The hellmonkeys jape and jape and jape and chatter. I lie cold cocked, arms akimbo and spread eagled on the cold stone floor of anonymous cave, on an anonymous continent.
But I am alive, a fact my steadily ticking Alviron emphasises, and I am the first NMan to make it through.
I am on the other side, and I am alive. This is my dawning thought, my first consciously articulated thought. It's a sculpture of a thought, a work of modern art. Alive. Other side.
I made it.
I am instantly famous beyond measure. My children ten generations from me will sing my name.
People will make a living for the next few NYears just describing my deeds. Imagine that! Someone will be able to feed their family, put their kids through college, buy a house even, just by telling people about what I did today.
Maybe five generations from now someone will make a steady if not lucrative living from selling home-printed posters of some long-dead artist's impression of how I must look right here right now.
I try to guess from which perspective a professional artist (which I am surely not) would choose to paint me from - up there in the highest darkest recess? Where it would make me look small and defenceless, one NMan against the whole other side?
Or maybe from the ground's perspective, so even though I lie here (and I am starting to stir, my body restless already) the artist could be looking up at me, in turn showing my eyes looking up at the unknown. 'One man against infinity' could be the posters caption.
These thoughts flip through my mind quicksilverish, like the pages of a child's home drawn animation - each one somehow linked to the thought before, in their sequential entirety spelling out a picture of me, the Hero.
Then they are gone, and a new animation starts. How to survive. I know that as an NMan I can last a little longer on low O2 than my womb-bred relatives, but not indefinitely. It is only when I look for the machinery that should have come with me that I discover that only organic matter has come through to this side.
Perhaps some metaphysical firewall has filtered out all my tech as though it had the potential to infect this side. Indeed, this may exactly be what has happened. The true mechanics of transference,of how things get passed, are not understood. We know just enough to make this side take small items, but not really anything about why or how it happens. Or even what this other side really is. When I think of the project that brought me here I always picture a primitive man rubbing two matches together to make the wood smoke and graduate to flame. We have no idea if we are using the machines as they were designed to be used, we are just using them to do what we want them to do.
The idea of a filtering firewall doesn't sound so far fetched when I think about what else I know about this side.
Regardless of causes, the reality is that I have around 25 minutes to source some fresh O2. Or I die here, on this world, where when I die I stay that way.