My heart lurches. I don’t fully understand what it means, but an ominous feeling creeps into the back of my mind. “Did you just say it’s an anti-radiation drug?”
“It was provided to us by this facility for use during our mission. We can’t survive in here without injecting ourselves with this drug. After all, every nook and cranny of this building is contaminated with radiation.”
“What?! Stop right there. What’s all this about radiation and contamination? What the hell kind of place is this?”
“A nuclear energy research facility equipped with a small-scale nuclear reactor for research purposes. And that very nuclear reactor just went through a meltdown about two hours ago.”
Meltdown. A nuclear reactor meltdown. This should be the first time I’m hearing that information, and yet, an icy chill snakes along my spine.
“Wh-What exactly does that entail?”
“A meltdown occurs when something causes the reactor core to melt, and the nuclear fuel leaches outside the containment chamber. It’s an extremely serious accident accompanied by frequent explosions and fires. As a result of the meltdown, radioactive materials are spreading from the leak and contaminating this entire facility with radiation.”
“How can that be?! This place doesn’t look contaminated to me—”
“Radiation is invisible to the naked eye and odorless. But it’s definitely here, eating away at our bodies as we speak,” she says clerically, retrieving a small device from her pocket. The palm-sized metallic black box is equipped with a green display with numbers on it. “This is a portable device for measuring radiation. The reading it’s currently showing is 1,108 mSv per hour. This number is equivalent to twenty million times the radiation dose in nature.”
“Twenty million…?!”
“Exposure to abnormally high levels of radiation causes serious negative effects to the human body. This includes vomiting, sores, organ failure, neurological disorders, genetic disorders, and brain cell damage.”
“…!” The lieutenant’s matter-of-fact explanation causes all the hair on my body to bristle with fear.
“All of these health problems can occur with exposure to 100 mSv and above. Meaning we are currently being exposed to extremely dangerous levels of radiation. This environment is so deadly we shouldn’t be able to set foot inside it under normal circumstances.”
“Are you screwing with me?! How can you remain so calm under these hellish circumstances?!”
“Calm down. Please let me finish my explanation,” she sharply tells me off, shutting me up. She continues her explanation with the drug in her hand. “Injecting AD offers almost one hundred percent protection against the effects of radiation exposure as long as you are in an area with low levels of contamination.”
“One hundred percent?!”
“This is a special drug containing medical-grade nanomachines that detoxify and discharge radiation sustained by the human body. Unfortunately, it only lasts for a mere sixty minutes, and we don’t have a large supply of it either.”
“Th-That doesn’t sound good…”
The drug sounds unrealistic, but seeing as she explained it with a straight face, it’s probably real. I feel the chilly tingle in my spine again.
“H-Hey, will we be okay without taking that shot too?”
“What? We only just injected ourselves with it—” The lieutenant stops midsentence and sharply inhales.
Moribe gasps and chimes in, “Oh yeah! When was the last time you gave yourself AD, Captain?!”
“N-No clue… Could be more than sixty minutes ago…”
“That’s bad! Very bad! You’d better inject yourself to be safe! You should have some AD on you!”
I frantically fish through my pockets and, sure enough, find a single ampoule. “Found it! How do you administer this stuff?!”
“It’s easy! All you’ve gotta do is pop off the lid and press the tip against a vein in your arm,” Moribe instructs me.
“L-Like this?” Urged on, I inject the ampoule. The fluid in the container enters my body with the prickling pain of a shot being administered. As the drug courses through me, I feel something fade from my mind.
What is this feeling? Is it the drug’s effect? Something doesn’t seem right, but at least I’m safe for now.
Yet administering the drug to myself doesn’t calm my nerves one bit. No way can I easily accept being dropped into this crazy situation, and without any memories at that.
“…Hey, can you answer me this? Who am I? What’s happening right now? And where’s the exit…?”
“The exit, you ask?” The lieutenant’s expression darkens. “We’ll take you to it now. I’ll explain the situation to you on the way there,” she says and starts walking.
Me, Moribe, and the girl trail behind her.