9 Awakened

Emma jerked violently due to the blast of Dubstep in her ears.

"Stop! Cancel! Shutdown! Damn it!"

The music stopped, and a pleasant robotic female voice came to take its place.

"Awakening successful. Warning, there is a fire in the vicinity."

"There has to be a way to wake people up without ear-raping Alexa! My ears are still ringing!"

"Objection, user seemed to have enjoyed the same music when the escape pod was on entry."

"Not in full volume!"

"Objection, user's ears cannot ring, the music was projected straight into user's brain from her spine. There was no auditory sensory involved."

If it was not for the fact that her entire body was aching, Emma would definitely move her hand and slap it onto her forehead right now. She deserved it for modifying her neural assistant, a practice that was discouraged by virtually everyone on the neural net, Emma thought. Who knew that adding a bit of personality to her neural assistant could hurt her heart (and ears) so much?

[Wait, I am still alive? How?]

Emma immediately opened her eyes. In front of her was pitch black for a second, but the headlamp was automatically turned on afterward in response.

The familiar escape pod control panel appeared in her vision. She flipped the switch to open the pod's lid. No response. The manual crank was stuck. At least there was no visible fire.

"Alexa, where is the fire?"

"Answer, outside the escape pod. Fuel leaked from the auxiliary fuel tank is burning."

[Well, then I should be alright for a while.] Emma thought. Fire from outside an escape pod could never affect the person inside. There should be enough chemical oxygen to last her a day or two.

But there was something else burning in her mind.

"Alexa, how am I still alive?"

At the speed of nearly Mach 20, and that was after having added the effect of friction and the small engines, colliding with the ground, there was just no chance. This was either a miracle, or some bad joke.

Maybe her ship had never gotten shot at by a strange ship, that was monitoring this planet in stealth mode for some reason.

Maybe she did not crash-land onto an uncharted planet, and no communication with the outside worlds due to the quantum jamming.

May the door in front of her open to her crewmates laughing at her, saying it was a prank. Then she would jump out and punch them to death.

Maybe… they were not dead.

Alexa's voice yanked her to reality.

"Answer, according to the footage from the heat pad camera, the escape pod crashed into a massive creature that was manipulating the dark matter energy to displace dimension."

"You mean the creature was trying to go through something solid?"

"Yes. The creature was most likely trying to enter the ground. The escape pod hit the creature, killing it instantly. However, the displaced dimension field took a while to dissipate, and the escape pod entered the ground, dragging the creature's corpse with it."

Thanks to that, the deceleration time was extended to a survivable amount, Emma thought in astonishment. That was one in a trillion chance.

She was very lucky, or very unlucky, depends on how one may look at it. She didn't know if a quick death would be preferable to being buried underground while being gradually suffocated.

With a quick calculation, factoring in the dimensional friction, the escape pod was probably around one-kilometer underground. Without a dark energy manipulator, or as people of the Corporation jokingly call it, "The Magic Gun", there was no way for her to get above ground.

[Well, there is nothing else I can do.] Emma pushed the switch on the emergency S.O.S broadcast. Radio signal could not go through one kilometer of earth, so she switched it to short-distance dark dimension communication mode.

[I don't believe someone else that survived could hear my broadcast, then come and take me out of here. That is just impossible. If that happens I will have used up the luck of my entire life.] Emma laughed self-deprecatingly.

The small pod somehow felt infinitely big and empty to her.