A Viable Candidate Ch. 01

On the coast of the Northern US, the summer sends everyone to the ocean shore. My sister yelled after me as she ran ahead, sending seagulls shrieking in her wake. I hurried, focusing on the forceful pounding of my feet against wet sand. I could hear our mom's voice faintly, telling us not to go far, but we were already miles away. My sister waded out until she was a speck, and then she was gone in what felt like an instant.

I looked down to see the seawater lapping at my toes. I wasn't moving. I was just waiting for the water to rise. I thought about my sister, now in Oklahoma. My mom, now dead. How nice it would be for this to be real again. But as I faded out of my dream, the only detail that didn't change was the sensation of liquid licking at my ankles.

I could feel the fluid sloshing around around my feet, which were spread apart. They rested on no surface; instead, I could feel more liquid under my soles. I opened my eyes slowly before narrowing them, as a bright light was coming from directly above me. I tried to stretch my arms in front of me, only to feel them be pulled back to their original pose raised out to either side. I kicked my feet and was met with the same predicament. I couldn't hear the liquid trickling in, and any ambient noise sounded muffled and faraway.

With a sting in the corners of my eyes, I forced my lids open and peered out into a frosted darkness. It looked like a series of lights were on in the distance, but everything looked fuzzy. I realized, with a turn of my head each direction, that the frosted appearance was coming from the glass tube I was in. I looked up to my hands and saw a small, smooth metal disc on each wrist about the size of a quarter. When I pulled my hand towards my head to wipe away a bead of sweat, this disc was what pulled my arm back into position.

I remembered the liquid and looked down. I noticed, first, that I'd grown a long beard that tickled my sternum when I tilted my head forward. That gave me the frightening thought that I didn't know how long I'd been... wherever I was. The second thing that I noticed was that I was entirely nude. My chest, muscular and round from training, was only covered by my coarse black fur. My stomach, more belly than abs, was bisected by a thick line of hair that led down to my unmanicured bush and flaccid cock. The foreskin hung over my head, the flesh there a tawny brown against my otherwise burlap complection.

Below, my thick legs stretched out to each side. My muscled calves were now being swallowed up by the slowly but steadily rising milky fluid that was pumped up from below. It was neither warm nor cool on my feet, and wiggling my toes around it felt less like water and more like seafoam.

I swallowed deeply, took a breath, and assessed the situation. My military training wouldn't go to waste, even if I was disoriented; I couldn't panic or scream or let anyone know I was conscious. My wrists and presumably my ankles were shackled with some sort of maglev technology. These devices, which were embedded seamlessly into my skin, did not look easy to remove. The liquid was at my kneecaps now, though it didn't seem to burn or sting. Though, it could be as innocuous as sugar syrup and I could still drown if it reaches my head. That needed to be avoided.

My first task: hope that whoever captured me wants me alive. It was a pretty safe assumption, given this would be an incredibly impractical way to kill the enemy. More likely I would be tortured for information, information that I will claim I don't have, no matter what they do to me. Still, the liquid was an unknown contaminant which has already covered over a third of my body, and it was rapidly approaching orifices. Plus, I didn't want to bet my life on an assumption.

I tried to press my arms into the sides of the tube. Whereas before it felt like my arm was sucked back into place, this felt like my arm being violently pushed back towards the axis of my cylindrical prison. I noted the soft blue rippling against the frosted surface of the tube, which I now believed to be something far more complex than just glass. Who would have this kind of resources at their disposal? India had been a pioneer of technology, but nothing I've seen in the war compared to this sophistication. The liquid climbed the tube, overtaking my cock and balls and then my waist.

As the blue waves faded from the surface of the material, I could see that to my left and above, there was another bright white light. This source was much closer and the glass did less to diffuse the light, so I could make out the rectangular silhouette of the same tube I was trapped in right beside me.

A pit formed in my stomach. I looked to the right and saw the same configuration repeated. As I gazed out in front of me at the series of diffuse light sources, I saw a dreaded pattern. I was not the only captive; I counted at least twenty lights stretched out in a wide circle. The neighboring tubes were the closest and when I looked very hard, I could see the distinctive warm flush of another person's skin. It seemed like many people were trapped here, nude, with me. I wondered why I had awoken and they hadn't, and as if on cue, I saw the fuzzy form of the man next to me squirm against the implanted restraints. If they were all waking up, that meant they were supposed to be conscious for whatever was happening next. The liquid was at my belly button.

I tried to get some propulsion in the liquid by kicking my feet, but the discs pulled me back down. I yelled out for help in every language that I knew, but seeing as I couldn't hear anyone else's cries as they visibly squirmed and jerked, I concluded that the chamber must be soundproof.

In a moment of weakness, I let myself believe that this might be the end for me. I thought of my life, which had been somewhat ordinary. I grew up in the third low-income district of New Haven. My mom had been from New York City, but had gotten out before the bombs hit. Our food was rationed, but there was enough of it. The US came out of the East Asian conflict with deep cultural wounds, but very few material ones.

That would all change when I turned 17 and India bombed a military base out in Nevada. I had a girlfriend and wanted to impress her by signing up to the draft one month after the news hit. The US had instituted a wide reaching draft in only four. We saw the war turn into an American meat grinder. I was lucky enough to be put on the second front, which got evacuation notice when the bombs hit. My best buddy Frankie wasn't so lucky.

I went home with a concussion and settled into a sort-of life. But, nothing was the same. I felt like I wasn't *doing* anything. That's when I enlisted in a special forces unit. It wasn't pleasant, but it was what I was used to. We had been investigating the crash site of a US missile, one which dropped out of the air and refused to detonate. It was the third of it's kind to do so, the other two not easily recoverable in the ocean.

The ocean.

I looked down and the froth had climbed to my throat. This was it. I took several full breaths in the hopes of surviving for longer. I tilted my head up to reach the last dregs of air when my eyes wondered past the halo of bright light that hung above me. In the middle, a tiny hole let me see further up the tube. Narrowing my eyes to block out the corona of light, I could just barely make out a...

Oh no.

The distinctive, flushed, bright pink hue of skin stared back at me, a mere 4 meters above. I screamed and screamed warning as the fluid rose to the corners of my mouth, daring to slosh inside. But the man above me was deeply unconscious, just as I must have been minutes ago. With horror, my eyes darted around and saw the same ring of bright lights replicated a layer above me, and above them another layer, and...

As the fluid finally overcame my nose and mouth, I shut my eyes tight. I thought about how many people were above me, unconscious and bound, waiting to be swallowed up by this slowly rising liquid. I thought about all of the people probably below me, already swallowed up. And finally, I thought about the man below me looking up in his final moments, screaming out a warning as I had. And how, to me, that probably just blended in with my dream, more shouts from my mother about not going too far out into the sea.