I look at the time at the top-left of my screen. 12:01am. My shift's over. I've managed to clean 2 out of the 4 SkyShips available. I'd tried to scrub the remaining green slime off the floor of the plane, but it wouldn't come off. It must have had some kind of staining agent in it.
Leaving the backrooms, I leave the corridors and enter the main area, where all the SkyShips take off. My next shift is the Mutant Testing Facility, where dead mutant animals are sent to for dissecting and extraction.
Finding my lab door, I push it open, the stench of dead animals hitting me. For a moment, it overwhelms me.
A battery warning flashes up on my screen.
WARNING: 75%
Charging needed
I tilt my head. What? I'd just charged it an hour ago. I could have sworn it had just been 99%. My battery power lasts me nearly a day if I don't do anything that exerts it.
Strange.
I scan the room. There's a charging pad nearby.Stepping on it, I wait until my battery ticks up to 90%. That should be enough to last me into the second shift, right? Even though my battery usually a lot longer. I wonder why it's so low today.
What is happening?
I step off the charging pad, almost hesitantly. I watch the battery in the corner of my screen.
90%
It blinks slowly. And then:
89%
88%
87%
The battery ticks lower.
86%
85%
84%
83%
I get back on to the charging pad, hoping that it'll go up, or at least stop. It slows down, but still, the numbers get lower.
82%
73%
62%
51%
What should I do? Alert security? If my battery runs out, I'll die here in the lab and I'll have to wait until some other humanoid finds me. I'll might even get shut down because of my low battery capacity and the inability to complete my assigned task. And for some reason, I don't want that.
The numbers keep going down.
43%
32%
28%
20%
11%
6%
The battery warning pops up on my screen.
WARNING: 5%
Please charge
It blinks slowly before fading away. I'm on 1%. I'm going to die. Something tight fills my chest. No, no, no-
0%
It blinks slowly.
0%
Why am I not dead? Why is my screen not blackened? What is happening?
0%
The number keeps blinking on my screen. I wait, watching the number continue to flicker before fading away. The battery symbol at the corner of my screen disappears. I should be dead now, but I'm still functioning perfectly well. Is the battery broken? Are the numbers inaccurate?
YOU ARE READING
Metamorphosizing
Science FictionV3R0N1CA 1236 is a twelfth-generation humanoid working in D0ME 4, one of the ten D0MES in Earth. Earth has fallen into disrepair and poisonous gases, radioactive substances and toxic fumes now plague the land. The D0MEs are now the only places that...
