Cold. Tired. Nothing new, there - that was the natural flow of things when you wake up in Canadian February and haven't had your coffee yet. Didn't even bother opening her eyes - dreams were nice. There were highways there, warm and distant and bordered with scrubland. Distant explosions, green and silent on the horizon. Pleasantly unreal. Except...
Something didn't click, and it took her tired brain a moment to figure out what and why. Not so much a presence but an absence... and then it was there: the flu-like headaches and coughing that naturally followed the nicotine addict's night without cigarettes were missing. For the first time in a long time, she woke in perfect health - which was reason enough to open her eyes and be faced with the unfamiliarity of her surroundings.
Unfamiliar bed - long and grey and heaped with blankets, more like an operating table than any natural place of rest. Her comfortably cluttered room was replaced with white, plastic-looking walls, unbroken expanses of gleaming pale. No windows. Constant hum. Years of science fiction, which by all rational measures should still be stacked to head-height along the hidden skeleton of her bedside table, squeaked uncommon reason. So much like the hum of a jet engine, but the cold, the occasional jumps in gravity - she was in space.
And those were not dreams.
She shot up, kicking aside the covers as if they were made of jellyfish tentacles, reacting to the worry pregnant in her belly. Her surroundings were unfamiliar, but otherwise without note. If there was any break in the smooth white walls for window or door, it wasn't apparent - possibly fused to the rest of this structure. Of more immediate interest was her body, which was unbelievably, undeniably different.
The last thing she remembered: falling asleep with a book on her chest, glasses set beside her bedside ashtray, paper insects cavorting on the wall behind her. She was 26, addicted to cigarettes, thirty pounds overweight, and recovering from the flu. No mirrors, so she rubbed her face in its place, and found smoother skin at the neck and cheeks, looser beneath the eyelids. Her hair, formerly a scruffy blond bob, was now beyond shoulder length. She felt a ready, wiry electricity in her smooth limbs. She no longer needed glasses.
She was older than she remembered, and in the best shape she had ever been. And that was not humming she heard.
No sound at all, really - nothing penetrated the walls. Quiet as the grave. But the machinery embedded in the walls, lurking below her feet, maintaining whatever facility now housed her - it was like sound, like smell, some otherworld sense that she had only experienced before in distracting flashes, occasional tussles with the TSA, and the inability to wear a watch.
As far as she knew, her condition was a rare intrigue, if not anything particularly groundbreaking. Some folks had it, and she was one of them. Every individual emits a small electromagnetic field, a byproduct of the energy necessary to keep them alive and thinking; hers was simply stronger than most. She could feel when computers and televisions were switched on and off, broke every watch she had ever owned inside a two-day period, once caused an alarm clock to vomit its internal components, and drained the batteries of cellphones and personal entertainment equipment at a quicker rate than would seem normal. An odd adjunct to an odd life. And this was the same effect she had always sensed, but somehow more distinct. Distracting.
She rubbed her temples, massaging wakefulness. The skin there felt different, too. Thinner, tighter. She absolutely had to find a mirror.
At which point the lights went out. The air seemed clear, for the moment it took before the red emergency lighting flashed on. There WERE sounds now - footfalls outside, excited speech. Something was happening below her feet.
Padding forth in socks and space pajamas, she walked a slow perimeter of the room, running her fingers along the walls. If there was a door, there would be some tactile indication. Probably.
