Rebecca was meant to wake the next person to take over for her shift on the watch, but there was no point in it now. As far as she knew, everyone kept sleeping in the cryo-chambers was dead.
The ark ship was meant to travel the galaxy, crossing it in search of a habitable planet to settle and colonize: a fresh start for humanity. The hundreds of people in cryogenic sleep were meant to repopulate the human race. The thousands of vials of clone-ready plant and animal DNA were meant to rebuild ecosystems.
But none of that mattered now.
She sat in the mess area, working her way steadily through a bottle of moonshine, distilled in the engine room. She'd been down there a lot, trying to find some way to jumpstart this bag of bolts, but it was no use. Critical engine failure had knocked out many of the vital systems on the ship -- including the chrono-nav, without which the ship was dead in the water.
With chrono-nav onboard, the ship moved by bending time and space around itself, folding the universe to make intergalactic travel possible within lifetimes. But now, after the collision and subsequent destruction of the chrono-nav, time and space had bent their way through the ship.
Rebecca swallowed down a long, bitter draught of the moonshine and watched as the shimmering, glowing cloud of disrupted time-space hung like fog over the heart of the ship. Below, a park had been terraformed, a wide-open wild space about the size of a football field at the heart of the spaceship. But now, under the influence of the glimmering cloud, the environment had begun to get...weird.
The edges of her vision blurred with the effects of the booze, but she was quite certain that she was seeing things below, past the railing that divided the ship's first and second levels. Things beyond the flicker of the glow-cloud of rogue spacetime. Things that seemed alive.
She was entirely certain that she was alone on this ship. She was certain, too, that the engine failure that had knocked out the chrono-nav had also taken most of the cryo systems offline. She'd gotten the backup life support operational -- lights, oxygen, gravity -- but as far as she knew, everything else was fried.
Everyone else on this ship should be dead, after all that.
So why did she have such a strong sensation of being watched?
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This chapter was written by T.L. Bodine
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Lost in Translation: A Collaborative Story
RandomA group of writers decided to write a blind collaboration. This is what happened.
