1.22 Arrival_Cosmosis

Arrival

The question that had been on my mind was, ‘do alien otters have satellites?’.

I asked.

We’d been on the road for hours, and the snowy mountains were disappearing over the horizon. Our vehicle was rolling through flatlands now. The snow was only six or eight inches deep, as opposed to several feet. And we hadn’t seen another vehicle yet.

I retorted.

<…w ould work back on Earth. >he said, just as easily, < But for all we know, this planet’s clouds might be opaque through that portion of the spectrum.>

I frowned.

<’Ha Satan’ is Hebrew for ‘the accuser’. Like, the devil’s advocate? Wait, what am I saying? I only know that because you already know that. Why is that piece of trivia floating around your head?>

The conversation died off for a few moments while I tried not to think about home more. The truck rolled along over the snowy road, and I stared up at the cloudy sky, trying to make sense of what I was caught in the middle of.

I insisted.

I said,

<’Imperialist?’ Taking a few liberties, are we?>

I started humming the Imperial March to press the point.

Hearing even a bit about Daniel’s life before being abducted caught my interest.

I’d just thought to try to avoid thinking about Earth.

I decried.

I confessed,

Daniel said.

He started humming a few short measures from a handful of songs. I didn’t recognize them.

I gave a conservative nod. Daniel’s state was… fragile. I didn’t want to do anything to risk it that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He could probably pick up on my sensitivity to the topic, but that was unavoidable when we were sharing headspace.

We understood each other.

It was why I felt comfortable admitting this,

I protested.

We had no way of knowing exactly how long we’d spent on the spaceship before being delivered into Vorak clutches. I was ball parking about three weeks, but there were some complicating factors that made it impossible to know.

That was a disturbing implication. I had been reading pretty far ahead in my AP Physics class, and I’d been exposed to enough sci-fi to have a vague idea about time dilation. Even assuming this planet and its star were the closest ones possible to Earth, we’d still shattered the speed of light.

If Daniel was right…

I gave a shiver and clamped down on that line of thinking. There was nothing worth thinking about there. I had enough worries.

Focusing on the rest of the conversation would help me get my mind off the possibility.

I said,

Daniel agreed. < But then again, you don’t really know much about relativity beyond the name.>

He was right about that. I’d read a few diagrams in the textbook about lightspeed being constant irrespective of… something. I wasn’t Einstein.

I said.

I said, pressing on,

< Should be early to mid-November back home .>

I concluded,

< Hmm.> Daniel hummed,

he noticed.

Daniel said.

I thought he might have been dodging the question, but he continued, < But, I don’t think it’s bad. Home isn’t perfect, but we’re still going miss it. Even the bad parts. We can’t help it. >

·····

Talking with Daniel about home was harsh in a healthy way. Painful, in the same way it hurt to peel bandages off to change the dressing on a wound.

But there was only so much emotional energy I felt willing to consume on the topic.

We were still on the road, and I had questions.

It was a small wonder to me, still, that Nemuleki could drive at these speeds while the road was still snowed over. Eight inches back on Earth would have stopped school for at least a day, maybe three.

We’d come far enough from the mountains that no new snow was falling, but it was cold enough that I didn’t think anything would melt any time soon. It was probably past midday now, and that meant the temperature would slowly start dropping.

Last night, several feet of snow had accumulated in just a few hours. Would that happen again tonight? Assuming Nai stayed conscious, then we’d have three drivers. We wouldn’t have to stop, even if it got dark.

There was already some snow piled up in the corners of the truck bed, and on a whim, I stuck my bare hand into the snow. My hand, the same one that should have been blasted to hamburger, didn’t feel cold, even when I started packing it into a ball.

It was so very odd holding the snowball in my hands. I let it melt to nothing in my hand over almost ten minutes. My hand still didn’t feel numb in the slightest.

I rolled up my sleeve and held snow against my forearm. The icy cold became intolerable after less than a minute.

I experimented, holding some snow in one hand, tossing it, and then with my other hand, feeling the palm that had just carried snow. It felt completely ordinary. Not any colder than my other hand. My hands didn’t seem to be bothered by the freezing cold.

Why just my hands?

I thought. My hands should have been frostbitten meat after climbing up the building. I’d even noticed that they hadn’t felt numb, but I’d been preoccupied with trying to help Tasser.

I stared at my impossibly tough hand. It didn’t feel any different. But I could tell it was. If I rolled up my sleeves, there were cuts and bruises galore all up and down my forearms, but my palms and fingers were unblemished. Reinforced from damage somehow.

The backs of hands were still vulnerable though. The hand I’d shoved down panther-hound no.3’s throat had a pattern in the seemingly sunburnt skin. That really was what it resembled. The back of my hand was burned and swollen, but there was a clean even line running toward my wrist, like I was wearing a glove that had shielded the rest of my hand from the blast.

Daniel asked.

I thought hard about it, inspecting my fingers. There were a few tiny old scars from years ago, but there had to be some more recent injuries.

<…Here.> I said, finding a faded bruise, almost completely invisible now, on the outside of my left pinky knuckle. I didn’t like recalling the moment. Seeing the aftermath, knowing that every person inside them had died.

Images of the other abductees suffocating inside pitch black metal boxes would haunt me forever.

Daniel said, giving me a mental poke .

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

<…I thought it might have been possible for us to have become Enumius back on Earth, before we were abducted.>

I said frankly.

Daniel pointed out, adept as ever at finding the counter point.

His question indicated something to me; he thought whatever had strengthened my hands was related to being Enumius .

he said, surprised.

I said, exhausted.

Actually… Daniel was right. Technically it had been Daniel doing the making—I hadn’t known I could do it too—but the tiny slip of metal had been the first thing the aliens had seen ‘me’ create.

They probably hadn’t known I could any more than I had.

But… I recalled,

I conceded. It felt like far less of a leap to connect the two phenomenon if there was a common link somewhere in my body.

he said. < Because I think this might be another case of ‘predicting otters’.>

No one, in a million years would have predicted otter aliens. Daniel meant that imagining we could have any idea of what we’d find would only set us up to be blindsided by something else we had no chance of guessing.

I said,

<’Now children, as you get older your bodies will undergo some confusing changes’.> Daniel joked, his voice like he was narrating an old-fashioned public health video.

I had to bite back my uncomfortable laughter. Tasser and Nai didn’t seem to like when I just started reacting to nothing.