Tom looked carefully at his surroundings. The inside of the cylinder seemed to be a rough cube about 25 feet in each dimension, suggesting that the walls -- apart from the one he had mysteriously fallen through -- were quite thick. The lights were definitely on, but had no obvious source. There was one display panel, with three characters, the lowest of which was changing quite rapidly, and the middle one of which was changing more slowly.
Most importantly for Tom's immediate needs, there was absolutely nothing which looked like a button, a handle, a lever, or a door. He needed to thumb a lift like -- what was his name...?
The white light snapped off and the display panel, white on black, was the only light left in the room. It began to shift as Tom watched it, and words appeared in English. They read, `Scan complete. Welcome, Tom.'
More concerning, the three moving characters reconfigured until they read left-to-right. They were numbers. As Tom watched they moved from 0:3:00 to 0:2:79 and continued to count down at a rate of one a second.
Tom had seen enough movies to know that when there's a countdown, and no means of escape, there'd better also be a button to press, or wires to cut, or some means of otherwise stopping the countdown. Especially when the countdown knows your name.
At 0:2:00 the words changed to DON'T PANIC.
Ah yes. Hitch-hiker's Guide. The only science fiction book he had introduced to Jamie. Normally it was the other way round.
At 0:1:40 the air in the room began to smell slightly of ozone as an electrical charge built up.
At 0:0:79 the words changed to SORRY, BASE 60 and the numbers to 0:1:20 again.
At 0:1:15 blue sparks began to move down the walls. Tom moved closer to the centre of the room, a primal instinct to delay whatever bad thing was going to happen.
At 0:1:00, as the clock ticked down to 0:0:59, the blue sparks began to arc two or three feet across the walls, floor and ceiling.
At 0:0:45, the sparks had become so frequent that the whole chamber was glowing blue. The energy continued to jump from one part of its surface to the other.
By 0:0:25 Tom's hair was standing on end as the energy crackled around him with an audible thrum. He noticed that he had an erection.
At 0:0:5 the energy stopped crackling, but the thrumming sound continued.
At 0:0:3 the countdown disappeared and silence fell, broken only by Tom's anxious exhalation. He hadn't realised he'd been holding his breath.
`Two,' he said to himself. He looked around.
One. Still no exits.
Zero.
In each vertex of the cube a blue sheen became visible. The thrumming began again, but with increasing intensity. As the pitch became higher, the waves of energy moved out of the corners of the room, moving along each face, pulsing like the surf breaking against a beach.
Tom raised his head and pulled his shoulders back. If this thing was going to kill him, he wasn't going to show it any fear.
He still had an erection. At least that meant he couldn't piss himself.
The walls, ceiling and floor were nearly entirely covered in blue electricity now. He realised that he was standing in the centre of the cube. He couldn't move. There wouldn't have been anywhere to go.
As the sound of the approaching waves reached an almost inaudible pitch and intensity, his feet were nearly engulfed.
And then, with a sound like water bursting through a dam, several things happened at once.
He felt the energy pulsating across the floor touching the sides of his feet.
He saw a bolt of blue lightning, visible in the ionised atmosphere, come from what he had come to think of as the front of the room and hit him in the centre of the chest, and felt another bolt hit him in the same place on the back.
The energy lapping at his feet shot up his legs, linking up with a bolt from the ceiling which hit him in the nape of his neck and running up and down his body like cool water.
His left and right hands were hit by energy emerging from the walls.
And nothing hurt, and he didn't seem to be dying, He felt just like he had when he'd been swimming in the lake.
He moved, slowly, and looked around, noting that the energy coming from the sides of the chamber continued to hit him in the same place. He moved his arms out to his sides and saw that now, the energy was pulsing over him, and through him, expanding from the seven entry points. He tried to turn around, but found that he still couldn't move his feet.
As the waves of blue energy engulfed him, they began to coalesce. The blue glow around his arms began to merge with that coming from his chest and back. Still the energy flowed into him, down from his chest into his stomach and up his legs, past his knees, creeping up his thighs.
The waves came together at the base of his cock. Every second they reached another two inches, and then fell back an inch. After five seconds, Tom's 6" cock, and his whole body, were fully covered in the blue energy. Immediately the pattern of the energy on the walls changed: straight lines emerged at the corners, met in the middle of each face and shot straight into Tom.
He hadn't touched his cock at all, but hell he hadn't had so much as a handjob for a week, so you can hardly blame him for starting to come. As he came, the energy from the restructuring device did its job. His skin became tougher than diamond, although still soft to the touch. His muscles, which weren't bad but had always disappointed him a little, thickened and toned. In place of his light two pack came a firm six pack, and his arms now bumped up and down even without being tensed. His lungs improved to cope with an even lower oxygen content than the transformation matrix had originally planned for and his stamina increased to superhuman levels. His sunburn was healed, and his tan subtly deepened, and spread. Apart from the muscles, which he could see, Tom had no idea how he knew all this.
And then his mind was opened up, and he began to sense the people around -- one person near the lake, a couple more along the road a mile away, and there were their emotions -- and their thoughts.
A voice in his head told him that everything would be ok.
The flow of energy into him stopped, but he continued to glow until, only a few seconds after he had begun his transformation, he stopped coming.
On the wall, where the countdown had been, a display appeared: Tom, 2:00:00. Another countdown.
He felt the ship in his mind.
`Hello,' he said.
<Hello, Tom.>
`I seem very calm.'
<Yes. Not like the last one.>
`The last one?'
`Red?'
`Succeed in what?'
<Others. You must gather three others.>
`To change?'
<Yes, to change. You have 10 kiloseconds.>
`What?'
`And then what?'
<And fix it when it doesn't.>
`I trust you. No idea why. How do I gather others?'
`Why have you called them?'
`How long?'
<26 teraseconds.>
`I don't know what that means.'
<Your time. Measured in seconds. Your units. Multiplied by kilo, mega, giga, tera. It is what your people do. I have learned.>
Oh I see. So 10 kiloseconds, that's nearly 3 hours. I can see that on the countdown. But 26 teraseconds...' Tom paused to work it out. That's 50,000 years. The last person who found you was 50,000 years ago?'
<Yes. I was so lonely. But the first was red. He burned the others. I could not calm him.>
`And I am blue?'
<Yes. Calm, life-giving, fluid. Not irrational and impetuous. Blue first. You must hurry.>
`What are you? No, that's obvious. You're a large cylinder buried in a lake. How long have you been here?'
<Physically, 34 petaseconds. But I, I with whom you are talking am only as old as your species. As old as consciousness. I had to keep up, to remain superior.> But Tom wasn't listening to that. He'd worked it out. This thing had been here nearly 70 million years.
`You came with people? Where are they?'
-- and the ship added to this an image of an exploration vehicle, long ago, being wiped out by an asteroid 600 miles to the south, the crew's remains splattered across the face of the earth. <You must prepare to go!> the ship said. <Go! And return. Bring them one at a time.>