Deicide

Chapter Six

If death felt like anything, Sarah was feeling it. She was in complete darkness. She had thought the space between stars, and between galaxies was dark. It was nothing compared to this. Further than not being able to see, she also couldn't hear a sound, not even when she was screaming. She tried putting her hands together and feeling her own body, and again she came up empty. Not one of her senses was working. All that she had to comfort her were her own thoughts, and the memory of the last thing she experienced.

The last thing she recalled happening was staring down a very long, very dark hallway, almost as dark as her location now, but she did remember her colleagues and escorts, good lot of work they did. She remembered hearing a sound from down the hallway, and everyone turned to watch it, and as soon as it came into the hallway, Sarah was dead. All she could do now was reflect on her life. As her mind jumped from event to event, the details were gradually changing and becoming more vivid. The memories blended with her imagination to become something wholly new and often unintelligible, but Sarah's analytical mind continued to dissect and understand what was going on.

She couldn't be dead. She could still think, and she was clearly dreaming, or something like it. Her brain was still functioning. When a person becomes a corpse, neurons stop firing and brain matter decays. She next considered whether she had fallen into a coma or had a stroke, but everything she had ever read was that rational thinking doesn't work in a coma. Of course, it wasn't her area of expertise, so she put the coma theory in the 'maybe' pile. As for a stroke, again, rational thinking is affected, but the patient is still generally conscious and has access to all their senses, so that's a no.

When Sarah considered what else could affect all of her senses, it dawned on her almost immediately. Her interface was inserted into her brainstem, and on top of the ability to read the sensory information flowing to and from her brain, the interface was also able to interrupt it. Sarah thought it was a story from over a decade ago, when the cerebral interface was still new. She had read online horror stories that were adapted into mediocre films. Frankly, she had even known that it was technically possible when she opted to get her interface. She had even heard tell of world governments and industries hacking interfaces and doing crazy shit to people against interplanetary conventional laws, but Sarah just brushed them off as the ramblings of psychopaths and schizophrenics.

She could do nothing about it now. For a while, her mind circled the fear that she may never get out of this prison. She wondered whether she would be there until brain death. If her body were lost in the alien structure, her suit would run out of internal oxygen within a day. From what she had heard, oxygen deprivation wasn't such a terrible way to go. Generally painless, gradual loss of rational thought until nothing. Of course, if it was someone who did this to her, they could be keeping her body alive, doing whatever they wanted with it, and she would never know. Through a proper nutrient feed, she could be kept alive for years, or decades even, until an untreatable disease finally took her.

Sarah didn't know how long it had even been since she entered this state. There was no way to accurately know. With so many scenarios, memories, and fears swimming around in her head, she felt as if she had been there for days, or weeks. Her grip on reality was lost the moment she entered this place, but after a while, she felt like she was losing her mind as well. At first, she had some level of control over her own thoughts and the images that she was seeing, but as time moved inevitably forward, she was starting to see memories that she didn't care to live through again, but Hugo wasn't there to distract her. There was no way to stop what she was seeing, and her own internalized fear had made the experience even worse.

She started thinking about the possibility that she could have been taken by the creatures she had discovered, somehow still alive deep within the structure, and her fears about these creatures quickly transitioned to the memory of the last time she had come face to face with an alien creature.