Transhuman Mambo by Hernandez Alex

Author:Hernandez, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2013-10-13T07:00:00+00:00

Agloolik

The avalanche devoured Craftsman in seconds; the planet’s heavier gravity drove it into the rage-filled savagery of a mad dog. Its ear-splitting roar reverberated within his chest. The white sliced and scraped at his flesh like teeth as it rolled him down the nameless mountain toward the outpost. An icicle gouged one of his eyes. Craftsman felt tremendous pain, more pain than he had experienced in his entire life. He thought about shutting it off many times during his freezing, suffocating descent, but he willed himself to suffer it because it gave him valuable information about the damage he was sustaining and his ever-plummeting chances of survival.

His momentum slowed and then he eventually stopped, but he was pressed under an immense weight of packed snow and dirt. The violent, grinding pain of the roll had been replaced searing agony of the ice. What little flesh he had left, he could feel it becoming blue, then black, with frostbite until it finally cracked like sheets of glass. His one remaining eye froze into a perfectly round chunk of hail inset within his skull. He attempted to dig his way out; desperately clawing at the snow with steel fingers before it all hardened above him, but it was no use. He couldn’t really move and he was squandering precious energy.

Craftsman gave up and simply laid there, buried for hours. Days? He was alive, severely injured, but still thinking. And, with nothing else to do, he assessed his pointless existence. Nineteen years he’d lived on this wasteland—this frigid, crushing Super-Earth of a planet—and what did he have to show for it? A miserable little outpost huddled around the grounded ship and eight (possibly seven now) clueless robots rooting around in the snow.

A long and terrible time passed and then the total blackness of blind burial took on the darker hue of a deathlike sleep. He felt his consciousness shut down in parts, higher functions first, until there was nothing but the numb, claustrophobic existence of dumb matter. Not even fear or pain remained within Craftsman. He became another rock, one more chunk of ice.

Then, after what could have been eons locked in the permafrost, Craftsman became distantly aware of voices. He couldn’t make them out because they were very far away and the sound of his torso slowly grating against the depth hoar drowned out their meaning. Eventually, as his dormant mind awoke, other things became clearer to Craftsman on his grueling ascent; one was that he was in fact ascending through a narrow, perfectly cylindrical tunnel. His legs and arms jangled noisily underneath him, so his next realization was that they were broken.

But when he felt the light from above hit the photoreceptors embedded in his casing, something rushed up toward him from within—like an internal avalanche—and before he could properly analyze it, the sensation, the overpowering surge of anxiety, hope, relief, and elation hit him like a tsunami of frozen water.

Then hands began groping him. Deliciously warm, gloved hands tugged on him, roughly bringing him into the light and the biting, salty wind.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.