This is just the opening to the Novella I'm working on. I'd like feedback. :)
Crack. The world was wind, a maelstrom of screaming gales and flashing red lights.
Pain shattered her skull, and she tried to curl into a ball to escape it. The air was ripped from her lungs. She could hear people shouting, their shapes frantic and blurred and they rushed around above her. Hands gripped her arms, her legs, her back. For a moment she was being lifted through empty space.
The hands deposited her on some soft surface that didn’t give. Frantic voices mingled with the howling wind.
“What happened?”
“The pod malfunctioned! I don’t know why, something in the tubes must have hit it!”
“Damn! It doesn’t matter, we’ll fix it later! Just get the oxygen out of the tunnel.”
“Working on it!”
Slowly, the winds subsided. She began aware of a constant, burning pain that engulfed her whole body. Something was fitted over her nose and mouth and she could breathe again, although every gasp was agony. She realized that whatever platform she’d been placed on had started to move.
“Ugh..That looks bad.”
“Ignore it, she’ll be fine. The wipe doesn’t matter, we need to preserve the template. Just keep pushing.”
Lights passed by overhead. One after the other, they dropped down into her field of view and then fell back out again. Everything else was a blur. The voices around her faded to a mumble, then a whisper. Her chest felt tight. The pain melted down through her skin and muscles, seeping into her organs and her mind. With it came a crushing blackness, and she let it wash over her.
The faint, green glow was soft, pushing through the darkness that enveloped her vision like a small child pushing through the curtain around its terminally ill mother’s hospital bed. She sat in stasis, no breath passing through her lungs. She couldn’t feel anything, no pain, no pressure, or any sense of her body at all. It was like being a floating mind, a conscious entity with no form. Low voices whispered and flitted around her.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. It’s bad.”
“How did this even happen? We haven’t had an incident like this since...eight, nine months ago, I think. And that was a full on GNR sabotage attempt.”
“It looks like there was an explosion as the pod was coming up the tube from the incubator. No idea what caused it as of yet. The tube she was in and the two adjacent were all destroyed, and a fourth damaged. Luckily, she was the only one coming up at the time.”
“I see. Well see to it that she’s fully restored. Then, either wipe her again and reprint her or use a default education protocol. As long as the template isn’t lost.”
Her eyes drifted open. The world was green and distorted. Two figures stood in front of her, but turned and walked off to her right as she tried to examine them. She was upright, and could feel the thick gel surrounding her and supporting her body. She tried to move her arm, but found she couldn’t. Not even her chest moved, and she realized she wasn’t breathing. She felt weak, limp and broken. A large, glass tube sat about twenty feet in front of her, filled with the same green substance she was encased in. The idea that she was probably in a similar tube drifted through her brain. A thin metal walkway ran between the two tubes, disappearing off into darkness in both directions. She floated like this for what could have been two minutes or two hours. Then, her mind slowly drifted back beneath the surface of her conscious and she was gone again.
