ch4: [ walter ]

With a sharp pain in his shoulder, Walter awoke to the metallic sound of a gnarled computer voice. Disoriented and confused, he found himself on his back on a cold floor; his face covered in a transparent goop. Grabbing his shoulder to sooth the pain, he slowly sat up and inspected the room that he was in. The blinking red lights that momentarily illuminated the space revealed a room filled with dials, buttons, levers, dim computer monitors, and other objects found in a control room. As his eyes tried focusing on the data displayed on the monitors, the computer voice came on again. "Temporal destination acquired... Please enter new orbital coordinates...", crackled the androgynous computer voice, through an unseen intercom system. The voice and message seemed very familiar to Walter, but he could not pinpoint them.

He awkwardly stood up and walked over to the monitors for a closer inspection. The three monitors, embedded into the metal walls of the room, all displayed what appeared to be orbital navigation graphics. "Temporal destination acquired... Please enter new orbital coordinate...” interrupted the computer voice, repeating the same message. However, this time, the message triggered a visual memory for Walter. In his minds eye, he saw a group of people wearing clean-suits, their eyes the only thing visible behind protective headgear. They appeared to be working around a machine of some sort. Before Walter could place the memory, the computer voice crackled in again, "New temporal coordinate recorded. Stand-by for hyper-jump." The monitors suddenly displayed a graphic of four transparent cubes, slowly sliding into each other. Walter also seemed to recognize this, but again could not place it in context. The computer voice came on again, "FA-291 shifting into hyper-fold, C3...C2... C1..."

The last thing that Walter perceived before he blacked out from the hyper-jump, was the sudden sensation of being immersed in salt water. With a silent rumble, the flight deck folded into itself, pinched space-time, and vanished.

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