Murder Drones: The Last Survivor

Awakening

Silence. That's all Nic could say about how it felt being in cryostasis for that many years—absolute deafening silence.

There was a little bit of light, but not much. The thick polycarbonate window of his pod was almost completely opaque, but he could barely see. That is, he could see until the lights went out. 

Cryostasis is strange. You wake up periodically, but you can't move at all. You also have no idea how long you've been out for. All you know is the date you went into your pod. I was one of the people who decided it would be a good idea to shell out the ungodly amounts of money required to try out this technology when it was first brought to the planet in the year 3000. 

Another thing about Cryostasis. You don't age, like, at all. You could go in looking 22, spend 100 years in the pod, and come out looking 22. So even if you could move to look at yourself, you can't gauge how long it's been when you look at your body. 

That's how it was when my cryostasis pod opened. I had no idea when I was, or what had happened. Then I tried to draw a breath and started choking. 

Let me tell you, choking ain't fun. It really isn't. You start tearing up, your chest feels like it's on fire internally, and your natural response is to gasp for air. Which you can't.

Eventually, I found an old Canadian military issue C5 gas mask and could breathe again. And once I took a moment to gather myself after almost dying and figure out what had happened. 

I was outta my pod, but I had no idea why. These pods don't automatically just eject people, they either do so because of humans telling them to, or power loss. When I saw how dark the facility was, I believed the latter.

If the power was out, then that meant a greater issue was afoot. They legally had to have backup generators to run cryostasis pods, with at least 4 years' worth of fuel reserves. This facility could support 10 years at peak capacity, or maximum power drain if memory serves. So no one refueling this facility for that long? Major red flag.

And the fact that every other cryo pod was empty? Another major issue. So with no one around, and being unable to breathe without dying, something had to have gone horribly wrong on Copper-9.

He tried to make his way out of the bunker-like construction of the cryostasis pod room, but without power, the steel blast door wouldn't open. And because of the bunker-esque build, he couldn't just break down the door. He had to find another way out.

Trying to see something that I could use to get out, I saw a chemical air tester specifically designed for Copper-9's atmosphere and whatever might pollute it. I popped it open and almost immediately it responded with a high level of Arsenic Trioxide. A compound commonly used in the copper mines of the planet, Arsenic Trioxide was incredibly toxic. So that explains why I couldn't breathe.

But for this level of As2O3 to be in the air, there had to have been a major accident at one of the mining complexes. To the point of the entire mine being blown up kinda major. Eventually, he spotted his escape in the faint lighting of the radioactive emergency glow lights.

A loose vent cover, likely unscrewed and never put back in, lay glinting beside the shaft it was supposed to cover. Nic thought back to the complex's map. This wasn't the lowest level, but most of the area here was cast in concrete, so the vent should be strong enough to hold his weight.

However, it was still very cramped, and as he shimmied through the narrow steel tube, he just hoped he wouldn't find something like a still-running fan that would just fillet his face. Lucky for Nic, no such fans were found in his path through the vents.