What happened yesterday paled in comparison to the headache Stoney is experiencing this morning. It feels like a jackhammer is set to maximum power and it’s pounding for hours in his head. His arms felt sore from finding a comfortable spot in his small corner in the ship. Besides the physical pain, he had this weird-ass dream that seemed to have lasted eternities. In it, he was building a machine inside the solar cruiser. He doesn’t know what the machine is nor how it works but he kept building on it without his precision tools. He built parts of it by levitating things with his hand and he powered it through electricity coming out of his body. Once done with the machine, everything went black.
Stoney woke up to a bed of steaming hot metal. He looked at the floor and realized, this wasn’t his bed. Rather, he slept in the engine room again. He knew he didn’t sleep here last night. Wait, did he? Maybe he had a little too much of cruiser booze that he forgot what happened a few hours before he slept. Stoney stood from his spot and looked at his watch.
“6000 hours”, too early for breakfast but not too late for some morning lifts in the ship gym. While his eyes were glued to his nav, something blocked Stoney’s path as he was walking. He fell down the grated floor and looked at the sudden appearance of a huge machine in the room.
“No,” Stoney said “It can’t be,”
It’s the machine from his dreams. The machine he never remembered building but here it was. The machine was chrome-colored from top to bottom. Sparks flew at the back while the machine whizzes silently. The machine is composed of two pods with a tinted window, blue on the left, and red on the right. In the middle of it was a console with two crude stencils of a human body divided into buttons corresponding to major parts of the body - head, torso, left and right arms, left and right legs, and the reproductive organ. All buttons are lit up in blinking red lights.
“What the hell,” Stoney muttered to himself as he traced his hands all over the strange machine. From the context clues given by the machine, the pods are reserved for two people. He doesn’t know what the buttons do but when he clicks one, the light stops blinking and it blinks back when he clicks it again. When he touches a pad, the glass barrier whizzes and opens. He tried getting inside but nothing happens. He guessed that it would only work if both pods have someone in them.