But I feel safe, sitting next to this big, weird alien. I feel safer with him than I have felt with anybody in a long time. These decisions I’m making, they’re ones of instinct.
A weird noise catches my attention. When I look around me, I see that the pieces of ship wreckage have started to hum. They’re strewn across the pier, a billion shards of alien strangeness. This is going to be an almost impossible cleanup, but I’m sure they’ll manage it.
“What’s happening?” I ask Brawn the question.
“My fleet is coming,” he says, quite calmly. “Rescue is at hand.”
“That will be nice for you,” I say.
When he is rescued, I will be alone. I will have to answer for not having obeyed orders. I will have to give testimony. I will be interrogated. I will be… my breaths start to come shorter and more panicked. I fight to wrestle them under control. I am not going to melt down here and now. Maybe later, when I don’t have a choice.
“You believe your people will punish you for not following orders?” King Brawn asks me the question with some concern.
“I believe my people will punish me for having seen you at all. See this uniform?”
“Yes.”
“It’s supposed to mean serving the people, but it often really means protecting the status quo. I think they’ll do anything to hide what really happened here today. Anybody who tells the truth about it will be called crazy. That’s what always happens when anything out of the ordinary occurs. There’s a narrative that’s part truth, part convenience. That becomes the acceptable story, and anything outside that is the domain of the outsider.”
“That’s quite a rant, human. Very eloquent.”
It’s not a rant. It’s a collection of thoughts which have been settling throughout my mind for some time now. Part conspiracy, part reality. Part sickness. Part health.
Nobody is going to want to deal with the psychological ramifications of aliens who regard the western seaboard as a thoroughfare. Aliens are, well, not part of the collective consciousness, and I doubt anybody wants them to be. Everything that is happening to me now will be unhappened through the collective truth soon enough.
“You are very cynical, Ariel. It almost doesn't make sense. You are being so kind to me, and yet you expect to receive no kindness from those beyond that puny perimeter.”
“Excellent psychoanalysis,” I murmur. I’m not being thoroughly sarcastic. He’s actually on point. “I don’t expect much from people. That doesn't stop me from trying to give my best to others.”
“That makes you a nice creature.”
“Nice creatures finish last,” I quip. It’s a waste, because he doesn't know the saying about nice guys.
Anyway.
The bits and pieces of the ship dance faster and more provocatively, sashaying across the pier like Miss Universe contestants, flashing brightly every now and then as they respond to the call of home.
His rescue is at hand, and that is good, because I am fairly certain that people on the shore have started to retreat. It might be my paranoia, but I feel as though there’s a bright spot in the sky that wasn't there before. Something reflecting the sun as it arcs in toward us.
I have no way of knowing, but my instincts tell me that’s a missile with just enough payload to blow us to smithereens. They don’t want the alien intact. Maybe they already know about aliens. Maybe they just don’t want the truth getting out. Maybe…
SCHLOOP
I feel as though I am suddenly being licked all over simultaneously, or like I’m falling through a big wet slide.
I emerge out the other side dry, in a big, cheerful yellow room. There are rubber duckies on the walls. It doesn’t feel like the sort of place that existed two seconds ago, but now it has come into being for my convenience.
It is immediately obvious that I am no longer on Earth. Earth doesn’t do this kind of comforting for anybody older than two. This is a room made by someone with great power and perhaps even greater kindness.
I try to take a step forward, but I find I cannot do so easily. My legs are trapped in a… ball pit?
“Okay, a nursery is a bit much,” I address empty space. “I’m a grown woman. I need a chair. Or a bed. Or actually, a stiff drink.” Or a stiff something else, I think to myself. It has been a very long time since I got laid, and being sucked through whatever I was just sucked through has set parts of me tingling that haven’t tingled in a long while.
Nobody seems to hear me. I wade my way around the ball pit for a while before sitting down amid the colored orbs. Unlike gross human ball pits which are just basically light plastic covered vats of human discharge, this one is made of far nicer materials. They’re soft, but they’re firm, and they vibrate when I touch them.