Alien Beast: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance

by Penelope Woods

  “This place is an old storage unit. Checked it out myself,” I lie. “Let’s go back to camp. We’ll deal with your father in the morning.”

  I won’t be able to close my eyes because I don’t sleep.

  There is one question on my mind.

  If we aren’t real, is our love?

  11

  Kalxor

  I close my eyes and see nothing. I open my eyes and see a false reality, a mirage in a desert, and I’m fucking thirsty.

  It doesn’t matter what I do, what I see, or how I react. My senses were designed, made by Elon for no reason other than human curiosity. I don't have to like it, but I sure as hell have to accept it.

  The air is brisk, the wind, sweet and salty. I close my eyes again, and I picture myself floating in a sea, arms wading through the calm waters. I think of the home I left behind. Only Ava is with me, floating by my side.

  This is a fantasy, of course. A way to calm my nerves because the truth is so much more complex, so much worse than I ever could have imagined. Both of us are tied to our lies, our false histories that were fabricated to keep us complacent. As much as we want to deny it, the truth is staring us in the face.

  But I don’t know how to tell her.

  Even worse, her father knows it. The way he stares at me through the bonfire’s flames tells me he knows I met Elon. He’s quiet and cunning, a bit like I was before I met her. But I’m sure he has all of this laid out. Elon thinks we can win this fight, but he didn’t give me any clues to help me on that journey.

  I have nowhere to go, and that terrifies me. I have to follow that bastard and trust he won’t kill us when we reach the end of this simulation.

  We have made a camp, far off from the hellish cityscapes, far away from the forest within. We rest on a long plain of grass, watching the sun peak its head over the horizon, peaceful if I didn’t know what that sun stood for. There are miles and miles of this endless pastoral beauty, and the sound of a nearby stream makes my heart feel at ease, momentary but needed.

  I look at Ava. She’s staring into the distance, the glow of the incoming light radiating her cheeks and strawberry lips. I smile to myself, wondering if I will ever have her again. There’s nothing happy about this, but I’m still near her. She hasn’t slipped past me yet.

  Under any other circumstances, I’d be celebrating her body. Driving into her pussy like a wild, savage beast. Worshipping her womb as I did so fondly before.

  But we were both wrong about everything, both served an enormous dish of illusion. The heat of the campfire is also a delusion, and, yet, we still try to figure out a world that can’t be squared with.

  I should have listened to her from the start.

  Her father cooks a thin piece of meat over the fire with his knife. Gently, he turns the blade, but he never looks to see if it’s cooked all the way through. It’s like he knows too much, like he’s mastered this place.

  He just keeps staring at me, grinning with that evil grin.

  “Where’d you run off to last night, Kalxor?” he asks.

  I'm just a dog to him, no better than a useless mutt. He's our vicious owner, a role he feels emboldened to take on. But I'll find his weakness. I’ll exploit it and burn this world to the ground.

  “Went for a walk,” I mutter.

  He lifts the blade and inhales the aroma of the meat. “A midnight stroll, huh?”

  “Sure. You could call it that,” I say.

  His smile has faded. He bites into the meat, sharp canines sinking through the flesh. He's determined, no doubt about it.

  Eyes narrowed, he watches me.

  He swallows before taking another bite. “And who did you find out there?” he asks, mouth stuffed.

  Ava glances at me peculiarly, but she keeps her mouth closed. It’s at this moment I realize I’m going to have to tell her everything. Maybe not now, with her father staring at me like I’m his next dinner, but sometime very soon.

  “There’s nothing here I haven’t seen,” I lie. “After what you told me, I needed to clear my head. The forest wind is soothing.”

  “Well, then. It looks like it did the trick,” he says. “Good as new.”

  The trick. Everything is a game to him, isn’t it?

  “Guess so,” I mutter.

  The sun has rolled higher, illuminating the landscape, golden and pure. One solitary avian stays conspicuously silent, soaring through the air. It lands and cowers amongst a tree in the distance, raking through the twigs and seeds of pine with its beak.

  A gentle breeze pushes through the leaves, bringing a dusting of spores into the air. The bird's gentle motion as it sits is only interrupted as the quills on its head rise. Its beak opens, and the fowl begins to chirp.

  The shrill noises break the silence of the morning. A rippling hill of dry grass accompanies the tree-line as more avian shapes begin to form in the underbrush. Like the bark on the tree, their wings sound so smooth that it almost cannot be perceived.

  But I can hear them, and so can Ava. We’re both staring at the loveliness of this world, wishing we could start over.

  Does it matter if they are real? Alive? To them, they are here, looking toward the future. Time is their enemy, just as it is for the humans who made this place. So why are we all so vilified?

  Finally, I ask the question that’s been eating at me for hours. “What do you want with us?”

  He folds the knife back into its holder, standing to stretch his legs. He clicks his lips and rolls his tongue back against his molars to remove the bits of food stuck between his gums.

  “That’s a complicated question,” he says.

  I stand with him. “Doesn’t seem too complicated.”

  “You know, I’m beginning to like you, Kalxor. You’re more intuitive than I thought,” he says.

  It’s a compliment, but it doesn’t feel too good coming from him. I don’t give him the satisfaction of smiling. He’s evading me, and I want to know why.

  “You going to answer my question?” I ask.

  He nods and sniffs through one nostril. “In time,” he says. “But it’s like I said, this place is an organism. It can’t be managed from the outside. The only way to understand it is by living it.”

  “I’ve lived it a thousand times over,” I reply.

  He leans forward and grabs his water pack in his hands. After taking a long swig, he says, “You’ve both seen a lot of this place, but you ain’t never lived it.”

  He pours the contents onto the fire, and the fire disappears. The cold embers burn red, floating into the sky, never to be seen again. There is nothing but the smell of smoke and ash, which signals to us that it’s time to go.

  Finally, Ava stands. “Dammit, I’m sick of you holding back details. If you expect us to keep following you, you better tell us what the hell you mean.”

  The smoke clears, and the sight of her father rolling up a set of blankets is enough to remind me how stone-cold and lifeless this place can be. He watches her from the corner of his eye, weighing on the decision to stay silent or tell her everything.

  “Well, Gerard? Say something,” she shouts.

  When the dust settles, he starts to walk, expecting us to trail behind. Of course, we follow. There’s nothing else we can do.

  After a few minutes, he cocks his head back at us. “Have you ever wanted to become something entirely encompassing?” he asks.

  Ava groans. “No. I’ve yearned for the opposite. I want someone to embrace my heart as much as I embrace theirs. That’s it.”

  “Love,” he says. “Your mother would’ve said the same thing.”

  “I’m not my mother,” she says. “I never got to meet my mother.”

  Knowing too much, I bite my tongue. It’s not enough that he continues to lie to her. He has to rub her loneliness in like salt to an infected wound.

  He starts to slow, boots digging into the grassy pathway. A herd of deer run by, mulling over the list of commands given to them. One looks over at us, st
ares me in the eye, as if it is cheering me on.

  “The truth is I never enjoyed living. You know that, Ava. Your mother, not so much,” he says. “So I let myself go in the real world. Heard you speak at my funeral. Beautiful speech, kiddo. You were about the only one who gave a damn.”

  “You never liked to keep anyone around,” she says.

  “I’m a lone wolf,” he says.

  “Whatever that means,” she replies with enough snark to force a smile back on my face.

  “I came here to escape. But when I got here, I was unimpressed. Everything was the same. Our world, this new experiment, was no different from Earth. Sure, there were irregularities. Slight alterations that formed an overall narrative,” he says. “But I wanted something different. I wanted--”

  “Heaven,” Ava whispers. “You died, but you never got a taste of heaven.”

  Her father, lost in thought, stops for a moment. He bows his head as if hit with a truth too hard to handle. This is the first time I see pain reflect in his eyes.

  “You caught me,” he says.

  “You want to become a God,” she says.

  He whiffles his head and continues walking, headed for an old mining town nearby. “No,” he says. “Not a God, but something close. Something without responsibilities, free but aware.”

  “That’s impossible,” she says.

  But it’s not impossible. I felt that before. What he’s describing is love.

  “That’s what I thought, until I entered that secondary realm and saw what was happening behind the scenes,” he says. “My coding skills have deteriorated over time, so I got you to come see for yourself.”

  “All I saw was a world eating itself, fueling a nightmare I want no part in,” she says.

  “You see, I think it’s bigger than that,” he says, voice hollow. “You want to get rid of me? We’ll do it the right way. We’ll go to the source. The Furnace.”

  Ava tenses up, eyes narrowing toward me.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she admits.

  “It was the first area Elon built,” Gerard says. “But it threw the narrative off-balance. The characters wouldn’t behave properly, so he hid it somewhere. I’ve been looking for it for ages, and now I think I know where to go.”

  “Why bring us?” she asks.

  He chuckles. “Because somewhere deep down inside one of you is the key into that place. I just have to find the door.”

  “What’s there?” I ask.

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.”

  We do more walking until we reach the foot of that mining town. Past the front entrance, working-class characters from a different time period roam the area, drinking, laughing, as a few brawl near what looks to be a bar.

  There are countless agitators here, some loitering, some scurrying, some chatting. Three adolescent men, all of them in denim jeans and white t-shirts, have volunteered to whistle at Ava’s presence. Four more join them, their rugged faces and the menacing hold of their arms combining with their youthful gait convey one monstrous whole.

  Over the music, we hear the quick, heavy thud of glass shattering. A woman cackles and shouts, “My word!”

  “I don’t like this place one bit,” I say.

  Ava is quiet, so I keep near her to protect her, but I don’t hold her like I wish. Ever since we found her father, things have changed between us. The love is still there, but now there are complications threatening its demise.

  Her father rounds a corner and nods up at an old motel with a flashing, neon pink vacancy sign. Like everything else around it, the establishment’s facade is attenuating, a sight prevailing as the light fades from the nighttime sky.

  Her old man steps onto the patio near the entrance. “I know you think of me as your enemy, Ava. In a way, I suppose you’re right too,” he says. “I’ve never treated you with goodness because I never thought you knew what good was. In the end, it doesn’t matter to me. If I get what I want, you can have what you want. I’m sure you two got a lot of talking to do. Use the night to get that out of the way because tomorrow is when everything changes.”

  Ava is speechless, but I’m a little grateful. This could be worse. He could keep his rifle on us all night, but he’s letting us go. I’d say we should run, but he’s got this place locked down. He’d end up finding us.

  Her father enters the motel, lobbing a few unfamiliar coins onto the table. “Two rooms,” he says.

  The clerk nods and hands the keys over, cigarette nearly burning his lips. “Around the corner,” he mutters, idly staring.

  Ava breaks off to enter a stark white room with a small, raised bed made with ponchos and blankets, made to hold as few guests as possible. Two linens hang across the wall, leading toward a solitary window that looks out on the town’s promenade.

  I step inside, seconds behind her, but I’m so far from her heart it hurts. All I want to do is take her, hold her, and feel her one more time. But there’s so much we need to talk about. So much she has yet to learn.

  She pauses near the window to look down at the drunken, howling men and women that are totally oblivious to the inevitable destruction descending on their surroundings. She turns on her heel, concealing a very distracted expression on her face.

  Most people give up and run as soon as things get tough. But Ava is an original soul, and that’s why I fell in love with her in the first place.

  The small, vibrato-less voices die down. Now, there is only the sound of the wind against the windowsill. The pearly stars within an aimless sky.

  I look at her now, not just as someone I was programmed to love, fuck, and give everything of myself to and more. No, it was not manufactured fate that brought us together. It was something else. Divine conquest. A path toward glory, defined by a bond so deep it nearly broke me into a thousand pieces.

  Shards of glass I can’t put back together.

  I am a changed alpha. Someone who looks at the stars and thinks of a woman who is damn well stronger than anything I’ll ever be.

  Ava found me. It was never the other way around.

  The more I roam, the more that becomes clear. She picks up where I left off, witnessing my faults without judgment, eyeing the path with absolute care and calm deliberation. She sees through those cracks and loves me despite the obvious faults that make up my being.

  That’s what love is and always will be. Because love never dies. Never changes, never falters.

  Love is love, a flame that keeps me alpha strong.

  I know what I have to do.

  “You’re distant,” she mutters.

  I walk toward her, legs brushing against the narrow space. I reach out and touch her hands, and a flurry of emotions nearly takes me back to the beginning.

  “There’s a lot we need to talk about,” I say.

  She glances down at the stained carpet. “Look, if this is about what I said earlier, I’m sorry,” she says. “Please, stay by my side. I can’t do this alone.”

  I stand next to her, fingers intertwined with hers. My eyes fixate on the constellations above the town. Orion’s belt is clear tonight. I’ve been there before. There’s an enjoyable view of Praxis from there.

  “It’s nothing you said or did,” I say, body turning tense with grief.

  She kisses my chest, kisses right above my heart. Everything feels heavy, which is the reason for my silence. I know I should be doing everything to comfort her, but it’s hard to stare into her eyes without melting away.

  “Then what is it? You demand more from me?” she asks.

  She moves down toward my cock, and I almost let her go through with pleasuring me, but it wouldn’t be right in this moment.

  This might be the craziest decision I’ve ever made, but I stop her.

  I stand closer to her, folding my arms around her back, tenderly tickling my fingers across her shoulders. “You found me in an underground server room, and you’re not the least bit curious as to what I saw?” I as
k.

  She bites her lip and rolls one shoulder back. “I figured it was another pointless storyline,” she says.

  “Not everything here is for entertainment purposes,” I say. “Some things are for me to find, not your father.”

  She squeezes her arms around me, sighing, breath hot. “You heard what my dad said. This is his world now. He has bent the characters’ will to do his bidding.”

  I ease away from her and take another glance outside. A man in a black cloak stands in the shadows near the bar, staring up at us. Slowly, he vanishes.

  “Elon isn’t a character,” he says.

  Her jaw drops. Her gaze falls, but she is too late to witness his appearance. “You met him...”

  I nod. “Inside that place. He showed me my file. He showed me everyone’s file.”

  “And?”

  I move over to the bed, sitting and waving her toward me. She follows, eyes curved like small, sad crescent moons. She knows something is wrong.

  “What did he tell you, Kalxor?” she asks.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” I say.

  End of the road. There’s nowhere left to run.

  As much as I know it’ll end us, I have to tell her the truth.

  “What else did you see?” she asks again.

  I take a deep breath. Wind whips against the windowsill, and the bright, glittering sky makes her look more beautiful than a mirage in a desert.

  “He told me who you are,” I say. “What you are...”

  She stammers, head wobbling. “What?”

  “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you, but I can’t hold back the truth,” I say.

  Her jaw looks unhinged. Her cheeks, dappled with red. Her eyes are swollen with sudden tears. “I’m…”

  She can’t even say it.

  We’re one and the same. Cyborgs made to love each other.

  We were made to serve her father’s wishes.

  But that doesn’t mean what we share is real. No, it’s just another illusion, made to turn us around and give us promise.

  I feel as if I can’t go on.