Felix Pascal landed his one-person starship on the edge of the rainforest, unclipped himself from the seat, and rolled out onto the metal platform that loomed above the canopy. The platelets hovered up to his face, slim and silver, young and timeless.
“You have seventeen injuries,” one platelet chirped happily.
“Would you like medical assistance?” another asked. This was not really a question, but a polite way of saying Felix would soon be taken into the infirmary. He reached up from the wet metal floor, grabbing one by its thickened ridge, pulling himself up. The platelet turned in the air and struggled to free itself from his grip. Despite knowing his hand was fractured, the platelet shook him off.
“You will develop frostbite,” a third platelet said. As the words came from its speakermouth, the little thing slammed into Felix, nearly breaking another rib with the force it employed to make him let go. Felix coughed blood onto the grating as he fell. The platelets turned like a school of piranhas, sucking up what they could, preventing waste.
“You are deficient in iron.”
“Supplements are recommended. Shall we provide?”
“We will take you to the medical bay.”
“No,” Felix growled.
Later, Felix writhed in the hospital bed, dreaming of the platelets slamming into his head and chest. He dreamt of smashing one open: of tendrils thick and rubbery slithering out like guts from its braincase. He imagined the faces of his crew stitched into the hidden circuitry, repurposed in the endless loop that was utilitarian space. He imagined screaming. Nothing could be wasted, not even minds.
He shuddered awake in a cold sweat, shouting and thrashing and looking conspiratorially for a murder machine. A white platelet with a thick blue metal trim, outlined in gold, its body decorated to distinguish its medical expertise, floated glibly into the room, its pathetic arms outstretched from the four cardinal directions. It waved at him with these black metal bones, bowing. From this distance, in the regulated atmosphere of the hospital, Felix could see the energy aura from its hypercooled levitation plate. He grimaced, pulled himself forward, felt the icy embrace of a partially frozen quilt on his extremities.
“Your symptoms are unusual,” the platelet admitted. Felix raised a bushy eyebrow; felt for a moment that a human might be controlling the thing. They were never usually this honest.
“Your body temperature is unusually cold. You sustained no injuries from touching the hypercooled plates.”
“I only touched them for a moment,” Felix added.
“Your body was frozen solid against the landing pad,” the platelet explained. It showed Felix the footage. His skin, pale and blue, was welded to the metal landing pad with a thin layer of ice.
“That’s your hypercoolers!” he insisted. It wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. Ever since being brought back from near-death by his crew after being mauled by a Vashto; those hideous things which writhed beneath this Kairheti IV’s surface, captain Felix Pascal had been a walking icicle.
“I’m on Kairheti Three?” he asked.
“That is correct.”
“The Vashto. They remembered us.”
“More than absent-minded beasts,” the nurse said. She was stood in the doorway, keeping a safe distance from the sub-zero exhalations of the platelet machine. Felix smiled grimly, remembering the fate of his crew.
“Shit. So the scientists proved it. Those things are smart?”
“Some argue we should leave that planet. A peaceful existence now would be hard to uphold. That they might forget us by the time they start throwing spears. We should have analysed the biosphere more deeply. They have language, well, communication of their own.”
“We need to survive too,” Felix argued. The platelet moved to the foot of his bed, giving the nurse space to approach him.
“We can’t go back home, this has to be home,” Felix continued. The nurse stepped forward, hesitated, and moved back.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Your hair, your eyebrows. They’ve frozen.”
Felix sat up, demanded a mirror. One was brought to him.
“Hello Mister Pascal,” the mirror said.
“No diagnostics please Cass. Just mirror.”
“My apologies,” the mirror said.
Felix stared at his face. Under the nurse’s instructions he tried out different flavours of emotion. He recalled the rage when a fellow explorer’s laziness resulted in a delayed shipment to the colony. He remembered sadness when his first crewmate died in the Vashto nests on Kairheti IV. He sailed his mind back to the horror he felt when he first saw the beasts towering above him. They were something between millipedes and prawns, large enough and long enough to swallow a human whole if they wanted to, which they never did. They preferred smaller meals, and were adept at turning humans into those meals.
“I’m still recovering from the dreamscreen,” Felix grumbled. “My suit, it made me think I was in Scotland.”
“To protect you from traumatic stress,” the nurse said.
“Didn’t work,” Felix replied. The medical platelet waited by his bedside, perfect and silent.
“When you are angry the ice develops faster, more jagged crystals,” the platelet explained. A viewscreen on its back showed the nurse what the crystals looked like.
“And when you’re sad, it’s a slower thing,” the nurse added. “Felix, this is incredible. Your body is somehow lowering its surface temperature enough to form ice, without harming you. It makes no sense.”
She had by now invited in other doctors to observe. Felix was familiar with the atmosphere in the room. Within hours, or perhaps minutes, he would be quarantined and investigated by people in white hazmats. If he died, he would be dissected. They might not even wait for him to die. The pressure to investigate his paranormal abilities might be such that a nurse would be given the wrong drugs to administer, and Felix would become an easy patient, locked in a permanent coma.
An anxiety grew within him, and he tried to suppress it, not wanting anyone to see the jagged frost developing.
“I don’t want to be your vivisection,” he said.
“I can assure you, you are here to heal,” the nurse explained.
“I’m in another dreamscreen,” he said, unable to hold it. Between him and the nurses and doctors he saw flickering images of the Vashto beasts, all claws and legs. His head ached as he remembered the first attack, the wild cat that his suit’s dreamscreen superimposed over the alien beast, the vision it presented to him that barely covered the reality. How was it so easy to believe? How did he not see through it?
“How did I get here?” he asked, “And what happened to my crew?”
A senior looking doctor stepped forth from the crowd. His coat was red and gold, his face sharp and angular.
“Mister Pascal. You nearly died in that outpost on Kairheti IV. As you know your dreamscreen presented an illusory reality for you, for you to better perform in the field without panic getting in the way. That same technology was employed in the case of your crew.”
“Records indicate a previous conversation in which a Cass unit explained to mister Pascal that there were no deaths,” the platelet said sympathetically. “Those records now need amending.”
“I was getting to that,” the doctor said. “Felix, there have since been some deaths. Our total at present is twenty-one survivors, seven missing, twelve dead.”
Felix nodded solemnly. There were no words available to him.
“now need amending,” he echoed the platelet.
Frost grew on his eyelashes.
END
Bonus worldbuilding (for the fans)
Felix Pascal was in the second novel I ever wrote, in 2009. He reappeared years later in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? and his story is continued in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS?
The Platelets are one of the older aliens I’ve written, their first drafts originating around 2008. There is more to them that I will explore in other stories
Dreamscreen tech is not stuck in the WBTH universe, Stephanie finds it too, in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH series
Felix never used to have elemental powers, though there was one lady with electrical powers in the first novel I wrote as a teenager, who is in the same story world as Felix
I built a working remote controlled Vashto bug out of Lego in 2007, so this is probably the oldest alien bug I’ve written
The rest of this story is featured in WHO KILLED THE HUMANS? which I would love to relaunch pre-orders for right now, but I am still polishing it. When it’s ready, you’ll find out here first, because you’re subscribed to RealPhillipCarter.Substack.com.
Thanks for that, by the way.
