Shireroth

Alexi woke up to the sound of a single heart beating.

It was dark, completely dark. The air was heavy and chilly, and the ground beneath her felt like rough, hard concrete...

... A single heart? She wiggled her fingers, then her toes. All extremities present, though her left hand - the only one of them still made of flesh - felt clammy and stiff, moving slowly in the cold. She raised a hand to her thorax and examined. Oh, hell. Best composite plastic on the market, they'd said. Her chestplate was heavily shot up, sporting several holes bigger than her fist. She felt around inside the chest cavity. Edges of torn metal, something that felt like organic material in places where it wasn't supposed to be, entire blood vessel bundles torn up.

All in all, she was lucky she had enough intact parts left to move.

Her memory of recent events was blank. Both of her memories. She still had a large chunk of her organic brain left, but like the rest of her body, it had been augmented with almost inconceivable technological marvels which, among other things, recorded all of her waking moments with far greater acuity than any human brain possibly could. These marvels now absolutely insisted that it was about 3 AM on the first of Viviantiana, 1 ASC. So much for the timer chip. Still, it was a hint. If the chip had gotten reset to zero time, it had probably happened three hours ago --

-- It was at at this moment that the smell penetrated her awareness. A violent, acrid stench of blood, feces, and stomach acid all mixed into one, and left to stew while slowly cooling for several hours inside her abdominal cavity. Alexi didn't often turn senses off, and here in the pitch black chilliness, she needed every sense she could have... but then again, her nose was still the original human make, there was no way it would be of any use in this sort of condition. She flipped a mental switch, and suppressive signals flooded her olfactory system. Until she'd choose to smell again, she could leave this distraction outside the bounds of her cognition.

She sat up. Immediately, her stomach plate gave out with a final agonized creak, and half of her small intestine spilled out into her lap. More blood vessels got severed and sprayed cold liquid for a fraction of a second before being automatically clamped shut upstream. Hell. She felt her pockets for the knife she usually carried, but couldn't find it. Well, she wasn't going to walk anywhere stumbling on intestines, and she wasn't going to be doing any digesting any time soon anyway, so she went to work: Feeling around, she found a particularly sharp edge that whatever had hit her had cut out of her exoskeleton, and with a sawing motion cut out as much of her intestine as she could. She could barely fit her left hand in for the sawing, and a stray wire of her support mesh kept cutting it until she had an open gash in its wrist.

While cutting off parts of herself she went through her memories, trying to figure out just how she'd ended up here, or where she even was.

Item one, last organic memory: She was on a boat heading to Musica from somewhere overseas. There was a tone of anxiety about it, flashes of some assailant or someone who was chasing her... the faces dissolved into monstrous forms and geometric shapes as she tried to recall them more clearly. With this little blood, at far below normal body temperature, her organic brain was barely able to process even basic cognition.

Item two, last memory in computer storage: A single moment, timestamped 13:45:12, Mo'lluk 9th, 4049 ASC. A recording of nothing but complete blackness. Beyond that, no memories of any events for several weeks, and nothing particularly suspect in any of the events she sampled.

Item three, the clock chip. This was what worried her the most. Not that it had been reset, that could happen simply if she'd been hit with an EMP, but that it hadn't updated. Its internal diagnostics all reported that there had been a reboot and everything was OK now. That meant she at least knew something about where she was: Somewhere out of reach of radio time signals. Most likely she was on a ship out on the seas - if it was daytime, the signals stations mightn't reach far enough even with skywave propagation.

She lifted herself up pushing on the cold, rough wall. It'd be a few hours before the blood - and thereby, water - loss would get to her. Plenty of time to find out where she is. Maybe to survive, somehow.