The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [87]
I told myself that it wasn’t so bad. I had been naked before, save for dead clothes, and devoid of significant IT. I reminded myself that I was a Madoc and a Tamlin: a supremely adaptable hero, ready for any twist of fate. I told myself that my new situation wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I was in the dark, and I was in some slight discomfort, but I was alive and whole and quite compos mentis. Things could have been a lot worse. I just had to get stuck into the task of finding out where I was, and making the best of my circumstances.
I reached out an experimental hand. There was nothing within easy reach above me, although I fancied I could hear the sound of breathing from that general direction. I groped about in other directions. The mattress I was lying on was set on a ledge, apparently plastic. There was a wall to my left and another a couple of feet from my head. I had to roll on to my side to touch the floor, but I seemed to be only a meter above it. I sat up in bed. The extra reach enabled me to ascertain that there was indeed another bunk above mine. That was slightly reassuring; wherever I was, I didn’t seem to be alone.
When I had maneuvered my feet to the floor I was able to stand up, though not as easily as I could have wished. My feet were bare, but the floor wasn’t uncomfortably rough or cold. It felt like plastic. I couldn’t tell by feeling it with the soles of my feet whether the plastic was organic or whether it had been gantzed out of twentieth-century waste.
There was an inert body lying on the upper bunk, whose dimensions I didn’t explore in detail because it seemed more sensible to let whoever it was continue sleeping. I touched a sleeve, though, which suggested that my sleeping companion was wearing dead clothing just like mine. The person in question didn’t seem to be sleeping very easily, but the body didn’t stir when my fingers brushed the back of the hand that was projecting from the sleeve. It was a small hand, not very hairy. I was prepared to accept that it was probably a female hand, but I refused to jump to the conclusion that it was Christine Caine’s. If it turned out to be Christine Caine’s, that would mean that everything I’d experienced had been real — more of it, at any rate, than I wanted to hang on to — and that something terrible had happened to Child of Fortune.
I felt for a belt and found that my dead trousers were elastic-waisted. The shirt was ill-fitting and buttonless, severely functional. I knew that if I really had been divested of the kind of smartsuit and internal technology that I’d worn on Excelsior I must have been asleep for a long time. It wasn’t the work of a couple of hours to strip that kind of equipment away.
If, on the other hand, I was fresh out of the freezer…
I needed to take a piss, quite urgently. That was a feeling I hadn’t had for a very long time, no matter where or when I was.
I only had to stretch a little to locate the far wall of what I’d already begun thinking of as a cell. The space in which I was confined was only a couple of meters wide. It wasn’t much more than three meters long, but there was a sub-chamber in one corner. Once I’d found the handle the screen moved aside easily, and I began to fumble about the interior, hoping that it was some kind of bathroom facility. There was a showerhead and a drain, and some other kind of fitment that I couldn’t immediately identify but might have been some kind of toilet. I wasn’t about to engage with any puzzles; the drain was good enough for me.
When I was able to get back to investigating the geography of the space that now confined me it didn’t take me long to find the door at the farther end, or the handle that opened it.
I didn’t expect the handle to turn, but it did. I heard the latch disengage. I hadn’t encountered a door like that in years; it was the sort of door that one only found in buildings abandoned during the Crash: a door constructed in the twenty-first-century, or even