Author: 唇亡齿寒 / Lips Gone, Teeth Cold
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 87
When Joshua awoke again, he found himself lying in a transparent incubation tank, surrounded by a pale red liquid, with mechanical arms firmly holding him in place, rendering him immobile. Through the liquid, he saw that he seemed to be inside a laboratory filled with odd instruments. A white figure moved among the devices, continuously entering data into a computer.
Joshua tried to move but confirmed he couldn’t break free. However, his movement caught the attention of the white figure.
“You’re awake?” The voice that came through the tank and liquid had a strange tone, and then Joshua recognized that the white figure was Kester.
“What is this place?” Joshua asked urgently. “Why am I tied up here? What are you going to do?”
“Stop yelling, I’m starting the cryogenic sleep program.” Kester continued to manipulate the strange instruments. “This is the ‘Boccaccio’ spacecraft, originally prepared for myself…” he said, laughing dryly. “Though I knew I’d never need it, I still harbored the vain hope that I might escape on it when the end comes.”
Joshua didn’t understand a word he said.
“It’s now impossible to make the ‘Dante’ return, so I’m having you leave on this one,” Kester continued. “Its speed isn’t as fast as the ‘Dante’, but it won’t be too slow either. You might arrive at the colony a couple of hundred years after Giorgione and the others…”
“I’m not going anywhere!” Joshua shouted, his agitation causing the liquid around him to ripple. “I want to stay on Earth! I want to be with you!”
Kester turned around and approached the tank. “Stop being foolish, Joshua.” His brows were furrowed, and his tone was stern. “You have no idea what those of us who remain will face. I don’t want you to head toward a hopeless future with us.” Placing a hand on the glass, he said, “You are young. You have a long journey ahead. You will meet many people, experience many things… You might even find someone you love and spend a long life with them—but it won’t be here, not on Earth.”
He withdrew his hand and stepped back. “This is farewell, my brother. We share the same blood, so live on for both of us.”
He turned back to his instruments. One by one, the lights overhead went out, until only a solitary light shone on Kester. The cryogenic sleep program had been initiated, and once Joshua fell asleep, the Boccaccio would rise and fly towards the boundless space with the last remnants of Earth.
Then, the last light went out. Joshua’s world plunged into darkness.
After that, Joshua’s memories weren’t very clear. During the long space voyage, he was mostly in a state of sleep, not even dreaming, as the low temperatures stopped all brain cell activity. However, to prevent damage from prolonged cryosleep, the system periodically woke him. Each time, a mechanical female voice would recite the distance the spacecraft had traveled, and the time spent.
The first time he woke, the mechanical voice told him that two hundred thirty years had passed in the outside world, but for the spacecraft and its sole passenger, only a little over a month had passed. Just that fact was enough to drive Joshua to despair. While he slept, so much time had passed on the planet he could never return to, and Kester might have long since died. He couldn’t accept this reality. Desperate, he struggled to break free and command the spacecraft to return, but the mechanical arms still held him firmly. The mechanical voice informed him that his restraints would never be released unless the spacecraft landed.
Thus, the times he was awake became an eternal torment for Joshua. He could only stare into the nothingness of darkness, trying to recall the bright and joyful memories of his childhood. He sifted through old memories like a neurotic old man flipping through an old photo album, over and over again. Initially, those warm and beautiful memories made him sad and hurt, but after revisiting them too many times, the memories lost their warmth and became pale and tedious, haunting him like persistent ghosts or like ghastly hands dragging him into an inescapable mire.
The most detestable were the memories involving Kester. In the darkness, Joshua cursed his heartless and cruel brother time and again for putting him in this horrifying situation. Yet, he also missed Kester desperately, longing for his gentle smile and warm hands, his clear voice and bright eyes. In his lucid dreams, Joshua couldn’t tell whether he was still on Earth or adrift in space. Ultimately, waking became a nightmare, and the cryogenic sleep turned into his salvation.
He oscillated between heaven and hell so many times that he became numb, living like a zombie in the pallor of memories and the darkness of reality. Just when he thought this deepest torture would never end, the spacecraft landed.
At this point, only about a year had passed for him, but nearly two thousand years had elapsed in the outside world. The spacecraft landed on a planet called Benjamin, approximately in the outskirts of a city, an area filled with ancient ruins and overgrown with weeds and rubbish.
For the first time, the mechanical arms released him. The pale red cryogenic fluid drained away, the incubation tank opened, and the lights around him lit up. Joshua stepped out of the spacecraft, standing on the edge of the ruins, with a skewed black city visible in the distance, obscured by haze and smoke. After a long nightmare, he breathed air for the first time—though it was different from Earth’s—tainted, with a faintly sweet and fetid smell, like a mixture of blood and decay.
At that moment, Joshua truly felt bewildered. Kester had wanted him to go to the colony, to the future, but now that he was really there, what was he supposed to do? Joshua had no money (if currency was still used in this future world), and he couldn’t communicate with the locals (clearly, human language had evolved significantly over two thousand years). He had extensive medical knowledge but no idea how to use it to make a living. Kester hadn’t considered these things, and the spacecraft’s mechanical female voice certainly wouldn’t think about them, so Joshua had to figure out how to survive on his own.
At first, he struggled greatly, walking through the unfamiliar city. His ears were filled with alien languages, and surrounded by many machines he neither understood nor could operate. The city was like a collapsing mechanical giant, vast and complex, with crisscrossed streets and alleys that looked like tangled blood vessels, and what flowed within was undoubtedly dying, filthy blood. Fear told Joshua that he needed to learn to protect himself, especially on this hostile planet.
On his third day in this strange world, he managed to get a job washing dishes in a rundown restaurant by using gestures. Due to a lack of staff, he sometimes had to serve tables. The pay was low, barely enough to cover his daily expenses according to galactic standards. Joshua knew that earning money wasn’t his top priority; his main goal was to familiarize himself with this future world. He quickly learned the local language, although filled with slang and grammatical errors, it was undoubtedly the lingua franca of the colony. Language was the first step to integrating into society, Joshua reminded himself.
After mastering the language, he started to subtly inquire about the colony’s current state from his boss, colleagues, and customers. The restaurant’s patrons were mostly thugs and occasionally prostitutes and drug dealers looking for clients. They never discussed national affairs, endlessly babbling about which girl was hottest and how to deal with a certain ruffian in the neighboring block. Joshua realized that continuing to stay there was no longer beneficial for him. He planned to leave this isolated place for somewhere more connected to the outside world. If Kester was right, Giorgione and the others had already arrived at the colony, and he needed to find a way to contact them or at least locate their descendants.
First, he needed a significant amount of money. The restaurant’s wages weren’t enough to cover the costs of traveling, and he couldn’t risk using the spaceship parked on the outskirts (he definitely didn’t want to be labeled as an “ancient person from two thousand years ago” and end up in a museum). Soon, he found an opportunity to earn money.
He was taking the restaurant’s trash to the bins in the back alley when a man dressed in black suddenly appeared beside him. The man wore sunglasses and had his collar pulled up high, covering most of his face. The exposed skin was unnaturally pale.
“Hey, kid.” The man’s voice was hoarse and hissing, like a hissing viper. “Want to make some money?”
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