’t wait for the bracelet to type anything else. She pounded her fist on the red button. A labored, mechanical whine from somewhere below her vibrated the entire pod. The lid separated from the base with a soft sucking noise, opening upward on powered struts. She clambered out of the pod before the door stopped. Frigid floor on bare feet brought a squeal of surprise from her lips as she ducked around the jagged flange of metal impaling the room, and headed for the storage lockers.
When she pulled the first locker open, she found empty space. Thin plastic film still adhered to the interior walls, like brand new electronics. “Empty?” She blinked and opened the next one. It, too, held nothing. “This is an escape pod right?” The third storage bin contained only air as well. “Where’s the supplies? Where’s my damn clothes? Bäumler said there’d be stuff in here! Crap! I’ll take a jail suit over being naked.” Shivering and grumbling, she pulled open number four, and found it held only more empty space as well.
The bracelet buzzed.
She glared at her arm, her impatient foot making a soft rhythmic clapping on the icy floor.
‹You are technically not naked. That would imply a complete lack of clothing. Lifeboat storage compartments should be stocked with survival gear. They should not be empty.›
Sima grabbed her left wrist as if to smash the bracelet into the wall, yelling, “Stop telling me obvious things. What happened to the stuff?”
‹I can only theorize.› After a pause, text continued to appear. ‹The fabrication company responsible for outfitting the EDS Progenitor likely decided to save money by omitting certain ‘optional accessories.’›
“Optional?” She stomped. “How can survival gear be optional?”
‹These pods were not officially occupied according to the flight roster. You were part of a special relocation project rushed in at the last moment.›
She folded her arms over her chest, unable to stop shivering, but took care to keep the underside of her left arm facing up so she could see the screen. “Yeah… send the street kids to a colony world. No one wants to deal with ’em.” She sank into a squat, forcing herself not to cry again. “They should’ve just shot me in an alley like they do with Seps.”
‹You would be dead then,› typed the bracelet. ‹Separatists who are shot to death are no longer alive.›
“Oh, being stuck on some alien planet in my underwear with no food and no supplies is sooo much better.” She sniveled.
‹You are not stuck in your underwear.›
She blinked. “There’s some clothes?”
The bracelet hesitated a few seconds. ‹You could remove them, hence they are not ‘stuck.’›
“Off!” She smacked her arm onto one of the cabinet doors. “Get off my arm you literal piece of crap. I hate you.”
‹That is unwise.›
Sima glared through tears at the three taunting words. I can’t feel my toes anymore. She shrank in on herself, shivering.
‹You should exit this pod before your body temperature drops to dangerous levels. I am detecting another malfunction in the cryonic unit. It is warm outside and the air is breathable. And please don’t hate me. :(›
She crept to the only visible door in the corner to the right of her pod. Parts of the roof had been compressed by external forces, bent down to the point her hair brushed the ceiling as she walked. “Are there any other survivors? Did the ship crash?”
‹No signals received. Status of the EDS Progenitor is unknown.›
Sima leaned up on her toes to reach the four-inch window in the white door. After wiping a layer of crystallized fog from the glass, she peered out at a world lush with traces of emerald, azure, and violet in the foliage.
“Whoa. That’s not Earth.”
‹Correct. You have landed on Mirage.›
“Huh?” She squinted at the words above her arm. “Mirage? Is this like some head game? Am I still locked up and plugged into a computer?”
‹I am sorry, Sima Nuvari. Your present situation is not virtual reality. This world received the designation of Mirage when astronomers found it to be a close match for Earth-like conditions. It was so similar they did not believe their eyes.›
“So I’m not gonna wake up?” She bounced in an effort to warm herself up.
The bracelet chirped. ‹You are awake. Shall I shock you again to prove it?›
“No.” S
he grabbed the bracelet. “Please don’t.”
As soon as she whimpered, she hated herself for sounding so vulnerable. She wanted to fume at it, be as angry with it as she had been with her absentee dad and all his money she hadn’t been good enough for. How could she fight an unbreakable Omnicomputer locked around her wrist for the next two years? It could shock her whenever it wanted to, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. At least cops responded to wide eyes and pouting lips. This thing scared her more than a tiny white cell.
Sima grabbed the rubber-coated handle on the exit door and leaned down on it with all her weight. For a few seconds, her feet left the ground, until she gave up with a gasp.
Beep.
“What?” she screamed, whipping her arm up to glare at the display.
‹Lift.›
She wanted to smash something, but decided against slamming her unprotected toes into metal. The lever moved with little effort when she pulled it up, and the heavy slab of duralloy came free from the hull with a rush of air. She grunted and shoved the door into a blast of hot, humid air. When it opened enough for the wind to stop howling in the gap, the noise receded to a faint whispering over a canopy of azure foliage.
Sima gawked at a verdant forest, the only time in her life she’d ever seen plants for real… but the colors and shapes looked nothing like what she remembered from pictures.
Clusters of brown roots formed dome-shaped chambers at the bases of massive plants with the general shape of trees. The smallest looked large enough to allow one person to crawl into, while others could hold small houses. Blue leaves, some at least twenty feet in length, drifted like ribbons in the breeze.
The ground in front of the pod appeared soft, covered in strands of wavering blue-green that looked more like fur than wild grass. Nowhere did any sign of a trail exist, other than the forty-meter trench her lifeboat had gouged when it landed. The world appeared somewhat close to Earth: brown dirt and tree stalks, the sky blue with white clouds. Wet air carried the smell of moss and vegetation, tinted with the occasional hint of floral. Patches of pink in the highest leaves flickered back and forth amid smears of fluorescent blue flowers and long, hanging vines that fluttered like ghostly hair. A standing cloud formed in the doorway around her as the humid heat of this world butted heads with the over-pumped air conditioning of the escape capsule behind her.
Awe made Sima forget all about being outside in her underwear. She squatted, grabbed the rim of the pod, and slid down the six-foot mound between the lifeboat and the ground. Hot air wrapped her body like a blanket, the warm dirt underfoot like cozy socks. She didn’t know where she’d wound up, but outside offered a world of paradise better than freezing to death.
She stood in the trench the lifeboat gouged into the ground, deep enough by the pod that the grass at the top wound up over her head. The escape capsule’s crashing slide had come to a halt when it met the edge of a forest. Sima crept up to the side of the trench, intending to climb, but hesitated. The powder-blue grass appeared delicate and harmless, but it might be sharp or painful. After a few tentative pokes with one finger, she caressed the strange plant matter with her whole hand. It resembled grass but felt like a fluffy rabbit. The blades reminded her of feathers, composed of hundreds of thin filaments projecting outward from a central shaft. After petting the meadow like a cat for a moment without anything stinging her, she gathered the courage to trust it and grabbed the top of the crash scar. She changed her mind, opting for an easier climb a moderate distance away from the pod where the sides only reached up to her waist. There, she pulled herself up out of the sunken channel into an embrace of fluffy plant matter.
With no frame of reference to go by, she picked the direction that looked prettiest and decided to follow a meandering clearing between two banks of trees, where the grass flowed like a shifting blue-grey river into the strange forest.
13
Rabbit Hole
Warm wind rushed down the open path between sections of forest, chasing the last of the chill from Sima’s bones and lofting her long, dark hair like a flag behind her.
She walked around in circles, giggling at the grass tickling her legs. Her gaze flicked from one wonder to the next. Here and there between trees, three-foot spiked pods with ruddy crimson shells and long yellow spikes dangled from the ends of sky-blue tendrils like gargantuan thistles. Potato-sized lumps of brick red adhered to the pods between thorns as large as her arms. All her life, she’d only ever seen city: buildings, cars, the wealthy, and the poor crammed together so densely that humanity choked off the world. The splendor of this place took her breath away, and she found herself staring for a while.
A croaking bird-like cry drew her attention to an almost twenty-foot-tall creature striding overhead. Dark emerald feathers covered a rounded body atop blue stilt legs. Tucked wings fluttered. The creature moved with long, graceful strides despite having the overall appearance of a giant flamingo. Sima stared straight up as it passed over her; the breath caught in her throat when its bright orange beak peeked around its breast, an upside-down head staring at her. The creature emitted an undulating warble, studying her with two volleyball-sized eyes at the ends of stalks as big as her legs.
The bird’s flexible neck craned, moving its head closer to her. The beak approached within a foot of her face, and appeared large enough to engulf her entire torso. Sima stopped short, blinked, and raised a tentative hand to wave.
“Hi. Please don’t be a carnivore.” She glanced to her side at wrinkled blue skin on a leg at least a foot in diameter. An uneasy whimper slipped from her clenched jaw.
The great bird squawked again, bathing her in a blast of stink—rotting vegetation. Sima gagged and swooned backward as the creature swung its neck up and strode away into the trees. When she could no longer see it moving amid the shifting forest, she resumed walking.
For several hours, she followed the grass ‘river’ until spotting a dark grey stone the size of a gee-vee embedded in the ground. It seemed like a good a place as any to rest. Two and change years in stasis had blunted the endurance she’d built up living on her own for four. Coarse, hot rock greeted her skin when she sat against the edge. She ran her hands over the curved surface, accepting it for stone and not some dead creature’s messed up skull. The chill of the lifeboat had long departed. Between the humid air and hours of walking, trails of sweat raced over her back. She glanced down and scratched at her bare stomach.
“This place would suck if I had any clothes on.” She blushed out of reflex. “Not like there’s anyone else here.”
Reclining over the top of the stone felt too much like being a steak on a heating element. She tolerated it for less than two minutes before sliding down to sit on the ground. There, she rested for about half an hour until a pronounced thump in the nearby tree line made her jump to her feet. Minutes passed in silence as she swept her gaze over the forest, searching for what moved. A light pop preceded another thump in the underbrush. Slow, tentative steps brought her closer to the spot. The sound reminded her of a rock being dropped in dirt, and didn’t seem scary enough to dampen her curiosity.
A few feet in from the edge of the clearing, a cluster of dull, crimson lumps the size of huge potatoes collected on the ground beneath one of the horned pods. She prodded one with her toe, finding it firm.
“Hey, bracelet.” She raised her arm. “What are these?”
‹Out of range.›
Sima squatted and held her wrist closer to the nearest lump. A pyramid of bright blue laser lines projected from the metal band, sweeping back and forth over the object. She froze in place, waiting. Forty seconds later, the pretty dancing lights ceased, and more text scrolled across the holographic screen.
‹Plant matter. Initial analysis suggests high chance of edibility.›
“Space cucumbers. Great.”
The bracelet emitted the soft pattering sound of typing. ‹Specimen is closer to fruit. Sugar content detected.›
“So this won�
��t kill me to eat?” Her stomach growled; she shivered. “Damn, there’s no food in those storage compartments. I gotta find something to eat.”
‹I calculate death an unlikely result of consuming this specimen.›
“Can you give me a definite answer?” She glared at the bracelet. “Wait. Don’t even say it. You’re going to say eat it and if I die, you’ll know.”
‹Humor detected.›
I hate this thing.
‹Pierce the skin and re-scan interior. My role is to safeguard you while you remain a minor. I am incapable of suggesting an action that would cause you harm… even if it would be funny.›
“I’m not a kid.” She sighed, squatted, and sliced a fingernail along the rubbery rind. “I haven’t been a kid since I was like nine.”
‹Your medical report shows no signs of forced—›
“Stop.” She licked her finger without thinking. A flavor like raspberry hit her strong before it faded to a pungent rhubarb aftertaste that made her wince. “I didn’t mean that. I meant I had to look out for myself.”
The lasers swept over the rip in the fruit for a few seconds. ‹Safe.›
She picked her prospective meal up in both hands. The dull red, pointy-ended, tubular fruit studded with little black ‘thorns’ of soft material was far from appetizing to look at. Bright purplish-pink in the hole she’d made tempted her to sniff. Finding it sweet, she bit it and got an explosion of bitter.
“Bleh!” She spat out the rubbery rind. “That’s nasty.”
After peeling it, she nibbled only the inner flesh, struggling with the overwhelmingly powerful flavor of raspberry. It soon melted into an unpleasant rhubarb aftertaste. She shivered, but if she ate fast enough, a new bite of ‘raspberry’ muted the rhubarb-like slap and made it tolerable. After devouring three of them, she rolled over on her back, too full to move, and spent an hour reclining in the grass, listening to her stomach make odd noises while watching airplane-sized creatures cruise overhead.
Out of Sight (Progenitor Book 1) Page 14