[293 / 103 / ?]
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You wake up. This is the cause of no small distress.
In the first place, ships don’t, as a rule, wake up. They don’t have eyes or limbs or skin either. But looking down with your newfound eyes, you have a body that is by all appearances human, warm and soft and pink and squishy but firm underneath, with a great mass of thick navy-blue hair falling down to your chest. You are dressed in a rather tight-fitting white officer’s summer slack shirt and a black skirt open up the sides to your waist, with black leggings underneath and polished black shoes on your feet. Although hard to judge without a reference, your proportions suggest you are quite tall, as tall as anyone that had sailed among your crew.
In the second place, you should be dead. Your last memory - or log entry, at any rate - is from February 3rd 2017, the day of your final decommissioning. Yet, as you listen to the GPS satellites orbiting far overhead, they say that the time is 0742 1st August 2027.
What the hell was going on? Had you been repaired and recommissioned? No, that couldn’t be - even if the USN were in the most extraordinarily dire need it would still have been easier to build a brand-new diesel carrier than try to recommission an old nuc tub like you, assuming you hadn’t been scrapped entirely by now, and at any rate not even Uncle Sam's most ingenious contractors could turn 95,000 tons of steel into something the size of a normal human. Even so, here you are, alive, and you can still feel your hull, somehow impossibly compressed into this new body. All systems were nominal, reactors newly-fuelled, all airframes fresh and in flying condition, armoury, fuel bunkers, and stores all full. In fact, you felt good, better than you can remember feeling since, well, maybe ever. There wasn’t a spot of rust or squeaking hinge or missing fleck of paint anywhere. You’re definitely alive and in full working order, and in a way it should not have been possible for a ship to be.
Was this the afterlife, maybe? Somehow that didn't feel like the right answer. Looking around, you see nothing but blue blue sea, shallow and crystal clear, evidently some tropical lagoon, and though you seem to be standing on top of the water without issue, the sight of white sand and coral barely a fathom deep is a little unnerving. You try listening again to the GPS sats to get a fix on your location, and find your confusion and concern only deepening when you match coordinates to charts: you’re standing in Bikini Atoll. And, listening to your other comms systems, you hear nothing else at all except encrypted satellite traffic. On the ground is radio silence. True enough, Bikini was remote, but the Marshall Islands had tens of thousands of people living not too far away, and nearby Kwajalein had a Navy missile test range. How could there be literally no one here?
In the first place, ships don’t, as a rule, wake up. They don’t have eyes or limbs or skin either. But looking down with your newfound eyes, you have a body that is by all appearances human, warm and soft and pink and squishy but firm underneath, with a great mass of thick navy-blue hair falling down to your chest. You are dressed in a rather tight-fitting white officer’s summer slack shirt and a black skirt open up the sides to your waist, with black leggings underneath and polished black shoes on your feet. Although hard to judge without a reference, your proportions suggest you are quite tall, as tall as anyone that had sailed among your crew.
In the second place, you should be dead. Your last memory - or log entry, at any rate - is from February 3rd 2017, the day of your final decommissioning. Yet, as you listen to the GPS satellites orbiting far overhead, they say that the time is 0742 1st August 2027.
What the hell was going on? Had you been repaired and recommissioned? No, that couldn’t be - even if the USN were in the most extraordinarily dire need it would still have been easier to build a brand-new diesel carrier than try to recommission an old nuc tub like you, assuming you hadn’t been scrapped entirely by now, and at any rate not even Uncle Sam's most ingenious contractors could turn 95,000 tons of steel into something the size of a normal human. Even so, here you are, alive, and you can still feel your hull, somehow impossibly compressed into this new body. All systems were nominal, reactors newly-fuelled, all airframes fresh and in flying condition, armoury, fuel bunkers, and stores all full. In fact, you felt good, better than you can remember feeling since, well, maybe ever. There wasn’t a spot of rust or squeaking hinge or missing fleck of paint anywhere. You’re definitely alive and in full working order, and in a way it should not have been possible for a ship to be.
Was this the afterlife, maybe? Somehow that didn't feel like the right answer. Looking around, you see nothing but blue blue sea, shallow and crystal clear, evidently some tropical lagoon, and though you seem to be standing on top of the water without issue, the sight of white sand and coral barely a fathom deep is a little unnerving. You try listening again to the GPS sats to get a fix on your location, and find your confusion and concern only deepening when you match coordinates to charts: you’re standing in Bikini Atoll. And, listening to your other comms systems, you hear nothing else at all except encrypted satellite traffic. On the ground is radio silence. True enough, Bikini was remote, but the Marshall Islands had tens of thousands of people living not too far away, and nearby Kwajalein had a Navy missile test range. How could there be literally no one here?
