Man and the Machine (I)

Pain. It ripped its way into Matt's unconscious mind and dragged him back to awareness, his body flailed and jerked a moment before he started to fade back below the conscious layer of his mind.

The rational part of his mind that hadn't been washed away by the pain thought that this was the spiral down into death, as his body shut down and his mind disconnected from his body to fade into nothingness.

The black yawning abyss waited for him in those final few moments as the neurochemical impulses in his brain conjured his version of nothingness for him. He descended towards the void, it's embrace open and welcoming to his ravaged spirit. At some point hanging just above the void Matt realised he wasn't dead, merely unconscious.

He was stuck in limbo between the dreams inside his mind, and the living world. The thought that his body was taking it's sweet time dying occurred to him, but the pain was gone. He sluggishly wished his body would bleed out already. He didn't want to wake up to that kind of pain again.

Matt awoke to a sensation, that wasn't pain but more the after-image of pain. That rush of endorphins as the body repairs the damage and deadens the nerves. The urge to scratch blossomed in his mind momentarily, and that puzzled him until the wave of itching swept his body for a minute. The itching forced his eyes open as he sat up and tried to scratch everywhere at once.

The wave subsided and Matt looked around to see where he was.The walls where white, the cushioned bench that he had been laying on was all white. He looked down and even his clothes where white.

For a moment he thought he had died and gone to that mythical place he didn't believe existed. But unless you were issued into the afterlife with a fully working body that could itch and was hungry then Matt was pretty sure he wasn't dead. How was the next question.

Matt placed his feet onto the white floor and gingerly transferred his weight from the bench to the floor as he stood up, not knowing what to expect; only that the last time he was truly awake his body was broken and dying.

Now that he was sure that his body worked properly, he paid more attention to the details of the room. He looked around the room, it was empty and as he stepped away from the bench it receded into the floor smoothly and with minimal noise.

Matt kneeled down and inspected the floor where the bench had been, the finest of small cracks the only tell tale sign that something was there. He sat back onto his rear with a "huh" and a puzzled expression on his face. A slight pulsing noise started and Matt looked around to see a blue tinged band pulsing down the walls.

Matt felt like he was cursed, and screwed his eyes tight and brought his fists up next to his head, as he rocked himself back and forwards to try to control the panic rising up. He couldn't believe that this was happening to him.

He should be dead but was now going to end up being dissected or anally probed like in the movies. Well to hell with that, he didn't care any more, there may be nothing he could do to stop them dissecting him but he could sure stop the Anal probing.

Matt stood up and looked at the join between the ceiling and the walls, and shouted at whoever he thought would be observing him. "Listen up alien arse wipes, I'll trade you some information for a favour. Now you're going to dissect me or examine me or whatever else it is you do. But you see this."

He turned around and point to his arse, "That's my arse, don't stick anything in there and I'll tell you whatever it is you want to know about us." He ranted on for a few moments about the cultural sensitivity of the action, then as he realised just how stupid he probably looked bargaining to not be anal probed he laughed hysterically, more then anything as a relief for the panic.

The Kovali's AI had been observing Matt for sometime, ever since the Maintenance drone that had been activated to reseal the hole in the cavern's entrance had brought his broken and bloodied body into the sickbay for repair by the Auto-Doc.

Since this was the first Imperial, first anybody he had seen in over ten thousand years. The AI was naturally curious as to what had happened on the surface to his old crew.

When the being began to stir from medical stasis, the AI watched as it first tested out it's environment. When the imperial began to show sufficient signs of cognitive functions the computer initiated the cognitive reasoning and language scanner.

Bands of light pulsed along the walls as it generated a field that would re-align the ships language banks with this being's spoken language.

Needless to say when the results came back the AI was shocked, this being's brain existed in a state that the scanner couldn't penetrate or interpret. Locked was the slang used back in Imperial days. This was exceedingly rare, so the computer would have to resort to a translation matrix to decode this one's language.

Matt looked as one of the panels changed from white to a deep green and then a display of a human body. He walked over to it and tried to touch the panel while keeping his hand on the other panels. They felt the same!!

Matt knew a little about science, and realised that the technology to get metal, plastic, polymer or whatever the hell this substance was made out of, to luminesce in such a manner was incredibly advanced.

The display then changed from a generic outline of a person to his image, Matt pulled back in alarm at that and stared in wonderment as the display showed blue light pulsing up and down the figure like he had seen come from the walls. Then a series of alien symbols was displayed. The text and his image then flashed a very deep warning red.

Almost as if to indicate something had failed. It took him a moment to realise that the display was trying to tell him that he had been scanned, possibly in an attempt to discern his language. But the scan had for some reason failed. His image changed to show his mouth moving and an alien voice sounded whenever the image of his mouth moving was repeated.