by Erin Grey
I tugged at my other hand to let go, but all the voices were screaming and I couldn’t force the action. No, it wasn’t the voices; the sound Sandy had heard filled my head. The sunlight sharpened and blinded me. Then …
… Nothing.
2
Before
3
The bit where I become concerned
The first thing to hit my awareness was the susurrus—a hundred voices whispering, or leaves rustling in a strong wind that tricked you into thinking it was raining.
The sound faded into a regular beep. If I had remembered that my last conscious action was preparing for suicide, I may have been afraid that my worst nightmare had come true and I was lying in a hospital bed, strapped to life by transparent tubes.
But I didn’t remember that. In fact, nothing entered my mind except the steadily increasing sound of the beep that crowded out the whispering, rustling rush. An acrid smell, like burning metal mixed with ozone, assailed my nostrils. I grasped at the sensation with mental fingers, and thoughts coalesced. My eyes tried to open, but there was something sticky trapping me in the blackness. I pushed harder, primal panic kicking in, and my weighted eyelids shifted, pupils drowsily searching for focus.
My brain took a moment to put its feet up with a whiskey and ponder the possibility of a raise before grumpily allowing BIOS to process the scene before me.
>REBOOT COMPLETE
>The system shut down due to an unknown error. Are you sure you want to continue?
“OK,” came the faint voice of Jasper.
>Activating sensory input system_
>Chassis orientation: Horizontal
>Skin surface temperature: 32°C
>Supporting plane: Stable
And hard, I thought, shifting slightly against the chilled floor and willing my eyes to break through the blur so my stomach would stop churning. Slowly, very slowly, I turned my head to the right, the back of my skull throbbing with the movement. BIOS continued to take stock.
>Superior plane: Stable; Attributes: proximity=2000mm, shape=curved, substance=metal, colour=silver
>Inferior plane: Not visible
>Dexter plane: Stable; Attributes: proximity=3000mm, shape=curved, substance=metal, colour=silver; Detected: Indicator lights, colour=red, white, blue
>Sinister plane: Not visible
>Anterior plane: Not visible
“Ooh, remember that escape room game where we were supposed to be trapped in a Submarine that was sinking, and we needed to find a way to override the on-board computer and get it to rise?” asked Gwendolyn. “This room looks a bit like that.”
I wanted to scream at her that this was not the time to be thinking of games, but rather the time to be freaking out about the fact that nothing around me looked like the bridge I was just on.
“Remain calm and focus,” instructed Jasper. “Is there any information before us to indicate where we are?”
I scanned the metal wall again.
“Why are there all those blinking lights and switches and things?” asked Gwendolyn.
My stomach dropped the way it does in jerky elevators, and the fizz of impending panic spurred me into motion. I tried shifting my arms to push myself up, but the necessary synapses refused to transmit the message. Maybe I could look left. Again, I exerted my aching neck and saw another curved wall of metal and flashing lights that connected to the arched ceiling, symbols dotting the various controls.
BIOS put out another message.
>Detected: Lifeform; Attributes: proximity=2500mm, size=large, shape=humanoid
Someone was in the room with me. Adrenalin surged, and I got my elbows underneath me, pushing with my hands to lift my upper body from the metal floor.
There were screens. A lot of screens. They filled the space in front of me. Each one played something different: a black and white silent movie with intertitles, a children’s cartoon, a rugby game, an action movie, a soap opera I recognized as one my gran used to watch before she died fifteen years ago, miscellaneous news broadcasts, a Nigerian music video. But no sound. Except for the beeping.
Then I noticed the figure sitting in front of the screens, his back to me, cast in shadow.
“How do you know it’s a ‘he’?” asked Gwendolyn.
“The breadth and shape of the shoulders, as well as the thick neck, imply a masculine build,” answered Jasper.
I must have made a noise, because my companion jumped and twisted around in his chair, blinking into the gloom where I lay. He removed something from his ear, flicking aside a dark curl as he did so, and stood up, then crept cautiously towards me, shoulders hunched. When his eyes focused on me, he straightened, the apprehension apparent on his face. He held out his hand.
Which was green.
Gwendolyn screamed.
4
The bit where I realize I read too much sci-fi
It was the medication I’d been taking. It had to be. I’d finally overdosed, and, instead of killing me, it had sent me on the worst trip ever. My brain was throwing up whatever junk it could find in storage, which turned out to be all the sci-fi fantasy crap I had ever read or watched. None of this was real.
“Don’t like it,” Mitch moaned, crumbling. He assumed his favourite position, and I found myself rolling into a ball too, holding onto my knees and burying my head behind them. Maybe if I couldn’t see it, it would go away.
“You really have lost it, haven’t you?” lamented Sandy. “The friendly men with the comfortable white jacket are going to turn up any minute and cart you off to a sterile padded room. Maybe they’ll give us some really good drugs. The fun kind.”
“Your ludicrous speculations are not going to advance our cause,” scolded Jasper. “Can you not control yourself for five minutes?”
“Listen, Buster, if even her hallucinations are worried, we don’t stand a chance.”
Sandy was right. The very tall, very green man dressed in a loose black top and pants watched me the way one regards a Great Dane that might be good-natured and simply slobber all over you, but could just as easily snap your neck in two with a casual crunch. His steadily creasing brow told me that neither option was appealing to him.
Then he started speaking English.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
I blinked. How is one supposed to answer a hallucination that asks if you’re alright?
>Searching file: Appropriate responses_
>Searching…
>Searching…
>Attribute ‘Appropriate response’ not found.
“Just do what you always do when you’re uncomfortable and terrified,” said Sandy.
“Run away?”
“No, Mitch, you idiot. I was talking about humour. Use humour as a defence.”
“Oh, humour usually works!” said Gwendolyn. “Well, except for that one math test.”
“Ok, the longer you keep quiet, the more worried Green Guy looks,” said Sandy. “Time to improvise.”
“I don’t suppose you have any gin?” I asked.
“Gin?” my host repeated, baffled.
“You know, gin. As in gin and tonic.”
“He does not appear to be familiar with the drink,” said Jasper.
“Alcohol,” I said and made glass-tipping motions towards my mouth.
Green Man frowned. “I do not drink alcohol. But I can get you some water.”
“Thank you,” I said as a rectangular sachet was shoved into my hand. I examined it, searching for an opening.
“Here,” he said, reaching for the sachet and pulling away a tab that revealed a small slit.
The slurping sounds that ensued as I sucked against the vacuum keeping the sachet contents from spilling embarrassed Jasper and Gwendolyn no end. The water tasted of tin.
“Are you happy to continue on the floor?” asked the hallucination. “Or would you like a seat?”
BIOS pointed out the numbness in my nether regions.
“A seat would be nice,” I said.
He reached towards one of the walls and flicked a catch which allowed a small padded seat to flip down. The mossy green of his skin shifted to a shimmering reddish bronze as his arm moved through the lights, like two-toned, cross-threaded fabric.
“You know, once you get over the fact that he’s a hallucination, he’s actually quite hot,” mused Sandy. “Those are some gorgeous biceps right there. And I’ve always loved me some good fore—”
“Sandra!” hissed Jasper. “Must you behave like a guttersnipe?”
“I was going to say ‘forearm’ but clearly somebody has their mind in the gutter besides me, Mr. Pot.”
I hauled myself up, wincing at the stiffness and the feeling that I’d been hit by a truck, then stumbled across to the seat. My host watched me with all the coiled tension of a sniper. The water sachet kept me occupied until Sandy complained that nothing exciting had happened for a few minutes.
“What’s your name, Dream Boy?” I asked.
He regarded me with a raised eyebrow before answering quietly. “Zhian.”
“Pardon?”
“Zhian. Zhi-ung.” He emphasized the nasal ‘ng’. “I believe it’s the equivalent of ‘John’ in your language.”
“Zhi-ung,” I echoed, drawing out the ‘ng’. “Ok, cool name.”
“And you?”
“Jane. I don’t know what the equivalent is in your language. I don’t know what your language is. Or what you are, in fact. Are you an alien?”
His neck tensed, and he looked offended. The look faded as he seemed to consider my words. “I suppose to you I am an alien. That is, I wasn’t born on Earth. But from a DNA perspective, you and I are the same species.”
“Really?” I was quite amused now, wondering where my subconscious was going with this. “Care to explain?”
“Well, we share around 99.9% of the same DNA. It’s the genes that differ.”
“Ew, science,” said Sandy. “Yuck.”
I creased my forehead in case it helped me understand the technical stuff. “I thought DNA was genes.”
“No, not really,” said Zhian. “You could say that genes are a subset of DNA.”
“Oh. Then what do genes do that makes you different from me?”
“In a way, they dictate how your DNA will manifest. For example, genes direct how much of your father’s portion of your DNA and how much of your mother’s portion of your DNA will go into the construction of your nose. A rudimentary example, but you get the idea.”
I didn’t really. And Jasper was becoming increasingly bemused by the scientific turn of this imaginary conversation.
“I do not recall ever reading anything about DNA versus genes,” he said. “Perhaps we should look it up when you regain consciousness.”
“Who cares?” said Sandy. “This hallucination or whatever is getting booo-ring. Can’t you get Dream-Boy over there to at least take his top off?”
“Sandy!” Gwendolyn squealed and fell to giggling.
“Is that why you look human except for the different skin colour?” I asked Zhian, aka Dream Boy.
“Yes,” he said. “There are some internal differences too.” His face turned sheepish, as though he was about to suggest discussing my menstrual cycle. “Pardon me for mentioning it, but you don’t seem terribly surprised to be here.”
My face blanked. “Why would I be surprised? This is all in my head.”
His sheepish expression wandered off to greener pastures, only to be replaced by befuddlement. Poetically speaking, it really should have been a wolfish expression, but Zhian was not artistically aware enough to comply. “What do you mean, ‘all in your head’?”
“This.” I gestured vaguely at our surroundings. “It’s a dream. Or a hallucination. I can’t remember if I took those pills or—”
“This is not a dream, Jane.” His face crinkled in exasperation.
“I’m scared,” said Gwendolyn.
“For once I agree with Gwendolyn,” said Sandy. “We’ve had enough drug-induced nightmares to know that this scenario can very quickly go the pursued-by-a-blood-drenched-axe-murderer route.”
As if my subconscious had taken that thought as reverse psychology, Zhian stood up, looming over me in a way that had BIOS sounding the ‘abort mission and run’ alarm.
“It’s not a hallucination either,” Zhian said. “You are real, I am real, and this ship is real. The question is: How did you get here?”
“How did I …? I have no idea how I got here and … why am I arguing with a figment?”
“I’m not a figment,” he growled (sadly, still no wolfish expression). “Now, tell me how you got onto my ship.”
“I want to wake up now,” I whined to myself, as Mitch groaned and rocked.
Zhian grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “You are awake! What must I do to convince you?”
I began a muttered chant of crap, crap, crap, while BIOS began a system shutdown. Zhian stepped away from me and briskly rubbed his neck, talking to himself in a language I didn’t recognize.
I watched him with wide eyes, my body frozen like a duck playing dead in front of a fox. A bead of sweat trickled down my temple, and I raised a hand to wipe it away. And saw the blue pen line drawn across my wrist.
He turned back to me with the kind of purpose you see in people about to deliver long, censorious lectures. “You’re safe, Jane,” he began. “I won’t …”
His speech became a distant buzzing as BIOS registered a spike in cortisol and adrenaline and the voices fought a loud battle over the reality and absurdity of the situation.
“It can’t be real,” declared Sandy.
“The facts tell us that it is,” said Jasper.
Gwendolyn dithered. “It’s all so confusing!”
I knew, I knew, that walls don’t really close in on you, but the room got smaller and squeezed all the air out of my lungs.
“Feel queasy,” said Mitch.
I closed my eyes and raised a finger to interrupt Zhian. “I want to go home,” I said shakily. “Right now.”
“That’s impossible,” said Zhian with an emphatic shake of his head. “This ship is not equipped to pierce Earth’s atmosphere. Even if it was, we could not land without attracting the attention of your military, which, as you can imagine, would not end well for us.” He shrugged as though we’d been discussing me catching a ride to the nearest mall. “I was about to return home anyway because I’m nearly out of supplies. It won’t—”
“Home? Where is home?”
“My planet. Planet Eorthe.”
“Just a minute,” I murmured, rising to my feet unsteadily. My chest tightened, my heart rate accelerated to warp speed, and Mitch dragged us into a full-blown panic attack.
5
The bit that turns out to be real
I’m going to die I’m going to die I’m going to die
“Calm down, Jane,” said Jasper. “You are not having a heart attack, and you are not going to die.”
“Shut up, you idiot!” snapped Sandy. “You know saying that doesn’t make any difference. It just upsets her even more.”
Because knowing the pounding heart and constricted chest and ringing in my ears are only symptoms of an exaggerated stress response—and not signs of pulmonary collapse or myocardial infarction—do NOT make them go away.
“Jane?” said Zhian. “Are you alright?”
“Don’t like it,” moaned Mitch. “Run away.”
“We can’t, moron,” said Sandy. “There’s nowhere to run to.”
“Jane,” said Jasper. “Breathe.”
I can’t I can’t I can’t
“Jane!” Jasper switched from a soothing tone to a no-nonsense one. “Ground yourself.”
I looked at the floor and tried to feel its support beneath my feet. But it was metallic and shiny and only reminded me I was in a spaceship, and that didn’t make any sense at all.
“Jane?” said Zhian.
I clutched at my jeans, feeling the ridges of the se
ams, the undulating weave of the denim, the cold rivets next to the pockets. The vice on my lungs loosened a notch.
“Good,” said Jasper. “Now go to your happy place.”
I lay in a grassy courtyard with a white stinkwood tree above me and cerise roses growing beside the trunk. Lavender bushes buzzed with bees and scented the air while a cat snuggled against my cheek and purred. Weaver bird wives shouted at their mates that the nests they built didn’t pass muster.
Slowly, very slowly, my breathing evened out and the static cleared from my skull.
I opened my eyes. Zhian watched me, his cheeks taut and hollow, his body tensed to spring.
I took a deep breath and pushed it out with the toxic waste of the attack. “It’s okay,” I said, more to myself than to him. “I’ll be okay.”
A beeping sound pierced the air.
“Wait a moment,” said Zhian, and stomped over to the control panel where I’d first seen him. The miscellany of visuals disappeared, and a single view took over the screen: the kind of view I’d seen in numerous Star Trek episodes.
“We’re in space,” said Gwendolyn. “I’ve never been in space.”
“Space is too big,” said Mitch. “Makes my tummy churn.”
Before I could slip back into an endless downward spiral of crap crap crap damn damn damn, I got a cold, logical grip on my thoughts and the sides of my seat.
Jasper stepped in helpfully. “Yes, we are in space. You are not hallucinating, dreaming, or dead.”
“You mean ‘not dead yet’,” said Sandy.
“Will die,” said Mitch. “Want to die.”
Except I was shockingly interested in survival at that point.
“Odd for someone who decided suicide was the only option months ago,” said Jasper. “Perhaps it is the adrenaline.”
“Where … what …” It came out as a mumble. I took a breath, disentangled my tongue, and tried again. “Where exactly are we?”
Zhian threw a glance over his shoulder from his hunched position at the controls. “I’m not sure you’d understand if I told you. But Earth is behind us, and my home world is up ahead.”