| Cyborg |
[Apr. 4th, 2010|09:18 pm] |
the stars call to each other in a twinkling Morse code, trying, even as does man, to broach the distance , the cold ,cold distance of space,.. it makes me think of the last time I saw this vista,. Which should have been the last thing I ever saw,.. the fates work within the realm of men, but they have their own rules,.. my friends call me Tinker, Tink for short,.., few that they are,. When you’re one of a kind and can’t seem to die, it’s hard for people to warm up to you, it’s been almost 800 years since a mars expedition consisting of an unmanned robot exploration device making tentative tracks in the layers of dust that for the most part seemed to promise yet more lifeless space debris,.. the premise was to seek signs of past life forms, or the markings of water the chalice of potential life ,...what they found, turned the tides of the world powers inside out, the signs of technology, not buildings or machinery,.. well, not the kind you would think,. the robot was armed with the most advanced research gear available at the time of its launch,. Equipment to test chemical composition, equipment to scan the frequency bandwidth for any sign of intelligible signal indicative of signs of life,.. picking a likely spot , registering enough background radiation to possibly reveal mineral deposits,.. hours into the repetitive tests, one of the technicians, on a hunch or something did some cross correlation’s and came up with a startling hypothesis, the silicon spectrum was demonstrating strange radio noise,.. taking the microscope images and processing the living shit out of them , something came into view that left most viewing the evidence white and chilled to the marrow,.. only one voice said what was on the minds of all there. "nano machines... " of course the media was far too involved in the program to cap the info,.. and it ran trough the press like piss trough a cloth diaper,.. it would have been a miracle if the world would have done the sane thing and pulled together to send men to mars as a unified expedition,.. yeah,, right,.. well someone from earth got there,.. and the rest is history,, the caches of technology, were worth the years and lives (and of course the money, but that came back in spades) fuel systems so efficient that they could demonstrate zero loss in energy, made the leaps and bounds of improving space industry to the point that colonization projects were just around the corner,.. that’s where I came in,.. one of the amazing finds of the mars era was all kinds of nanotechnology, nano as it was commonly called , ever notice nobody likes using the long names of things,.. I don’t either,.. the boon to space work was some very neat nano there was the type they wove into cloth that when exposed to hard vacuum it would transmute the material into a impermeable bubble around any living flesh,.. this in conjunction with an injection of nano virus that would super oxygenates the blood , and make the possibility of a cargo pod breach survivable,.. as long as someone found you within an hour or so,.. and as valuable as the cargo was, someone would be along well within that time,.. the biggest worry was that , sometimes ,oh call em pirates,.. would get to the site first,. Deploy a non reflective membrane over the pod, and though the likely hood of identifying the ship (the life bubble was usually opaque) they would fry all the bubbles,.. humanity’s come a long way .eh?,...so what the hell is my story, well shut up and listen,, I got forever, or so it seems,.. I started out the way most spacejacks I got busted running bootleg nano into depressed subnations,.. got a choice of working for the Mars Mining Consortium (MarMinCo.)a subsidiary of Macrosoft Inc., or icetime to a longhaul colony project,.. not being fond of the concept of being a popcicle , I opted for the spacejack work,.. this is the grunt labor that was too menial for an expensive robot to do,.. most penal labor lasted from a year to four, before some mishap or other closed their dossier,.. of course the average sentence was five years,.. as was mine,.. talk about statistical disadvantage,.. I was working well into my fourth year , only one event with the cocoon, so I was always kinda looking over the shoulder as the odds were really not in my favor,.. of course I had full plans of surviving the time, ego is something that shouldn’t be discounted, since I planned on being free eventually I was creating a nest egg of stashed gleanings from shipments I’ve worked on,.. not knowing anything other than much of the stuff coming trough was more tech artifacts from the now extensive mars dig, I would snag anything I could conceal on my person that was small enough to hide in my berth, till I could transfer it to a more permanent hidey hole,.. yeah, I’m still a scumbag, so tell my mother,.. oh sorry she’s dead going on 160 years now so that’s not an option,.. the major change in my life came at the end of shift, I was concealing a vial of silvery metal shavings in my pouch I got from one of the cargo bins,.. oh one of the things I forgot to mention was how they kept us from running off,.. you got it nano,.. each day we were injected with a nano virus that in 24 hours would devour our bodies leaving a plastic compound that no one had really found a use for yet,.. but burned really well,.. as we went off shift we were given a shot that reset the clock on the nano,.. considering earth was a week away the likelihood of escape was pretty slim,. This was the reason we had so much freedom around the complex,.. on this fateful day little did I know that this nano would save my life,. And change it in ways I don’t think anyone will ever understand,.. the routine was as the shift ended most guys would go to the mess (aptly named) before showing for their booster, some guys got nauseous with the shot so we were given leeway on that ,.. as I was walking across the deck to stash my new grab,. the deck is a force field contained air envelope that connects the sections of the complex , it only a slightly more comfortable environment to hard vacuum . behind me,.. something exploded, the shock wave caught me off guard and launched me off the deck , the nano did its thing,.. blooming bubbleville!,.. shit,.., should you wish to live the experience of the cocoon have someone wrap you in a floor mat, then duct tape it tight to you , and then drop you in the pool,.. of course I wasn’t suffocating cause of the oxy-nano , it still doesn’t feel good,.. trying to get my bearings as much as I could, I could see a bit, but other than the flashing of other blasts I had no clue, I wasn’t sure it was pirates till I felt the heat of a laser cutting through my life support, being semi transparent the rays were cooking me even as the bubble tried to repair itself, not how I planned on going out,.. suddenly the world did a flip flop and I don’t remember anything but lots of blue flashing,.. then a long sleep,.. I only call it sleep because of the pain of awakening , I woke in a medivac unit,.. people huddling around me, I did a mental check on myself,.. no pain,.. I actually felt better than I had in years,.. a guy in scrubs gets in my face and says relax were gonna take care of you,.. yeah ,... right,.. okay I’m alive, "so what happened? "I ask , "someone raided the depot" came the reply,.. "no shit,".. says I, then a light came on ,, "hey! I haven’t gotten my booster yet today,.." he comes back with, "that’s the least of your worries, we cant figure it out, it looks like the conversion already started, but your body is somehow countering it,.." I lay back and went huh?, then I got mad ,.. I didn’t realize I was held down by straps till they ripped off the gurney, sitting there feeling shocked till I looked up and saw six pair of frightened eyes looking at me,. people started to scatter, I got off the gurney and before I could get my bearings a security guard was on me,.. I shook him off just as his partner rounded the door pistol drawn,.(laser , you don’t shoot projectiles in space) , and fired at my chest, these weapons have a wide dispersion beam and there should have been a hole the size of a softball, where it hit, but to my surprise I looked down and saw what looked like black plastic,.. slowly diminishing as flesh replaced it, looking up I saw my surprise mirrored tenfold on the guards face,..."just stand still! "he said, with a not too convincing authority,.. at that point a guy I took to be the head medic stepped into the room looking me up and down he said "we need to talk, can we be calm about this?" I merely motioned at the two guards, guns drawn, standing as if to fend off an invasion of bug eyed monsters , "you boys can go," said the boss, and they left warily and thankfully from their expressions,.. the doc broke into his explanation , seems like I had received several doses of laser fire, and that the normal reaction of dying seemed to be mitigated by the plastic reaction,. .he had no doubt it was due to the nano in my system, before my waking they had attempted to draw blood only to have the needles apparently absorbed by my body as soon as they broke the skin,.. not knowing what else to do he was making inquiries into some specialized equipment, he had no idea why a system that had been working one way for fifty years suddenly would do something so unprecedented,.. then he asked if I was carrying something metal as they had seem traces of silver coloration on the original burn before it began to disappear,.. I told him "no" as I wasn’t about to admit anything that could cause more trouble,.. unless I thought it was in MY best interest,.. I spent almost another year in that hospital , playing guinea pig for the researchers visited from time to time by the chief provost of the prison system,, telling me I was doing a service for mankind and other calculated crap,. To keep me mellow,.. I was eating better than anyone else on the rock, and I was clean and warm , why rock the boat,.. in all this time no test had proven to be of any value, I had my own theory, I think the metal that was in the vial ,was something the nano needed to become self replicating,.. and all they were doing was protecting their domain,(my body), and they had been proven very effective at what they were designed to do, one day the provost came to me and said that my sentence was up and that they would like me to continue the research on earth,.. " yeah" I said, "but on my terms" I work now when I feel the itch, I can go anywhere, even hard vacuum and function as a thinking agent ,.. this has brought me some lucrative jobs,.. I still give the research center time but after a hundred years they haven’t any better idea than they did day one,.. I don’t age, and I seemingly can’t die,. This could prove to be very interesting,.. |
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