As Daniel ran toward his ship, the Afterthought seemed to grow larger and brighter.
In the dull glow of his ship's emergency lighting, he saw that – to his surprise – stacks of "coasters" and stacks of folded "t-shirts" lay everywhere.
He still wasn't 100 percent sure if he had guessed right, but the objects sure looked like t-shirts and coasters.
That's when Daniel decided something.
This place makes no sense, he thought, still rushing to his ship at full speed.
Though he didn't slow to examine them, he got a good sense of what the stacks looked like as they blurred past.
Each stack varied in height. Some stretched above into the darkness, and some stood only two or three inches tall.
The coaster stacks looked like white cylindrical columns, and the t-shirts stacks looked like blue rectangular blocks.
Every so often Daniel would come to a dense concentration of stacks, and would need to jump over the tiny ones and sprint around the taller ones.
And finally, after what felt like ages, he found himself 100 feet from the Afterthought. He slowed to a stop.
Thanks to his medicloud, he didn’t feel tired at all, even after 6.5 miles;
He sighed in frustration – The medicloud had also rid his bloodstream of alcohol. Again.
Daniel quickly rectified that, and then returned the flask to his pocket.
Cloud's getting better at harshing my buzz, Daniel thought, using some very old Earth slang.
He worried that soon his hourly eyeopener would have no more kick to it than water.
Forget that and focus! he thought. She needs you!
“Jeska?” he called quietly, wary of alerting the creature to his presence.
“Daniel!” he heard her scream again.
Got a lot of work done on Stuck over the weekend.
Will post another post later today.
Will back-fill missing posts.
Interesting thought: alcoholic drinks don't effect people because the cloud "fixes" the "problem."
Or, in this case, they get better and better at removing the alcohol from the blood stream over time because their programming determines the owner must be trying to kill himself.
I'm sure Daniel would disagree with their assessment.
Would he really?
For that matter, do medical clouds have a suicide override? There are moral implications either way.