THis Has Happened Before, Probably

Posted on 09 Mar 2018 @ 8:19pm by Lieutenant Reginald Hawthorn

564 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Crossing Over
Location: Deck 19, Turbolift Shaft Kappa
Timeline: MD 35; 9.30

He looked down into the hatch of the small room and wondered if this was really the best course of action he could take.

He’d woken up a good hour or so ago, and was just beginning to get peeved at the notion that he knew what a hour was but not who he was. He was he, a big amorphous question mark. Who was he? How had he got here? Where was here? His mental book of questions was filling up. Much in the same way, the other fella in the small room below him was a question mark, albeit one lacking in the fine gift of consciousness. He wore the same clothing as he was, even had a similar number of gold buttons on his collar. There were just two glaring differences.

One: he, the one who was now stood on the top of the little room, which sat at the bottom of a tall shaft, was conscious.

Two: the unconscious one at the bottom of the little room didn't have his hands bound.

In all fairness, it had made getting to the hatch in the roof of the little room a challenge, but he was shockingly spry. Sure his knuckles hurt from getting the hatch open, but staying in a locked room with the body felt wrong. So up he’d gone, after an embarrassing amount of time trying to get the door open.

Door 1, Hatch 0. That brought with it a smidge of pride, and his lips ached until he was grinning. So brain memory gone, but not muscle memory. That probably explained why the metal manacles on his wrists were making him antsy.

But he was out of the little room! That was progress!...And now he was at the bottom of a tunnel. Or was it a pit? Lights were spaced at regular intervals up the sides, and weird metallic protrusions could be seen at odd intervals. What was of immediate utility was the ladder set into the wall. The ladder led up, whereas getting back into the little room with the unconscious man did nothing.

“Well...ain’t getting nothin’ done standing here,” he muttered and began to climb.

With his hands bound as they were, this was not a speedy endeavour. Nor was it the most steady and sec-

He fell. Not far, but enough to make the wind rush from his chest with a gasped cuss word that seemed to fall into the muscle memory category. He’d have laid on the curved metal roof of the room, had not a deep reverberating groan shuddered through the metal under him. That sound, of tormented metal and stress, did something to his gut that made him grimace. He slowly got back up, with only the smallest rattle of bending metal filling his ear. This noise vanished when he stepped back onto the ladder and took his weight off the roof of the little room.

“Oh...kay…” he said to himself, looking down, and then up into the darkness of the pit. “Well, I can say here, talk to myself. Or climb and...well reckon not knowing anything’ll make falling to my death a whole lot easier.”

He began to slowly climb because somewhere above there had to be an exit. Or, failing that, a fall from high up would get things over and done with.

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