Emergence

A pale, honey coloured cryolophosaurus, approximately the size of a juvenile specimen, slithered out of the growth chamber it had been incubating in and crashed against the ground in a wet heap. The impact was enough to rip the cord from his stomach and to knock the fluid from his lungs through his nose and mouth, and it stimulated him to breathe. His first real, conscious breath, though he was not yet fully aware of exactly what events had transpired.

He lay there for some time, taking slow, deep breaths. The remnants of the puddle of liquid that he lay in was thick and viscous, clinging to his partially-developed feathers. There had been a mechanical malfunction of some kind, a stutter in the machinery that had caused it to eject its contents and reset. The fluid had poured out onto the floor and drainage grate as the tube began to lift, leaving nothing left to support him. 

He felt weak, like his limbs were made of jelly and his head was full of fuzz. Nothing felt quite right.

His first attempt to move was more of an uncoordinated twitch. A claw, the tip of his tail, a jerk of his head. As he became more aware of his body, he managed to consciously move a limb, just a little. He pulled his arms a little closer, his claws dragging along the grate, then his legs. His legs were harder to manage. They were so long compared to his arms.

His head still felt heavy and the tip of his muzzle dragged along the ground, bumping across the bars of the grate as he tried to push himself onto his stomach. Even that was exhausting, and when he managed to get enough of a sense of himself to pull his head up from the ground and rest it against the back of his shoulders, he lay almost completely still. His eyes still were closed, his breath coming in quick and shallow pants. He did not try to move again until his heart slowed down.

Though blind to the world for now, he was still aware. The inside of his nose stung, but the scents of his surroundings had rapidly overpowered the fluid that had filled his nasal cavity not too long ago. One day he would learn to associate the dominant scents flooding his senses with metal, rust, and mildew. Somewhere there was water, and just faintly, the scent of earth, plants, and even the sweet scent of something flowering.

It was quiet in this still, dead place, but not silent. There was a constant, steady hum of machinery and electronics that buzzed in the air, the occasional hiss of valves releasing pressure from somewhere far away. Below him there was a quiet, infrequent drip as the sticky, thick liquid dripped off of the bars of the grate on which he had fallen, disappearing in the dark trough below to be carried somewhere else.

There was a distant, almost impercetible bubbling which sparked the tiniest bit of curiosity in him. It was familiar. A sound which he had a deep-rooted memory of, though he was not sure where it had come from. He had to find the strength to move before he could begin to consider searching for the source of the sound.

Moving around, though he did not yet realise it, would also warm him. He shivered lightly, cold even in this temperature-controlled environment, as his feathers began to dry. Instinctively he shook himself, which nearly cost him his balance and his roughly upright position that he had worked so hard to achieve.

The world was dim and blurry when he finally cracked his eyelids open. It did not take him very long to realise that it was not just his eyes. The environment that he had awoken to was… dark. The chamber that he had been unceremoniously dumped from was the only source of light in this part of the room, reflecting off of the bottom of other dusty metal and acrylic growth chambers. Empty growth chambers. They were bone dry and dark, either having emptied their contents long ago, or never having contained anything to begin with.

There was another light that he could just make out, past this row of empty chambers which were given a halo by the pale blue glow. The source of the humming, bubbling sound, maybe. He wanted to see.

The small cryo pushed himself up onto unsteady feet. Even his claws felt strange, as of yet unhardened and flimsy after spending so long in suspension.

Something caught his attention as he glanced around with this slightly more elevated look at his surroundings. There was something moving, apparently stuck in the chamber opposite to him which he had thought to be empty until this very moment. Small, golden, with a white marking accenting its face and a deeper gold stripe along its neck and flank, as well as several vertical stripes on its shoulders. It was the only other living thing here, it seemed, and he wanted to meet it.

Every movement he made was jerky and uncertain. Trying to take a step forward towards the other cryo was more like a stumble. He almost lost his balance and fell back to the ground, only catching himself when he wildly overcorrected and leaned against the metal base of the chamber he had come from. His legs quivered with the effort that it took to stay upright, but the next step he took was slightly more steady, and he managed to step towards the other cryo. The other seemed to be similarly struggling, its own movements just as unstable as his own. Every uncertain step that he took brought him closer to it and somehow it to him, though it seemed to be walking inside the darkened chamber. He also realised it was bigger than he first thought. It was about his height, almost exactly.

When he got close enough to the chamber to touch it, he reached out with his nose to sniff it. The other cryo apparently had the same idea, stretching its neck towards him until - the young cryo flinched when his nose hit cold, hard acrylic. He shook his head, disgruntled, an action which the cryo inside the chamber mirrored. It had apparently bumped into the acrylic, too.

Rather than risk his nose again he reached his claws up, but again he couldn’t seem to touch the other cryo, and it didn’t seem to be able to touch him no matter how it tried. It was trying, reaching for him with the same… the same clawed hand. The young cryo stood a little taller, and the other stood a little taller. He tilted his head, the other tilted its head in the same direction. Exactly the same, mirroring him. He clacked his teeth together, but he only heard one set of jaws close in the empty row of chambers - his own.

He sighed quietly. Not another. Just the one. Just him.

His curiosity and naïve nature, lead on by the freshness of his existence, quickly dispelled the disappointment he felt at being alone. He drew his claws back from the lifeless metal and acrylic container and wandered on wobbly legs down the empty row towards the junction where light spilled into the walkway.

It didn’t take long for his curiosity to be partially satisfied and intensified all at once. The hallway that the junction brought him into lead to more chambers just like his. Some of them were dark and lifeless, just like the ones from his hallway. Some of the ones that were dark had… things in them that he would never be able to understand, nor describe, but they smelled foul enough for him to want to avoid them.

Some, though, contained something else. Light shone inside the chambers, illuminating dinosaurs of all different sizes, shapes, and colours who still floated in their bizarre cradles, with sinuous cords traveling from their stomachs to the top of the chamber. Bubbles slowly drifted by, forcing their way through the viscous liquid to the top of the chamber. The longer he explored down this row of chambers, the more alike they seemed to become.

He eventually came to a stop in front of one of the chambers and straightened his posture again. Nothing. He lifted his claws - the one inside did not move with him. Strange. Was it not a reflection? It looked… 

There was a quiet unfamiliar sound, something like a cough or a huff. The young cryo turned abruptly and faced it with a look of surprise, his feathers reflexively puffing up to make him look bigger.

Quickly, though, he relaxed. For perhaps the first time in a long time, there was a joyful sound of life in the lab as the young cryo gave a happy chirp. These were not just reflections - he wasn’t even facing the tube. Standing before him, there were other dinosaurs, real ones, and like the others still in the growth chambers, they looked… almost just like him!