Excerpt: Ontological Mystery

Distantly, Nathan heard something, and fought his way slowly to consciousness. He woke in total darkness, curled tightly with his legs bent against his chest, his arms wrapped around them. Space was tight. He felt warm and wet and drowsy, but all temptation to linger evaporated as he realized that his mouth and nose were stuffed up by something, and he wasn’t breathing.

By raking his fingers across his face, his elbow scraping across something in the process, he managed to catch and pull out the ropy slimy stuff that had gotten into his mouth and nose, gagging and coughing as it slid out of his throat, wrapping it around his hand and wrist. It wasn’t really an improvement. There was air, but it was close and damp and very warm. Now there was a nasty taste in his mouth and nose. When he tried to straighten his neck and get his face away, he realized that he couldn’t.

Something was pressing on his body, keeping him from uncurling. He was in the fetal position in some kind of capsule with barely a few centimeters of space. Nathan felt a little prickle of claustrophobia and forced himself to go over the insides as best he could. They were wet, with some kind of membrane over a curved, porous surface. His own skin was absolutely covered in thick slime that puddled in the capsule with him, as warm as bathwater. He’d been in it long enough that his living and synthetic skin both were incredibly wrinkled.

Scraping some of the membrane away from the curved wall, he braced his right arm and pressed on the surface of the capsule with the cyber fingers, and felt it give, very slightly. It was a hard substance, but he could probably break through it. To see if the thing was anchored down, Nathan started to rock, then to throw himself as best he could against the sides. He was rewarded by the thing falling over and rolling some small distance, making him gasp in alarm. He ended up facing upwards. The slime, splattered around by this movement, started to ooze down, pooling as high as his ears.

No voices or alarms outside, and with a container like this sound should have carried. No point in waiting for a better chance to escape.

Bracing his feet and head and trying to force them apart resulted in a lot of straining and a promising cracking sound. After a few minutes of this he stopped to breathe heavily. He was getting somewhere. Very slowly of course, but he was an Imperial trooper. Imperials didn’t give up. Ever.