Ch 03.4

“Ugh…I don’t know why I’m asking now but… what the hell happened here?”

“Who knows.” Lilia said as she bravely walked across the room. “There are no signs of struggle. Maybe they starved to death?”

“Yeah, that I know. But… why?”

Eight days have passed since I woke up. We were back inside the ruins, in the room where we first met to be exact. It’s a good place to be in if you are a fan of skeletons. Lilia has been putting off the exploration for a while to watch over me but after much effort and a lot of pain I managed to convince her to go together.

The room didn't change much. Of course it didn't. Broken pods were lined up on one side, most of them broken. Shattered glass littered the floor, together with a bunch of tubes and cables that led to who knows where. Thin roots forced their way in from the ceiling while dark green moss grew on the walls. 

The most important part are the skeletons laying around. Whoever they were they died so long ago that the rot had already disappeared. 

My blond companion used one of her sci-fi looking tools to get a reading on the bones. There are eight distinct sets while the broken pods were ten. If I was in one of them doesn’t that mean eight have died while someone other than me survived?

“It says five of them have a built similar to modern day humans, but the rest are... different in some ways.” Lilia showed me a hologram with what I assume are the readings from the dead bodies. I obviously can’t read alien so that wasn’t really necessary. Not to mention that a closer look told me everything I needed to know.

“So three males and five females…” I murmured to myself. I came with that conclusion by examining their skeletal structure.

Ten humans stored on an uninhabited planet. Human experimentation? Why not on earth? Why not on a more civilized planet? It being illegal never stopped the people behind such things from lowering the costs, so why come all the way here?

“Dead humans… huh…”

A scene from my dreams flashes in front of me. A girl getting eaten by a lizard-man alien thing. The delight I felt as she screamed asking for help. She was suffering in front of me, but all I did was watch and laugh.

Not that I could do anything, I was as dead as her to begin with. But to laugh at a girl being eaten alive? I must’ve really hated her. The same can be said about these corpses. Should I feel sad or something right now? The only thing I feel is the same as when I played dark souls for the first time.

“This is the only room with the bones, right?”

“This is the last one I went into so… yes.” She said. “The others were empty…”

“Hmm….” I crossed my arms and closed my eyes trying to gather my thoughts.

“…y……he…hey…..re..o…key…..HEY!!”

Hearing a voice shouting I was suddenly brought back to reality.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

Huh? Close! She’s too close! What’s with the sudden change of attitude? Did she get over how I smelled and is now able to approach me? Is that why she’s able to bring her face so close to mine to the point where we can accidentally kiss?

Just kidding. Lilia still kept her distance, poking me with the bottom of her spear. It seems I spaced out for a moment and she got worried when I didn’t respond to her call.

“Yeah, I’m fine. No need to worry.”

“But you don’t look fine, you didn’t respond and I called you multiple times…”

Did I fell asleep while standing? Now that she said it I feel a little sluggish, and this emptiness…

“Lilia… sorry but… can I have one of those emergency rations from before?” The rumbling sound coming from my stomach echoed through the room. It has been little past three hours since we left the camp, and even though I ate my fill I still got hungry.

“You should have said something back then, I wouldn’t have minded you eating a bit more.” She said as she searched inside her bag.

“No, I was fine until just now. Don’t know where it came from.” It’s almost as if I ran out of energy.

“Anyway, you shouldn’t worry too much about food, you probably burn more energy units than I do.” Lilia handed me two of the small brown bars. “Don’t hold back, they are rather easy to make.”

“Sorry… thank you.”

Lilia had a daily routine ever since she got trapped on this planet. She would wake up at sunrise, go to a nearby source to get clean water before gathering some fruits. When she is done eating breakfast she would go around exploring. When the weather doesn’t allow it she would stay in the ship and do some reading.

Two days before we met she found the entrance to the ruins by accident. According to her this place is strange in many ways. Although clearly abandoned it still had a functioning barrier that, much like the one at the camp, keeps the animals and beasts from getting close. The illumination wasn’t in the best condition but still available.

Then there is me. She initially thought there would be something that could help her to escape from here, but in the end she only found one clueless human with memory loss.

Yeah, I continue to be a disappointment even for people I just met.

“Doesn’t seem like there is anything useful around here, should we go to the next floor?” I bit into the calorie bars as I asked.

This place was huge and searching each floor took time. That’s why instead of starting from scratch we came directly to the last place Lilia arrived to.

According to her the floors above contained living quarters. Most of the rooms were empty but some of them still had things like books and living necessities, which I will make sure to check at a later time. It made me think they evacuated this place in a hurry, but would they just leave us behind like that?

Lilia said that human males don’t exist anymore so five of them would be considered a big catch, right? They went through the trouble of preserving us for this long too so why abandon us like that?

Lilia walked to one of the pods. The same one I was pickled in.

“Actually, there is something here that made me somewhat curious.” Leaning forward she looks for something before pointing at the bottom of the cylinder “there.”

The thing she pointed out was a rusty metallic plate. Engraved on it was a single sentence.

“Original human sample 007?”

English letters and… numbers as well?

I checked the other pods, or what’s left of them. They all had the same sentence followed by two zeros then a number. The only one still intact was the sixth while the rest were shattered. Why am I so surprised by a bunch of letters and numbers? I already know that humans used to run this place, and I had my theories about how I got here.

“You know how to read this?” Lilia asked sounding a bit surprised.

Apparently she didn’t have a sci-fi device that could translate foreign languages. Weird. Shouldn’t that be the first thing you get when traveling outside your planet?

“Yes.” It’s easy to guess the meaning of that sentence as well. Human males are extinct so the only ones left are those from long ago. In fact this gives me a vague idea of what’s the purpose of this whole faculty.

“Good. Excellent, in fact. If you can read it then we might learn something here.” Positive thinking, at least one of us saw the bright side of this.

I on the other hand was to busy panicking over what I just hypothesized. I think a part of me wished it was aliens who messed with my body. Why? Because I don’t trust humans. Because I…

“Let’s go to the next floor, I have a bad feeling about this.” If humans are the ones who built this place, the same humans I know, I can rest assured that whatever we’re about to learn won’t be so pretty.