For those of you who wanted a sample of my writing, and are not following the Writers group. From the "Who Wants to Play-- Character Introduction Sandbox" thread:
"Shift-spectrum," Doctor Geertz droned in the background.
Lights and nebulous, shapeless phantoms drifted before my eyes. The air beyond the Hefler Visor attached to the operating table I was strapped to became particulate and... what I could only describe as 'smoky.' If I didn't know better, I'd have guessed that I was seeing the ultraviolet and the infrared spectrum at the same time.
Which was, of course, impossible without my SDG. The goggles could shift through the spectra and read most levels of radiation, electrical currents and even 'see' datastreams in the liquid crystal datalines throughout the ship. Whatever the case actually was, it was too much.
The table was cold, light in the lab was cold, but the good doctor's voice was coldest of all. The excessive visual stimulation began a buzz in my right ear and a slow, rhythmic throb behind my eyes that signaled the start of another migraine.
Damn him. Geertz knew what light, noise and confusion did to me. His heartless, clinical 'faith' in the operable, the genomic, and the experimental, unfettered by one shred of human decency or compassion had prompted me calling him by the derisive, Doctor Mengel.
But never to his face.
That face then hovered over the cerulean glow that filtered from the Hefler Visor. His pinched features brought to mind victims in late stage starvation, or corpses pulled from the peat bogs back home. Icy, pale, nearly colorless eyes stared dispassionately down upon me, then shifted to the datapad he held in his long, spidery fingers.
"Since the readings are inconclusive, Engineer," he said to me, again not bothering to learn, much less use, my name, "can you tell me how you feel?"
I wanted to tell him to go to hell. I wanted to loosen the straps holding me down in Laboratory Deck C's medical theater and throttle the life out of this loathsome worm.
What came out of my mouth was a rasp and a gurgle as I discovered a new threshold of discomfort. An entirely unquantifiable series of stimuli raced through my frontal lobe, signals my brain could not comprehend. This coupled with a descending series of electrical shocks traveling from the parietal plate of my skull, searing across the occipital, crackling in every vertebra, and down, ending only when it felt as though my toes would break from massive contracture, opened for me new vistas of cranial trauma.
How lovely.
As animal noises continued to tear unbidden from my throat and my lungs screamed for air, the Doctor merely 'tsked.' "Ah, well, considering the state you were in when you were brought to me by the Captain..." He trailed off, then concluded, "It may be stated that it is a miracle that you are alive, Engineer."
"Tell me," he patronized me in only the manner a graduate of Johns Hopkins can, "do you recall the events that led you to this point?" He tapped three times on the visor.
Tapped on it? Was it malfunctioning, and he thought he could get it to work by tapping on it? An amorphic-solid crystal holo-display can't be altered by tapping it. It required use of a frequency of ultrasound...
A frequency that I was certain was present in this room at this time. What? How did I know that?
Taking my shocked and probably slack-jawed silence for ignorance, he droned on condescendingly, "Shall I tell you?" And without pause for my compliance, "You were involved in an accident in hangar bay four..."
I didn't particularly like the way he said "accident."
He tapped on the visor once more, a sharp, clacking sound. Sheesh. One would think he'd trim his nails before an operation...
A vision flashed through my mind, bright, bright light, the doctor's face looming above with the olive-skinned assistant, Hideko, off to one side, her almost black eyes glittering in the relative dimness away from the operating lights hovering above me. Their faces were lit in blue from the ultrasound hepa-shields they wore on the collars of their surgical scrubs. There was blood-- my blood-- on the doctor's gloved hands.
The sound of the doctor's inane tapping on the visor wrenched me out of the fevered reverie. Hideko's sharp, clipped, heavily accented speech filtered in from the right, "Heart rate elevated. Adrenaline, Norepinephrine and Cortisol levels heightened."
I could see that from the visor's display on my side. I wasn't sure what the numbers meant, but they were above one hundred each, and even if the numbers were Sanskrit to me, I knew what my body felt like-- heart exploding in my chest, mind reeling, and that damned headache throbbing merrily away, like the doctor had implanted a miniature version of himself with a hacksaw into my skull, where he currently sawed away at my optic nerves.
I had missed what he'd said while Hideko blandly reported my hormonal shifts. "...the Captain gave me the directive to get you back on your feet, under your own power, by whatever means necessary. To that end, I was forced to make some... adjustments, due to the extensive neurological damage you suffered when the power grid you were performing maintenance upon blew up in your face."
He seemed... amused. I calmed. By dangerous degrees.
"I took the liberty, in the interest of returning you to duty, and perhaps making you less prone to accident,"
There was that word again, let slip like some slimy thing poured out of a beaker into a ether solution meant to neutralize it.
"and better able to successfully perform your given duties. Several implants, as you may or may not know, of my own design," he continued arrogantly, "are available upon my own discretion for use."
I was beginning to hate the very sound of his voice.
Hideko chirped in alarm, "Cortisol levels flatlining. Testosterone abnormally high, doctor."
He smiled thinly. "You're angry. I know."
Every time I'd ever seen Doctor Geertz, that phrase had come spewing from his mouth. He was certainly in love with 'knowing.'
He tapped on the visor again.
I snarled, "Will you fucking stop that?!"
I rubbed at my eyes.
He tapped again.
The readouts were different with my eyes closed. [.04 rads/ .39 sv/ RetShield 0.5/ ADT 55% cap./ Adrenal Boost: off] It seemed radiation levels were slightly high, and my eyes were adjusting to the light intensity. It also seemed that I had a readout for... what? Hormones?
I was mystified.
I opened my eyes, with the intention of asking the doctor, 'just what the fuck have you done to me,' and arguing with him over the legalities of performing unauthorized procedures... but I got the feeling that conversation had already happened.
He tapped again.
I opened my eyes slowly and saw not the azure I was expecting. Instead of the Hefler Module, the cerulean expanse above me was a clear sky, and the screen through which I viewed it was the canopy of the stasis pod. The biogeltin mucous membrane had all but dissolved, and though my heart rate and pulse were normal, the tingling I felt in my extremities as far up as my knees and elbows told me I could not yet move.
The rapping upon the canopy was not the doctor. It was a raven. A fleeting, elusive sense of familiarity crept over me and was gone. Had I read something once about 'as the thrush knocks?' No. It was a raven, and the feeling was more ironic than poetic to me. Why couldn't I remember? I read voraciously in my off time. What was the last thing I had read?
The Captain had ordered me sedated before placing me in the pod; and it was indeed a mercy. Putting Third Lead Engineer Ryan Alder in the access tubes was asking for disaster. As claustrophobic as I was, putting me in a stasis pod while aware was asking me to kill myself trying to batter my way out of shatterproof ceramic-crystal plating in a wild panic.
As it was, I was in fact awake, aware, and trapped inside just such a pod, unable to move or speak, with a reedy scream in my head for company.
