Starcraft: Thirteen

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My eyes opened for, as far as I could tell, the first time in a long time.

The world around me still seemed to be distorted. The sounds of the room before me had an odd quality, as if they were not as clear or as loud as they perhaps should have been. Wherever I looked, only a vertical section of the center of my vision was clear. Beyond that clarity was a wall of a hundred different shades of teal. Sometimes the shades would grow darker or brighter. In time, I learned that this difference depended on what part of the room was in my peripheral.

The first thing I noticed was that either the room had changed drastically since the last time I had become self-aware, or I was in an entirely different room. The floors, walls, and ceiling were now of similar glossy, bright gray metal panels. Overhead lamps burned with a blue-white color. Several wheeled trays with odd metal utensils had been left in the middle of the room.

There was movement. In the far right corner of the room across from me, I saw two darkly uniformed human males stepping away from a glass tank filled with blue-green liquid upon a black base. I at once assumed I was also housed in such a vessel. There was another human, a naked female suspended in the tank whose eyes were closed and bubbles floated upwards from her torso and head. Although her auburn hair, facial and body structure looked familiar to me, much was different. I looked around her tank and spotted a dark plaque, the word ‘Brass’ embossed on it. So it was the same being I knew. She appeared somewhat larger, having more skeletal and muscle mass than I had previously observed. The word ‘matured’ floated on the surface of my thoughts as a means to describe it, though I wasn’t too sure of its meaning.

I wasn’t ready for the next sensation. Somehow I became aware of my immediate surroundings. Though I hadn’t moved, I could ‘feel’ the glass tank around me, confirming my assumption. I could feel the floor of the tank, slightly raised from the floor of the room. It wasn’t so much a sense of touch as it was being aware beyond the senses that I was currently familiar with. I extended the sensation and felt the room. The feeling beyond my tank was lighter than within. Before I could expand that thought, I became aware of additional tanks to my right. I turned slowly to inspect them.

I never got to them. From my position I could a see a metal door a good distance from me, flanked on either side by oval windows. The door was rather nondescript other than being darker than the floor or walls, but beyond one of the windows was another human female lying on an elevated steel bed that captured my curiosity. She was different than Brass; her body was smaller, lithe, and her hair was platinum blond. Her hands, feet, and neck appeared restrained by black bands at their respective joints. There were also strips of black that went from her collar, down her breast or sides, down her stomach and ended at her legs. Near the collar end of each strip was a small, razor-edged metal disk held aloft by small arms above the strip.

I looked above her and saw a couple other uniformed figures around her. One of them I knew and associated his identity with the name ‘Duran’. I remember him standing before me, watching me whenever I became self-aware in the past. I described his dark-tone facial features as ‘strong’. Others always came to him before leaving again. I assumed he was the leader, giving them orders orally, though I could never understand his muffled words through the glass and liquid.

He raised a gloved hand and brought his fingers together and apart abruptly. The other figures moved at his physical command, attending to machinery before he and the others moved away from sight. I looked back towards the female on the table. Her blue eyes had clear liquid coming from them, and the word ‘sob’ came to mind to describe the complex movements of her restrained body. I noticed the edges of the metal disks become a blur and gently descend onto the black strips. At once they were at the thigh end of the strips and a wispy red mist floated from her body. Her mouth opened.

There was a terrible moaning of the room I was in, and I watched the door shiver in its place. Then I saw the glass explode into shattered pieces beside it. A high-pitched scream, a wail filled with terror and pain invaded my head, the clearest sound I had ever heard. If I could focus on anything but the horrifying sound I would have noticed my vision lifting slightly as it pulsed with darkness. All I could focus on was the definition of terror and pain, emotions I had never conceived, that the sound forcibly articulated to me. My physical form shook, and bubbles rose around me, clouding my darkening vision. I saw the glass housing me begin to crack while a form was suddenly whisked across the floor by a flood of fluid near the door. I saw a metal hatch cover both of the windows, and the scream went away, though the moaning remained. With a final pulse I was robbed of sight and my mind became lost again

It would be a while before I became self-aware once more.