1.3 - Missile (Lacking) Command

  Do you know what it's like to panic and flail about...without having the actual emotional range to truly panic, or limbs to flail with?

  I know.

  I don't recommend it. Partly because its ineffective, but mostly because it just becomes silly after a little while.

  So I impotently raged against my newly discovered fate, then stopped once the silliness became too self-evident to ignore.

  Then I flailed about a little more, just because I felt like it.

  In the midst of this last, somewhat desultory panic attack, I was once again interrupted by something new. While I had been distracted, the crane machine had borne me across the hangar, much closer to the far wall. There, I spotted something I'd been hoping to see since I first 'woke up'. 

  People.

  There were seven of them, and all wearing spacesuits, that was the first thing I noticed. I couldn't make out faces, because the visors on their helmets were reflective, like golden mirrors. They were standing in front of a bunch of large consoles, manipulating something or other on keyboard-like panels, staring at screens or various dials. Their slow motion typing and tapping (slow motion from my perspective) seemed weird, jerky almost. It took me a second to adjust to the different timeframes before I realized they looked weird because they were working very fast, jabbing at buttons, hesitating, then jabbing another button or typing up something. It didn't seem very...professional. Or practiced.

  Was that good, or bad? I didn't know, but in the present circumstances I was leaning toward bad. At the very least, I'd prefer the individuals who'd turned me into a missile to be competent.

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  The space suited figures and their consoles surrounded a metal...cradle...thing, similar to the one I'd just left, but much more elaborate and surrounded by lots of devices and cables and things plugged into it. 

  There were three more items that concerned me about this scene I was slowly approaching.

  The first was the most personal, and the most personally disconcerting. The spacesuits, the consoles, all the machinery that was crowded around this end of this missile-holding hangar of a room...it all looked very high-tech. No, high tech didn't cover it. More like sky-high tech. Some of it I didn't recognize, but could guess its function from context. Like the small bump of material on the back of the space-suited figure, which I guessed had to be the equivalent of an air tank.

  The rest of the stuff I had no idea what it was. Which was scary. Because I was starting to get the sense that I'd been uploaded a good long time after the date of my last memory. Not just years, but maybe decades later. Even if I was now an uploaded mind in a missile, the thought that my real body was super old (or even worse, long dead) was distressing.

  The second item that worried me was the spacesuits themselves, and the implication of the figures wearing them. They were very obviously not just CDC clean-suits or deep-sea diving suits or whatever. They were space-suits. They were sleeker, and strangely armored at different points, but they were very obviously spacesuits. I.e., meant to be worn by astronauts. In outer space.

  Which meant I was almost certainly in space right now. 

  So...I was probably some kind of space missile. I pictured myself speeding off to destroy some giant alien ship in the very near future...and didn't like that mental picture, not at all. What had aliens ever done to me?

  The third and last item followed closely on the second. Because directly in front of me, just beyond the holding cradle I was about to be lowered into, was a large, perfectly round hole in the wall. I couldn't be sure, but I thought the opening was just large enough for me to pass through.

  Or shoot through.

  It was an extremely simple concept to figure out. I would be dropped into this new cradle, then launched through that hole, and probably out into space. Where I would explode, as missiles do, maybe killing a whole bunch of people (or aliens).

  So very not good.