2199 Extinction

The Ship

            Now that the elevator doors close, I slap the sleeve of my jacket to pull up the monitor. I set the time and day for the proper day and time, and then pause. What are those stupid coordinates? I think for a while and then just randomly punch a few numbers. I feel the familiar feeling of fire in my bones, I close my eyes and I prepare myself. This time, when I open my good eye, I am still standing on my feet. Well, that's a plus. I finally got the hang of this time traveling business. I look around with my good eye, I can just make out the outline of something large. I walk in that direction and find myself face to face with Amancia's ship. Unfortunately, for me, it's closed up tight. What do I do? I remember Amancia telling me the ship and her had a psychic link.

                 So, I do the only thing I can. I place both hands on the ship and ask it to open up, in my mind of course. I step back and look. No door. Why isn't is working? I try again and nothing. No door. No sign of life. I pull back from the ship. "You have to open! There is a baby in there who needs my help!" I scream at the ship. Of course, that does nothing but send the small creatures, nearby, skittering into the trees and chattering angrily at me from high above the ground.

                  "Oh, shut up!" I yell at them. "I hate you! I hate this whole stupid planet! I hate this ship! I hate Amancia for doing this to me! I hate Amlican for dying no matter what I tried to do! I hate time travel! I hate everything!"

                I put my head and hands on the ship, frustrated with everything that's happened. "Amancia is going to die. My birth mother is going to die, and you don't care. I'm going to die, and you don't care about that either. All I really wanted was for you to open up so I can at least keep myself from starving to death in this jungle." I slide down the ship to my knees and just cry. All the emotions of the past twenty years just boil up and spill out. "And now I'm going to cry. What the heck is wrong with me? Copaie don't cry." But I do cry, my head still pressed against the ship. I don't know how long I sit there like that, before I hear a low beep and a loud whooshing sound.

                   What the heck? I pull my head off the ship and look to my right. The door is open now. The door is open? The ship listened? We bonded? I get up off the ground, step into the ship, and place a hand on the inside of the ship. Thank you. I need you to shut the door and take me to the abandoned scientific city. The lights turn on, the door shuts, and I feel a low rumble. I leave the cargo area and turn left instead of right. I place my hand on the wall near the door and think open. The door opens and I find myself in a room filled with medical supplies. But no baby.

                I rummage through the supplies and find a pack of Instaclot. I tear it open, take the bandage off my eye, lean my head back, close the bad eye, and dump the stuff onto my wound, rubbing it in. I count to ten, open my eye, and right my head. I feel a little bit of burning in the wound, as the stuff starts to work. But I can actually see out of it, now. I walk over to the mirror and examine my reflection. The cut starts a few inches above my left eye and cuts downwards at an angle, ending a few inches below it. On closer inspection, I'm really lucky my eye didn't get cut or that I didn't lose it. That would have really sucked. I run my hand down the cut, it looks like it was really deep. I'll probably have a scar there.

                I pry myself away from the gruesome sight and start the search for the baby. Me. I'm searching for myself, in a literal sense. That's a strange feeling. I look around the room, opening cabinet doors, storage closets, but no sign of the baby. Where in Saltu is baby Astra? Where am I? I start pulling stuff out of the cabinets trying to see if the baby is hidden behind stuff, but no such luck. Seriously, who the heck brings a baby on a journey like this anyways? Amancia does. Ugh. She is so frustrating. After tearing apart the small room and still not finding the baby, I just stand there staring at the mess, a moment. I'm pretty sure the baby wasn't in the same room as us. I think I would have noticed her. But to be sure I run to the room and start taring it apart as well. After a while I realize how fruitless that search was as well. Where. Is. The. Baby?

            I let loose and scream as loud as I can, until my throat hurts. Amancia is so frustrating. She swore the baby is here, she didn't bring her with us, so the baby still has to be here. But where? I just stand there a while trying to think, and that's when I hear it. At first the sound is faint, but then it grows louder and louder. The baby!! Wherever she is, my screaming appears to have woken her up. I dash back towards the cargo area and stop to listen. It sounds like she's in here. That's a really strange place to put a baby. But it is Amancia, and nothing about her is normal, not even by Copaie standards. I stand in the mostly empty room and look around. The only boxes in here are much too small to hold a baby.