"Shall we see how the sausage is made? Check for any injection site reaction..." Surgical tools clattered on metal trays. In the medical bay operating theater of the “fishbowl,” an unapologetically brutalist complex of connected structures enclosed by a gold-bonded aluminium trimmed geodesic dome on the Moon at the edge of Copernicus, a battery of biohazard insectoid robots assembled from bundled cables within pencil-thin multi armed skeletal frameworks woke the far ranging castaway from suspended animation looking none worse for wear. The medbots, discontinued by the manufacturer made computational bloops and bleeps as they attempted to extract protocol compliance samples of the captain’s plasma with sophisticated equipment, but discovered none could be drawn. He did not need generated oxygen to breathe, sleep, synthetic meat, macrobiotic pills to ingest, nor recycled water or Tang to drink, and had become impervious to pain.
"Look alive, Frosty. What is the last name of your favorite elementary teacher?" an officer at Command appeared on a glitchy terminal to welcome the isolated program asset rescued from the jaws of cold storage oblivion and just 237,000 miles from civilization.
The earth-bound misfit stared off pensively from a watchtower on the meteorite-scarred, non-luminous natural satellite during a lunar eclipse. In a panoramic ringside view of the occultation, continents on the dark side of the world sparkled in concert from the lights of hundreds of cities, flashes of lightning, erupting volcanoes, wildfires, bioluminescent tides, and dancing auroras.
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