by J. Blanes
TEN
They reached the other end of the left, unexplored corridor. It was the same length as the one that had led them to Dylan’s hangar, but without a blocking wall at the end. The corridor opened into another big room at the end. It was not a hangar but a spacious, three-story hall. The left and front walls were similar to the other dull, featureless walls so familiar to them, but the right wall was different.
It was built like a weird building facade, three stories, with no windows. Each story had a single door that opened directly on the wall. To reach each level, a metallic staircase adjacent to the wall, with a landing at each level just in front of the doors, rose up covering the entire height of the wall. The staircase reminded them of the emergency fire escapes used on Earth building exteriors.
“OK then, which floor?” Dylan asked.
“Let’s start with the door on this level,” Keira proposed. “Albert’s going to have some trouble climbing that stair in his condition.” She was referring to the previous accident, when Albert had fallen from the ladder. They had already explained that part to Dylan.
“I don’t know,” Albert said. It was true that he was still hurting from the fall, but something bothered him even more. “Haven’t you noticed that the doors on the first and second levels are well illuminated and the one on this level isn’t?” Up until now, they had strictly followed the illuminated corridors, and Albert had a feeling that they should adhere to the same pattern in here. “Forget my accident. Let’s try a top-bottom approach,” he suggested finally, “and let’s explore this door only as a last resort.”
They agreed and climbed the stairs to the second floor, where they found a bedroom similar to the one they had left on the small ship, but four times as large and with more bunk beds. It was all déjà vu, and Keira immediately had a hunch. “I bet the kitchen is on the second floor.”
As she predicted, they found the kitchen on the second floor. Again, it was four times as large as the one of the small ship, with a big rectangular table for ten in the middle of the room. There were also ten chairs anchored to the floor around the table.
“It’s clear that the bathroom must be on the lower floor,” Dylan predicted this time, following the same reasoning as Keira. “We’ll need to explore it after all.”
The doorway on the lower floor was different from the others. Apart from the fact that the other side was completely in the dark, the doorway didn’t led directly into a room but into another, darker corridor. It was not inviting at all, and they went in reluctantly. Just a few yards in, it was so dark they could barely see anything.
“We need our helmets to see in here,” Keira said. “And by the way, I don’t think this corridor leads to any bathroom.”
“You’re right.” Albert had reached the same conclusion. “The other rooms were illuminated and easy to find. This corridor doesn’t feel right.”
“It’s creepy,” Dylan said, his voice trembling. “Let’s go back. I’m sure the bathroom is in another place.” They put his welcome suggestion into action with haste and got out of there with goose bumps on their skin.
Back in the bedroom, they searched for the bathroom without success. They went back to the kitchen and repeated the search, with the same disappointing result. If the bathroom was on those floors, they couldn’t find it.
“Don’t you really think they’re on that corridor, right?” Keira asked in disbelief, but nobody answered her, as going back to that place was not a pleasant thought.
“I’d rather pee on the floor than go back inside that corridor,” Dylan said firmly.
Keira had a more practical idea. “We can also use the bathroom on the small ship. It’s a long walk from here, and we need to go in pairs, as one of us must watch the door, but it’s better than going inside that corridor again.”
They spent the rest of the evening exchanging stories, playing some games, and having a late dinner, but the lack of a bathroom had started to get on their nerves already. It proved difficult to synchronize their need to go to the bathroom, and the walk was long and slow, especially with Albert.
“This ship isn’t moving, and nobody seems to care we’re here,” Keira complained after dinner. “It reinforces my opinion that we’re merely lab rats trapped for some sick experiment.”
“Yeah, my point of view exactly,” Dylan concurred. “We need to find a way out of here on our own, and to hell with them.”
Albert remained silent. He believed they were both wrong, but after his last conversation with Keira, he wasn’t in the mood for another discussion. And on top of that, his head still throbbed in pain.
“It’s past ten,” he said instead. “It’s strange. The lights shouldn’t be on by now.”
They all stared at the ceiling. “You’re right,” Keira said after glancing at her watch, which she normally wore under the suit but was now visible because she had freed her hands for dinner. “It’s almost fifteen past ten.”
“Are you kidding? It’s Daylight Saving Time now or what?” Dylan snapped. “It pisses me off when the rules change without notice. How are we going to be able to sleep with all these lights? And spend all night without a bathroom? What if one of us needs to go? We’ll have to wake each other up and go together to the other side of town just for a pee.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Albert said in a soothing tone, slightly moving his hands up and down as a sign for Dylan to calm down. “Maybe it’s just that this ship is programmed in a different way. Let’s wait a little bit more. I’m sure the lights will go out soon.”
The soon that Albert expected never came. After half an hour of waiting, the lights were as bright and intense as ever. Keira proposed searching for light switches, as the aliens could have set up this ship in a different way than its smaller counterpart. They put her proposal into practice, but as had happened with the bathroom, it was a fruitless search. Frustrated and exhausted, they finally gave up and gathered back in the kitchen.
“This is bullshit!” Dylan blurted out in anger, bashing the table with his hand.
“I didn’t expect this,” Albert confessed. “No bathroom, but water and food. Lights on, but beds for sleeping. It’s nonsense.”
“You hear, you green, big-headed bastards?” Dylan yelled at the top of his lungs. “Even your most ardent follower’s faith begins to falter!” He was referring to Albert.
“Come on, shut up!” Keira complained. “Nobody’s listening anyway.” She needed a bathroom and she needed rest, and Dylan’s outbursts only startled her and didn’t help at all. However, Dylan was too exasperated and ignored her complaints.
“Why don’t you turn off the lights, you mother…mother ship? Do you understand English? Turn…off…the…lights!” Just then, as if the ship had understood their needs, the lights went out.
“What the hell just happened?” Dylan asked openmouthed.
He was confused, but Keira and Albert made the connection at once. Albert smiled. “Ship, turn on the lights!” he shouted in a firm voice.
The lights returned, and they could see the surprise on Dylan’s face, still with his mouth open.
“You’re a genius,” Albert congratulated him as he patted Dylan’s shoulder.
“Am I?” Dylan asked, still not sure why. After pondering for a while, he realized what had just happened. “Oh! Of course I am!” he added after recalling his words just before the lights went out. “I knew this would happen,” he lied.
“Sure, whatever,” Keira said smiling at him. “But if you could make a bathroom, I’d bow to you.”
Those words helped to form an idea inside Dylan’s mind. “Really? You promise?” he asked her.
Keira looked at him in surprise, but she didn’t believe he could perform magic in there, so she promised.
Dylan winked at her. “Then prepare to bow because you’ll now see my true genius,” he said as he sto
rmed out of the kitchen and ran into the bedroom, followed by their intrigued friends.
Dylan waited for them before putting into practice his new theory. “Hey, you, mother ship!” he shouted when they arrived at the bedroom doorway. “Where are the bathrooms?”
To Albert and Keira’s complete astonishment, the lights went out, and a blue glowing line appeared on the floor in front of them, going straight to one of the bedroom walls, the only one without beds next to it. Then, the blue line ascended on the wall about four feet before splitting into a Y shape of two short lines about two feet apart from each other.
At first, Dylan frowned, confused. The line was not what he had expected, but after a moment of thought, he approached the wall resolutely and touched with his palms the two ends of the blue lines. The wall instantly slid open, revealing an empty chamber.
“Turn on the lights!” he ordered the ship. Then, he turned around to see his friends’ puzzled faces. It was their turn to have their mouths open, and he rejoiced at his completed revenge. Who would dare mock him now?
“How could you…?” Keira couldn’t find the right words; she was really impressed by Dylan, not to say extremely happy with her new bathroom.
“Remarkable,” Albert conceded. “You’ve outdone yourself this time.”
Dylan ignored him. He had another thing in mind. “Well, what about my bowing?” he demanded looking directly at Keira.
“Are you kidding?” She couldn’t believe her bad luck. When would she learn to keep her mouth shut?
“What? Are you retracting now? Are you saying your word is worth nothing?”
She knew she had no choice. “I bow to your genius,” she said as she bowed.
Dylan grinned, victorious, and announced that he had won the right to use the bathroom first. The others agreed and he went in. He told the ship to turn the lights on and close the door.
Then, a twisted idea occurred to Keira. She hesitated at first, but she couldn’t resist it. “Shower on!” she commanded the ship. “With cold water!”
Dylan’s scream from inside the bathroom was clearly heard by Albert and Keira and, with only brief interruptions, their laughter could still be heard half an hour later.
They all slept more than usual because of the dark that enveloped them. It wasn’t a perfect darkness because, as had happened on the small ship; the familiar blue glowing lights delineated all the wall perimeters at the base. For the past two weeks, they had grown used to being woken by the turning on of the lights each morning by the small ship, but this larger ship, operated by voice commands, kept the lights off until told otherwise, allowing them to sleep as long as their bodies needed.
Albert was the first to wake up, inadvertently making enough noise to wake the others, too. He went down to the kitchen, and the others joined him soon after.
“Ship, music on!” Dylan shouted as he entered the kitchen, instantly receiving an astonished look from the others.
“What? It was worth trying,” he said dismissively when ship didn’t play any music. Then, instead of touching the panel to get some food, he commanded the ship again. “Ship, I want scrambled eggs with bacon and hashbrowns.” The ship ignored him again.
“Perhaps you’re trying to get too much from the ship,” Albert told him.
“You’re right,” he said. “Ship, I only want scrambled eggs, forget the hashbrowns,” he said. The ship did nothing.
Albert shook his head. Dylan was a lost cause.
“As I said, it was worth trying,” Dylan said, smiling. Then, he repeated the order but on broader terms. “Ship, I want a nice breakfast.” This time, a group of small, cylinder-shaped meals appeared after a few seconds. “Well, it’s better than getting them one by one,” he said as he grabbed them and sat at the table.
“Now that we know how to turn the lights on, why don’t we resume our exploration of the dark corridor?” Albert proposed when they finished their breakfast. “It would be a good start for our search to get out of here.”
“I thought you wanted to wait for the aliens,” Keira said. She still remembered their last conversation about that topic.
Albert sat back. “I do, but you don’t, and besides, it could be very interesting.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Dylan agreed, eager to find a way out of there as soon as possible. “Maybe we can find the aliens, too. I want to tell them a thing or two.”
Ten minutes later, they stood in the doorway of the corridor, and Dylan commanded the ship to turn its lights on. To their delight, the ship complied. With the lights on, the corridor wasn’t so scary after all. It was narrow and long with several open doors on each side, like a hotel corridor, and with no outstanding features, as usual.
Dylan was the first to enter, followed by Keira and Albert in a single line. The first door to the right led to an empty room, and to their disappointment, so did all the other doors on the corridor. Why so many rooms with nothing inside? It baffled them.
“Not much of an interesting exploration,” Albert commented when they were almost at the end of the corridor without having found anything relevant. The others agreed with nods.
Albert was the first to reach the end of the corridor. It widened into a rectangular chamber, without doors, and something immediately caught his attention. The wall in front of him had six rectangular columns next to it, with some inscriptions on them. It was the first time the smooth-plain-dull-wall pattern was broken, and he was so thrilled that he almost burst with joy.
“Come here! Look!” he called excitedly at the others.
Keira and Dylan rushed to his side. “What? What’s going on?” Dylan asked.
Albert showed them the inscriptions. They were squarely shaped, strange symbols grouped in small columns of five to twenty.
“They look like Chinese characters,” Dylan remarked.
“More like Korean ones, with all the O and the | and _,” Keira corrected him while showing him the symbols on the columns. She knew the Korean alphabet perfectly well, and even though she found the semblance remarkable, this was very different from it. “Their similarities are just a coincidence. These ones are meaningless, and Koreans don’t write from top to bottom like the Chinese,” she clarified just in case Dylan took her words by heart and started thinking they were inside some sort of Korean ship.
Albert gently touched the symbols from top to bottom. Each one of them glowed in blue for a few seconds after and, more intriguingly, changed into a completely different shape even though it was engraved onto the metal. Albert could feel with his fingers the edges of the shapes transforming into others.
“Wow!” Dylan exclaimed in surprise. “That’s cool!”
“The columns may be metallic, but they’re touch screens, too,” Albert remarked. “Well, touch-and-feel screens.”
“Any idea what they mean?” Keira asked, also touching the symbols.
Albert thought for a second. “Hmm, let me try something. Ship, open this door!” he shouted, without receiving any response from the ship.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Either these symbols are the key to opening these walls, or they tell what’s behind them. I think.”
“Maybe it’s a test, a puzzle we have to solve in order to get our freedom,” Keira suggested.
“Maybe,” Albert said, unconvinced. “I still think we’re not being tested at all. I think we’re here for some other reason.”
“Then, why these symbols now?” Keira didn’t believe these symbols were there by coincidence.
Albert pondered for a minute before answering. “This is an alien ship,” he said, “like the small one, there’s no doubt about that, but we’re in an area of the ship that doesn’t look alien at all. Doors, stairs, ladders, beds, chairs, even the breathable air and the proper gravity, all of it feels too human. For me it’s clear that they have transformed this area of thei
r ship into an area habitable for us humans, as they did with the small ship. Do you think they’ve changed all sections of this monumental ship? Obviously not, this is only a tiny area compared to the rest of it. It would be ridiculous to change the whole ship just for us. I think these columns are part of the real ship, the alien ship, the one they haven’t changed at all, and the alien part of the ship is behind these walls. It’s more than possible that we’re on the border between our allowed human area and the forbidden alien one.”
Keira and Dylan nodded in agreement. Albert’s assessment was full of logic, as usual, even though they couldn’t prove anything he said.
“All the more reason to decipher those symbols,” Keira insisted. “The way out of here could be behind these walls, on the alien part of the ship. They probably don’t expect us to reach that area, and we could catch them unawares. It’d be a good chance to escape.”
“Look.” Albert started to feel uneasy about having this kind of conversation with her again. “I don’t want to be the pessimist here, but there are lots of things to consider. There’s a reason why they made all these transformations for us in here. For example, what guarantees that there is the same gravity or the same breathable air behind these walls? Maybe they breathe poisonous air or their gravity is much greater than ours, maybe enough to crush us to death. And that’s just for starters.”
“What if you’re wrong?” she questioned him again, refusing to give up. “What if there’s another prepared area behind these walls with a ship for us to go home?”
“If that’s true, it would be a disturbing change of their behavior,” Albert replied, his patience almost gone. “It’s been relatively easy to find our way up until now. Why change the rules now? Why radically increase the difficulty of reaching an area? As I said to you before, if they wanted to study and test us, they could have done that much more easily by just watching our behavior on Earth.”
Albert’s argument felt unsettling because it rang like truth, a truth with a meaning Keira had not been able to grasp yet. “I can’t follow you,” she said. “What are you really trying to say? That there’s no hope for us?”