THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 33 - Awakened

Sarah's eyes flitted open.

At first, her mind was a blank slate, like an empty laboratory minus all the equipment used in the daily affairs of science. In fact, if her mind was a lab, it lacked everything. There were no worktables, counters, or storage cabinets. No microscopes. No refrigerator or freezer units for preserving samples. Nothing. Her mind was a bare room. The lights weren't even on.

Like lightning bugs at twilight in a forest, the synapses in her brain fired off one at a time. Her neural pathways charted a map that connected to her short-term and long-term memory. Those well-trodden trails in her brain buzzed with electrical impulses. In the dark she gasped for air, her lungs heaving, sucking in oxygen deprived breaths. Her hands flew to the transparent shell above her face, the air she exhaled fogging the glass. Thoughts raced through her mind as she tried to grasp for understanding, wondering where she was while her fingers searched for a way out, gliding over the smooth surface. Her first thought was of her last encounter on Earth, the conversation she had with Admiral Jax. She remembered his last words: Good night, Dr. Lawson. Happy travels.

Her fingernails clicked on the glass, echoing in the enclosed space. The dots connected in her mind. To her right, a display appeared on the canopy shell with a series of blinking digital numbers divided by two slash marks. 3/27/2080. The date: month, day, and year. Now she knew when and where she was.

Two and a half years had passed since she went to sleep in the cryogenic hibernation chamber.

Cryo sleep had a certain effect on people. There were no dreams. No consciousness. Little brain activity at all. Just enough to keep a person alive. The chamber kept her lungs breathing and her heart beating imperceptibly. That's why her first impulse was to breathe deeply and replenish the oxygen in her bloodstream.

With her body jumpstarted, everything flooded back to her at once—her memory and all she needed to assess the situation. On the display above her, she touched a tab labeled Open Unit. The curved lid rolled into the wall beside her with a hiss of air.

Sarah removed the restraints that held her in place—a strap across her chest and another over her thighs. She struggled to sit up, her back arching and her body rising beneath her. Her limbs weren't responding to the subconscious commands from her brain like she wanted them to. She assumed her body was taking longer to recuperate than her mind, but eventually, she overcame this strange malady and nudged her legs in the right direction. Though Sarah had lain dormant for two and half years, she still mustered enough strength to swing her feet over the edge of her cryogenic chamber.

A leather cushion cupped her backside as her legs dangled above a white floor. She glanced around the room, feeling as light as helium on the inside, a hot air weather balloon at the edge of the stratosphere.

She took a moment to settle herself and then turned her attention to what surrounded her in the room. Five other cryo chambers lined the walls, three on each side. Her gaze combed over the unconscious occupants of the units opposite of her own: Commander Phoenix Drake, Ensign Callisto Tenzing, and Dr. Ariel Fairhaven. In the dark, a flaxen braid curled over Dr. Fairhaven's shadowed figure, floating inches above her chest.

Zero gravity.

They were in space.

Sarah slid off the cushion but didn't drop like she would have on Earth... until her boots pulled her down, adhering with a slight suction to the floor's smooth surface. In a flash, she realized why she wasn't drifting around the room. It was the navy-blue jumpsuit. The people who created the suit had weaved a thin metal lining through the fabric. The boots had steel plates inside the soles. On Earth that would have made them cumbersome, but in space, she wouldn't have suspected a thing if it weren't for the brain downloads and the training in the artificial gravity simulator. A magnetic field emanated from beneath the floor, pulling the suits ever so gently down, simulating the gravity of Earth. Prior to lift off of the Titan X spacecraft, when Sarah wasn't working on engineering the serum, she was busy preparing for the mission in the time before the crew arrived. Of course, the artificial gravity was not perfect because her hair still wafted behind her as she put one foot in front of the other.

To her left, positioned down the length of the cryo hibernation section of the ship, lay the chambers of Luna Skye and Lieutenant Commander Nova Kailani, the two women inside, deep asleep.

As serene as the setting seemed, something was wrong with this picture. Various scenarios flew through her mind, taunting her with a thousand possibilities. Had her sleep unit malfunctioned? Had she woken up too soon? Was she now awake for the next two and a half years alone? Or had they been in cryo too long? Had the ship missed its target? Were they now on an irreversible course in the outer solar system? Or had she awakened first, for a particular reason, moments before arrival at Arcturus? Admiral Jax hadn't told her anything about what would occur when she came to. She assumed all of them would awake at a pre-programmed time, appointed by the admiral. For that reason, she knew there had been no mistake. She awoke from cryo first for a specific purpose.

"Lights on," Sarah said. She inched toward the front of the ship, unsure of herself in the simulated gravity. The lights flickered on one at a time, reflecting off the white walls and floors. She paused mid-step and closed her eyes, shielding herself from the bright glare, waiting a few seconds for her pupils to adjust before moving on. She had trained for this, but it felt weird, especially with her hair floating above and behind her.

A voice spoke to Sarah. A rich baritone. She flinched, came to a standstill. It wasn't out loud. The voice was in her head, in the back of her mind. It sounded like an eerie echo repeating a command in her subconscious thoughts. Go to the cockpit cabin.

         Sarah knew the cabin was on the ship's bridge with the memory station. Somehow, she also knew what she had to do. She needed a brain download. Admiral Jax—it was his voice in her head. He must have performed a brain download on her after he put her under in cryo sleep. And when she awoke, the command sequence had activated an order for her to follow, which she obeyed without question, as if it were her own idea. That was a little unsettling. The last place she wanted the admiral to be was inside her head. Surely, they hadn't developed mind control in the deep recesses of Site B? No. That was something she had no desire to ponder at the moment. She had to move on, proceed with the order to get that voice out of her brain.

Sarah walked through the circular hatchway that led from the cryo section of the ship to the bridge.

She angled to the right and sat in a swiveling chair in front of the memory station. Before her, a screen imbedded in the wall came to life with a warm glow. A brainwave pattern marched across a blue background like a heart monitor in a hospital. Sarah traced a finger under her hairline at the back of her neck and located the end of the surgically implanted port. Then, simply, she plugged a cord that ran from the memory station into her brain.

A box appeared on the screen.

It read, One Memory Available for Download...

At the end of the command, the three dots blinked like a cursor.

Below the option on the screen, a tab selection told her to press Yes to complete the download.

Her finger hovered over the touchscreen, a hair's width away from activating the command sequence. One push of a button and she would know why she woke up from hibernation first, and what she needed to do next.

Sarah's brows pinched in contemplation, and then, with a casual shrug, she pressed the button on the screen.