Escape by Ian Cardin (e book reader android .TXT) 📕

ESCAPE

Ian Cardin
[email protected]

Searing beams of coherent cobalt obliteration screamed by the cockpit of the small planet hopper I had stolen, missing the pressurization bubble by meters. The archaic control systems protested as I forced the ship into a sloppy but effective evasive maneuver, praying to gods I had never believed in to spare my life. I hadn't had much time to pick which ship to steal after I'd broken out of the small containment cell they'd thrown me in and recovered my ill-gotten gains, but the fact that this was the only one that didn't have a military grade code lock on the door had certainly influenced my decision.
One that I should have spent more time on, I reflected, as more beams speared past me into the interstellar abyss. Pushing the drive beam up to maximum, I was thrown back in my seat as the inertial dampeners strained to compensate. Hopefully my slim piloting skills could get me far away from the warship before its gunners managed to find me with the uncomfortably close probing fingers of their seemingly endless supply of particle beams.
Several hair-raising minutes later, I must have exited the maximum range of their weapons, because the beams stopped firing. It took only a few seconds for me to realize that they had likely stopped firing because the tiny ship wouldn't be able to make it to any populated worlds with the tiny amount of reaction mass onboard. It also stood to reason that they wouldn't have given up so easily if they had known I had gotten away with my theft - again.
The immediate and obvious next step was to plot a course for the nearest inhabited star system, put the drive beam on maximum, and go into stasis until I arrived. Even though a check of the ship's oxygen reserves indicated that there was sufficient air to comfortably live awake for at least the next several months, a cursory check of the food stores in the depressingly small pantry confirmed that there was less than two weeks' worth of food. I spent some time going back and forth with myself but eventually picked the closest system, which the ship's guidance submind assured me had no less than three populated planets.
Carefully tucking the item I had been imprisoned for stealing into a convenient cavity in the wall, I settled into the stasis couch, doubts orbiting in my head. Would the guidance system malfunction? What would happen if the stasis module failed? Would the system still be inhabited by the time I got there?
Realizing these thoughts led nowhere, I ordered the stasis module to engage and welcomed the cleansing curtain of nothingness as it descended.


The quickening fluid felt like burning ice in my veins, and for a time there was nothing but that searing cold bringing me slowly up through the many veils that separated stasis from waking. As I passed each veil, I could feel perceptions and thought processes materializing, building up to consciousness in a hazy sequence of perceptual reactivation.
Stasis functioned by taking the brain offline and into total particulate suspension region by region, and each of these "veils" was in fact my mind reactivating piece by piece. Knowing the theory behind the science didn't do anything to speed up my eyes opening, however. They responded slowly, still sluggish from the stasis.
Scanning the interior of the tiny ship betrayed no immediate reason for my reawakening; the celestial collision alarms were silent, and there were no alien tongues pronouncing unfamiliar phrases spilling out of the communications console. Tendrils of grayish silicate spiderwebbed across the panels covering the stasis machinery, but I had heard of stasis machinery exuding strange material before; that was nothing special.
Heading to the cockpit to get a look at the nearby stars, I was taken aback. At first glance it looked as if I was still stuck in a void - no visible stellar objects existed as far as I could see. Switching on the screens, I swore in frustration. The instrumentation must have been degraded by the passage of time - there was no way those readings were accurate. I had seen this type of problem before, usually on old equipment; long years of use gradually stripped away the ability of the sensors to function properly, resulting in data coming in at infinite values. The mass analysis module claimed the space around the ship was infinitely dense, while the gravitometer assured me of its certainty that the type of gravitational tides that normally existed only around the core of a black hole were, in fact, also surrounding us.
Aside from the fact that being close to any object that could cause what the instruments were telling me was surrounding us would cause the nearly instantaneous pulping of the ship, I just knew the instruments had to be wrong. The types of conditions they were attempting to convince me of were physically impossible.
Accessing the ship's timelock, I queried it, asking how long ago I had gone into stasis, and blinked disbelievingly at the result. According to the timelock, it had been less than a day.
Suddenly one of the cockpit screens flashed into life, throwing amber reflections against the ceiling of the ship. At first I ignored it, until an ear-shattering noise tore through the ship, causing me to reflexively cover my ears. It sounded like someone tuning a radio at excessively high volumes, and then it began to cohere into multiple tones attempting to unite into a single note, fluctuating in and out of harmony with itself. The amber light from the cockpit flickered again, then settled into a rhythmic pulsing, which the note began to match, stuttering in imperfect rhythm. Utterly confused, I strode over to the flickering display, unsure of what I would find.
I am not sure what I expected to see on that screen, but it was certainly not what was actually there.
My own face stared back at me, rendered in an eye-blinding cacophony of colors. The detail was exquisite; in a strange way this image of me looked more real than the face I knew from the mirror. And yet there was something missing.
"What are you?" a harsh, synthesized voice grated from the speakers. The face on the screen convulsed horribly in sync with the question, and it struck me that the expressions, and indeed, the image itself, were created by something that had no working knowledge of a living human face. The proportions were wrong, all the miniscule facial muscles that create and convey the microexpressions of emotion missing.
"What are you?" I asked, disbelieving. More than likely this was some type of security system built into the ship. I had heard of this before - private ship owners paying ridiculous sums to psychoanalysts and fringe coding experts to create automated routines designed to unnerve and unhinge potential thieves. Whatever it was, it was certainly working. My nerves were crawling.
The visage on the screen contorted, rapidly flowing through a sequence of improbable facial expressions. Then it disintegrated into thousands of randomly intersecting pixels, a seething concatenation of hypnotically pulsing points of light. The holoprojector built into the deck flickered into life and I watched in curiosity as the ship's database folded out into a shimmering virtual representation of its file hierarchy. Images and text files bloomed open and closed, seemingly at random; pictures of the original solar system, taken with the ancient Voyager probe over fifteen centuries ago; pages and pages of quantum mechanics and relativity equations, blurring as the archive trawl increased in speed.
Soon the holoprojection was nothing but a chaotic swarm of information, moving far too quickly for my eyes to comprehend any one item. I waited for several more minutes and finally grew impatient, realizing I'd been duped. I decided to play along one last time. "Show me what the hell you're doing already."
The holoprojection reassembled itself into the blindingly multicolored representation of my face and then broke into the same pattern of randomly intersecting pixels I'd seen before. They tumbled and spun, tessellating as they reassembled into a deep field image of the night sky. Galaxies gleamed, fixed in place against the endless abyss of deep space, the unseen gravitational influence of the supermassive black holes at their cores traceable in the structure of the star systems that surrounded them. Supernova remnants hung in frozen beauty, light years of cosmic dust arrayed in breathtaking chaotic patterns. Stars of all shapes, sizes, and ages glimmered. Then, just as the picture reached full resolution, thousands of cosmic objects filling the view, everything slammed into motion.
Galaxies hammered into one another, colliding in a titanic clash of immeasurable proportions. Trillions of tons of stellar, planetary, cometary, and asteroidal matter smashed together and through each other, the billions of objects that made up galaxies whirling in a dance of obliterating transmutation staggering in its scale. Star birthing regions formed and expelled their stellar progeny in an exponentially accelerated cycle of cosmic evolution, millions of years passing in seconds as the interstellar dust coalesced into brightly burning suns. These soon acquired their own planetary systems only to lose them as the stars met their deaths, collapsing inwards to form neutron stars and black holes or exploding outwards in massive supernovas, returning the original material to the void to begin the cycle again. The sheer range, violence, and scale of the universe's evolution was staggering, and I found myself entranced and humbled at the mind-numbing complexity of it all.
The cycle continued to increase in velocity, and as time went on, the picture began to grow darker as the larger stars burnt out their fuel supply and died. Now no new stars formed as the cosmic nurseries were exhausted one by one, the miniscule amounts of dust remaining distributed back into the interstellar medium. Soon even red dwarf stars passed out of existence, leaving the picture eerily darkened.
A bar of light swept vertically across the holograph, altering the image where it passed to reveal furiously churning black holes. Hawking radiation jetted from their cores as they committed time-lapsed disintegratory suicide, cosmic time scales unimaginably accelerated to show a process that would normally take aeons elapsing in seconds. White dwarfs swept dark matter particles into their orbits only to obliterate them in the blink of an eye, the stars themselves dissolving into pure radiation moments later that was sucked into the rapidly expanding black holes.
As the black holes expanded to fill the view, thousands upon thousands of them crowding the holograph, the ejection of Hawking radiation from their cores grew faster and faster until the holes themselves were dissipating out of existence by the handful. The images went completely black and the holoprojector shut off, leaving the tiny interior of the ship all the eerier in the low running lights.
"This still doesn't tell me what you are or where I am," I ventured, trying to reorient myself after the disturbing sequence of images.
The cold metal of one of the autosurgeon's robotic restraining limbs clamped around my skull, holding me tight as I protested vehemently. Limb after limb shot out of the autosurgeon, clamping onto the various parts of my body until I was completely immobilized. The operating tentacle snaked from its receptacle in the wall, the array of gleaming blades bursting from its tip counter-rotating in a horribly sentient display of intent. Losing control, I screamed in terror as it selected a particularly wicked-looking needle that buried itself squarely in my forehead.
The almost unimaginable pain of having a large needle punch