Saturday, July 20, 2024

Extremus: Year 73

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Tinaya Leithe blinks slowly. Something hard and sharp is on top of her, but she can’t see what it is. She’s in a glass chamber of some kind. It’s taking a moment for her mind to stop being so jumbled. She can’t remember what happened, but she knows that she was severely injured, and on the brink of death. Her vision focuses, and she’s able to get a better view of her surroundings. She’s inside in what appears to be an infirmary, but she can’t see much, and she doesn’t recognize it. She doesn’t get the sense that anyone is around, and if they’re nearby, she doesn’t want to alert them, because she couldn’t know if she can trust whoever has placed her in this. She struggles to sit up, and looks down upon herself in horror. First of all, she has somehow phase-shifted through the closed medical bed cover. Or maybe that isn’t the right word for it, because the glass is still all around her, embedded in her skin. Or no, it’s more like her skin is made out of a layer of glass now. How is this possible?
She lifts her hands out of the chamber, and moves them around before her eyes. They’re stiff, but still mobile. So it’s a flexible glass at least, but not pleasant either way. She reaches over to the side of the medical chamber, and feels around for some kind of switch. The cover slides away from her chest towards her legs and feet. They too are made of glass, though they’ve not yet passed through the cover. Maybe she was wrong about it. Maybe her glass skin is unrelated to the transparent cover. It sure feels like a different material, at least when she manages to concentrate, and touch it with her fingers. If she’s not careful, they will pass right through it, as her torso did before. She is now a glass-based entity that can phase through solid objects. Because that makes sense.
Tinaya spins to the side on her smooth glass ass, and plants her feet on the floor. It’s slick, and hard to balance on. No, the floor is probably fine. Her soles are made of glass. Is this her life now, doomed to skate around the world like Sasha Cohen? She feels like a newborn foal, teetering and tottering, arms out wide, ready to try to grab onto something if she succumbs to the fierce gravity of this planet. If she really is made out of glass, then it could kill her, but if that’s true, nothing she does for the foreseeable future will save her life. It may just stave off the inevitable. She’ll eventually drop a handheld device into her crotch, or accidentally bump her head on a cabinet. It might be better to shatter to a million pieces now than try, suffer, and ultimately fail anyway. She does fall, but does not shatter. It doesn’t even really hurt. She must look like an idiot, though, sprawled out on her stomach. How could Arqut still love her now? Her memories are beginning to come back; what brought her to this moment. An explosion of the extraction mirror threw her across a field, and nearly killed her. Someone has apparently managed to revive her since then, but she doesn’t know how long ago that was, or who this person might be. Lataran hopefully made it back to the Extremus.
The door opens while she’s still face down on the floor. Spirit runs in, and starts to help her up. “Oh my God, are you okay? The medchamber alarm should have alerted us to your awakening.”
“What happened to me?” She struggles into an armchair.
“We don’t know yet.”
“I’m made of glass!” Tinaya shouts.
“I know. It’s from the time mirror. That’s also why you’re not dead.”
“Yeah, that explains it,” Tinaya spit sarcastically.
“Well, it’s made of magic, so it doesn’t really explain it, but if it were a regular explosion with a regular mirror, the regular glass would have given you regular cuts, and made you regular dead.”
“Right.” Tinaya focuses on lowering her heart rate with slow, deliberate breaths. She accepts the cup of water that Spirit gives her. “Report. How are you alive?”
“It’s tough to kill a Bridger,” she begins to explain. “I was given certain temporal properties to protect me. The explosion that killed me was massive, but even that wasn’t enough to keep my molecular structure apart forever. They reconverged at an exponential rate, and eventually made me whole again. Your body experienced something similar. It even took about the same amount of time for it to reacclimate to its own new structure. It’s 2342 now.”
“We’re stuck on Verdemus, I assume. The mirror was the only way back to the ship.” She was still only thinking of Arqut.
“Affirmative.”
Tinaya takes a look around. “You’ve rebuilt the infrastructure quite nicely.”
“We had help.”
That’s a weird thing to say. “From who?”
“A ship arrived. The Iman Vellani. You remember it from your studies?”
“I remember her from my studies.”
Spirit nods. “Her namesake was built by an android who was involved in the world of time travelers named Mirage.”
“Oh yeah, I remember her from history class. I’m better with people.”
“Yes, Oaksent’s evil army sent her and her crew to kill us. They destroyed the planet, so they could record the whole thing. Then we sent our consciousness back in time to stop ourselves from doing it, but kept the recording. They took it off to sell the lie that we were all dead. Hopefully the bad guys won’t be coming back here ever again.”
“That’s quite the story. I’ll require the full mission brief.”
“Of course, when you’re up to it.”
“Will I ever be up to anything again? I’ll repeat in case you forgot, I’m made out of glass! How does one get over something like that?”
“I did,” Spirit answers.
“What are you talking about?”
Spirit lifts her shirt all the way up to reveal her bare stomach and chest. “Go ahead and touch it.” The skin is reflective from its own layer of magical glasses. Her entire left breast is hardened and unmoving, while the other is only partially restricted. The rest of her body appears to be okay. “While I was still reconstituting, I fell upon you, and some of the shards stuck in me as well. As you can see, it’s not as severe, which is why I woke up faster. I’m also part phoenix, so that helped.”
“I’m sorry, Spirit.”
She winces, and pulls her shirt back down. “How could this be your fault? The mirror exploded, and struck you. What could you have done, steered away from me while your were flying through the air uncontrollably? You’re just as much of a victim as I am; more even. Besides, Belahkay kind of likes it.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“He was one of the crewmembers who showed up, but he decided to stay. We’ve been together for about two non-realtime years.”
“Must. Be. Nice.” It’s made her think of Arqut, who is now hundreds of light years away from her, and counting. But that was rude. “I’m sorry, I’m just still trying to get used to all this.”
“It’s fine. You’ll like him, he’s cool. We’re a small group, we have to stick together.”
“The kids. The kids! I saw them just before I passed out. They didn’t make it through the mirror? But they were gone by the time I started running up there?”
“They made it through,” Spirit replies, trying to calm her down with hand gestures. “They’ve led their own lives for several years, and returned to us with homestones. They’re older in mind than they appear, so speak to them as if they’re young adults...because they are.”
“How did they get here in the first place? Why would a homestone bring them to the planet?”
“They were born on Verdemus. The young man’s mother is Hock Watcher for Ilias Tamm. The girl’s parents are dead. Died in the explosion.”
“Is that everyone?”
“Yeah. Like I said, small group.”
“Hm. Only need 141 more people, and we could populate this world with a self-sustaining faction of humans,” Tinaya muses. “The Glassmen.”
“Right.” Spirit laughs.
“I need a light,” Tinaya determines.
“Hey, Thistle, turn the lights up to 100%.”
“No, not that kind of light. Where are my clothes? We can communicate with Extremus through my own little time mirror, but I have to open the spectral lock.”
Spirit stands up, and walks over to a cabinet. She grabs the tactical clothes that Tinaya was wearing when she first came here, and sets them on the little table next to the visitor chairs. She then takes a handheld device from her back pocket, and hands it over. “This is all yours. You can apply your profile to it.”
Tinaya unravels her jacket to find the hidden pocket, and spreads it out on the table. Then she fiddles with the device’s flashlight settings, searching for a specific shade of green. She can’t remember exactly which it was, but she has a general idea, so she only has to try a few hex codes before the right one illuminates the zipper. She opens it, but the mirror is gone. She’s able to stick her hand all the way through, and back out to realspace on the other side. “Shit. The pocket dimension I had it in must have collapsed in the explosion, or something.”
“I dunno,” Spirit says. “The spectral lock is still there, which means it’s still detecting the pocket dimension. It’s just...been moved.”
“Moved where?”
Spirit thinks about it for a moment, darting her eyes in saccades. “Into you? Maybe that’s how you survived the explosion.”
Tinaya sighs, and leans back in her chair to rest again. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Let me put you back in the medchamber. Just because you woke up, doesn’t mean you’ve finished recovering.”
“Very well. Thank you.”

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