The Defiant
Chapter One

When I woke up, it was black. The world wasn’t just dark, wasn’t just muted in color, it was black. I had never known darkness like this, and briefly, with the detached curiosity of a scientist, I wondered if perhaps I was blind. I didn’t know for certain. Actually, all I knew at the moment was that I was standing.

Not where I was, not how I had gotten there.

Not who I was.

I should have panicked, but I felt slow and sluggish, my brain sitting at the bottom of a deep pool of molasses that my thoughts had to swim through to reach it. My limbs felt very heavy; my veins filled with lead.

Sluggishly, ponderously, I lifted a hand to my shoulder and slowly extended it in front of me. It passed through the thick air for a moment, then pressed against a cold, smooth surface, like glass or metal.

As if the return of sensation had brought that of my rational brain as well, I finally began to feel fear. My breaths grew short and my heart raced as I lifted the other hand in front of me and began to feel the surface, which was a flat sheet of some kind, slightly curved at the sides, as tall as I was and not much wider.

My mind conjuring horror stories of live burials, I felt frantically along the other sides of the small space. The wall behind me was made of a curious spongy material that wrapped around my finger when I prodded it, and it wrapped around me to meet the glass-like surface.

The adrenaline coursing through my system made it easier to move, and I pushed myself off the back wall of the small space, searching with my hands for any kind of irregularity I could use to release myself from the tiny room.

My fingers found what my useless eyes could not, and along the edge where the hard wall met the soft, I felt what appeared to be a kind of hinge.

Quickly moving to the other side of the hard wall, which I had figured to be a door, I soon found a small rubber flap attached to the edge of the spongy wall. Breathing hard through stone lungs, I pulled the flap up, and underneath was a raised circle of plastic, like a button, which I immediately pressed.

There was a sound of suction releasing its grip, like a plug being pulled from a sink, and the glass wall hinged out slightly, away from me. A thin crack of bluish light knifed from the world beyond. I was so relieved to be able to see that I didn’t feel the burn of my eyes adjusting to the new illumination.

I threw my body weight against the glass door, and it swung outward, expelling me into a new room.

Instinctively turning away from the light, I looked with stinging eyes through my fingers at the place from which I’d just come. It was a small stasis pod, like the kind used for deep space missions or postmortem preservation experiments. It was tall and thin, the black glass door ajar to reveal the imprint of my body already fading from the foamy substance inside.

When my eyes had adjusted enough to lower my hand from them, I looked around the rest of the room, which was lit by a dome-shaped blue light shining from the center of the ceiling. The floor was cold, crafted from pieces of colored glass to form a mosaic, a wheel of some kind, with an unfamiliar planet patterned in the center and writing in a language I didn’t know scrolling around the outside. My pod stood in an alcove in one of the walls, of which there were eight, seven of these containing pods, closed glass doors like blank faces, and the final wall with a large metal door set into it.

Briefly regarding the other pods, I decided to investigate the door first instead, entranced by the possibility of escape.

A cursory inspection revealed a small, covered control panel imbedded in the wall beside the door, which was simply designed, two slabs of metal coming together to meet in the center, no ornamentation or handles.

Since there was no other way that I could see to open it, I assumed the door was locked, but decided to press on it for good measure, in case, like my pod, this room was meant as a temporary storage place for me, not to be stayed in.

As soon as I made contact with the metal, fire shot up and down my veins. My vision flickered and I fell to the floor, convulsing uncontrollably as the electricity ran through my body. Eventually the charge subsided, and I lay drained on the floor, shivering slightly. I tasted blood in my mouth from a bitten tongue.

I carefully pushed myself to a seated position with weak and trembly arms. My frazzled nerves tingled, and I felt oddly like the end of a badly frayed piece of yarn.

Still shaking a little, I wrapped my arms around myself and giggled a bit, uncontrollably, a shocking sound in the otherwise silent room. I held a twitching hand up to my face and watched the small muscles in my palm spasm and jump.

I was just beginning to return to normal when one of the pod doors cracked open.