A Country Life

CHAPTER 20 - DARIEN

Reanimation sucks.

This was the first thought that went through his mind, as his body screamed its distress at not being able to perform basic functions, such as breathing. For the twenty-fifth time, Major Darien Searle cursed whoever had designed an upload and reanimation sequence that involved achieving conscious thought before body reconstruction was complete, and waited for it all to end.

His second thought was that he shouldn't have been able to recall anything about the previous twenty-four times at all. He knew this, and also knew he shouldn't have any memory since his first upload - that was the way it worked; you die in the v-con, get reanimated, start again at the point you first came here and then learn everything you ever knew before by laborious reading of the mandatory journal. Yet here he was, knowing this was his twenty-fifth reanimation. More than that even; he could remember everything from before - right up until the point his twenty-fourth version met the unknown soldier who'd stepped out of a reanimation tube and shot him.

Darien blinked a few times as he got control of his eyes, and a few seconds later he gained the ability to see. It was dark in Arrivals. That didn't bode well. Through the distorting glass of the embodiment engine Darien could make out the glow from the console, and somewhere several meters away a faint rectangular glow that might indicate a doorway of some kind.

A few seconds later the process was complete and the glass tube slid upwards, while at the same time complete control of his own body was given to him. He crouched, expecting an attack of some sort, but there was total silence and no movement that he could make out.

"Dr Johann? Private Krantz?"

Before, the fat doctor had fussed around him, checking his embodiment had gone well - that his physical ability and mental acuity was functioning to normal parameters; but this time, nothing. No answer from Private Krantz who had been stationed at Arrivals and who had been with him when he died.

Strange too the acoustics of this room. Arrivals was sizeable, even with only ten embodiment engines, and the space echoed and rang with any noise. This room seemed different - like it was smaller. Although it was dark, there should still have been a glow from the control panel at each of the other nine engines, but there was only the one from the tube he was still stood in. Either the others were switched off, or...

Darien stepped off the plinth and reached out to one side. Sure enough, just a couple of paces away from the engine he felt a wall. Working his way cautiously along, he discovered quickly that the room was very small - only just large enough to fit the one embodiment engine in that he had emerged from. And on the wall facing the engine's control panel, there was a door - an ordinary, unsecure and unguarded door.

Darien tried the handle. The door opened outwards with a protest of stiff, rusty hinges, its opening made more difficult by sand which had blown up against the door in a small drift. Darien blinked in the glare of light and looked out onto an arid, flat, featureless plain that spoke more of a desert than the temperate grassland the Arrivals he knew was situated upon. There was no surrounding fortification either - another oddity which, combined with the fact that there appeared to be no other persons present, made him very uneasy.

Carefully, slowly, he stepped outside. It was daytime, which in the v-con he inhabited meant everywhere was noon-day bright, even though there was no sun in the sky. Instead, the sunlit side of Earth loomed massively above him, blue-grey ocean and drab coloured land obscured to a large extent by cloud. Almost directly above was a typhoon, its eye the only sharp feature amongst the hundreds of miles wide whorl of cloud spilling out from the centre. It reminded Darien of an image of a galaxy he had seen as a child, which in turn drew him into a momentary feeling of unreality as his consciousness rejected the thought - he had never truly ever been a child, as no person who had lived an entirely virtual life had; the memories of childhood he carried with him were there to fulfil the mind's need to remember childhood; something vitally important in keeping him sane.