The Next Page Over

“Structural integrity failing!” blared a familiar and distant voice.

Horrible tears echoed behind meters of air and high-tensile poly-thenalium. It had an ominous and doom spreading sound that crunched closer and closer. In one moment it felt like being in a trainyard with all of the lines filled all coming into the station at the same time. The next it was hauntingly quiet as though death already grabbed everything and it was only the last breath that remained before the end.

“Floors 145 through 192 are gone!”

Everything flipped upside down suddenly. Breaking silence and horror filled crushing exchanged between each other. Any sense of direction or understanding of the situation disappeared. Chaos came as an inadequate description with everything in darkness.

“…unstable…warning…imminent collapse…”

Silence washed over everything. Forces pulled and pushed in all directions.

“…temperature rising…pressure…”

Dead silence.

Chapter 490 – The Next Page Over

A high pitched whine ran through Yumi’s ears forcing her awake. It wasn’t enough to make her jerk up, which was fortunate for her. Once she had enough awareness of self, she realized that she was lying down in some sort of pod. Yumi pushed on her arm to get it to move, but found that she couldn’t feel anything. ‘…my arm…’

Yumi turned her head towards her left arm not seeing anything below her upper arm and barely even that. Examining herself in the tight space of the pod, she saw wounds sealed up all over her and both of her legs missing. ‘There’s so little of me…how’d I survive…and where are we?’

She had so many questions for herself and the situation, but her mind couldn’t concentrate. Consciousness passed for her as quickly as it came. Once she woke up again, she managed to hold it together for a little longer. Things had changed, she had legs again, though they felt a little odd to her. She wanted out, but the pod didn’t release her and unconsciousness captured her once more.

Everything started to move, her mind told her as she hovered on the edge of consciousness. Full alertness to her situation came moments later when her body jerked in its harness within the pod as it came to a stop from rotating. She no longer laid horizontal, but now propped up right. ‘What’s going on? The light…’ Her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the brightness of wherever she was. Nothing beyond her glass pod was visible to her and only barely that much.

“What’s…going on?” she tried to shout, but her voice could only manage a soft whisper. It was never going to make it out of the pod. Yumi pressed her hand up against the glass trying to get anyone’s attention.

It didn’t take long for the pod to open though, likely not because of anything she did. A hissing sound released from within as the door of the pod opened slowly granting her fresh air that wasn’t the same recycled oxygen of her own that she had been breathing for who knows how long. The sudden change in air made her cough briefly.

“How you feeling, Yumi?” asked Yuki’s voice.

“Yuki? I can’t see you…”

“Yeah, the rehabilitation pod takes some time to recover from.”

“Rehabilitation pod? My legs…” Just waking up, it took her longer to process everything than she wanted. If she had a little more time, it all would have come together for her. Yuki however, explained things for her.

“We didn’t exactly have a smooth ride when Sumiko opened that wormhole. It tore the whole place apart. By sheer luck, enough atmosphere and structure held together for us to crash land on this planet.”

‘Not likely that it was luck…that’s what he’s thinking…’ Slowly adjusting her eyes, the brightness started to fade. Her body quickly adapted to being awake once more, though things still didn’t feel right. There was something off, but she couldn’t place it.

“They managed to recover us in the wreckage, due to where the reactor was located within the structure, we had more protection than many.”

“That’s not an encouraging report. An uncontrolled crash onto a planet isn’t going to be pretty.”

“It wasn’t.”

“How many?”

“Ninety percent.”

“Damnit…” Her hands clinched up just imagining it. ‘My memory of the events are hazy still…the last thing I remember is the wormhole and it not being large enough for the ark, but I can’t…’ But she still remained uncertain about everything else. The current situation was no more clear from Yuki’s report than before.

Yumi walked forward still finding her legs a little strange and not quite picking up feelings like she expected. However, her attention remained to the room now that she could properly see with them adjusted.

While she never took the time to see every single room in the Ark, though she could have easily, even if she wouldn’t have likely remembered all of the details. Just by a quick glance, she didn’t recognize the room. Since she had come from a pod, she guessed that they were in the medical ward, however given the gravitational forces in the unstable wormhole it was likely that they were stripped off or crushed. The fact that they managed to even have a few pods for medical healing should be impressive.

Based on what she could put together from the appearance of the room, it was probably a storage room. It lacked any of the usual technical markings for a single purpose room. She couldn’t find anything that gave it a purpose. Which had to mean it had none, at least for the sake of the project. Though even with that, she could see beams of light cracking through parts of the room.

It was then that she realized that the room wasn’t actually level. Given that they were in a structure meant for space and no gravity, being on the surface of a planet wouldn’t have left them level. Which explained why the door was missing. It was above her. Though even that wasn’t straight, yet the floor was. Everything was rotated to a forty degree angle it seemed. ‘Why is the floor separate from the room?’ She turned to look over at Yuki for some more answers. “What’s the state of the Ark?”

“Largely destroyed given crashing into a planet, but a surprising amount managed to survive enough to be usable still.”

“This wasn’t built for any sort of landing on a planet, it should have all been completely destroyed. We should be dead.”

“I agree. I’m surprised by that, as is everyone else. But we survived somehow, though given that we’re just trying to live right now, no one has tried to explain it. They’re just happy to be alive.”

That was definitely something that she could appreciate. She didn’t even know yet what sort of planet that they landed on and how nasty the conditions were outside. There was a lot that she needed to find out. “How long?”

“Five days.”

“Damn…” Yumi rested her hand on her hip as her mind finally felt completely awake enough to start running calculations. It was a lot of change. ‘What’s this mean for the goal of solving whatever the objective of this world is? Why did things progress and not loop this time? What am I supposed to be doing now?’ She sighed to herself with so many questions filling her head already. “Just one crisis to another…”

“This world certainly doesn’t seem to lack them.”

“I agree, but there’s a point to this. I just haven’t found it yet.”

“Give it time, it took you a long time to figure out the last one.”

She gave him a dry smile recalling the time that she spent in Masa’s world, which already felt like a distant memory that she could hardly even revisit. “I’d prefer not to spend five years this time, even if I might have already done that…”

“You broke the loop at least. So that’s worth something.”

“Not sure I had anything to do with that. We still don’t know why it happened to begin with and if it might start again.”

“You think there’s a specific route that you’re supposed to follow in order to progress?”

“That seems a little too much like a game for that to be the case.”

“But that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not really full of valid theories on it right now. Guessing is all that I’ve got. Hopefully, I can just progress normally from now on.” Shifting the weight on her feet, she leaned to the other side still feeling the strangeness. “Speaking of normal…my legs…” She looked down finally for real to see that they weren’t actually her legs. The gown covered her up for the most part, but the lower part of her legs that were visible wasn’t what she expected. Given how they had been feeling just slightly off in a disconcerting way, it made sense now that it would fall within such an explanation.

The soft peach tones of her skin, that had started to come in during her time in Masa’s world leaving behind her more porcelain appearance, were completely gone. While they were white, it wasn’t skin that she was seeing anymore. Her legs had been replaced with mechanical ones. Seams along where the plating connected to the next could barely be seen. “So those vague memories in the pod of my body were real. How much of me did they have to replace?”

“Both your legs and left arm, along with half of your internal organs. You were crushed under part of the wall of the engine room I’m told. They say that we were actually dead for a short period of time.”

“What about brain death?”

“I don’t really know anything about medicine. I can only guess because this is the future they have better treatments or because this is a virtual world.”

“How’d anyone get to us in time? We all should have been dead or unconscious.”

“Thankfully, machines don’t have the same sort of limitations of humans. They rescued who they could and did treatments.”

“Seems a little convenient.”

“Yeah, if this had been the real world we probably would be dead right now rather than continuing to live in this fiction. Probably should be glad that they’re a little more generous with the rules here.”

“Or they want me to live. I still haven’t ruled out that this is all just some sort of ploy by them to break me.”

“It’s probably not bad to be pragmatic. Though you probably want to see the rest of the situation. You can’t really understand what’s happening in this storage room.” He pointed over to the corner of the room that had wall dividers set up for privacy. “You can find something to wear over there.”

A makeshift dressing room, it hardly had much in the way of variety. Everything looked the same, matching the same one piece suit that they had been wearing since they arrived. ‘I probably shouldn’t have expected there to be anything different. But it is familiar at least…’ She pulled off the medical gown seeing the seams that attached the mechanical parts to her flesh. This wasn’t a technology that she studied since it didn’t apply to Sumiko’s work or getting them out alive. So she only vaguely knew anything about it. It was like the ones that Nerine was given though from what she could tell. They functioned well enough, but they weren’t perfect. Just enough was off that she could notice something was wrong even if they worked well.

Yumi dressed herself and stepped out for Yuki, who waited on her. “The future isn’t known for originality it seems,” he remarked seeing her expression.

“It’s fine. I’d like to see what we’re facing now.”

He turned to point over to a crudely carved out part of the wall with several plates missing from the surrounding wall, appearing as though they ripped things apart trying to find the best way to create an opening. “I’ll warn you that things are still pretty rough.”

“I’m not surprised.” The exit, as best as it could be called, didn’t even have a functioning door. It was simply a hole, which made her wonder how well those that lived this sort of age handled something so primitive. The state of things became only more obvious as she went into the hall. At one point what she stood in was definitely a hall. The angles pointed to such, though it was no longer the same sort. They treated it as a hall, but it felt more like a cave of metal and scrap than anything more intentional as a hall. What parts weren’t crushed or torn from the impact were exposed with their need to create a path out. There was little logic to it that she could see. It didn’t even go straight like she expected them to do.

Her first steps on the floor created a deep groan that worried her. Looking down through into the abyss beneath her made her wonder how high up they were. She got the feeling that it was nowhere near the surface of the planet. If any of the floor collapsed she was likely dead. ‘How are they even feeling comfortable about this?’ A harsh reality seemed to be the only thing that she could guess for why things were like this. They just simply had no choice in the matter.

Following Yuki through the junk path, things did seem to improve, though she didn’t ever feel safe. A cold chill gripped her back the whole time. She had none of her powers that gave her safety or protection. In this world, she was normal and she could die easily. It acutely reminded her of that fact with every step.

But she finally reached the area that Yuki wanted to show her. Exiting out above it all, she got a good view of the sight. Below her was what she could only guess was parts of the habitat that they protected. It was massive and completely in ruins. It could only ever work in a zero gravity environment. A light came in through the windows that lined whole sections, though they were mostly shattered from the impact.

It was all a complete mess. Yet amongst the wreckage she could see a couple of lights that hinted at some sort of life. Despite everything that had managed to find some sort of way to keep going. They weren’t giving up. Their new home had a long way to go, but it could start. “She’d be happy to see this.”