Seren, Star of Sirius

Maybe it's the unnatural perch of the stasis pod, but you feel taller than you're supposed to be. Uncomfortably long-limbed. Uncompacted into a new and nebulous world.

Elma doesn't speak as aloofly as you'd expect them too, either. It makes you, counterintuitively, far more likely to feint apologetic. Something has to bear the brunt of the disconnect here.

At the Lifepod, you frustratedly flail your arms. Your long, limbering, left-handed arms.

One survival sleeve, a flexible compression contour complete with digitized glove, covers half of you.

Two, then three. You waggle your wrists, waiting for something unspecified to unjam.

Everything isn't, here. There's a malaise of unreality.

A Young Grex follows you, puking belligerently, all the way back to the White Whale. You have to keep pumping your too-long legs forward, patellae shifting with grief, despite the nausea the sheer size of the structure (and infrastructure) before you conjures.

Competent-looking fellows all wearing the same standard of survival gear, couched in kneepads and neoprene, say nothing to you as you ascend to the gateside elevator. They've got soft faces, scruffy hair.

What is a military industrial complex? What is a military industrial complex with soft-hearted, real-people macho men?

You've been wearing whatever it is you've found on the floor, after all. The spoils of wreckage. The pockets are littered, littering, with the wreckage of spoils. Vesper wings. Blatta secretions. Actual wild game.

Germs, slick and ooze, don't seem to make or get any real grips with you. You're machine-clean.

You don't pace, in the elevator. It's unclear who's looking away - whether the awkwardness is principally owned by Elma or by you, both of you let the other on with their chosen direction. It's raining too hard for unblinking, unsquinting eye contact. And then the recruits at the top of the climb look much less like recruits. Harder. Colder.

It's time to get out of the rain.

A clear sky stretching thinly over the artificial city doesn't help draw your eyes to the gleaming percentage on the central tower, but it doesn't need to.

Every last survivor counts. But who is it that's counting?

It's not that you don't believe you could have been just any ordinary person, an age ago. It's actually that you don't know if you could even have done that. As if, somehow, that that is a higher existence that yet eludes you, that you could never go back to.

That you wouldn't want to go back to. That wouldn't serve you, to do so.

This. That. This. That.

There's no choice, now, is there?