GoKawiilThe suit is designed to keep you alive at all costs, so you barely feel a thing as the ship peels apart around you and you’re sucked out into the abyssal dark of space. You register that parts of the disintegrating ship smash into you on your way out, but the kinetic dampeners built into the suit are second to none. They register as nothing more than little nudges, like someone brushing past you in a crowded room. All around you, composites and alloys shear and shatter and fold into one another. But your flesh, soft and pierceable, is pressurized and safe.
You’ve been taught not to panic, but you can’t help yourself, eyes clamped shut, screaming at the suit to lock down and activate all possible safety measures. Once it confirms that you’re safe, you let yourself float, no sound apart from your breathing and the metronome of your heartbeat. Eventually, it slows. There’s the occasional jolt, barely registering, as debris knocks against you. It seems the ship hasn’t quite finished exploding; perhaps the splinter of rock that speared it ruptured the fuel tank as well, and what’s left is still busy tearing itself apart.
You feel a momentary sense of weight as you’re pushed outwards, away from the carcass of the ship. There’s a dull reddening of your vision even as your eyes remain tightly shut; light forcing its way through the thin barrier of your closed eyelids. A big explosion, then. By the time you can bring yourself to look, you’ve been flung far enough away that you can’t see any remnants of the ship, just the dome of stars pinpricking all around you.
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
There’s nothing to worry about. The suit is designed to keep you alive, and help will be coming. No one is left behind, even in the dark wilds between the stars. It might be a couple of days until a rescue skiff can get out here, but you’ll be fine, thanks to the new suit.
Everyone at the company had been excited when the new suits arrived, and you’d been desperate to be one of the first to try them out. Stealth-black, sleek, the design quiet and minimal and giving no hint of the frantic myriad functions blurring beneath the surface. You know, for example, that the nanomaterials and picomaterials can reshape themselves to perform virtually any necessary function, including the complete onboard recycling of all waste products. That had been a big selling point: negating the need to go to the bathroom on the long hauls between starweave points.
More importantly, the suit will already be metamorphosing its skin into a hyperefficient solar array. Even at this distance from the nearest star, it’ll be soaking up and converting stellar energy to, quite literally, inject into you. It’ll keep you fed until you’re picked up.
You go to move your arms and encounter resistance. You can’t bend them at the shoulder, elbow or wrist — the joints of the suit are mag-locked in place, and so, by definition, are yours.
“Unlock motor functions,” you say.
Bright red letters flash up on the inside of your helmet-glass. Insufficient solar input to maintain calorie equilibrium unless movement is fully restricted. A moment later, Please remain calm.
... continue reading