“Phoebe!”

Light stabbed into darkness and ripped open burning eyes. The instant nerves shook off the electric haze of shock and reoriented themselves to the sensations of having a body again, Phoebe could feel hands crawling all over her, pulling at her, touching, grabbing. Lips parted, sticky with foam and thickened saliva, teeth flashing in a frightened, frantic scream.

All at once, the hands tightened to fists, yanking, tearing, ripping at things embedded in her hair, her flesh– things that still felt like part of her body. She screamed louder, fought them, struggled against them, but they were stronger, and as soon as she felt herself being scooped out of her narrow cocoon, she went rigid, every muscle tense and hard.

Names, objects barely registered. The shattered lines and feeds of the neural harness hung over the edge of the simulator pod like the ripped inner shell of a soft egg. She could hear the scraping of the composite soles of her nanolastic boots being dragged across the bay flooring, and suddenly the hands seizing her uniform were no longer threatening, felt like the hands of some million-armed savior, a Hindu Christ with blue skin who danced the dance of Shiva in a neon lotus made of liquid sky. Flexing her own fingers weakly, she licked her lips, wondered briefly where she was, what the hell was going on.

“...still in shock” someone said. A hand flexed, waved and flapped bird-like in her eyes. Another voice, another distinctly different vibration. “...Mac?”

Phoebe opened her mouth to speak, but her tongue was too sluggish, couldn’t keep up with the thoughts, the words locked up in the vault of her mind. The hand returned, and she caught another snatch of speech, words from somewhere else, somewhen else. “...dammit Pheebs!”

“What...” She heard herself say, suddenly amazed that even some minute fragment of her vocabulary had managed to free itself from its fleshy prison. Somewhere, some other part of her had managed to gain control of her voice and was already speaking. Amazed, she watched from deep within herself, watched the entire world unfold around her from somewhere far beyond the bottoms of her distant eyes. “Where am... I? What happened?”

“There was a surge.” Someone said as they strapped something to her arm. “It overloaded everything, killed the lights, the simulators, the door. We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.”

Phoebe’s forehead wrinkled in frustration, hands tightened of their own accord. She felt her lips moving, fighting against gravity and air. “No.” She managed. “What happened?”

“Relax Phoebe.” Izzy. Eyes slid slowly right, found themselves lost in Izzy’s gaze, her impartial, slightly stern features oddly comforting. Someone squeezed her hand, and Phoebe felt the broken edges of a smile flickering across her face. Izzy was so pretty, so pretty. Sometimes Phoebe wished she had hair like Izzy’s, wished that her hair naturally grew like Izzy’s did so she couldn’t help being pretty in the same way too.

“Just relax.” Izzy said, and Phoebe nodded dumbly, still smiling.

“They’ve both got it bad.” Someone was saying. “I’ve never seen simulator shock like this before.”

“I thought there were systems in place to prevent this kind of thing.” Another voice. “Failsafes... bypass systems, something.”

“There is! It all wires directly into the brain, and the Navy designed the entire system to practically destroy itself before doing any kind of damage to its pilots. They built in a ton of automated safety switches that were supposed to take over in case of some kind of overload or powersurge or...”

Izzy turned back to look at something, someone Phoebe couldn’t see. “Any luck hailing a med team?”

“Comms are down. Everything’s down. Everything’s fried!” The other voice shot back, suddenly frantic. “For all I know, we’ll run out of fucking oxygen in fifteen minutes!”

“Then stop yelling!” Izzy shouted back. “Save some air for the rest of us!”

“The power systems on these starships are nanoregenerative.” Someone said– the voice sounded familiar– Tessa? “Even if it’s just this section of the ship that’s gone out, the system is designed to repair itself and keep critical systems running.” A pause. “I doubt it’ll be long before things start coming back online.”

“I hope you’re right.” Came the worried response. “The Captain keeps fading in and out of consciousness.”

“Phoebe too.” Izzy said, then looked back to meet Phoebe’s absent gaze, the slack-faced features of a woman lost beyond the periphery of her own mind. She sighed in quiet frustration, watching as Phoebe tried to speak, tried to move her lips, but only managed a tired lisp of sound before she sucked it all in on a gasp and a swallow, totally unaware of the tiny line of saliva threading from the corner of her numb lips.

“Jeez.” Izzy managed, then reached out and wiped the drool away with the corner of a sleeve. “If that shitty simulator turns you into a freaking vegetable, I swear I’ll kill the asshole who invented it.”

In the silence, Phoebe smiled. She couldn’t help it. In her mind, an asshole danced around its latest invention– a simulator that turned people into carrots and celery. The image of Izzy as a potato alone was enough to make her chuckle, gurgle and laugh. A grimace creased the edges of Izzy’s features, and she looked away again.

“God, I hope they get the power back on soon.”