Rebirth {Book One}

Chapter 17

"Hey." I was jarred rudely from sleep by something cold and hard slapping me. "Wake up."

Still bleary-eyed from sleep, I saw that the thing was one of the Pod's many metal arms. "What the heck do you want from me?"

"Remember the stuff you made me scan two days ago, both of which are still inside me?"

I blinked stupidly, the details of the dream I'd had fading with each second my eyes were awake as I tried to remember what the hell this stupid piece of plastic was talking about.

"Oh, right." The chunk of Thomas hand and the Element sample I'd given the Pod before I went down to the Caverns. "What about them?"

"Are you going to take a look at them or are they in permanent storage?"

"Since when did AI have the mental capacity to be sassy?" I grumbled as I got up, stepping over Dale, who was curled up under my feet. Two screens blinked to life in front of me, information about the hand chunk on the left and info about the Element to my right. I squinted at the screens, trying to sift through the scientific mumbo jumbo;

The Pod had given me a bunch of scans of the little chunk from a bunch of different angles. I ignored those, and instead focused on the particle-level scans; aside from the normal hand stuff you'd expect to see like skin cells and whatnot, there were patches of some weird material that was obviously Element and a ton of nitrogen particles scattered around that practically outnumbered the actual skin cells. There were even some fusions between nitrogen and skin going on. The Pod noted that the nitrogen present in the hand was the exact same type found in all escape pods like itself that was necessary for putting the occupant into emergency cryostasis. Another note said that during the two days the rock had been under observation, the rock had increased its size by about 12%, the patches of Element moving and shifting around before the chunk grew bigger.

Ah fuck, please tell me I'm wrong  I thought wishfully, an idea I didn't like popping into my head.

"Microscope, please?" I snatched up the chunk of rock from a tray that emerged from the walls. What looked like those things that eye doctors make you wear for eye tests that allows them to easily click on lenses popped up from the walls, along with a bunch of lenses. It was an easy budget microscope setup, way easier than trying to contain an actual, fragile microscope inside of an escape pod. I clicked on the six highest magnifying lenses onto it and put the chunk under it. What I saw only confirmed my suspicions; there were little impressions and bulges in the finger area, and if you squinted hard enough, it genuinely did look like the muscles inside the hand. As I watched, a patch of Element wormed its way over to the base of the middle finger and expanded. It stayed there for a couple of minutes, then when it recompressed and moved away, I saw that a little bit more muscle and the beginning of a tendon were starting to form on the finger.

"Is the Element repairing it..?" I'd figured it out already, I just said it out loud because I'm redundant like that.

"It appears so." The Pod confirmed. "My own Element-made hull doesn't appear to have this self repairing function, though."

I nodded. "Otherwise, that little claw mark Bennett left on the side while playing would've healed by now."

Switching off the hand diagrams, I checked out the Element screen;

There was a normal picture of the particles and an infrared picture of it. On the normal one, it showed traces of various chemicals that presumably must've been Thomas' initial accidental discovery, but there were pieces of what looked like dried human skin and also two or three weird little particle formations that looked like neurons from those brain videos I used to watch on YouTube. On the infrared scan, the particles were practically unseen under the amount of radiation that swirled around. It mostly swirled around the neuron thingies. The Pod noted that the particles were also constantly moving, not unlike the particles of something that was being heated up.