✅ Project SETI Trilogy

Chapter One - Part XII: The Facility

          The next time Nova woke up, he wasn't sure where he was. The recovery room felt familiar, but there was nothing about it that he actually recognized aside from the standard equipment. He noticed he was still connected to the same stuff he had been during labor...

          Then he remembered. The labor. What happened...?

          He looked down and noticed that, strangely, he was fully clothed—the electrodes for his heart and belly were under his shirt, and his sleeve had been pushed up for the blood pressure cuff.

          "Ugh..." He grunted and flinched when a dull pain passed through his chest, like someone had just punched him in the sternum. The pain radiated down through his back and into his round protruding stomach, and even though he could hear the regular chirping of sinus rhythm, when he looked up, he saw that the monitoring equipment was actually powered off.

          He shuddered. There was something very off-putting about that. Alarmed by it, he shot upright, slid the blood pressure cuff off his arm and took the pulse oximeter off his finger.

          Red lights that seemed to have no source started to pulse on and off, like a police vehicle was in his room and flashing its lights in slow motion. A garbled voice started to speak over the aging PA system in a flat, threatening tone:

          "Code Blue in Room #4. Code Blue in Room #4."

          He whipped his head over to the monitor when it seemed to click to life on its own. A menacing red ECG trace showed a flatline, and it started to screech at him so loudly and so unnaturally, almost organically, that it made him shoot off the bed into a fast sprint for the door. As he approached it, he felt another invisible punch to the chest that made him recoil and lose his footing.

          He grunted softly when the wall caught him, andhe pushed himself away from it and flew through the door when he'd caught hisbreath. He felt sweaty and anxious when he noticed the hallway looked very strange; it was plain in how uniformly grey it was, and it felt oddly small and cramped, even though there was nothing in it. He quickly looked in either direction, but it was identical either way: there was a fifteen foot length of hallway that met another hallway. He jogged to the right, and as he made it to the junction, he felt the floor shift. Just around the corner was a small circular window that confirmed his suspicions—he was aboard an old seafaring ship. He looked out and saw that it was the dead of night, but there was a lot of artificial light, which was amplified by the rippling reflections on the dark water of the ocean. It came primarily from a lighthouse that was attached to a gigantic compound—it sprawled out across as much of the coastline as he could see from where he was. What windows could be seen on the buildings also gave off a little light, but he was too far away to see what was in them.

          He heard something shuffling from the hallway he'd just turned from and quickly leaned back to see what it was. He saw a handful of nondescript men in suits and immediately started to run again—he couldn't be sure, but... he didn't think he saw faces on those men.

          He could feel his heart pounding hard in his chest as he sprinted through the hallways. He only stopped at junctions or corners to carefully look around, and then he'd keep going. Finally, he decided he needed to find a quiet spot to think and formulate a plan. On this ship, he was trapped. But if he could get to the coast...

          He noticed a small skinny door across from where he was standing. On it was a broken washroom sign, and upon entering, he saw a defunct bathroom that was only barely illuminated by the emergency lighting along one wall. He slipped into one of the stalls, closed and locked it, then crouched on the toilet seat so he couldn't be seen from below or above.