Drop Point - Episode 10: Back to the Future, Part 3

Click to read the previous installment of Drop Point.

Previously on Drop Point:

Kyle Carter was sent back in time in order to give information to Earth’s moon military base regarding something called the Siren. But the file got ‘lost in transit’ and Kyle arrived at the base empty-handed. He met Commander Piott and Doctor Morris Bradley. To get the rest of the information from the file, Bradley hooked Kyle up to a machine that would allow him to retain more by making him re-live his memories. But when he tried to pull Kyle out, there was an explosion in the lab, and Kyle was caught up in a world of collapsing dreams.

Kyle Carter saw a large flaming chunk of Europa plummet towards the ice cream cone’s horizon. It landed with an explosion of milky white liquid and yellow chunks, and a deep, staccato crack echoed across the delicious caramel terrain. Trailing behind the noise, a giant crack started making its way towards the mountain on which Kyle was standing. He screamed and jumped off the side, sliding down the side of the swoop. The crack spider-webbed across the ground and reduced the mountain to rubble. The orange-yellow hunks went tumbling after Kyle. He picked himself up and started sprinting, hoping he would make it to the lip of the cone. Jumping over the side of the cone proved a bit nerve-wracking. He slid down the wall patterned with rhombus-shaped ridges.

Meanwhile, in reality, Bradley had called in an emergency team and Kyle, in a hospital, although still prone to spasms, was fine.

“Pull him out!” Bradley shouted at the doctor who had taken over. “He might be in danger!”

“What danger could he possibly be in?” The doctor asked skeptically.

“When I tried to pull him out, and the machine almost crushed him, it sent him into an unstable accumulation of his memories. If we don’t get him out soon, he might get wiped like a blank slate, or even die!”

“How do we get him out, anyway? Won’t he just wake up?”

“No, he’s in a technologically induced coma, which means you need the same machine to wake him up,” Doctor Bradley noted, adjusting his glasses nervously.

The doctor swore and told him to get the ‘machine-thingy’ down here fast.

Meanwhile, in Kyle’s head, Kyle had made it off the ice cream cone and after a string of other random objects like a giant couch, a giant pinball machine and a giant slip of paper that had all met their fate with exploding Europa debris, was now sitting on an asteroid roughly the size of a house. It had little gravitational pull, so he had to hold tight to keep from floating away. By now, he’d become worried that the moon was out to get him. After all, they were his memories. He’d come to realize that you can never truly escape your past, even if nothing deeply scarring or emotional had happened to you. Suddenly he was hit with a giant yellow fish.

Back on the outside, they were getting ready to pull Kyle out with a rickety old model of Bradley’s memory machine.

Kyle was clutching to the giant plastic yellow fish, watching the google-eye spin around like a playground carousel. He wondered briefly when he ever came into contact with one. Then he remembered: this was one of his childhood toys, the Mr. Fish and Friends toy series. Actually, Dr. Octopus was his favorite, but he’d lost it when he was five.

Out of nowhere, the infinite blackness of the galaxy seemed to blossom into explosive whites and reds. A high-pitched beeping echoed through space as a machine on the outside powered on. With a sense of relief, Kyle watched as the Universe around him started getting brighter and brighter, spinning around his head. He closed his eyes instinctively just before having the sensation that his body was unfolding out from his neck and straightening out. He felt needles prick all through his body and retract, pulling his body out in all directions. There was a sound like cloth ripping as his skin opened up and shed itself from his body, but then there was new, more real skin underneath. Something was stabbing through his eyes. Kyle gasped and arched his back, flopping back down on the bed of a hospital ICU. The dreaded cuckoo reader hung over his head, the light at the tip of its long needle dying out. He was in a lot of pain, but was finally out of his brain.

“AGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” was the first thing that came out of Kyle’s mouth in over fourteen hours. Quite frankly, it startled a dozen patients out of their beds, since they were all calmly sleeping at three in the morning. A good punch in the mouth was the first thing Doctor Bradley got from Kyle when he heard Kyle had finally woken up.

“What was that for?” He shouted, shocked.

“I am not going back in there, so I hope for the galaxy’s sake you got what you needed!”

“Don’t worry, we did,” Doctor Bradley said, nursing his jaw tenderly. “The only problem is, in my rush to get as much information as possible, I’d forgotten my monitor can only save one screen shot at a time. So we only have two of the three space-coordinates on its location. But it’s a lot more information than we had before, so… yeah.”

“Doc.”

“Yeah?”

“What’s the Siren, anyway?”

Silence for a moment, then: “You’ll have to take that up with Piott.”

Kyle crawled back into the bed and Bradley left. The sound of his shoes squeaked across the hospital room, followed by the click, hiss, hiss, click as he went through the door and was gone. There was a few moments of silence, but then a different kind of silence fell over the ICU. Kyle sat up and saw movement beyond his curtain.

“Hello?” he said, but there was no response. He left it alone, and eventually, he went back to sleep.

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