Blademaster Ascension

34- Desperate Methods

Rowan stood beside Isa as they stared at the round, hollow, metal spheres, each of which was about a meter wide and had a hatch open to let them see what was inside.

They were inside the last unexplored room of the bunker. Perhaps fortune had taken notice of them and decided to screw them up royally once again.

They were four, excluding master Fallspark who was perhaps already captured, dead or alive.
But the escape routes they had been searching for desperately turned out to be these metallic spheres tucked away inside the room, and there were only three of those.

What garnered their attention were the bright screens in front of the spheres that showed the usage of these devices. The screens had lit up as soon as they came inside the room, and the disembodied voice that was constantly declaring the time left for the destruction of the bunker had stopped repeating itself, saying something new to the four of them.

"What you see in front of you are a part of the project "Cryosleep", designed to save the lives of the personnel inside in an emergency where they must escape as fast as possible. The process is being showed in the screens ahead of you.
Would you like to initiate the program and escape ?"

Rowan and team were extremely taken aback as they realized the disembodied voice could actually interact with them, something they hadn't discovered on their previous expeditions. Perhaps it was because of their intrusion in this room that triggered such a development?
But they hardly had the luxury to discuss this matter.

From the clues they gathered from the pictures and cookie-cutter explanation, the metal balls were similar to hibernation grounds for animals. Whoever entered inside would slip into torpor and their physical activities such as metabolism would become very low, to the point of making the person seem dead. Although none of them had enough knowledge to understand most of the information, they were relived to learn that the metal balls would be ejected out of the bunker inconspicuously before the self destruction mechanism fully activated.

The term "ejection" was rather worrisome. After further investigation, they realized this wasn't exactly a traditional escape path, but a deceptive strategy to fool the enemy into thinking they had fled.

The subjects inside the metal spheres would be put "Cryosleep", making their vital signs of life disappear, and ejected through a tunnel hundreds of meters deep into the ground where a tiny underground river curved away from the desert. The steady stream of water would carry away the metallic balls, which could apparently float due to some mathematical gimmicks none of them understood.

As for where or when the people inside the balls would wake up, that would depend on how fast the supply of nutrition and other necessities in the ball dries up and warns the subject's body indirectly to jumpstart the metabolism rate and neural activities.

"Is this really safe? I mean, it has already been over a century since this place has been tended to," Isa wondered aloud.

"There is bound to be a chance of failure due to external factors. The risk is even higher in this case became of the passage of time. It is possible that the process may fail halfway," the mechanical voice answered emotionlessly.

The whole matter was mind boggling to the four teens. Let alone the strange phrases that sounded very erudite, the simple notion of stimulated hibernation was quite amazing. They couldn't help wondering about how advance the ancient human civilization had been to have produced such technology. Although this bunker was supposed to be a research center of cyborgs who didn't see an eye to eye with humans according to the rumours, it still signified the ability of ancient humans.

"Now, What we need to pay attention to, is the fact that one of us has to stay while the rest escapes," Rowan muttered dryly as he finished surveying the moving pictures. His unnecessary observation was met with silence from his compatriots.