Straitjacket

[7] Sage

Back in the Earthen spaceship, I was able to battle the Voice for the first time since my murders. Now, its hold on me is still here, but weaker - far weaker.

What the hell is going on? Is she really just weakened by the change in environment, or is it something about this alien ship?

A surge of random glee hits me, erasing the troubling thoughts. I know it's from the Voice, meant to distract me, but I still giggle from the pure bliss of the emotion. The male alien looks at me with raised eyebrows and a slight smile, and I get the sudden, certain feeling that he knows. He knows something is wrong with me and he finds it amusing. The Voice's hold tightens and I know it is holding back the fury I would otherwise feel.

Strange. Hatred is usually one of its favorite emotions.

I am snapped out of my head as the alien begins to speak.

"You are on a spaceship that holds the shattered remains of a dying race."

The room around us suddenly bursts to life, and we all flinch away from it. Deirdre's hands ball into fists, obviously wanting a weapon. Nicole bares her teeth, a sight that is rather comical once one works past their initial terror. Xavier taps his fingers on his legs, his expression tightening. Jake growls slightly shifting backward. I just scoot towards them all. After all, my body is my weapon and my caretakers ruined it.

High definition holograms surround us. We are an island of calm in the midst of a horrifying war.

Not a war between men. A war against nature.

Screams fill my ears, laced with pure agony as throngs of these albino aliens struggle to avoid rapid streams of lava running down the streets of a pulverized city. A house collapses with a magnificent crash, and I hear a baby wail inside of the ruins. A rock shifts, falls, and the cry is quickly cut off.

I feel a twisting in my stomach that is quickly swept away. I am glad. Nausea is one of my least favorite feelings.

The projections change to show more ruins of what was obviously once a large city. This wreckage is quickly submerged with water as huge tidal waves crash relentlessly against the building husks and the beach they were once situated on. The place is already so broken that there are no more people who must evacuate. They are already dead or gone. An albino corpse, strangely small and thin, floats facedown through the filthy. The Voice watches in quiet interest.

Then we are in a rainforest. Rain is pounding down, thick sheets of it. A small group of aliens move cautiously through the rain, trying vainly to shield both their faces and a tiny figure in their center that I quickly realize is a toddler, supported by several different hands. One man slips on a log, falls, and does not get back up. A woman screams at the sight and the child begins to cry.

Mercifully, the projections stop, leaving our ears ringing in the sudden silence.

"Our world was changing in ways our scientists have still not been able to understand," the man continues calmly, as if he hadn't just been standing in the (albeit holographic) wreckage of his home planet. I wonder how many times he has given this speech. It seems monotonous, bored, even.

"What should have happened over the course of thousands if not millions of years was happening in a single decade. All the volcanoes erupted, the oceans tore further and further inland, earthquakes destroyed any man-made objects left over, and sinkholes swallowed the rubble of those destroyed cities - and wherever there was not a sudden and violent natural disaster, rain pounded down so long and so hard that nobody could live there for long without the rain destroying whatever they built.

"The Supernova Initiative was hurried into effect. Decades prior, the mission had been intended for a preconstructed spaceship holding five crew members to travel into deep space, to promising stars in search of another habitable planet. We are an advanced race compared to yours - we had already developed the technology to allow us to do so.