Unfamiliar Faces

The worst thing in the universe isn’t feeling alone; it’s being surrounded on all sides and still feeling alone.

It’s true in kindergarten, it’s true in after-school sports, it’s true wherever there are people to be surrounded by.

And, turns out, it’s true even with no ‘people’ involved.

For a whole month Daniel and I had hurtled through space, growing further and further from Earth with every minute. We’d felt alone then.

But here? At the end of the trip? Who knew how many million miles away from home? Surrounded by the stuff of nightmares?

This was so much worse.

The cot wasn't bolted to the floor, but I clenched down on the temptation to upend it and curl behind it, just to give myself any semblance of privacy or protection. In the cell, it was on the wall opposite the giant window. Nearly half of the cell’s circumference was dominated by glass thicker than my arm. I was being watched, and I refused to give them any more of a show.

There was nowhere to hide in the cell where the stupid otter-like aliens wouldn’t see me. Why couldn’t they have been thinner and mangier? Rat aliens would have been too on the nose for what I was feeling, I guess.

The month it’d taken us to get here had been filled with question after question, punctuated only by a complete absence of answers. He and I hadn’t known the first thing that was happening, but we’d sure wondered…

Being abducted by otter aliens wouldn’t have been my first guess.

I was beyond angry. Beyond scared. Even saying I was ‘alone’ just didn’t do this ridiculous situation justice. The last thing I wanted to do was look at the otter-aliens scrutinizing me from outside the cell.

…No, that wasn’t true.

That was the second to last thing I wanted to look at right now.

Looking at Daniel would send me over the edge. I’d probably lose it even if I didn’t look at him, sooner or later. But for now I refused to even glance toward him.

“You should keep looking around,” he said. “You need to notice everything you can if we want to live.”

I ignored Daniel, not taking my eyes off the otters outside.

Bad move, that.

Because the cell’s metal door swung open with barely a whisper.

Too absorbed with the armed ones outside, I didn’t even notice the aliens entering until it was too late to react.

I’d been scared already, just looking at them. As the otter aliens surrounded me, new terror welled up in me, making me miss moments ago when I’d been simply ‘beyond scared’.

Six aliens covered in bulky hazmat suits jostled into the cell, spreading themselves out to herd me from all sides. They didn’t say a word, to me or each other, moving directly at me.

I moved.

I didn’t question why the door opened. I didn’t hesitate to wonder if could even get past them. I just tried to get out.

A full tilt run got me past two of the otter-gorilla-like aliens. Some part of my brain expecting to bowl them over. I was taller than all of them, but even in awkward thick hazmat suits, each alien had the physique of a miniature gorilla.

They tried to grab me as I passed, and just that contact was fresh hell for me. Screams filled the cell. I was dimly aware that a fraction of them weren’t mine.

It was like throwing myself into a crowd of stone statues. The two otter-aliens I’d passed quickly closed in behind me. I dug my feet in, desperately reaching for the open door, but the otter-aliens threw me back. I went sprawling across the cell floor, immediately switching to try scrambling away from them.

But desperate as I was, it was futile.

The six aliens closed in on me slowly, inching closer, cornering me against the cell where the window met the wall. Which one was going to approach first? I barely looked at them.

My eyes were fixed on the door, still open behind them. I lunged again, but the otter dropped its stance and drove a shoulder into my belly. I was still screaming as loud as I could. I’d never stopped. My limbs thrashed in every direction, yearning to push the aliens aside and make it to the door.

But one caught my wrist in a hug, pulling me forward and over its back. I slammed in the ground hard enough to gasp for breath—the first thing to interrupt my screams.

The alien held its grip on my arm though. I brought my knee up, clumsily bashing the side of its head. The impact freed my arm just long enough for me to scramble halfway upright again, only for two otter-aliens to tackle me back to the ground.

Each one pinned an arm, but one was too weak—or I was too frantic—too keep a grip on it. I hammed my fist into anything I could reach, kicking and flailing in every direction. The otter that held its grip on my other arm got the worst of it. I managed to get my other hand toward its face, and slam it into the floor.

Somewhere in the mess of it all, I caught a glimpse of dark navy splatter on the inside of one of the hazmat suit masks.

None of them backed down, and I was too crazed to be smart. In seconds, flailing had drained my limbs and now my whole body felt like lead. I struggled as long as possible, but my bare hands ached. Some part of me that was still rational knew I might break my fingers or wrists swinging this violently. These aliens were dense and tough.

I managed to shove one away from me, craning my head to stay focused on the door. I made one more distraught lunge for the door, only for the otter-alien I’d just shaken to catch my ankle and almost trip me.

I shrieked as loud as I could, anything to keep them away from me. All six surrounded me again, closing in unstoppably.

Right when I was about to charge again, one of the otter-aliens raised a hand toward me.

In the chaos, my mind had drifted from Daniel’s presence. But now he was front and center in my field of view, suddenly fascinated by the otter’s palm pointed at my face.

“Wait…what is that?” Daniel’s voice started.

The air rippled for a split second before—

BAM

Everything in the cell flashed white, and a shrill whine drowned out everything else. Dimly, I recognized something had exploded. A flashbang to stun me. The real thing was nothing like I’d seen in games or movies. The sound alone felt like a physical impact, as painful as any of the aliens’ tackles.

With my sight and hearing completely overwhelmed, I could do nothing while I felt something trap my arms in a hug and drag me to the ground. Vise grips closed on my arms and legs, pinning me in place, all the while I couldn’t see or hear a thing.

Except for Daniel.

The image of my fellow abductee was painfully visible, like he were pasted overtop the stinging white that slowly faded back into blurry shapes.

“Easy, hermano,” Daniel said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

I began to hear my own hollering again, as if it were in the distance. Even with four aliens wrapped around my limbs, getting me in a headlock, I still squirmed. But every motion I made just drained my tired body further, and the otter-aliens locked down their grip a little tighter.

In seconds, I could barely move an inch. Only then did I understand the purpose behind their numbers. Four of them to immobilize each of my limbs, and one more to lock my head and neck in place.

The sixth popped open a clamshell case I hadn’t noticed, and I was treated to the blurry sight of a steel tip being attached to a device connected to clear tubing.

My breath caught for a second when I felt the otter-alien yanked my shirt up and exposing my belly. Just out of sight, I couldn’t tell what it was doing. My stomach and lungs burned as my screaming renewed tenfold as I felt the steel tipped instrument slide between my ribcage.

Every twitch sent a painful throb through my body, where the needle was rigidly stuck inside me. But pain couldn’t overwhelm my dread. Whatever the otter-aliens were doing to me, the only thing worse was the look I could see on Daniel’s face.

Clinical. Detached.

Red blood oozing through the tube distracted me from my hallucination, and I got to watch in horror while the otter-aliens filled tubes with my flesh.

I screamed the whole time while they stuck me four more agonizing times.

My vision was clearing enough to see each sample in ghoulish detail. The chill of the metal going into my skin, the painful twinges with every wiggle it made, the sting where the otter-aliens sprayed each wound after they withdrew the needle.

While the sixth otter-alien worked, the other five stayed vigilant, not relaxing for a second. None of them even said a word. Only when the sixth one spoke a short phrase did any of them chance position, shifting to let the sixth otter-alien put a sticky padded square over each wound.

The pads stung on contact, and I recoiled, tugging against their grip. Their hold remained ironclad though.

More wounds stung, and I realized they were cuts on my face. My tears were streaming into them. Had I stopped screaming?

No, my lungs had lost strength, but I was still pushing out a raspy whimper.

The sixth otter-alien finally closed the clamshell case on numerous tubes of blood and guts they’d pulled from my torso. It walked briskly toward the open airlock, and envy lanced through me watching it just…get to leave like that. It was a cruel taunt that I couldn’t look away from.

I was kept restrained even after the door swung shut and gave out a pressurized hiss.

“It’s an airlock,” Daniel observed calmly. ”Even if you’d managed to get through the door, you’d still be trapped. Someone outside has to cycle it.”

“Shut up,” I wheezed. Ragged as I was, the words weren’t cogent. More like ‘shugghhu’.

Thrashing against the otter-aliens still holding me yielded nothing. But I could hear them talking now. None of the words were recognizable. All of it was just harsh, grunting nonsense.

But when they said words in a rhythm, I realized it was a countdown too late. The two holding my legs let go simultaneously, leaping to their feet, and darting for the door.

I surged again, twisting my body in the remaining three’s grip, but I couldn’t make it to my feet. They were out of reach of kicking too.

Instead, they three slid themselves on the ground, dragging me one-hundred-eighty degrees around so I was facing the half of the circular cell with a massive looking glass window.

Outside the cell, four otter-aliens wore no hazmat suits and held rifles aimed at me.

I didn’t care. I kept trying to wrestle my way out of four-hundred pounds of alien marsupial grip.

This time I was ready for the rhythmic words from the otter-aliens holding me. I didn’t know any of the words, but it was a count for when they were letting go of me and sprinting for the door. The second the two on my arms loosened their grip, I wriggled in the last one’s headlock.

I got an angle to start punching at the otter-alien’s belly, and I felt the first two hits pound into soft flesh. But the third slammed into something rigid, and a fresh crack shot through my numb and swollen hands. I saw some sort of thick plate suddenly covering their chest and stomach area.

It was like armor, but it hadn’t been there a second ago.

“There it is again…” Daniel muttered.

The otter-alien didn’t waste the opportunity my pain afforded it, hauling me to my feet still in the headlock. It shoved me right against the clear looking glass and the otter-aliens outside brandished their rifles threateningly.

I didn’t care if they shot me. I just wanted out of the cell. But something in my brain still heeded fear, and I froze for a moment. It was all the opportunity the last otter-alien needed to duck through the heavy metal door and pull it closed behind them.

Rushing toward them too slowly, I could only squeal in hoarse frustration at being trapped. I slammed my hand against the steel slab, squealing again in pain at the impact.

“Calm down, Caleb,” Daniel said gently. “If you keep hitting crap like that, you’re going to break your hand.”

He frowned at me, and even with him standing somewhere behind me, I somehow knew that. “You even thought of your hands during the fight. What the hell is up with your head?”

“Shut up!” I croaked, barely more intelligibly than before.

“I’m just saying, you played that about as dumbly as you could have,” he said.

“How many times do you want me to say it? Shut. UP!”

“Hey hermano, if you’re right and I’m just a hallucination, I’m not saying anything you aren’t already thinking.”

“I’m thinking I’m going to bash your face in,” I said, trying to get control of my breath.

“You think I’m a hallucination,” Daniel said. “How are you going hit me? We can agree I’m not solid right now.”

Despite what he’d said, I’d been a heartbeat away from taking a swing anyway.

“Shut up,” I hissed.

“Come on. Talk to me,” he said. “You’ve been through something traumatic. Well…another something traumatic.”

“Shut up,” I insisted. He couldn’t hurt me anymore.

“I’m not trying to hurt you!” Daniel protested. Another chill went through me. He was responding to my very thoughts.

“I dreamed last night, I got on the boat to heaven…” I sang, trying to distract myself. “and by some chance I had brought my dice along. And there I stood and I hollered…something, something…the devil will drag you under, by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat... Sit down, sit down, sit down,sit down, sit down you're rockin' the boat…”

The lyrics did little to dissuade Daniel.

“Come on, you can’t just sing me away. I’m real! I felt something weird when that flashbang happened, and when that armor covered the alien’s belly! You’re just running away from this,” he accused.

He was right. Theater wasn’t the comfort it used to be. Baseball was a better distraction.

“Mariners failed to make the postseason. Oakland got knocked out in the wild card game, but the Nats have made it all the way to the World Series for the first time ever,” I muttered, sliding down to the floor. “I wonder if they beat the Astros…and somehow the Angels still suck even with Trout and Ohtani, the two best and coolest players in the league—”

“Take this seriously,” he scoffed. “Just TALK to me!”

I knew I shouldn’t reply, but I couldn’t help it.

“I’ll get right on that. Can you take a number?”

Daniel swiped a hallucinatory hand right through my face. I flinched.

“ Get a grip!” he shouted. “Any idiot can get angry. Anyone would! We got abducted by aliens—fucking aliens! Sure this whole thing is screwed up to hell and back. Throwing a tantrum, panicking, getting scared as shit, curling up in a ball and reciting baseball to yourself? What are you doing?”

“This is a very reasonable response,” I spat.

”That all might be the perfectly reasonable response. But the typical, reasonable response to all this isn’t going to HELP you for shit...So shut up, and really think about what kind of reaction you want to have to all this.”

“I don’t want to have any reaction!” I hissed. “I know I’m hallucinating! I know you can’t be real. And if I’m seeing things that aren’t real, then how do I know everything isn’t real? Everything in sight, everything that’s happened, every second I’ve known you could be a hallucination. For all I know, I might still be on earth in a coma. I could be bleeding into my brain and you’re just an aberrant neuron ruining what’s left of my sanity.”

“…Except you don’t actually believe that,” Daniel said. “Because if your perception is that unreliable… then when did it start?”

He spoke slowly like he was reading into the very thoughts I was trying to keep away from him. He was doing exactly that. How could he not?

“If you really think that this is all a delusion, how far back does it go? The ship? Whatever yanked us off the ground? Waking up in the coffins? What about trying to rescue the others? If your hallucinations start any point after we left Earth, then something still abducted you from Earth! And if that’s possible, why would you think the rest of this isn’t?”

I fumed at him, willing him to burst into flames or wither and die. Anything to shut him up.

“The only other alternative is that you became delusional BEFORE you remember getting abducted, which means you’re right. You’re just back on Earth, probably in a hospital for an aneurysm or something tragic, but ultimately mundane. Poor you.”

“Shut up.”

“You first. You want to pretend none of this is happening? Fine. Then shut up and play along anyway. If you’re right and this is all just your subconscious torturing you because you think I died, then get with the program! If none of this is real, then you risk nothing by pretending it is.. No matter how you slice it, you KNOW I’m right. Because even if I’m just another part of your hallucination, then you know this has to be your own brain telling you this.

“Honestly, Caleb, I get it. You’re not the only one scared all this is real. However weird this is for you? You still get to be ‘you’. Something happened to me, and I’m stuck in your head. Imagine everything you’ve got in front of you, plus missing your own body—your own brain. I know this sucks for you, but it sucks for me too. And the only shot I’ve got is you. So please don’t just shut down. Help me, Obi Wan. You’re my only hope.”

Some part of my brain, slave to my exhausted body, wasn’t prepared for a movie quote, and I let out a whimpering laugh despite myself.

“…I always liked Star Trek more,” I said shakily.

“Then do like Picard and remember; ‘things are only impossible until they’re not’…I got that straight from your head, by the way. Thought you might want to know that,” Daniel said.

…

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

He was right about something.

I didn’t want to be that person. Someone who shrank back just because it was hard to trust what my eyes were seeing. If nothing else Daniel was right I didn’t want to act scared of the unknown. That was easier said than done. Anyone can imagine being brave inside their own mind. Everyone could imagine overcoming challenges in fantasy.

But it was hard to just blink and decide not to be afraid, no matter how much I wanted to. And I did want to.

It was human to want to be brave.

“How am I supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? I know impossible things happened on the spaceship. I don’t just mean strange things; I mean I could feel my own mind. I could feel things I still can’t wrap my head around.”

“ You ask yourself: what do you want more? To react to your fear? Or to act despite your fear?”

He was structuring the question intentionally. When he put it like that, it did almost sound easy. It certainly sounded simple.

“First, you try to calm down. Not all the way, but just breathe slow and steady. Get your heartrate down and ignore things you can’t control. You try to learn, even if only by exposure. Reality has rules, and the more we can learn, the better we can figure out what’s happening with both your mind and mine. Deal? ”

He was right. Or some part of my hallucinating brain was.

“…Deal,” I whispered. The words felt like a lie. But I wanted to try.

“That’s good enough,” Daniel said.

“I’m getting a pep talk from my hallucination,” I said. “Good enough is all you’re going to get.”

“I really don’t feel like a hallucination…”

Of course he didn’t. Hallucinations didn’t feel anything. They don’t have senses. He was just a product of my own brain losing a handle on my own senses.

“You can’t have memories that aren’t mine. You’re a hallucination.”

“ Says you. We both might have some holes in our memory, but I still remember some stuff about me. I remember I lived in Cali. I remember I was about to go to college. My parents’ names are Darcy and Taylor. We have a retriever. I played—”

“Shut up!” I hissed, loudly enough for the otters outside to shift nervously.

He had to be dead.

I could run my hand right through the space where my eyes told me I was seeing him. He wasn’t really there anymore. He was dead.

He had to be.

“…I’m sorry man, but I don’t know… Are you sure I’m dead?”

I was sure.

It was the one thing I knew more than anything else right now. Daniel was a ghost. A tagalong. A delusion I wasn’t alone in this cell. He might have sounded like the last human being I’d seen, but he couldn’t be.

He was dead.

I…

I was sure he was dead.

“ You’re not delusional. ” he said, “ You’d only be delusional if you didn’t know you were hallucinating. You’re aware you’re hallucinating. And I’m not totally convinced you even are actually hallucinating. ”

“How could I not be hallucinating?” I hissed.

“Hey, I’m right there with you ‘ermano,” he said. “I never believed in ghosts before either. But at the same time, I feel aware. Like you said, hallucinations don’t feel anything. They aren’t aware. But I am. So what the hell am I?”

The urge to reply ‘dead’ welled up, and I bit my tongue. Daniel was aware of what went through my mind though.

“…You’re still more scared of me than them,” he observed.

I wanted to hide my fist clenching. I begged my breath not to skip. Nothing would have made me happier in that moment than to put on a brave face and pretend otherwise.

But once again Daniel was right.

Aliens had barged into this cell, pinned me to the ground, slid steel between my ribs, stolen my blood, and altogether ruined any sense of safety I might ever feel again in my life. And the only reason that hadn’t reduced me to a gibbering mess was because I feared whatever was going on inside my own head more.

I felt weak. Daniel knew it. And I knew he knew it.

“Breaking into musical theater and baseball were odd choices,” Daniel said. “But I don’t think your instinct was wrong. Distracting yourself is a good idea right now.”

“With what?” my voice trembled.

“…How about the only thing less scary than me right now?” he said, tilting his head toward the aliens outside the cell.

Without meaning to, my eyes followed his gesture, coming to lie on the otter-aliens watching me.

“Who would’ve guessed ‘otters’?” Daniel asked.

We’d been trapped on the rocket taking us here for a whole thirty days, and I’d spent every one of them picturing increasingly ridiculous wide-eyed grey men or enormous green bugs with drooling mandibles. The last time I’d lost consciousness, I’d been dreadfully sure I would wake up strapped to a table under a blinding light with giant shadowy figures lurking just out of sight to dissect me. That sort of thing.

Otters. Not my first guess. Not my hundredth guess.

“I thought they’d be bigger,” Daniel said. “Aliens are classic horror story material. The monsters are always bigger than humans. The Xenomorph. Klingons. Hell, even Superman is built like a truck.”

“Counterpoint: ET,” I said.

“Touche.”

Still, I’d been wholly unprepared for our abductors to be smaller than us too. Was he getting that from my head? The otters weren’t shorter by too much, but still…It was unsettling how they all came up to be almost the same size as me. It just pricked at my brain, like…I’d made an assumption all my life, and now I had to look at the counter-evidence in front of my eyes.

Actually, forget ‘like’ anything. That was the exact situation.

…

Daniel was right.

I could distract myself by looking at them. It was weak, as far as confrontations go, but refusing to avert my gaze was about as defiant as I could muster myself to be right now.

“Told you so,” he smirked.

“Shut up,” I muttered.

Four of the otter-aliens were equally space along the massive viewing window that dominated half of the round cell they had me in. Several more were sporadically visible in the background, but the window was tinted in such a way I couldn’t see very far.

The otters topped out close to five feet tall, but their posture made me unsure of that number. Their shoulders hunched forward, and looking at the ones not wrapped up in hazmat suits, I could see they did have scruffy tails, making me further unsure how big or small they were.

But, it was plain to see I stood taller than each of them, which only made me more confused. The hazmat suited ones had each weighed more than me. It had been like wrestling middle schoolers made out of brick.

Looking at them now, it was easy to see why. Despite being shorter than me, each one had bulging muscles underneath their fur. Even shifting their weight sent ripples through their posture. I was struck with the vivid impression of a gorillas physique stuffed into an otter’s pelt and skeleton.

Unlike otters back home, these ones weren’t all brown. The four uniformed otters watching me were varying shades of tan and dark grey, but I snatched a few glimpses of others in the background. A few of them had looked navy or dark purple.

It was their eyes that made my skin crawl though. Every one of them stared at me hungrily, giving me a horribly perfect view of their tri-part pupils. Their irises dominated the whole socket, and their pupils were like three-pointed stars that suddenly tightened or dilated with no warning. It gave the impression that their focus was twitching from one thing to the next even while they all stayed stock still.

But as alien as they were, it was the similarities that were truly disturbing.

“It’s the clothes, for me,” Daniel said.

The four in front of me all wore the same visibly manufactured outfit. Dark heavy-duty jumpsuits, lined with cargo pockets on the chest and thigs. Overtop of the jumpsuits, they wore chest harnesses with loops for equipment and finally loose dark green jackets complete with patches on the forearms and shoulders.

Each of those four also carried weapons, distinguishing them from the other otters I saw scurrying at the edge of visibility. What little I saw of them was even more disturbing. White button shirts and dark pants—or maybe overalls. One of them might have even been wearing plaid. I couldn’t be sure.

I was getting Top Gun flashbacks. Not everyone in the military wore camouflage. Every branch of the armed forces had engineers, secretaries, even research personnel whose dress would vary. And here was the same thing. A bunch of otter-aliens all wearing bland alien clothing that passed for something analogous to office casual.

My eyes drifted back to the jacket patches of the four otters in front of me.

“They’re soldiers,” I said.

Daniel leaned close to the glass, sticking his illusory face halfway through. “Yeah. I see what you mean.”

He pulled out a pen and scribbled that detail into a notebook.

“Maybe that’s where they got that flashbang from earlier,” Daniel proposed. “Think a military wouldn’t have the idea for stun grenades just because they’re aliens?”

“Was it a flashbang?” I asked. “I didn’t see any of them holding anything. No one had anything in their hands to throw. It seemed like the flash just appeared right in front of me.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Daniel pondered. “Could it have been something built into the room? Or maybe their hazmat suits?”

The one otter-alien had put its palm in front of my face the moment before it happened. A big flash of light from the palm?

“You think alien otters take inspiration from Iron Man?”

“Not really, but stranger stuff has happened,” Daniel pointed out. “Honestly, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t part of the room or the suit. I don’t know how to describe the feeling…right before the flash…it was like a bad omen. I felt it come from the otter itself though, not anything around you.”

I hadn’t felt anything like what he was talking about. But the way he described it I could almost imagine the sensation. Daniel seemed genuinely surprised and shaken up. It was a strange sight, seeing my own hallucination stressed, but it felt like it lifted some of the weight from my shoulders.

The idea of my hallucination having independent reactions was not comforting, but nothing around me was right now. I almost felt bad, feeling relief at his anxiety.

Almost.

“We’re seeing the good stuff now,” he said, looking at the white-coat otters visible just barely at the edge of the window. They looked to be fiddling with some devices or lab equipment just out of sight.

“What?”

“ Remember that first day on the ship? ” Daniel asked.

I did. That had been a dark day, but that first day had still been easier than now. Once we’d found the ship to be totally empty of anyone besides us, the overwhelming terror of the unknown had lost the worst of its edge.

“ It all seemed too… ”

“Low tech.” I finished.

The rocket we were abducted to flew further into space than any manned human craft, yet every part of the ship had been remarkably mundane.

No holograms, no artificial gravity, no aliens even. What little machines had been available to us had all been operated by analog buttons, dials, and levers. The whole thing had just been us passengers and a lot of eerie silence.

“We should have known better. They’re spacefaring, they would have to have better technology than us. But if you’re abducting some helpless humans… ”

I saw what he was getting at. These otters had technology at least similar to science fiction, but why put any of it on the spaceship if they didn’t need to?

Why let any of it out of their sight? Now we were seeing more of what these aliens could do.

“…I can’t see how that helps us right now, though,” I admitted.

Daniel shrugged. “ Probably won’t. But every little detail might help, so nothing is too dumb to think about. ”

I was already having trouble keeping details straight. Just looking at the otter-aliens felt overwhelming.

Even if Daniel was proving to be at least a conversational hallucination, I didn’t feel in a stable frame of mind. It probably wouldn’t be worth trying to remember most of the stuff we’d noticed.

“ Don’t worry about remembering it. I’m writing everything down. ”

I turned to look at him closely. Sure enough, he was maybe half a dozen pages deep into the same spiral notebook. Where had he gotten the pen?

Wait. Scratch that. He was a hallucination. It wasn’t a real notebook. It wasn’t a real pen.

“Take a moment to think about what you just said.”

“ What? ”

The notebook.

The pen.

I tapped my own head and it clicked for him.

“ Huh. That’s… weird… ” He trailed off. He hadn’t noticed before now.

“How long have you been taking notes?”

“ It was the first thing I did after seeing the otters. I’ve written down approximations of every word I’ve heard. ”

“And you didn’t think about how you didn’t have anything to write with?”

“ Well… well no, not really. I just kind of thought ‘I should write stuff down’. And then I did. ”

Why would I hallucinate someone writing down nonsense? Except…when I looked at the pages he showed me, I saw the note he’d written about the ‘patches’, ‘jackets’, ‘uniforms’, ‘therefore; soliders’ from earlier.

It seemed identical to what I remembered him writing.

“Maybe it’s not nonsense,” Daniel said, poring over the pages he’d written. “Maybe what I write down stays consistent.”

“It’s a hallucination, it’s just information in my head, like a memory,” I huffed. “It’s like eyewitness testimony: not reliable.”

“Yeah, and I’m supposed to be dead, but I sure don’t feel that way. We don’t know what’s really happening with me and your head. If I’m not an ordinary hallucination of a person, maybe this isn’t an ordinary hallucination of a notebook. Maybe it acts just like the real thing.”

“Please, shut up…”

“Fine, but I want to test it later. If the information recorded in it stays consistent, that could be really handy.”

“Fine,” I sighed.

Daniel let me have a few more moments of silence, but he didn’t stay idle. Instead, he leaned opened a new page of his notebook and started sketching the alien in front of him.

The pen didn’t move correctly with his hand…it was…desynchronizing with his hand and the page…

“Hey, keep looking at the alien,” he said. “I’m not a hallucination, but I am stuck in your head. I can only see what you do. So if you’re not looking at them, I can’t see what I’m drawing.”

I looked at the otters again, this time noticing a feature of the window. There was a line on the ground beyond the pane, which all of my armed watchers stood inside of. But past that line, things in the background became unusually blurry.

It was only noticeable when I slowed down to look at the details, but the window didn’t behave like any glass I’d ever seen…

The otters standing on this side of the line weren’t out of focus at all. How did the window do that?

“Should we have expected all these similarirites, or not?” Daniel asked, sketching the otter-aliens bizarrely human uniform. “They’re aliens, so…can we be sure that things mean the same with them?”

“Most things have at least some pragmatic design,” I said. “Even if they seem like strange creatures, we know they’re at least somewhat similar. They have eyes. Ears. They have recognizable parallels.”

I forced myself to get to my feet. The window was four inches thick and crystal clear. Every bone in my body ached as I trudged right up to the glass and picked the nearest otter.

Not three feet away from it, I could see every terrifying detail. I could see the faint scratches its clawed fingers left on its gun. I could make out the tiny wrinkles and quivers in its nose. Faded scarring around its mouth. Some alien emotion flickered behind its eyes as we stared each other down.

My heart pounded so hard, I was sure the otter could see the veins in my neck twitch in time with my pulse. Every second of it was terrifying, but the more time I gave myself the more anger I cobbled together against my fear.

Every memory of every thought I’d had in the forty days since being abducted welled up in me. I was so damn tired of being scared, but I couldn’t stop.

But I could be angry.

I dredged up the first memory I had of the alien otters. From the ship with Daniel…

“ They were there, ” Daniel whispered, following my mind’s train of though. “At the end.”

The recollection came to life in my brain.

Daniel had been impaled, bleeding out. I wasn’t in much better shape. On the edge of passing out, a glow had caught my attention.

A hot line had drawn its way across the metal hatch to the spaceship’s cabin. Otter-shaped aliens, wearing form-fitting spacesuits, had torn their way into the ship. They’d grabbed me and dragged me to… it all went black after that. The last piece of the memory was seeing the blood, water, and oil all undulating in zero gravity.

“ Maybe I’m not dead,” Daniel said excitedly. “The otters are the only ones who could have staunched your bleeding, and if they got there to save you, maybe they could have saved me too. ”

I darkened at that. The otters had abducted us. They had to have. Even the thought of them saving me made my blood start to boil.

“We already know they don’t want us dead.” I said, “There was food and water on the spaceship, enough for way more than just you and me. Why abduct people alive and not keep them alive?”

The otters outside my cell shifted nervously when I made noise. The two guards both kept a hand on dark purple metal guns affixed to the harnesses they wore.

I bit my tongue. Talking to my own hallucination was a bad habit to start. But my point stood. Even if the otters had stopped my bleeding, even if by some miracle the real Daniel was still alive, these otters had abducted us God knows how many trillion miles away from home.

They wouldn’t get an ounce of gratitude from me.

Daniel wanted me to take this seriously?

‘Be careful what you wish for, hermano,’ I thought to myself.

Daniel just grinned.

I could fight and flail against every damn thing these otters wanted to do to me. Right there I made a promise to myself; I’d keep struggling.

“Diablo, hermano,” he grinned. “I’m just glad you’re coming around.”

Despite myself, I smiled back. It felt good to get angry, even for a moment. But anger took energy, and I was too spent for more right now.

So the moment dwindled into the only other thing Daniel and I could still agree on: incredulity.

“I mean seriously,” he complained, “who would ever guess alien otters?”