5 YEARS LATER
It was the harsh breeze that jolted him awake. It was like icicles tearing into his skin. As his eyes flew open, he realised that not only was he freezing cold, but he was also very much naked. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room, he discovered he was lying on a metal table of some kind, and there was a trolley full of instruments off to his left. A distant drip, drip, drip from a pipe somewhere, sent a dull echo around the room.
“Where the fuck…”
“Ah, you are awake! Excellent. That means we have made progress!”
A rather excited gentleman in a long white lab coat burst through a plastic curtain at the far end of the room, and it was only when Harry moved to stand up, he realised he was being held down on the table by restraints around his chest, both arms and his legs.
“Just what the hell is going on here!” Harry shouted, his throat raw, his voice jagged.
The man removed his goggles, and rolled a chair to the edge of the table, sitting in it and leaning in towards Harry’s face.
“Well, would you like the short answer, or the long answer?”
Harry had never wanted to punch someone in the face so hard in his entire life.
“Allow me to give you the short answer, then.”
The man got up from his chair, and began pacing the room, tapping a pen on his wrist as he walked from one side of the room to the other, methodically.
“My name is Doctor Tim Blakeman. I was placed here entirely by accident, oh about… ninety years ago. Give or take.”
Ninety years? Harry was astonished. The man did not look a day over forty, and he was almost certainly human. The confusion clouded his vision, and he had to focus to hear the rest of the words.
“You see, long before your time Admiral, a small group of us were working on a significantly advanced form of artificial life. Far beyond that of artificial intelligence, you understand. Something much more intricate and unique. Of course those on Earth with morals and objections caused our research to be shut down before we even started. But someone came to me, and offered me a chance to continue my work. I believe she is a mutual friend of yours.”
Drusilla. Fucking bitch, Harry thought.
“Anyway, she got a little, shall we say, trigger happy with my associates, and so I, and there’s no easy way to say this, stole her ship and ran away.”
Harry almost laughed at that one. The idea of anyone successfully stealing a ship from Drusilla filled him with joy.
“I managed to barter and trade my way to the Saraswathi System, and I discovered a wonderful spatial phenomenon. I did not have the means to fully explore it, but it appeared to be some kind of energy nebula. I tried to get close to it, but I couldn’t penetrate the perimeter, the ship was too weak after several skirmishes and lack of good maintenance on my part. I lost control, and found myself crashing on this frozen planet you currently find yourself on. It is quite fortunate I had made the discoveries I had before the accident, or I would be very much dead, and my research lost forever.”
Harry did not like where this was going. As feared, this was definitely a laboratory, and not a medical facility. He had to know.
“How long have I been here?”
Looking slightly offended at being interrupted, Blakeman sighed and gave the response.
“You fell from the sky roughly five years ago. And there wasn’t much of you left after the impact, I can tell you that much!”
Five years. How could that be? And then a dormant thought came rushing to the fore like a flood in his mind.
“The gravitational field? It was this planet?”
Blakeman was animated once more.
“Ah yes! Another one of my genius inventions. You see, I was fortunate to have basically a whole laboratory onboard the ship I stole, and when I landed here, this facility was abandoned, and so I’ve been tinkering away perfecting my craft for quite some time now. You are a shining example of that. The perception filter is another.”
“Perception filter? You mean like a cloaking device?”
“Yes! Precisely!”
But now was time to focus on the other part of Blakeman’s statement.
“I am an example of your work?”
Blakeman nodded enthusiastically.
“Oh yes my friend. The artificial lifeforms I have spent almost a century working on, undoubtedly saved your life. You’ve basically been reconstructed from the DNA upwards. I am so very proud of my little autonomous children.”
Even though it wasn’t possible to get any colder than he was, Harry shivered. The demeanour, the words, the actions of this so called doctor, chilled Harry to the core. He couldn’t speak, the words caught like a lump in the throat. But he needn’t bother. Because Blakeman spoke first.
“Alas, although you are awake, the task is not yet completed. There is more work to be done. I think… yes… spinal fusion should be our next task. Don’t you think so my little beauties?”
Blakeman turned towards a large cabinet. Inside were several vials of various coloured liquids and equipment. But the specimen jar in the centre, larger than all of the others, contained some kind of swirling mass. A soft green glow came from whatever the creature was, and as Harry watched on, Blakeman reached into the cabinet and extracted the jar. He carried it over to Harry’s restrained form, and unscrewed the lid.
“Oh yes, soon we will have you better than new, Admiral.”
He grabbed Harry’s jaw, and squeezed his mouth open, and gently tilted the jar forwards. In one smooth motion, the creature inside the jar plunged down Harry’s throat, his body convulsing violently. As Blakeman screwed on the jar’s lid and walked away, Harry Ransome’s screams echoed throughout the entire facility, and across the entire frozen world.