Beneath the Surface Pt. 1

Posted on Sat Jun 13th, 2009 @ 6:00am by

726 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Behind the Mask of Familiarity
Location: Unknown
Timeline: Current

ON:

Kevin Larkin found himself wandering the halls of the USS Archimedes. He ought to have been happy, as he'd just received a promotion, but he couldn't even bring himself to crack a smile. The recent problems they faced had left him very uneasy, and he couldn't get the problem of the possible saboteur off of his mind. He had a strange intuition that the answer to all of this was staring him in the face, but he had no idea where this feeling was coming from.

As he was about to round a corner on Deck 4, he caught the faint sound of a voice calling out. He wasn't quite sure, but he thought the voice was familiar. Unsure of where it had come from or what had been said, however, Larkin paid it no mind and continued his walk. He wasn't consciously aware of it, but he was heading for the Arboretum.

At the door to the Arb, just before entering, the CSO heard the strange, whisper of voice a second time. "Kevin Larkin."

"Hello?" he called out down the corridor. A quick inspection showed that he was alone. Thoughts of saboteurs and assassination attempts fueled a knee-jerk nervous reaction.

"Kevin Larkin," this time the voice was clear, and the CSO practically jumped.

Realizing, finally, that someone must be trying to contact him on his communicator, Larkin sighed at his own paranoia, and tapped it. "Yes?"

His nervous thoughts returned when no one responded. "Computer, has anyone just tried to contact me through the ship's comm?"

"Negative."

Now that the voice had been silent for a few moments, Larkin began to wonder whether or not he'd actually heard it. He recalled the incident in the jeffires tube, where he had hallucinated being the subject of some sort of medical procedure, and shuddered. "Great, now I'm hearing things too."

He attempted to shrug off the experience, and stepped through the door to the Arboretum. Instead of finding a tranquil environment, filled with bright lights and beautiful foliage, the CSO found himself in a dark, narrow hallway. The walls were made of rusted metal; protruding bolts and weldings gave the hall the feeling of the ancient subterranean military facilities of which Kevin had seen many a hologram. The CSO didn't recognize the hall, but he had the strange feeling that he had been there before. The voice which had been calling his name came once again, an echo from farther down the corridor. Larkin had no idea what was going, but decided to follow the voice.

The hall continued for a few hundred meters past countless, identical doors. They each looked very thick and were spartan except for a very small bared window about three quarters of the way up. Several times, Larkin attempted to see what was inside one of the doors, but the room beyond was always dark. From the spacing of the doors, he concluded that the rooms were probably quite small.

At the end of the corrider, he found a large room. It was poorly lit; the only clearly visible object was a strange looking device in the center, which resembled some sort of stasis pod. As Larkin drew nearer, he saw the misshapen figure of a small person inside the pod. His curiosity peaked when he determined that the figure was actually growing before his eyes.

Before he could get a closer look, another voice drifted into the room from the way he had come. Abandoning the device, Larkin found that the dark corridor was now slightly more illuminated by light coming from the cracks around one of the previously lifeless doors.

"They turned it on?" he was shocked to hear his own voice coming from behind the door. "Whose DNA did they use?"

The first voice, the one which had called his name, responded with only one word. "Yours." For the first time since he'd heard it, the voice triggered the memory of a name: Elijah Wendess.

A flash of light blinded Larkin, and suddenly he found himself back on the Archimedes in an unidentifiable jeffires tube. He watched as his hand, under the control of someone else, reached forward with a hypospray and injected what would later be identified as a virus into one of the ship's bio-neural gel-packs.


To Be Continued:

Lt. Kevin Larkin
Chief Science Officer
USS Archimedes

 

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