Blaeyde Flynn has always considered herself a black sheep, an outcast among so many people, with an abrasive personality that tends to annoy people and rub them the wrong way with her hyperactive tendencies. She is more than thrilled when she gets a...
Blaeyde entered the room containing the simulator obstacle course for the first time, anticipating the upcoming moment. The large metal door creaked and hissed shut, leaving her alone in the room. She knew that there would be someone monitoring her progress, and that the general might even stop by once or twice to watch. This was her only chance to show off all the skills she had learned back at the Academy.
The room was massive, as if it could contain an entire city. The white lights in the room dimmed to an eerie blue glow and tiny Nano-cubes swarmed from the floor. The tiny three dimensional boxes were all individual tiny robots that acted almost like pixels to form the environment around her except for the fact that the Nano-cubes were actual objects.
The tiny robots were each about the size of a grape and programmed to act as the simulated environment of any one of hundreds of inhabited worlds, but in this case they would be simulating the planet she had been assigned to based upon intense study via satellites orbiting the untouched alien world. They reminded Blaeyde of the robotic building blocks she had as a child except on a much smaller scale and much more technologically advanced. Blaeyde watched as the tiny cubes swarmed around themselves and formed a crudely depicted tropical jungle with strange plants and animals. Her objective was to run around the course, dodge the simulated perils, and to avoid anything in the way of her mission objective. Easy as pie.
Once the cubes were done forming the target environment, the lights turned to a dark green and the walls of the large room which were really giant televisions rolled footage animated as closely as possible to the actual location. The graphics were realistic, but accuracy compared to the actual planet was unknown. The simulated forest was still, almost empty.
Blaeyde heard the crash of foliage as a large creature stepped through the trees. Its legs were extremely long and it was so tall that Blaeyde could hardly see its body above her. Its long legs were an almost neon blue and what she could see of its body was black. The cubes did a good job of representing the animal, but it was too easy to tell it was just a bunch of three dimensional pixels pretending to be the real thing. Blaeyde stood still as the animal lowered its head on a neck even longer than its legs. Its head was like that of an earth goose but striped with black and white and its beak was the same blue as its legs.
The head of the creature had two curved horn-like protrusions where the beak met its face, and the animal opened its mouth but no sound came out. It then suddenly shot its head like a missile towards the ground inches from Blaeyde, and she rolled out of the way. The simulated creature tried again, but she was ready for it. Her reflexes sprung her into action as she leapt up to meet the animal's head.
Her fist hit its skull, and she heard the sparking and snapping of Nano-cubes breaking under the pressure of the impact. A wave of the cubes exploded in unison as they absorbed the shock of the other cubes connected to them. The shockwave of exploding cubes was like the ripples of a stone being thrown into a pond and they shattered like thin glass. Blaeyde pulled back her fist, stunned. Immediately, the simulator turned off and the tiny robots not affected by the shockwave dispersed. Blaeyde stood there not knowing what to think, staring at her hands in disbelief.
"Oops..." Blaeyde said, standing there awkwardly. The intercom leading to the room clicked and she heard the voice of the technician over the microphone say, "Er...Miss...Flynn, is it? Can you stand by? We are experiencing a technical difficulty." Blaeyde shrugged and said, "I think I broke it!"
"That indeed you did, Miss Flynn." Said the man on the mic. Blaeyde stood there, waiting for instructions. After a long period of silence, Blaeyde heard the technician again, but he must have thought that the mic was off.
"How is this possible? Those things were specifically designed to withstand the force of a stampeding elephant each...And they just smashed like a tin can!" he said, before realizing that the microphone was still on.
Blaeyde heard a click and then complete silence. She walked up to the door of the room and tested the handle. It was locked. She was expecting that. She wondered if she could use that strange super-strength to open the door. Blaeyde gripped the handle and pulled on it, but it didn't give. She pulled harder, but to no avail.
She was so confused about why it wasn't working because she had just busted a thousand Nano-cubes with her bare fist. She stepped back, deep in thought. She had just busted a thousand Nano-cubes with her bare fist. As far as she knew, a feat like this was humanly impossible, and she stared at her hands in disbelief. Maybe the cubes had just spontaneously combusted when she just happened to hit them.
She tried to figure out every factor leading to the strange event. Still, she could not figure out why it had happened. Nothing like this had ever happened before in her life, had it? There was this one time when she had been chopping vegetables at twelve years old and she would have sworn she had cut her finger, but there was no blood at all and next thing she knew the knife was under her finger instead of above. It was as if the knife had passed clean through her finger.
She had never thought much about it, not until now. Why couldn't she use whatever it was now to open the door which could handle a lot less force than the Nano-cubes, and yet she had totally busted the tiny robots. She thought long and hard, all the while staring at her hands. She stared harder and harder at her hands, trying to figure out if they were any different from anyone else's.
As far as she knew, they were perfectly normal hands. But maybe it wasn't her hands, but the skin or muscles instead that had caused that weird shock wave of exploding Nano-cubes. Or maybe it was just a coincidence of the cubes happening to explode from some sort of malfunction at the same time. No. She had thought over that possibility, but she was not sure what to believe. Was this why her father treated her like he did? Was he afraid of her, or did he just despise her for other reasons? She didn't have any of the answers.
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