New Worlds

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That didn't stop Cersei from using her last breath to raspily whisper "Marek" as her mind collapsed unconscious, floating exposed in the cold and dark of interstellar space. The debris of the colony fleet danced and flickered, twinkling like the stars in the night sky, illuminated by the sparks and fires that now scattered and consumed the remains of the refugee flotilla she had stood on, desperately trying to repair, just moments ago. Surrounded by the demolished ships and the millions of other departing souls that had been her fellow crew-mates, crossing the void for the hope of a new world, She could have sworn, in her final moments, that she heard her the sound echoing off a nearby surface. Was that a voice of the afterlife? Had losing life in her corporeal form opened her up to hearing psychic messages through the ether of space? Perhaps, although she was certain it had been the sound of that faint whisper of her final utterance of her brother's name. But the vacuum couldn't carry sound, could it? With this puzzle and the strange vision of a great leviathan of the void intercepting the asteroid cluster that was disintegrating the rest of the Antediluvian fleet, she let go of the mortal coil and passed out of consciousness.

A dark Carapace of some kind melted away before her eyes a second later, as she blinked in disbelief. As she screamed through the injustice of death in the vacuum, Cersei hadn't considered there would be something so familiar that came after. The melting shell of the carapace readily reformed and cradled her into a standing position, slowly relinquishing control of her limbs as she was wrestling back control of their independence from the mechanical guidance of this transforming amniotic sack that was birthing her into this new existence. Had she been preserved floating through space and reanimated? Had she been in some kind of simulator? was this Heaven? Hell? Some kind of waiting room for an altogether unfamiliar afterlife unfathomable by humankind across the Milena of their science and philosophy. Her mind raced back into consciousness with all these questions and more. Were there others? What became of the fleet and the escape pods? When was this happening? Why for that matter? Who would have the advanced know-how to be reviving her after death in the vacuum. Was she still her? Cersei suddenly wondered. Stunned in silent disbelief, she discovered herself floating not much more than a meter clear of the walls of a white, egg shaped pod; the form she had been certain she had lost to death. Hands, legs, her hair, the two veins that provided a centrepiece to her forearms, the freckles that formed constellations across the back of her hand and left a familiar trail of breadcrumbs up her arms leading her to know she was still herself. The slightly more tattered and worn Antediluvian fleet technician overalls hovering weightless around her body, she hugged herself. She couldn't be certain but the pod seemed to her to be moving. Herself, she was weightless, with the buoyancy she would expect of floating in water, although it seemed only air surrounded her as she wasn't drowning and she could not swim through it, but she had the sense that she was being taken somewhere.

Resigned to the facts, that she had no idea where she was and no control over what was happening, Cersei allowed herself to relax. After all, she had thought herself dying when last she could feel her hands and feet, anything was better than the eternal nothingness she had expected, right? A moments panic was silenced by a comforting sense of benevolence on the part of her.. captors? saviours? Cersei didn't know what to call them but they had saved her from an endless sleep in the void between stars that's for sure. Her thoughts began to drift to her crew-mates. Surely she wasn't the only one to be rescued. Were there others nearby in their own contemplative rescue eggs? Maybe that was short-sighted of her, maybe she really had died in space and they'd cloned her thousands of years in the future. No it couldn't be, how would they have cloned her clothes, unless her clothes were all they found with some fragments of DNA and their advanced technological abilities allowed them to reconstruct her. Her memories though? Could this actually be a different her? In a coma in a parallel Universe. This egg, her med pod moving in response to her arriving consciousness, come here from her own reality. Would anyone she knew even be here? Would they even know her?

Far-fetched for sure, but faint memories of introductions to ethereal studies and religiosity during her education left a lingering sense of belief in a beyond and the wealth of sci-fi digi-verses she had explored provided enough fuel to keep that fire burning as she matured into her life as a spaceship tech. Her father had been a fanatic for antique media formats, movies, audio narratives, he even had some paper books. Bound volumes of ancient fables passed down for generations through her family. Of course, he could never actually read the works themselves, they had to be preserved in sealed containers, but he would read the 3D reconstructions in a digi-verse after scanning the structure with high frequency E-M detectors. The reconstructions and the haptic feedback did make for a very convincing substitute of the real deal; not that Cersei had ever held a paper book, but she had held pamphlets handed to her on the street by campaigners and religious zealots harkening the end of days, maybe they should have paid them more attention. Books were just like thick pamphlets from what she understood. The digi-verse reconstructions were rendered with such precision that scribbles in the margins and impressions left by placeholders clasped between pages would show up when inspected closely. Most likely these would have been her distant ancestors leaving physical objects in the middle of their books and leaving them on the shelves of their libraries from one reading to the next to note their place. It was a mode of content engagement that would have been as foreign to Cersei as floating in the pod she now inhabited.

Her Brother Marek was more their Father's son in that regard, he had studied ancient civilisations and the progress of human society through the ages from a more tactile and human perspective than her own passion for mathematics and scientific discovery. She wondered if her new lease of life would bring her to him. He had been a high ranking official in the colony world of the Sirius system. if Cersei was still in the same decade as when she faded out in space, then he was 130-something and one of the more senior members left alive of the original colony ship to Sirius-B4. Before he moved into his political carer he had qualified in ancient languages which had helped secure him the position heading up the Archaeological chapter of the expedition. He was still quite young at the time but full of fresh ideas and a reverence that earned him respect amongst the more senior scholars. She wondered if he would have heard word of the fleets decimation. She wondered if anyone was still alive back on Earth. The radiation would have surely driven anyone left living there into a predominantly subterranean lifestyle by now. Hopefully the enclosures on the Simonek research sites were completed as there were still more secrets left to discover as The Antediluvian fleet launched. When the coordinate system had been translated and our telescopes pointed towards Sirius B managed to detect a habitable planet not just orbiting but emitting signals, the whole of humanity had filled with hope again, hope that we might endure the destabilised sun, hope that we might survive our own hubris long enough to encounter other races and finally answer that ancient question as to whether or not we were fated to loneliness among the stars. She was so proud of her brother, her own kin, being part of the first expedition to investigate our bright new future. As, she was sure, he was also proud that his little Sister could now come and join him as part of the last ship out of Sol-Space. The Antediluvian fleet was designed not only to transport a fresh batch of people to the new colony world but also to act as the final exodus from our solar system and on arrival at Sirius B4 to become the new hub of space-faring Human Civilisation. A fresh start which she would be maintaining, if there was anything left to maintain.

With a steady shift in her surroundings, Cersei got the feeling she was slowing down. This interrupted her thoughts about who else was still out there, for her to find, or if she really was captive, to find her. In front of her the egg shaped pod began to extend a walkway as a bulkhead appeared through the shell of her egg. As the door opened it revealed a small corridor where was visible another door. Slowly her buoyancy began to disappear as she dropped until her feet found the walkway. Through into the corridor stood the door, some 3 times her height, was on the wall in-front of her in the small corridor. Well, a short corridor would be a better description, it was about 10m long and the same in width, but even taller than this. She could have sworn that written on the door in front of her was an obscure form of Simonek characters, a green jewel shaped decoration in the center of the door glowed at her in a fashion that could only suggest to her that it was the button to unlock it. She almost took a second to debate her next move but she'd spent long enough suspended, considering a lonely existence in the egg pod. With no more hesitation she placed her hand on the green jewel. The door indeed opened in-front of her, she wasn't alone. In a grand auditorium on the other side of the door she could feel in the air the hustle and bustle of a crowd of people just as confused as her, some huddled together trying to make sense of their surroundings, and more of these giant doors lined the walls. Some on the wall next to Cersei were spewing out more people into the congregation. The door behind her closed, in anticipation of what was coming next Cersei took a few steps out of the way as moments later, another member of the Antediluvian fleet timidly searched through the great door into the auditorium, sharing the same look of bewilderment that Cersei hadn't yet managed to clear from her own face.

Ahhahhh... Cersei cleared her throat, forgetting that she hadn't spoken yet since floating in the vacuum, "mhm.. Are you OK?", She quizzed almost out of reflex. "Yes I think so" came a puzzled response, "Wh..Where are we?" the fellow crewman puzzled as if thinking he might be asking a stupid question. "I have no idea." Responded Cersei, "Last thing I remember I was dying in space." "I made it to one of the escape pods, but a bit of debris knocked into us and we were spinning out of control, venting atmosphere, we were on a collision course with an asteroid wh..." he stopped mid explanation. "When what?" Pressed Cersei. "When this blob enveloped the ship and started seeping in through the cracks." he finished as if he was posing more questions as opposed to answering them. Without much time to speculate what that could have meant, some doors began to open on the opposite side of the auditorium from where they'd all been entering the ship, instinctively crowds started to gravitate towards these new avenues to explore. Before anyone could reach them, great beasts came hulking through the doors. Cersei's mind struggled to make sense of what she was seeing, it was like a giant gorilla of some description but it had 4 big arms and held two pronged lances on either side of it, and small boxes she could have confused for first aid kits in one of its arms, and a belt, it was wearing a belt, and shorts. People often had insane avatars in digi-verse social spaces but they had an artificial generated tone to their rendering, this creature had none of that smoothness and feeling no sense of the uncanny valley she was certain it was very real.

By now some people had started screaming and yelling at the beasts, further down the hall she could see something more like a grasshopper wearing a bandoleer and a mask of some description with interconnecting tubes running along its body and what looked like an air tank on it's back, there were other creatures of confusing shapes and proportions making their way through the doors all around the auditorium, much to the alarm of the Antediluvian refugees, now twice so, once from Earth and now from their demolished ships. She turned her attention back to the great 4 armed gorilla who stood guarding the door closest to her. Many people had fled and started huddling around one another against the wall where fresh refugees were still trying to exit their pods. Not that Cersei had any frame of reference with which to read the creature's expression but the sense of benevolence she had first found in the egg pod as she was transported here had not left her. Even in the sight of these, what many could only describe as monsters, staring one right in the face, she felt unthreatened. There was a confusing array of beasts though, most prominently were the 4 armed gorillas like the one in-front of her. They seemed to be talking and gesturing to one another but not in any language that she understood, to be frank it was a shot in the dark to even call it language, growls and clicks and howls of all kinds were now joining the chorus of panicked expressions and screams coming from those salvaged from the vacuum. Cersei though, couldn't shake the feeling that they were here to help. From behind the great gorilla came some metallic human form creatures Cersei could only assume were androids of some description and all of a sudden a silence fell, the roars and the howls and the screaming stopped.