Drop Point - Episode Three: Awakening

Click to read the previous installment of Drop Point.

Wandering around a sleeping space ship had just started getting unbearably boring for Kyle. Oh, don’t get me wrong: the ship was very boring and had been since the moment he stepped out of the storage facility. By unbearable I was most definitely not using a hyperbole. He had already seen the hangar where the recruits hung motionlessly in that horribly creepy fashion, he had seen the bridge of the ship where the captain’s CryoPod was hooked up to a ton of wires as he piloted the ship to Earth’s moon in his subconscious; the moon loomed quite large but still motionless in the bridge’s main visuals, as usual.

The omniscient Narrator supposes the reader has long been wondering why the passengers needed to be preserved when traveling from Earth to its moon. He also supposes now would be the most opportune moment to explain this. He shall get you up to speed with all the action and adventure Kyle is currently undergoing and then return to this in a moment.

Kyle, bored, sleepy, and angry with himself and Caldwell and the war commander and everyone in general, returned to where he had first arrived in 2335: the tank in which the last of the sustenance fluid had been kept. He laid down next to it, stared thoughtlessly at the yellowish muck sticking purposelessly to the glass-panel inside walls, and eventually fell asleep despite being drenched in the long-left-unchecked air conditioning and the cold, clingy goop.

Now, back to the need for CryoPods. You see, there came this genius down on Earth that came up with this way of sending people to the moon almost instantaneously. The process was called Slow-Time Travel, because that was basically what it was. Using steam power that was produced near the engine of the shuttle, a generator near the front wrapped the entire craft in a field in which time moved at a speed that would allow the shuttle to arrive in seconds while thousands of years passed inside the shuttle, like a ripple in time that only passed through objects in previously mentioned field. Then a battery in the bridge would turn on and metaphorically iron out the wrinkles before unwrapping the ship and waking everyone up. That’s what the CryoPods were for- to keep everyone from aging. In fact, even though no one but the omniscient Narrator knew this, if one were to go Slow-Time Traveling one hundred and twenty-one times in the same year, it will cause one to start aging zero-point-two seconds per second instead of the standard one second per second everyone is accustomed to aging.

Also, some things the omniscient Narrator would want the reader to know before we arrive at the moon base, which is approximately two-point-zero-four to the negative-seventy-first power seconds away, or exactly ten minutes in Kyle’s time.

The war, the beginnings of which the omniscient Narrator wishes to withhold from you at the given moment in your time, soon caused the ten major civilizations of the galaxy to split into three parties:

Also known as the MIP, the Mutual Interest Party’s priority was to set up a democratic government in which representatives from every celestial body came together in a manner similar to that of the US government (and for those of you who do not know what this is like, click over to Wikipedia while you’re online) and included Earth, Europa (Europa and Earth’s Moon are both Earth settlements, but Moon is part of Earth’s gravitational system and Europa has no primary planet body, so Europa in this instance is considered its own celestial body), Peripheral. The other two parties are the New People’s Monarchy Party, and the In-Between Party, whose existence, as far as anyone else knew, was completely unknown. When asked about them, people of the first two parties who were heavily engaged in this sort of thing would snort and wave them off as a group of civilizations that came together and called themselves a party purely to avoid being bothered to join one of the others.

Oh, wait, it seems something is going on in the hangar.  The omniscient Narrator turns your attention to the hissing of extractors beginning to rotate.

The extractors hissed as they began to rotate. The CryoPods began to rise in temperature while the heating system of the entire ship began to rattle into power. A few minutes later, teenaged boys were ripping off wires like long white hairs from their various body parts and sustenance tubes from their noses, reaching for the white clothes that one of the many service robots had laid out for them, and feeling their unexpected baldness. They were also randomly saying words, stretching their joints and muscles, and testing their memory or speech skills, to make sure everything was in check. A whole seven minutes of this had passed before the captain walked off the bridge in his own pair of white clothes, which he had on underneath the captain’s suit and helmet, he was pulling on at the moment.

As he awoke rather groggily, Kyle’s first impression that something was wrong was that he was comfortable and warm. Then he heard the squeal of machines in the hangar and sat up, knowing that, other than losing the folder of course, this was all going to plan, but at the same time still scared as to what was going to happen when he was found.

Something in his peripheral vision scratched and whined at the metaphorical back door of the abode that was his mind, but the matter of convincing the person who had currently tasked him- or herself with twisting the door handle three feet away from him that he was from the future had refused to let anything else compromise his attention.

But it’s important! whined the something.

Nevermind you and your importantness, you crazy unimportant something! Responded the matter in a disregarding manner. I have work to do!

By that point in time, the door had just swung open and a scruff voice barked through.

“EH? How’d you get outta yer pod?”