Close Encounters 04: of the 7th Kind

The stream starts out grainy. I squint at it for full five seconds before I realize that it's not grain -- it's people.

Aliens, in a bazaar-type market. Hundreds and hundreds of them, of every shape, color, race and size, hustling and bustling around in front of the fisheye lens, on foot, on feet, on hands and feet, on wings, on wheels of several types, carrying and pulling and hoisting wares -- some of them alive -- and slaves -- some of them dead -- around between them, left to right, front to back. The footage is visual only, but I can almost hear the clang and clamor of the scene, smell the mixture of odors created in such a crowd and feel the warm, humid stench of it against the skin of my face.

I've been alone with my two guys -- not counting that unfortunate incident with the seven other Dryth in between, that is -- and floating around this uninhabited corner of the universe on this relatively spacious ship for... weeks, or months? I have lost track of time... so just seeing that much life all at once is a mild shock to my system.

It also immediately becomes clear that my idea of finding Bane on camera was a relatively stupid one. Bane is tall and would stand out in any crowd (to me, anyway), but this crowd is so very large and chaotic. It would be like finding a needle in a needle-stack, except the needles are in a big vat that's constantly being stirred. And this is only one camera on one street of Tulun D'tel which, I now realize, must be sprawling.

Just before I turn back to Rune and ask him to switch the camera -- just for the hell of it, really, not because I really think there's any chance of spotting Bane -- my eyes snag on a figure in the video. I do an actual double take and my mouth falls open.

"That's..."

The figure walks along with a sort of rolled-up carpet on his shoulder, coming into and going out of focus within a beat and then vanishing back into the crowd.

"A human," I finish.

***

"That's a human." I actually smush my fingertip against the screen where he had just been like I could pin him down. The static electricity of it tingles coldly against my skin and the picture warps slightly.

"That was... a human guy... walking right there."

As I point and stare, there are two -- no, three! -- others popping up between all the aliens. I can make them out within a split second because of the familiar shape and gait. One here, another over there. One of them, by the black-haired, black-mustachio'd, brown-skinned looks of him of South-Asian origin, is wearing a friggin' adidas T-shirt. The bright white logo winks at me.

I feel like someone just slapped me upside the head. It's been more than three years since I've seen a human being outside of a mirror. I don't think I was this shocked when Bane opened his mouth and started speaking relatively accent-free fluent English to me.

There are other humans in this galaxy.

There are. Other humans. In. This. Galaxy.

"There are other humans in this galaxy!" I exclaim and turn around to Rune. "Did you see them?" I ask him. "Did y-?"

Rune is not looking at the screens. He's looking at me, and his eyes are so dim they are the color of rust. His tail is ramrod straight. He looks very displeased.

Scary.

I straighten. A frisson of unease zips down my spine. "What?"

"You will not leave this ship," he says immediately, biting off the words.

I draw my eyebrows together. I hadn't planned on leaving this ship. I hadn't even hinted at wanting to do anything of the sort. All I had done was pointing out that there are...

I look back at the screen, spotting yet another figure in the bustle that could well be a human, and then back at Rune, who's still darkly glaring at me, waiting for confirmation.

The inevitable conclusion I draw seems almost ridiculous, but mostly just infuriating.

"You think I'd abandon you and Bane the second I laid eyes on some random human dude?" I ask, crossing my arms in front of my chest and -- yes, now I'm tapping my foot. Things click into place. "Is that why you two tried to keep this whole stopover-thing a secret from me? Because you knew there are other humans on this planet and you wanted to keep me away from them?"

Rune doesn't confirm it, but he doesn't have to, really.

Un. Fucking. Real.

Good to know the two of them seem to think I'm just biding my time with them until I'm presented with the smallest opportunity to latch on to someone who is coincidentally genetically closer to me.

Shows me that they really don't have the slightest clue about loyalty, or love, or about me.

After almost two months, after everything we've shared. Man, that stings.

Maybe, a snide voice in my head says, they don't get feelings at all, just like you will never get ultraviolet light, or having a tail, or preferring Pepsi over Cola.

Because they're aliens, and so are you, and that's all you will ever be.

I swallow down some bitterness, feeling it settle and harden in my stomach.

Alright. Alright, then.

I draw in a very conscious belly breath, even though it physically makes my bitterness-lined stomach hurt enough for my hand to fly up to and press onto it. This is not the right time to get angry at anyone, or for anyone to get angry at me.

Bane is out there somewhere in that maelstrom of aliens and people and things, and he's running late and I'm having this sick, curdling feeling that he's not just stuck in rush hour traffic.

As I turn my back toward Rune and open my mouth to tell him that No, I wasn't planning on going anywhere (up until a hot minute ago anyway when you opened your mouth and said things that were, frankly, hurtful as fuck), my gaze falls back onto the screen showing the footage of Tulun D'tel's busiest street. The scenery has changed somewhat.

My entire body goes cold as I process what I'm seeing there.

"Oh, what the hell," falls out of my mouth just before I need to clamp it shut, lest I waste even more food than I already did on this ship by regurgitating today's breakfast right here on the floor. "No, no, no."

***

Let me tell you a short and somewhat depressing story.

Once upon a time around three years ago, a crappy 2003 Volvo was abducted off the freeway by a couple of insectoid aliens. The abduction was pretty clichee, really. Bright light. Tractor beam. That kind of thing.

Much to her misfortune, Valerie Greene was inside the crappy Volvo at the time, driving home after nine hours of work, wearing a polyester power suit and dress shoes that pinched.

After said aliens found her hiding in the foot well, they stuffed Valerie into a 3x4x5-foot quasi-wooden crate and nailed the lid shut, then drilled a couple of air holes into it as an afterthought.

All things considered, the first ten hours weren't vastly more uncomfortable than flying economy on basically any airline. Points deducted for lack of in-flight entertainment, though.

The second the crate opened again, several centuries later, Valerie was rearing for a fight even though -- or maybe because -- she was scared out of her mind, and fucking angry about sitting in her own feces for so long and having to suck fluids through a metal nozzle like a pet hamster, and also because she may or may not had herself convinced that it was all a crazy dream anyway and she would wake up any second.

Or, you know, being caught in a tiny box had made her stark raving mad. Probably, it was a bit of everything.

So anyway. Picture her standing there in her sweaty, rumpled, literally crappy suit, unwashed and half-starved and mad as a hatter, looking at a couple of the unlikeliest creatures she'd ever seen outside of a Walmart, against the backdrop of yawning, endless space.

That was the moment Valerie met her next manager. He/She/It was a five-foot-tall, dark purple, several-footed slug-like creature that stank like a flambeed refuse bin in summer.

The slug creature reached out a drippy tentacle to wrap around her neck and lower jaw to hold her still while someone drilled a hole into her head.

They were shooting a translator chip into her temporal lobe, but since Val didn't understand anyone's language at the time, she reasonably assumed that her brain was about to get sucked out of her skull and eaten.

Let's just say that the whole thing wasn't pretty and there was cursing, crying and urination involved.

Also, needless to say -- translator chips? 0/10 would not recommend. You don't need to be able to understand anyone that badly. Download Rosetta Stone or something.

The space slug didn't even bat a non-existent eyelash and never once eased their crushing-yet-casual grip. Once that was done, they dropped Valerie, wiped her blood off on her clothes, introduced themselves as "Krgotu", and told her she would "work".

So she did, for three years, staying out of the manager's way as much as possible and trying -- mostly successfully -- to tell herself that everything between floating away in her Volvo and finding a workable routine on Vurn X'lora 15 hadn't really happened.

Because that's what you do when there isn't a therapist available and you're not quite brave enough to try outer space booze.

It wasn't so bad, all things considered.

Except maybe for that last bit, where she almost got digested alive by yet another Krgotu.

The End.

(Of the prequel.)

What I'm saying is: One can safely state that Krgotu are at the very, very bottom of my Favorite Alien Races chart, and I've met aliens who communicate by urinating and defecating on their conversation partner's different body parts.

Which is why the sight of a couple dozen of the selfsame Krgotu rolling down the main street of Tulun D'tel like an avalanche of rubbery, oily garbage makes my stomach clench and heave. It also brings up all kinds of memories which, as it surprisingly turns out, I hadn't really dealt with. Immediately, I fight the need to (in no particular order) hide under a table, curl into a ball, soil myself, projectile vomit at the enemy, and cry.

What's more, I am very abruptly reminded of the fact that Bane murdered their Important Krgotu Envoy and technically stole something (namely me!) from the Krgotu manager over on Vurn X'lora 15, right after trashing the establishment I worked (or rather: was held hostage) in and killing some folks who definitely deserved it.

Bane who is somewhere in that city and possibly doesn't know that the slugs are out patrolling the streets in numbers.

Bane who might be a Great White -- but even the biggest sharks die in a crude oil spill.

"Bane doesn't have some sort of communication device on him?" I ask Rune pleadingly, knowing I'm grasping at straws.

On the screen, people are shoved aside by the slug stampede -- or casually buried underneath it. I'm so grateful there is no sound on this video, but the visual alone is already enough to follow me into my nightmares.

"He does not," Rune answers my question with infuriating calm.

Well, fuck. What now?

My mind starts racing, mostly in circles.

Stupidly, that very same moment I remember that one time I got lost at the supermarket when I was maybe four years old. When my mom finally found me after thirty minutes of both of us running across the vast store (and finished giving me a good hiding because that's what counted as 'parenting' in her book), she designated me as the sitting duck forevermore. If we got separated again, I'd sit my ass down in the last place I'd seen her and she'd come find me.

Now, Bane and I (and Rune) are separated. Instead of Costco, Bane is potentially stuck and lost in a huge fucking city full of murderous slugmonsters, and we are stuck and lost without Bane.

Which of us is supposed to be the sitting duck? We hadn't discussed that before.

(We should have discussed that!)

(Just like we should have discussed what would and wouldn't happen if I met another human.)

(Do Dryth even know what a duck is?)

(What if the slugs are there because of Bane?)

(Why the hell could Bane possibly be late? Three hours late on a 21-hour trip!)

(Is there a duck-equivalent animal on Y'Dryth?)

(Would you STOP it with the ducks, please?!)

(How far away is Tulun D'tel?)

(Oh my God, why didn't he take a goddamned comm device with him?)

(If they are searching for him, they're also searching for me.)

(And for Rune. He killed the manager, didn't he? I never thought to ask.)

If I hadn't thrown out food and wasn't so wasteful, we wouldn't be here.

What do I do? What do I-

(What can I even do? Nothing.)

(What do I-?)

(Nothing! You're useless!)

What do I-

"Valerie."

His voice is quiet in my ears but loud in my head. Not like a bang. More like the roar of the sea in a storm, or like the rumble of thunderclouds rolling together, or tectonic plates groaning as they move against one another. It's the sound of folded mountain ranges being born.

"Valerie."

The more-than-noise runs through me like a shockwave, making every hair on my body stand up straight and shivering the marrow of my bones while every single one of my confusing and pointless thoughts comes to an instant halt.

"Valerie!"

There is a short, blessed silence in my brain. I am floating.

And then everything quickly bleeds over into a yawning, panic-inducing, airless emptiness that feels like I'm free-falling into my own mind.

"You will not leave this ship," Rune's voice, layered a hundred times on top of itself, reverberates through that emptiness, catching me mid-fall.

I hear myself whimper and feel myself nod frantically. There is literally nothing else I can do. Not if I want to breathe and my blood to resume flowing through my veins. My head feels like it's caving in.

This is why he never answered any questions about his gift. I wouldn't have understood.

Now I do.

Holy shit, I do.

"He will be back soon," Rune continues, voice back to normal, the reality of it hitting me like a clap to the cheek. "We wait." Then he turns and leaves the bridge, and me.

I stand on quivering knees, gasping, and don't watch him go.

***

Bane will not be back soon.

In fact, Bane won't be coming back at all.

The thoughts fill my whole body with cold fog.

I watch the minutes (or whatever the time units are called here) pass on a timer on the dashboard (or whatever the thing with lots of buttons, switches and other high-tech stuff on it should be called).

Four hundred KV4022 minutes. Moons rise and sink on the horizon, causing the light to go from blue to gray to black and back again.

No sign of Bane. Or any other Dryth, for that matter. This planet must be in the neutral zone, or maybe the Dryth invasion hasn't reached it yet.

I almost wished it had. At least, Bane wouldn't be all that obvious then, and maybe the Dryth would have devastated the slug population. The slugs are obviously the ruling species on this outpost. It's obvious by their mowing down others with impunity, by the way that everyone else is trying to steer clear of them, and by the flocks of slaves trailing them on long leashes, reminding me of those metallic helium balloons that are always sold by a dubious middle-aged guy at the fair.

Oh, and of me. Good times, good times.

What must have been two hours ago, I worked out how to switch the cameras (by pressing every single button on the dash -- it's really quite intuitive) and am now stuck in a hell of my own making.

Literally every single city vista of Tulun D'tel has the big slugs in it. They're everywhere, shoving other aliens (and humans) aside without any effort, avalanching through the crowds, like the stink spirit thing in the bath house scene in 'Spirited Away'.

It's starting to dawn on me what the K in "KV4022" stands for.

None of the vistas has Bane in it, though, and the longer I watch, the less I am certain I want to see him there and then see what happens when one of the Krgotu notices and possibly recognizes him.

(Or maybe that already happened when you were watching some other cam.)

I moan in distress and rip my eyes away from the city on the screen, only to have the real city displayed on the other screen right in front of me through the bridge cams, the skyline twinkling tauntingly at me now that most of the moons are down and something like night has fallen.

Something is terribly wrong. I just know it.

(And what can you do about that?)

"Nothing," I whisper to myself and bite the inside of my cheek. The pain distracts me from crying. God, I hate crying. It's useless and gives me headaches. I tug my own hair in frustration.

(You will not leave this ship.)

"I wouldn't even if I could," I rant at that echo of Rune's voice in my head. "I don't know the way out of this bloody ship, let alone make it to that bloody city on my own -- look at that shit, it's, what, fifteen miles away?! I don't even have fucking shoes! And there's probably, like, a river or a canyon or a moat or the fucking Dead Marshes between me and it!" I gesture at the city in the distance. "And if I did miraculously make it, I wouldn't know what to do when I bloody got there!" I catch my own reflection, hand stretched out like I'm in the middle of a particularly hysterical Shakespearean soliloquy. Naked. "And fuck, I'm talking to myself again!"

Just like last time I thought something had happened to one of my boys and I was in distress.

"This isn't like last time," I promise myself through teeth clenched so tightly my gums hurt. "No one's dead. No one. Is. Dead." I repeat it twice more like a mantra, willing myself to believe it.

(And you're not alone.)

"Right. I'm not alone. Rune is still with me."

(Right.)

"Right."

And then something inside me clicks, like the odometer in my Volvo going from 99999 to 100000. All at once, I'm not desperate, and I don't want to cry (all that much) any more.

What I want, and need, at that very moment... is a knife.

A big, sharp one.

So I run from the bridge to get myself a knife.

***

As I get myself that knife, I realize I need some other things. Clothes, ideally something as closes to shoes as possible, a bag to put some supplies in, a bottle of water, some Space Lembas just in case, and a collar with a leash.

And weapons. Smaller ones, lots of them, with straps to fix them on my body underneath the aforementioned clothes and hide them securely inside the aforementioned bag. Unsurprisingly, it's much easier to find weaponry and holsters on this ship than, say, a T-shirt. I do find my old bio-garment, a little withered and tattered by still good enough for an impromptu mini-skirt.

I'm tying a knife-belt around my chest when Rune finds me. I see him watching me from the doorway out of the corner of my eye but I don't react and I certainly don't stop what I'm doing. I've wasted enough time already.

He only speaks up as I lift the gleaming machete-sized knife up and test its considerable weight in my too-small hand.

"My teacher," he says, "what is it that you are doing?"

I look at him, grimly determined. "My best," I quip darkly, and lift the knife up to my scalp.

The scalpel-sharp edge of the knife glides through my hair like it's nothing. My tresses tickle my shoulders, arms, and back on their way down.

The cold air licks at the freshly shorn strip of skin and for a terrifying moment I'm convinced I have scalped myself and possibly also cut off my ear. I pat the now mostly hairless patch of skin and check my fingertips for blood, but there is none. So I set my jaw and continue until I'm standing in a half-circle of fallen hair and a good portion of my head is shaven(ish. It's probably uneven as hell. I don't give a fuck).