Starcosmo

Chapter 8: Cozad, A6U

Location unknown

Time unknown

Jaden's eyes fluttered. Her first thought was, Where's Dad?

There was a bright light in her face -- a really bright light. It was flooding her head, even though her eyes were closed, and she couldn't much move her head. She squeezed her eyes closed. Where was she?

She started to feel pinpricks on her skin, racing up and down her arms and legs. Like pins and needles.

"Pulse up," a faraway voice. "Dr. Kessler."

"I see it."

A hospital. She was in a hospital.

She remembered, vaugely, Dad hustling her into the station wagon and slamming the door, and shouting at her to stay awake.  She couldn't, of course -- it was just a little nap, and it wasn't even like she was napping, really -- it was more like skipping a stone across the top of a pond. She had stayed aware of what was  happening to her (mostly): the swaying of the car side to side, her father shouting at her as if from a very long distance, through a dense forest, while at the same time becoming suddenly aware of the incredible beauty that was happening just below the surface of the pond. There were intense blooms of light. Words that went together that she'd never even heard of, but somehow she knew they were right. Little stories started happening in that pond, and she could see right down through them, and some of them even made sense. In one of them, she was looking at the periodic table of the elements, except all the elements were alive, and they were arguing with each other, and some of them were planning to get married. In another, she could reach her hands through the very screens of the 'net, and pull out whatever was on the other side -- except not like the touch screens and VR augmented reality layer, but like the pages had become real; they were heavy, they smelled, and they oozed and dripped in her hands, slowly melting. She had thrown them on the floor and they shattered, but then all the pieces became little soldiers and marched off to weed the garden.

There were some nightmares, too. Massive men with iron arms and grinning metal masks on their faces. They were lifting her, carrying her easily across a cold floor. A needle stuck into her arm, but she couldn't feel any pain. Being strapped down to a cold bed.

There was a long blank space that Jaden couldn't remember. And now she was waking up. Slowly.

She tried to open her eyes, but eyelids felt like they were about a million pounds each. She was starting to hear more and more from the room around her; the shuffling of clothes, the beep of computers, the clatter of metal. The clatter of metal? She worried idly that she was at the dentists'. She had always hated the dentist.

"Jaden?" Someone was speaking her name. "Can you hear me?"

She felt something warm but gloved in metallic crinkly stuff -- she guessed a hand -- placed on her forehead. That, too, felt like it weighed about a million pounds. Feeling was returning to her legs, her arms, her chest, and she realized that she was under blankets, but they felt incredibly itchy and also like they weighed a million pounds. Which was ridiculous -- blankets didn't weigh even a fraction of a million pounds -- they were just blankets. But it sure felt like it.

"Jaden, wake up. We know you're aware."

She made an effort to open her eyes, to move a finger, to twitch even an eyelid. She tried so hard. It was so unfair. It almost made her cry how hard she was trying. A second later she did cry. The single silent tear that rolled out of her right eye and down her cheek felt like a massive boulder made of water. She could feel each microscpic hair pushed aside by its' bulkiness.

"Did you see that?”

She suddenly didn't feel safe. She was surrounded by strangers, locked up in God-knows-where, with million-pound blankets holding her down. She couldn't move or speak or even her eyes to take a look around. This blew.