Liam was prodded into consciousness by a bright white light filtering through his eyelids, gaining a reddish tinge at the edges. His eyes flickered open and the light lost the reddish tinge but gained a headache-inducing brightness. Well, at least he could see. Maybe. He raised his hands to his face. He could see them, so he wasn’t actually dead. Probably.
He sat up, wincing as stiff muscles in his neck and back complained. He looked around, or at least he tried to. Either his eyes had not yet adjusted, or this was the whitest room he had ever seen. He couldn’t even make out the corners; light seemed to be emanating from all surfaces, leaving no shadows for contrast. Even the black and white patterned floor shone strangely.
Liam wondered if he were in some sort of simulated purgatory. He dismissed the thought almost immediately, reasoning that, with the way his life was going, purgatory was too good for his luck. He briefly contemplated trying to find one of the walls in order to measure the size of the room, but instead, and quite probably more wisely, he sat and waited.
After a few minutes, without preamble or warning, the white light vanished, replaced by a dull red glow from overhead. The walls turned a dull gray and began to flow like quicksilver, forming new shapes and textures. Suddenly, without quite realizing what happened, Liam found himself standing in the middle of a ship’s corridor.
“Well, that was something,” said Liam to the universe in general. He shrugged his shoulders and wandered off down the hallway where, moments later, his eyes brought him to a stop in the middle of the corridor.
Impossible, said his brain.
I calls ’em like I sees ’em, said his eyes. It’s a bloody great wall of water.
Exactly, said his brain. We’re in space. There are no giant walls of water in space. Impossible.
Well, you just make sure and let the water know that. Now, let’s go!
Impossible.
Ah, to hell with this, said his eyes, deciding to bypass the brain and talk directly to the legs. Bloody middlemen.
Liam ran.
###
It is a fact that many humans spend a great portion of their lives training their senses to communicate directly with their limbs. What they should be doing, is training their brains to interrupt this process more often or to at least provide a good amount of separation, like a chaperon at a school dance.
Liam, for example, could have taken any of a dozen more intelligent and useful actions. He might have stopped and thought for a moment, possibly even calmly finding a room in which to seal himself. Instead, his legs simply ran while his brain tried to figure out why there would possibly be a giant wall of water on a spaceship, and why it would be used in training simulations. Surely, water was tightly rationed. They wouldn’t just waste it like this. It can’t be real, just another projection. Surely.
These thoughts and other similarly useless ones left little brainpower to keep the senses in line. As a result, he made it only a short distance down the hallway before the world filled with a loud rushing noise. He looked down as a low tide of water rushed past his feet, running ahead, taunting him like a marathon runner at a local jogging track.
Then there was a surge, and he was wading through knee-deep water. He stumbled and looked back just in time to be smashed full in the face. The water crashed into and over him, sweeping him along like so much used bath tissue. He fought for the surface, but soon gave up when he touched the ceiling and found no air. He felt the tingling again and then darkness.
###
Waking with a start, Liam rolled onto his side and coughed water onto the floor. He was back in what he now thought of as ‘the death room’: glowing white walls, chessboard floor. This time, however, his hair and clothes were soaked, and he was not alone. Durney, sitting on a low bench jutting from one of the white walls, grinned at him.
“You die too?” asked Liam while getting soggily to his feet.
“Nah, I’s just taking a quiet. I chased ’em off the damn program, so’s I figured I come here fer a bit. What happened t’ya?”
Liam paused before answering. He was keenly aware of the puddle slowly forming around his feet and was also suddenly very self-conscious. It was doubtful that drowning in space, even in a simulation, was something that would help his early reputation. “Explosion,” he lied, his gaze carefully avoiding the floor.
Durney also carefully avoided looking at the floor. “Rough day?”
“I don’t know.” Liam sat down on the bench next to Durney. “I thought I knew what a rough day was, but today has been so . . .” Liam trailed off, shaking his head, unable to conjure an appropriate adjective.
“It can’t be that bad,” said Durney.
Liam took a slow deep breath. “Yes, yes it can. I have been kidnapped and forced into military service. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, but while trying to figure it out, I have been crushed and dro—exploded. The most I’ve been told is, ‘you’ll figure it out as you go’. And, as far as I can tell, my life-expectancy can now be measured in days. This is so far beyond a ‘rough day’ that I must be approaching the best day ever from the opposite direction.”
“That’s the spirit!” Durney grinned, slapping Liam on the back and then drying his hand on a trouser leg. “Nothing like a bit o’ melodrama ta cheer yurself up.”
Liam gaped. The entire universe had gone insane. Or maybe it was just him. Maybe he had cracked. Maybe—
His silent exclamation was interrupted by Sergeant Gunn’s voice coming from the ceiling of the room. “Pause program!”
The wall opposite Liam and Durney flowed into the floor, revealing the rest of the sim room: once more plain, without holographic façade. Sergeant Gunn stormed over to Belle as the rest of rouge squad walked over to join Liam and Durney on the bench.
“Belle, what was that?”
“A roundhouse kick,” answered Belle demurely.
“And what were you supposed to do?”
Belle sighed. “Scream and run away,” she intoned flatly.
“Right,” said Sergeant Gunn. “Scream and Run Away. Not scream and kick him in the face.”
“Yes, Sarge,” said Belle
Seemingly mollified, Sergeant Gunn turned toward the rest of the group. “Alright, ten minutes, then we try it again. AUVI, reset program.” She walked off, disappearing as the ‘death room’ was once more walled off.
Belle joined the rest of the squad, taking a spot on the bench next to Liam. He looked over and quickly decided not to bother her. Her arms were crossed over her chest, which just brought more attention to the area, and she wore a sulky expression: brow furrowed, lips pouting, eyes staring at nothing. In his experience, that expression was to would-be-conversationalists what a sign reading ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’ was to the recently dead.
His mouth, however, ignored the decision and asked, “What is your job exactly?”
She looked at him sulkily for a moment. “I’m the SYF,” she said in a low voice.
“The s’what?”
“S-Y-F, SYF.”
“What is a S-Y-F?”
“Single young female,” she said, sighing and looking at her feet as though embarrassed.
“Right,” said Liam drawing the syllable out. “But what, other than the . . . ah . . . social implications, is a SYF?”
“Well”—she rolled her eyes—“mostly, I’m supposed to scream and run away and keep the baddie, monster, mutant alien, or random guy with a knife, chasing me. Sometimes though, I’m supposed to let myself get taken captive so I can unlock the door to a hidden lair or something.” She sighed again and waved her hands in exasperation. “It’s just that when some creep is coming at you with a knife, you don’t want to scream and run away or keep tripping yourself to make sure he’s keeping up, you want to kick him in the . . . you know, and then knee him in the face.”
Liam stared. “I see.” He didn’t. “So that’s why Victoria—”
“Sergeant Gunn,” corrected Belle.
“Right, so that’s why Sergeant Gunn was yelling at you?”
Belle shrugged. “And because she used to be the SYF. She has a very firm idea of the job and doesn’t like much improv. I just don’t think running away is always the answer,” she finished huffily.
“So you’re supposed to run when the . . . whatevers are chasing you?”
“Yes.” She rolled her eyes again. “It’s a stupid job, I know.”
“I don’t even know what my job is, so I certainly don’t want to insult yours, but I don’t understand. Why do they chase you?”
She gave him an incredulous look, as though it were the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “ ’Cause that’s what they do. Bad guys chase the good guys.” She shrugged. “Or, good guys chase the bad guys. It’s one of those point-of-view things.”
“I see.” He didn’t. “But why do they chase you?”
“I’m really cute,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Modest too,” he responded before he could stop himself. Where had that come from?
“You gotta know what you’ve got before you can learn how to use it,” she replied with a smile.
Liam smiled back.
Then she noticed his bedraggled state and said, “Rough day?”
Liam just laughed. And laughed. Until there were tears. He was sure everyone else must have been staring at him, but by the time he could see clearly, they were all gone and the simulation had restarted.
###
After that brief respite, Liam quickly lost track of time. His many simulated deaths were the only means he had to measure the passage of time, and eventually he even lost count of those. After electrocution was a brief water-break and a spot of general yelling from Sergeant Gunn followed up with a quick death by acid pool and a side of more general yelling.
A firing squad and a fatal disease later, Liam was able to borrow Durney’s AUD so he could finally see what all this ‘your training manual is in your AUD’ fuss was about. Then came asphyxiation, rapid decompression, hypothermia, hyperthermia, and a follow-up round of asphyxiation sprinkled with hypoxia, and Liam had still found no mention of Canaries, but had learned the floor was called a deck and he hated freezing to death.
He was exhausted and thoroughly confused; his survival instincts had given up hours before, and he was starting to feel life in general was overrated. So, when yet another simulation began, he wandered the hallway for a few minutes, lay down on the ‘deck’, let out a short sharp laugh, and fell asleep.
###
He slept deeply, and his dreams were filled with rock tunnels and water and endless metal corridors until a loud blare of trumpets crashed through, exploding them into a million fuzzy-edged pieces. He bolted upright and hit his head on something hard, replacing the fragments of his dreams with a painful whirlwind of colors.
He lay back down, rubbing his forehead and trying to blink away the resulting disorientation while the trumpeting was replaced by a smooth female voice which sounded vaguely familiar: “This is a drill. General quarters. All hands to battle stations. This is a drill.”
The trumpeting repeated, and Liam covered his ears. He still couldn’t see anything even though the spots were mostly gone from his vision. So, he felt around with his hands, finding smooth solid surfaces on both sides and about ten inches from the tip of his nose. He spent a moment trying to remember where he was, but the last thing he could recall was lying down in one of the simulations.
“Hello?” he ventured.
There was no response. Panic started settling in and began warming up for full-on jump-to-ridiculous-conclusions mode. Had they thought him actually dead when they found him? Maybe they went so far as a simulated burial. Maybe they shot him out into space. Maybe this was punishment for falling asleep on-the-job.
Panic had warmed up and now Liam began to flail his arms, beating on the walls all around him. Then his left elbow struck the surface on that side of him, and the wall moved out and up. He followed it, but went out and down, falling hard onto a metal floor. Panic subsided as he focused on catching his breath while staring at the glow strips running along the ceiling. He got to his feet and found he was in the hallway running through the racks. He saw no one else around. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone there? Uhhh . . . Where are the general’s quarters?”
There was no reply.
“Hello?” he said again. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Anyone?” He sounded pathetic even to himself, and when silence replied once more, he opened his locker, grabbed the AUD, and hit the power button.
The display read:
‘GOOD MORNING, [JUNIOR] SPACEMAN [DEFAULT USER], UNIFORM OF THE DAY IS [COMBAT A]. MORNING MESS ENDS IN [-0.28] HOURS. GENERAL QUARTERS HAS SOUNDED. REPORT TO [BRIDGE] IMMEDIATELY.’
He sighed and his stomach rumbled. Straightening his uniform, which he had apparently slept in, he stepped into his boots and walked off to see if he could find the bridge.
###
He wandered for about twenty minutes, and had still not found anyone when his entire world lurched sideways throwing him to the floor—deck—whatever. Alarms blared as he picked himself up and slapped the door panel of a nearby hatch. He jumped through before it was fully open and caught his shoulder, sending a jolt of numbing pain down his arm. He ran down the hallway and arrived, gasping for breath, at a hatch marked Command and Control Bridge. It turned out to be easier to find than he’d thought.
He felt a momentary tingle of confidence as he touched the door panel. That tingle evaporated as soon as the door opened and he was pushed off his feet into the room beyond. He landed hard on his face, all breath knocked from his lungs. Rolling onto his back, he saw the stars through a gaping rent in the ship’s hull. He felt a tingling start at the back of his neck. Not again, he thought. Then there was darkness.
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