I’m not sure what part of my body regained sensation first. I think it was my face, but for some reason it felt detached from the rest of me…. My memories just following the crash are dreams. Vivid dreams of my old crew, swimming through my head. I recall “dreams of loneliness” , not just typical human loneliness or the feeling of being alone in deep space.

But almost as if I had nothing…

WAS nothing…

Not even a body to speak of,

just a nervous system suspended in a liquid medium.

Then AGONY…

A swirling vortex of grinding teeth rending flesh from

calcium, to rearrange my gooey, near silty bones.

Wrenching open my cracked skull,

They violate my sacred haven

To uninstall the

Hardware

In My

…

They plop my most vital of… organs into a soup which… feels like home liquefied.

I’m not there long enough before the hands come back, disrupting rapturous sleep and

scraping off some of the new growth, tearing open forgotten wounds

They grab me, and drop me into a freezing, steely skeleton…

Icy-hot, the bones glow scars upon my tissue…

They layer over with new nerves and

String together new flesh

Between the frame

New organs

Stitched

In!

When I woke, there was light first, and then sound in quick succession. My eyes were accosted by harsh, blurry lights; then I’m greeted by a strange woman, dressed like some kind of pink, old earth nurse with black hair.

“Oh, are your eyes opening zsugar?” The woman spoke with a gentle candor, and a strange, almost French accent, yet in old English. “He’s waking up, doctor!” She exclaims to someone behind her.

“What is ‘zee PROTICOL MADEMOIEZELLE!?!” interjects a strange, black and blue cloaked doctor, with a bizarrely long and bulbous head, and too many weird, oversized crimson goggles, who appears to excrete from the opposite wall. “We must test him for COGNITION!”

“Ummm, Wha…” The nurse stops mid-word “you’re right, Doctor Uulioyya…” The nurse says, quivering. “We should check to make sure this isn’t merely a false start.”

My eyes flick back and forth between the doctor and the nurse, trying to identify some compassion in their faces, but all I get are blurry approximations…

“Let’s see his response…” The nurse drones on. “Let us test cognition.”

I’m unsure how to respond to such a sterile response. “I…” I say, the nurse and doctor look on in shock at my reaction.

“I…” I stutter between what feel like state-of-the-art teeth “I don’t know where I am…”

The doctor bends down to my eye level “Very  interesting, great response time” he says as he pokes my exposed eyeball. The nurse recoils and makes a disgusted sound.

I’m in deep trouble; I now realize I haven’t blinked since my sight came back on...

“Doctor…” the nurse nervously speaks up “perhaps we should allow him to rest, he’s not ready yet.”

The doctor violently whirls around to look at the nurse, until I interrupt him “… shit…I am sooo… high right now…” I’m such a fucking dolt. The doctor turns back and trains some of his red goggles on me.

“Perhaps you are right NURSE!” The nurse flinches at his exclamation. “We shall deactivate consciousness...”

After that I’m plunged back into the void for a moment before I’m accosted by more dreams of my body being exercised against my will.

Running,

jumping,

lifting,

punching,

chewing,

working

and stretching itself to exertion over and over again, and again… without my input,

until I begin to awake anew.

“…I…I think he’s waking up.” A familiar voice fades in from muffled obscurity. “We need to…” she is quickly drowned out by numerous murmuring voices.

My eyes adjust to the brutal lights and sanitary environment that lay before me. The scene was akin to a lovechild between a military hospital from the 1940s and a late 20th century pediatrician’s office, yet outfitted with unbelievably advanced-looking tech, complex, refined, enamel white, and elegant in design, although I could not begin to explain which piece of equipment did what. The room was small, no more than four by four meters, and in it were packed more than twenty people, including the nurse from my earlier awakening, a beautiful, tall woman [no less than two meters], with pale white skin, long, jet black hair and glazed pink eyes, almost matching her bright pink nurse uniform.

“Mr. Walker…” at the sound of my own name my eyes instinctively flick to her and my head follows in tow. This is greeted with “oohs” ad “ahhhs” from the crowd of onlookers. “How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Where am I?” I instinctively ask, confused “Am I dead? Can I walk?”

“…Well, the doctor was able to repair what he could after the crash and reconstructed everything else. You are very much alive Mr. Walker.” the nurse relays, as if there was nothing bizarre about my being “reconstructed”. “You should have regained full functionality now!” She exclaims the last part as if she was a used starship salesman.

Grunting, I sit up. My body feels well over fifty kilos heavier. It begins to ache as though it’ll tear itself to shreds under this meager effort. I then slide myself off the hospital table in an attempt to stand. My body’s newfound weight is too much for me to handle, and I fall to my hands and knees. Something must have happened to my hair, because it merely flops in front of my left eye. The crowd looks on in shocked disappointment, but none move to help me up. After about a minute, I quit waiting for it. I slowly make it to my feet and look at my surroundings. Everything seems smaller than it should be, and shorter.

I hear “Oh my goodness!”’ and “Oh my King!” from all the onlookers, this draws my attention to the tall, almost… Greek-God-like human figures clad in elaborate, otherworldly garments that’ve surrounded me.

“Hey!” I exclaim, instinctively, not knowing what kind of words are gonna follow my exclamation. Silence fills the air as I’m given the floor, in this state I feel an immense head rush coming on. I feel my very essence sink to the floor while my body stays standing, for a little while…

When reality fades back in, I’m alone, in the shimmering dark—wait, shimmering dark?

The room that lies before me is impossibly different from the one I fell from, a formless room bereft of any other furniture or equipment, but with the exact same shape, a perfect cube. Each side of the cube resembles a rippling, silver/grey mirror. With the corners and sides of the cube glowing dimly with an eerie, white light. I hear mumbling voices from outside my box. I drop my head back on the stark, grey table, trying to keep my eyes partially open to try and gauge what I’m dealing with.

The room’s lights flicker when the nurse shows up, exposing the nature of this strange tech. The ripples vibrate at an accelerated pace, lifting off the surface of the square, creating shapes. These shapes take the form of the tech, the stethoscopes, thermometers, the cabinets, the auto-injector, the strange glowing panels on the wall, the anatomical paintings, the very bed I lie on, the…everything!!

The nurse struts over to me, carrying a concerned look, and says: “Mr. Walker? Have you woken up?” I rise from the strange, postmodern bed and shrug. I retort with:

“’MR. WALKER’…was my father’s name!” I hop off the bed. “I’m Jonn Walker. I’m confused, and angry. And I wanna know where I am!”

The nurse recoils timidly and attempts to stammer something out, but all that escapes her lips are a whimper. This [for some reason] agitates me more, forcing me to take immediate action! I pry and tear the bed off the floor. It cracks off and I throw it at the opposite wall of the cube.

The bed begins shattering as it collides with the numerous pieces of equipment, which they in turn shatter into a mess of tiny, angular shards. The bed smashes through the wall, shattering both in the process. The nurse immediately reacts by shifting into a luminescent, amorphous blob of slime. This, obviously, surprises me, causing me to recoil and shriek out of shock.

After my outburst, the nurse undulates away from me and out the opening; I look outside my newly fashioned hole in the wall. Outside my small cube I see a crowd of humans and aliens of all types: Phectektarians, Ver-Men, Q’eirth-ens of all kinds, a handful of Uh’Lpqhaxaqcxa and a Zhurok in women’s clothing pushing a baby carriage, along with a few species and permutations of human that are completely unfamiliar to me. I just sit here, leaning up against the opposite wall, an injured monkey in some insane zoo. All of a sudden, a noise rings out over the incessant gibbering of the crowd: the clack of heeled boots against marble.

“Leave us!” a voice cries out from across the long, dark hall in front of me, cutting through the chatter. The hall resembles a tall, shrouded cathedral with a single spotlight in the center, where my weird little cage lies. As the voice calls out all the strange people clear out, leaving me with this one shaded figure strutting towards me. “Cue the lights!” The figure gestures to our surroundings “Hello John, you’re on  Paradise-One” The rest of the lights gradually glow back to life, revealing a tall, peculiar man approaching, in unorthodox platinum and purple regalia. “I am The King of Spades, the ruler of this world, and Master of The Immortality Machine!!” He reaches his long arm past the shattered tech, and pierces my soul with his violet, diamond shaped eyes. “I’ll answer any questions you have, just please… be civil…”

TO BE CONTINUED...

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