The ship was shot, it was tearing apart and spun out of control... spiralling, it was about to crash.
Thelarians had chased her into orbit—maybe two or three ships. A kilometer above the ground, she ran for the exit. The hatch blasted open. She leapt.
At that time, Eve didn't know of her powers. She took the risk anyway.
The stolen Thelarian ship crashed into the river. She hit the river hundreds of meters away.
The ships hovered, scanning.
Swimming was a new experience, she fought to stay afloat. The currents dragged her towards a massive waterfall. She held her breath again, bracing for the impact.
When she regained consciousness, she was covered in mud and dirt a riverbank. Jungle surrounded her.
For days, she just wandered, avoiding the dangerous jungle critters and predatory creatures. She found a cave and took refuge.
Hunger was a new sensation. For two days, she just sat in the cave, trying to remember who she was. What she was.
Nothing. She could remember absolutely nothing.
Only fragments of the Thelarian lab she was escaping from. And a name: Dr. Kyle Seraphis.
By the third day, hunger became unbearable. She fashioned a crude spear and entered the woods to hunt.
She found a Rhyne-beast. She ran, astonished by her own speed, and drove the sharpened wood straight through its chest.
Eighty kilos of flesh, carried with ease. She was only a teenager, yet her strength defied reason.
She made fire. She just knew how to make it, not knowing who had put the knowledge there.Eating, she wondered—how was she able to fly that spaceship?
Something inside her neural brain was partially operating her.
She slept. Woke up in the middle of the night to scraping claws. A vulture-like predator. There was nowhere to run in the small cave.
She defended herself. The bird had teeth and huge claws. Her skin was slashed in multiple places. Then she got aggressive and picked up a stone, smashing its head violently.
Exhausted and injured, she curled against the wall, trembling until sleep claimed her.
When she woke up, the wounds were gone. She could see metallic tissues where her injuries should have been—embedded, covering her wounds. She didn't feel the pain she had felt the night before.
Two weeks later, she had become a master hunter. She made herself a bed from leaves and thatches.
At night, she whispered her name to the moon.
"Eve. I am Eve. You are a beautiful astral body floating in the sky."
Loneliness. Just to assure herself that she had a voice—that she could talk.
During her sleep, sometimes she had dreams and nightmares. In one dream, she saw an electronic phantom of a woman with electric blue eyes, just the same as hers—black hair and chipped electronic skin—walking to the mirror, trying to reach out her reflection.
Nightmares, of course. Suffering. Torture. Procedures. Too vague to remember.
Then dreams of an unknown planet lush with life. Dreams of a handsome man she had never seen—on a battlefield, at home, with a family. Dreams of the lab. Vague glimpses.
After waking up, she used to take a mental note of what she had seen during her sleep. Think about it for a little while. Then get up, not knowing what was next—except hunting for food.
She didn't care for clothing. There were so many things she was unaware of.
"Am I the girl in the lab?"
"Who is Dr. Kyle Seraphis?"
"Was I born? Was I made?"
"Am I human? Am I a machine?"
"A cybernetic hybrid?"
"Will they come looking for me? Have they forgotten about me? Will they keep chasing me?"
"Should I stay on this planet? Should I escape? Where would I go?"
"How old am I? Do I have a family? Was I abducted by those aliens? What's the name of my home planet?"
No answers. No clues.
Yet, she had the knowledge of things—trees, animals, creatures. Not names, but scientific knowledge, like data.
Terrains. Trajectories. How to make tools. How far she could jump, how many steps to take before she could successfully reach the other side of a chasm.
Sometimes she sat by the waterfall, bare skin damp with mist, hair tugged by the wind. Cross-legged, she listened: water, birds, wind—the voice of wild nature.
And in her meditation, she dived into the rich knowledge inside—the calculative power of her neural brain. Processing and reprocessing her memories... her dreams. What she knew about the planet. Moves she could pull off during the hunt. Just imagining them.
Amazingly, everything she visualized during meditation, she could apply during the hunt. She had made a spear. Bows and arrows. Nothing more she needed to protect and defend herself.
She thought of making a treehouse or a home. But looking at huge spaceships passing by in the sky...
"I can't be here. I have to explore the universe. I have to know more. I have to get out of this place. I will. In time."
Six months had passed. With nothing else, she had trained her body and mind—the only things she could experiment on—to their extremes.
Sometimes, she would jump from the mountain cliff and fall straight down, just to see if she could survive.
Sometimes she would deliberately carve her flesh, watching metallic tissue weave the wound shut. Over time, she noticed healing faster healing. Hourse became minutes.
Metallic fibres crawled out and instantly healed her ruptured arm.
She would dive into the river, hold her breath with a steady heart. She could submerge herself for almost half an hour. She had started from just two minutes.
Everything about her body was elusive. Evolving. Sometimes it just worked independently of her mind.
By the seventh month, she was prepared. Prepared to leave this planet. Every day, she watched the sky from her cave or from the mountain top.
At last, a tourist ship appeared—its passengers human-like, horned, with luminous eyes like blue screens.
They captured creatures, sealing them in crates.
She approached. Waited. Just when they were about to leave, she freed a trapped beast and occupied the box.
They lifted the box without looking inside, now being transported aboard the ship. She exhaled with relief when the ship lifted off.