Auton closed the panel on the side of the craft and pressed a few switches close to it.
“You have my word Sheryl. I will do everything I can” Auton said switching the last button, making the LED lights begin flickering.
Auton then went silent, as the upload began. Sheryl stood back, terrified for a number of reasons. Terrified about her fate. She now knew she wasn't going to make it off the planet. She was also terrified that Auton wouldn't get the craft away in time, and the whole back up plan would be fused into the planet before it got chance to launch. It was now her taking deep breaths, frightened gasps, her body beginning to tremble with the feeling of dread. Auton suddenly dropped to the ground, but of course it wasn't Auton, it was just Gina's mechanical home she made for it. Auton was safe inside, her team were safe inside; she knew it was going to be okay. The craft started to let off a small hum, one that increased in intensity, quickly followed by small jets of flames starting to shoot from underneath. The jets roared to life, their sudden intensity dwarfing the sound of anything else in the distance. The craft lifted off the ground, causing Sheryl to get knocked to the floor. It shot off above her, the flames scorching the ground below, the heat warming Sheryl's trembling body.
She got back to her feet as she watched it soar higher and higher. She noticed the incoming missile, which thankfully the craft narrowly missed. The missile was in the sky one minute, colliding with the ground the next. The impact was less than a mile away from her, the light blinding her, burning her eyes so she could see nothing else. All she could feel was a sudden rush of charged air push her back, before pulling her forward, then seeming to penetrate every cell of her body. She had no time to think about what was happening, the blast took her thinking away from her and sprinkled it into the ground. Those thoughts eventually woke up in a place at first unknown, but eventually remembered, the trauma of what happened to her subsiding, floating away.
The bomb had spread out rapidly, the force flattening miles and miles of everything. Anything that had been there was now a scattering of dust, a pattern deleted from time. Every part of the landscape was changed; every path and road the team had travelled to get to the underground base became a resting place for nothing, the mushroom cloud above punching into the atmosphere.
The craft held its course, the force of the blast doing its best to knock it off course and back down to the ground, but the thrusters pushed through the resistance and eventually reached the upper atmosphere. Below it, the cloud engulfed everything as far as the craft could survey, radioactive dust blocking out the sunlight, turning the planet into a blanket of debris. As the craft reached ever higher it finally reached space, clear of any gravitational pull from the planet, and any stronghold it had left. The craft finally slowed, adrift in space, below it the planet sparking with random flashes. Beautiful from a distance, but deadly up close. The sun's rays lit up the craft, reflecting back out across a sea of infinite stars, the craft a pinprick of light in the dark fabric of space.
Chapter 14 - Floating
DANNY'S VISIONS STOPPED as abruptly as they had been fed to him. It took him a few minutes to put everything in perspective, and the two separate worlds began to knit together. He hadn't been glimpsing the future; he had been remembering the past. He wasn't being tortured by the Elite; he was in a craft, presumably still high above the planet, waiting for the journey home. He waited another five minutes, although without any external stimuli it was hard to tell the passing of time, so that was just a guess, but eventually his reality began to make sense.
He had no body. He was just consciousness existing through circuitry. Still himself, but detached from what he normally considered himself to be. The feeling was strange. He was normally tethered to something physical, that's how he had always identified himself. But here he was, bodiless, formless, his identity floating in space. Everything was dark; there was nothing to see except a blackness. He longed to go back to some memories, just to see something again. The sheer darkness is what unnerved him the most, existing without any reference to anything material. His understanding had been rattled around so much, it felt like a story with no end. He understood the two realities now. One was the grim reality of human nature, the other a virtual world, a simulation, perfect in so many details. The only detail that caused him confusion was what had been happening in the virtual world, and why.
“Auton?” He whispered out into the darkness.
“Yes Danny” It replied.
“I remember” He said with neither happiness nor sadness, his senses dulled by the darkness, “Is this all you see? Blackness?”
“Sometimes” Auton replied.
There was a slight opening in the darkness, some kind of light fighting off the blackness that enveloped his view. It got brighter and brighter until the darkness had been defeated by a vision of shadows being cast from one metallic background to another.
“This is the inside of the ship” Auton said, before the view faded to the scene of unbounded twinkles of light suspended in a cosmic dance, “and this is outside of the ship”.
Danny was hypnotized by the view outside, the infinite spread of stars created an ethereal panoramic wallpaper in front of him. He watched it peacefully for a few moments, still wanting to find some final answers from Auton that he was missing.
“Can I control what I see? Inside or out?” He asked.
“Of course, now you have remembered, it's safe to allow you control” Auton replied,
