The truth? You’re probably already dead. If you're not dead, and that really depends on how you define the word, you’re almost definitely one of two things… A block of disassociated human algorithm festering inside the Eternal Hive Mind, or a complete asshole.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Who lived, died, assimilated, or became a spandex snogging dystopia monger, was at least partially a matter of circumstances. It wasn’t all your fault.
Me? I just woke up. Way back in 2013, I took a gig in a cryogenic sleep lab. That was only supposed to last for one year, but I slept for over two hundred. I missed World War Three, an apocalypse, most of World War Four, and all the brainwashing that preceded those exciting festivities. I didn’t wake up until the good guys found me, and now I’m with them.
I suppose it’s possible that you could be one of the good guys too, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, I’m also counting on it. World War Four is still raging out there, and let me tell you, World War Four is a grind. Killer machines scouring the Earth for the last human survivors… We all saw that one coming, didn’t we? Yet here we are.
You know what no one saw coming? The capes. Capes and super powers were supposed to be fantasy, no one thought they would ever actually exist. Well they do now, and I finally have one of my own. The problem is… Somehow, despite the capes, despite my cape, we’re still losing this war. Humanity is losing.
I guess maybe it wasn’t all about me after all. After everything they put me through, maybe it was really all about you. Can you hear me? If you can, you need to listen. Listen carefully if you want humanity to live. We start with the day my new friends busted me out of my cryo chamber...
So I woke up screaming into this massive armored hand. The screaming was clearly due to the unbearable pain in my skull, but I couldn't account for the hand so I tried opening my eyes. I was hoping to find a sympathetic lab tech setting up a morphine drip for me, but all I saw was blinding white light, so I squeezed my eyelids tight and screamed even harder.
Like I said, World War Four is a grind.
“Ooo… Uhhh... I think it’s getting worse,” said the man who owned the hand. His voice was deep. Too deep. It was like hammers falling on my eardrums.
There was another guy leaning over me too, one with a more average voice. “Dammit Eighty Three, I told you! Never let a levitator out of the box!”
“I know, Ten,” the man with the deep voice said. “But he didn’t look good in there. I had to get him out.”
Ten was utterly outraged. “Of course he didn’t look good, that’s what happens when you initiate a rapid awakening!”
“I didn’t touch anything, he was already like that,” Eighty Three said.
“That isn’t possible,” Ten argued. I was inclined to agree. Rapid awakenings were the worst, so they were only for emergencies. And there were some serious firewalls built up against accidental initiation. On the other hand, it did explain why my skull felt like it was splitting in half.
Besides, Eighty Three had what turned out to be an excellent point. “It’s possible if someone was here before me.”
Ten obviously felt he was in the right, so he wasn’t exactly ready to graciously give him the point. Any hope of a swiftly applied morphine drip ended right then and there when their argument escalated.
“Well you still should’ve left him in there!”
“Why!?”
“The box kept him quiet!”
“Well I didn’t know he was gonna scream!”
“They always scream! And who turned on the lights?!”
“They just popped on!”
“Exactly! Because you broke him out! Any machine passing by probably heard that!”
“I know!”
“Alright! Okay then… Shit... So we should probably go, then, alright?”
“Eeyup... Probably...”
“And, Eighty Three, how long do you think he can breath like that!?”
“I don’t kn- Oh. Right.”
My scream tore out into the lab the moment Eighty Three freed my face, and I swear I heard glass break. I’d like to say I have a proud, grizzly sort of scream, but nope, not at all. If Eighty Three’s voice at normal volume was like anvils, my scream was like armor piercing bullets. There was nothing in the lab to soften that borderline inhuman shriek, either. It was just concrete, white paint, and some cheap wire conduit. The place was more of an amplifier than a reducer.
Eventually I was forced to breath, and Eighty Three tried to console me. “Easy bud, we’ll take care of that now.”
Ten was already set to do just that, apparently. “Just hold his hands down.”
“Gottem...”
Eighty Three peeled my spindly keyboard warriors away from my temples and pinned them to the floor with ease. I screamed in his face, “JACKASS!” It wasn’t about my wounded pride, although I admit it was relevant. I was mostly angry that I couldn’t hold my head in anymore. Not that it was working anyway, but still.
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Ten stuffed two tubes into my nostrils. I tried getting free to rip them out, but Eighty Three was like a human hydraulic press. Before I could scream a volley of derogatory names at him for this added indecency, two puffs of cold powder filled my nostrils, sinuses, and mouth. For about three seconds it was like choking on a cinnamon laden saltine cracker. But then, all of a sudden, every bit of pain just went away, replaced by a tingling sensation and a faint scent of lemon lime Kool-Aid.
“Not bad, right?” Eighty Three asked. His voice was actually pretty pleasant now.
Not bad was an understatement, so all I said was, “Holy shit…”
“Let’s go then,” Ten said. In hindsight he was probably right.
“Ten…” Eighty Three argued.
“What?” Ten asked impatiently.
And just like that they were back at it.
“I’m just saying he needs a bit of time, just a minute,” Eighty Three pleaded.
“You’re wasting our time,” Ten grumbled.
“Just give him a minute, that’s all.”
“Are you forgetting where we are?”
“Yes. Where are we, Ten? Are we at Uma’s, home of the tastiest butter fries?”
“Funny... Our intel on this place is sparse, and we don’t know this guy.”
At that point Eighty Three saw that I was sitting up rubbing my eyes, and he enthusiastically stuck his hand out for a shake. “There you go bud!”
I stopped rubbing my eyes and reached out, but I froze with my arm half extended after I finally got a look at the two space gladiators kneeling on either side of me. I was expecting white lab coats and stethoscopes, not crimson capes and conformal black battle armor. Plus I came from your time not theirs, so the first thing that came to mind was, “Uhh… Doc Z lets you guys do Halloween now?”
They shrugged at each other.
At this point neither of them had their helmets on, and they were kneeling close by, so I could see their faces in HD. Eighty Three had a beefy, clean shaven brown face. His head was shaved smooth too, and he wore that style like a heavyweight champ, even if he did have big brown puppy dog eyes.
Ten was a little paler, and he was about five foot ten, but I could tell he was athletic. Unlike Eighty Three, he kept a little of his jet black hair up top, short and tight. He had blue, impatient eyes, and even then I could see something hidden inside there, some old wound that would never heal.
I couldn’t help admiring their cosplay skills, because Robert Downey Jr. and Don Cheadle never looked so legit. There armor was paper thin and lightweight, form fitting and flexible, with a gloss black finish and little red light bars running up the sides of their arms and legs. The capes looked like they were cut from some kind of experimental smart fabric, and there were these little gold flecks shimmering inside those deep crimson threads. The was an impossible realness to it all.
Anyway, it looked like neither of them were going fill me in, and the awkward silence was too much for me, so I just kept rolling with the Halloween thing. “So did you guys win the costume contest?”
“Yea, sure thing bud," Eighty Three said, nodding at Ten before winking at me. I was pretty sure he did that in the wrong order.
Ten nodded at me and managed to not wink suspiciously, but he still had a terrible poker face. “Definitely. We’ll tell you all about it after we get you out.”
“Out?” I asked. They were both terrible liars, so obviously I was suspicious, and there was no way I was going anywhere. “No. No way. I’m not even supposed to be awake yet, am I?” Which meant I would be out sixty grand. The lab was paying me to sleep, not wander around the building chopping it up with the lab techs on slow days.
“Honestly?” Ten asked, but it wasn’t really a question. “No. You should still be in the box.”
Eighty Three sighed and looked a little defeated.
I finally glanced over at my busted cryo chamber, and I couldn’t believe what they’d done. “Holy shit!! You guys ripped the door off?!? Are you trying to get us fired?!”
“Great, here we go,” Ten mumbled.
“Hey bud, what’s your name?” Eighty Three asked worriedly. “They call me Eighty Three. His name is Ten.”
“Yea, I gathered,” I said. Their roman numerals were emblazoned in gold on their left breastplates. “My name is Kevin.” I pointed at the nameplate velcroed to my chamber door, which happened to be laying right side up. The badge displayed it in bold, right underneath a picture of a gangly blond guy with a huge dopey smile on his face. Kevin Stobart.
Side note, it really was a dopey smile. Orientation day was the greatest day of my boring life. I thought I was about to make the easiest money. It was like winning the lottery, and all I had to do was sleep.
Eighty Three smiled a big pearly smile at me. “Alright Kev, we gotta get you outta here.”
“Nooope.” I shook my head and tried to stand up, but my legs barely even wobbled. “Fuck…” I kept trying, but there was really no point. I wasn't in a movie, and apparently in the real world you don't just come out of cryo ready to slay aliens.
“Kevin…” Ten said. His demeanor had changed, and I couldn’t quite identify it. Bored? Nervous? Threatening? He was a little hard to read sometimes. “Look around.”
I did just that, and what I saw shocked me. The whole place was empty. Every cryo chamber, every workstation, and every office down the hallway had been cleared out. Everything was dark too, except for the emergency lights and the main lab lights. That had never happened before. We were a twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five kind of operation. “Oookay… Okay… What the fu-”
“Easy Kev,” Eighty Three said gently.
I corrected him absentmindedly while I stared down the hallway at Doc Z’s shadowy command center. “Kevin.”
Eighty Three nodded. “Okay, sorry Kevin.”
“It’s Sunday,” I decided. “Right?”
Ten shook his head. “Tuesday.”
Eighty Three gave me a sympathetic look and opened his mouth to say something, but he was interrupted by an eruption of campy sci-fi gunfire somewhere on the floor above. They both leaped to their feet, and their helmets snapped instantly out of their capes and locked into place with a satisfying thwack.
Just so you know, their helmets were exactly as nice as you’re imagining. They had glowing red eyes, a matching luminescent red ridge running from front to back over the dome, and everyone who wore them sounded a little like Affleck’s Batman.
"Ohhh so you guys are from the weapons lab..." I said, but that didn't make sense either. "We have a weapons lab upstairs?"
Before either of them answered, some kind of visible scan swept the room. When I traced it to the lab’s rear door off to my left, I found a brown haired woman standing there with her hands resting casually on her hips. We all shuffled around to face her, me on my bum of course, as the heavy steel door locked itself behind her.
“Hi there,” the woman said joyfully. She was all tidied up and wearing a professional smile that only an HR rep or a cult member could master. “I’m Becca from HR,” she said, using the edge of her hand to draw an invisible line under her badge. Three explosions rocked the ceiling, and she didn’t seem to notice.
“Kevin,” I said, glancing up at the flickering fluorescent lights.
Becca corrected me with an enthusiastic little fist pump. “More like Thee Kevin.”
“Sure…” I said, utterly flabbergasted by her upbeat vibes. “Thee Kevin. That’s me. And I’m very excited to be part of the NeoCryoICT team.”
Eighty Three and Ten glanced at each other and held some kind of secret committee. Right after that they took a couple steps behind me, one to either side. At the time I still thought they were lab techs or weapons testers, and I figured they were just preparing to pin their mess on me.
That wasn’t it at all…