So, it’s after dark, I’ve been asleep for awhile (or at least it seems like it), and I’m awakened by a knock at the door. This is quite unusual, not only because of the time, but because the door being knocked upon is my upstairs bedroom door, the one that leads out onto the deck that has no exterior stairs or other access down to the ground other than falling over the railing. Not even a fireman’s pole or a pirate ship’s plank (either one of which would be cool). What makes this situation even stranger is that for some reason it seems entirely normal. I open the door and there’s a man in a dark grey jumpsuit looking uniform standing there just like I should be expecting him to be there for some reason or another, or whatever, who the hell knows?
If you want to tell this story go ahead, I dare you to make it make sense, really.
So anyway, I open the door with my cock hanging out because, hey, it’s a warm night and I like to sleep naked, ok? It’s cooler and less constricting. Don’t judge me.
The fellow in uniform gives a surprised cough and turns his head, saying, “If you’d care to get dressed, sir, we really should be going. Wouldn’t want you to be late for orientation on your first night.”
It occurs to me that he has apparently not been briefed on my sleeping habits, perhaps on purpose, so that I now, and others later (when the story gets told), get the entertainment benefit of his shocked reaction. The sidebar here is that I don’t really know why he should have been briefed on my sleeping habits, it just seems like he should have for some reason. I get a smile out of it anyway. So I head over to the day’s work clothes laid in an easily accessible pile on the floor and put them back on. An inexpensive blue plaid, short sleeved button-down work shirt with a single breast pocket on the left hand side; heavily patched, grease and oil stained, tan fire hose material logger’s jeans, and leather hiking boots. The single concession being clean socks, because fuck wearing the same slimy ass socks I’ve been sweating my toes off in all day. Now more or less dressed, I return to the door, and step out onto the deck as the uniformed fellow steps aside.
“Nice ride,” I say to him as I turn to shut and lock the door. Hovering above my deck, which is large enough to park maybe five Ford Fiestas on, is an interesting and quite sporty looking craft. It’s about sixteen feet long, seven or eight feet wide at its widest point in the rear, and looks like someone tipped over a small pyramid and half flattened it by stomping on it like a beer can, so that now it has six sides. Top and bottom are equal triangles, the sides are two triangles that look squished out. Close your eyes, imagine a four sided pyramid with a point at the top, now kick it over and step on it… that’s about what this thing looks like. Now imagine it was designed by an Italian sports car company, but for a government agency that didn’t want to pay for the finer details, and you’re getting the idea.
“Thanks”, he says, with an undertone of ‘What the hell is up with you and why aren’t you infinitely more impressed with this whole situation?’, like me being totally comfortable with everything that’s going on is making him more and more not. We walk around to what us Americans would call the driver’s side of the vehicle and the side slides open much like a mini van’s side door, revealing a central pilot’s seat in front and three seats across behind that. The other two passenger seats are already occupied. I enter the craft, sit down in the unoccupied passenger seat (closest to the door) and begin strapping myself in. It’s a convoluted six way harness system, a bit like a five way racing harness but with two straps between the legs and an extra cross strap across the chest (maybe seven way, I’m not sure exactly how to describe it). It’s like your arms and legs go through the straps so it looks like you’re trapped in a funky spider web when you’ve got it on right. He leans in to help me, with the air of someone who has to do this every time, and I wave him off so I can finish and tighten down my straps.
He says, “You’ve done this before, there’s no other way you could know, but according to my manifest this is the first time you’ve been taken up. So who the fuck are you?”, and then backpedaling with a sudden, very nervous expression on his face, “I mean, no offense sir (said like “Sir!” in military form, which I find amusing) but I just don’t want to get caught in a shitstorm over a bad manifest.”
“Don’t worry about it buddy, I guarantee you know more about this shit than I do. I don’t even understand how I understand any of this shit, or know what I appear to know. Know what I mean?” I ask him.
“Not really, but that’s your story and I’m stickin’ to it,” he says, with conviction, as he slides into the pilot’s chair and straps in while studiously avoiding looking at me.
At this point several things happen in quick succession. I look to my right and observe the other two passengers, a man and a woman, both looking rather disheveled and wearing apparently just what they had been sleeping in, with very odd expressions on their faces. And the ship begins to move astonishingly rapidly. It’s not the Disney World roller coaster ride that you might expect though. The ship seems to carry its own gravitational atmosphere, so to speak, so that we are not thrown back into our seats or whipped side to side like riding in a fast car or an airplane. We are mostly insulated from the common inertial forces that you would expect from rapid acceleration and maneuvering, although there is still a slight hint of it. Mostly there is the sensation of vast distances covered in a single heartbeat, a feeling of sitting almost still as the entire world is slipped from beneath your feet like a magician whipping a tablecloth out from under place settings. It is a difficult sensation to accurately describe. Then both my fellow passengers start trying to question me at once.
“Who are you?” asks the woman.
“Yeah man, where the hell are we going? I mean, this seems cool as hell and all, but what the fuck?” asks the man, smiling broadly.
She is probably in her mid thirties, white, medium build, with blue eyes and thick, frizzy, light brown, shoulder length hair that currently looks as if it might try to leap from her scalp at any moment. She’s wearing bland pajamas beneath a thick bathrobe, the obligatory fuzzy slippers complete the ensemble.
He is younger, early twenties perhaps, hispanic, short hair, slender build, wearing an old black t shirt, some Walmart draw string sleep pants, with old, dirty, white sneakers unlaced upon his sockless feet.
“Hi, I’m Aaron, and I’m as clueless as you are. I’m just along for the ride, same as y’all,” I answer.
“Hector,” laughs the young man, “And you’re full of shit. Dude, he let you get dressed, he called you ‘Sir’, and you know how these fucked up seatbelts work. Man, I couldn’t have figured this shit out if I had instructions. I think you done this shit before.”
“He was naked when he came to the door. I saw…” says the woman, who doesn’t volunteer her name, “He had to get dressed. And the seatbelts aren’t really that hard, just not what you’re used to in your car.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“Still,” laughs Hector, “I think this dude knows something, he’s holding out on us. Homeboy up there as much as said.”
Throughout this exchange, the pilot remains studiously silent, head forward, minding his own goddamned business so hard I can feel it. I think he agrees with Hector, but he’s not going to be flippant about it, and he’s not going to push for information because he doesn’t want to have someone higher up the chain of command shit in his cornflakes over it later. He’s just gritting his teeth and doing his job, flying this minivan through space, ignoring the rowdy kids in the backseat.
I look out the window and see blackness, stars, space. Here we are, sure as shit, in space, and instead of being completely amazed I just feel ripped off because I’m missing out on the whole weightlessness bit, which I always thought would be the coolest thing about being in space. Turns out space travel is less like astronauts on the news and more like Star Trek. Who’d a thunk it? Then I feel our course shift slightly and my view is instantly filled by… the moon. Damn that was fast.
“Well guys,” I say, “I think I know where we’re going.”
“Oh yeah, where’s that?” asks Hector.
I gesture with my head towards the side window of our minivan in space.
“Holy shit dude! Is that the moon?”
“Sure looks like it.”
“But it’s only been like, a couple minutes.”
“Yeah man, we’re cookin’. This fuckin’ space minivan is way faster than I thought. I was expecting like, an hour or two at least.”
At this point the pilot looks back over his shoulder at us (mostly me) with a face that says, “You kids want to shut the fuck up and let me park this goddamn thing, or do you not really want to go to the movies after all?”
Me and Hector shut the fuck up.
Our descent is smooth and fast. We come in over the shoulder of the ‘man on the moon’ and swoop down into the edge of the shadow of the dark side of the moon. If you look at the full moon from earth, it is somewhere around the two o’clock position, and just around the back where you can’t see it. I know how helpful that is. You’re welcome.
When the building comes into sight, it is an odd thing to look at. It looks like a giant Nazi swastika that has been built onto in a half assed attempt to make it not look so much like a goddamned giant Nazi swastika anymore — whatever. Apparently there is still a whole bunch of shit from World War Two that isn’t being admitted. Go Government! And also, Fuck You! You arrogant assholes.
Too much? Eh, blow me.
Anyway, as we come down, the structure is kind of hard to fully quantify. We’re moving fast, and there appears to be some sort of clear dome covering the whole compound, just barely perceptible here in the twilight of the edge of the shadow. The building grows to rather immense proportions as we close in on it. It looks to rise four to maybe six stories over the surface of the moon, but is easily described as sprawling. I mean, when you can see the whole moon in the window it looks like a lapel pin, so when you get up close and personal you might fully expect little green men to be drag racing ocean liners down the hallways. It makes that kind of first impression.
We swoop uneventfully down through the dome and into what looks like a perfectly normal, if rather large, airplane hanger. One end is open to the world (or moon, anyway) through a pair of large sliding doors that look as if they would take a full minute and a half to close in case of an emergency in the next twenty five seconds. This is how we entered. The other end butts up against the outside wall of one of the long arms of the swastika. Directly under the peak of the Quonset hut style roof is a set of glass doors bookended by glass window-walls that would look at home in exactly any shopping mall you might care to think of.
Gee, I came to the moon and it’s more J.C. Penny’s than The Sharper Image — fuck you reality! Seriously, whoever designed this place really needs to be subjected to A Clockwork Orange style viewing of Forbidden Planet until they have fully internalized what science fiction reality is supposed to look like. I mean, hell! One’s first impression of a secret base on the moon should not be one of, “Oh yeah, me an’ my new buddy Hector and the fuzzy headed girl from down the street (cosmically speaking) carpooled in a space minivan to the moon mall and all they had to offer was a shitty movie theater and all the shows were sold out by the time we got there because there’s nothing fucking else to do on that piece of shit rock! We could have gone to San Antonio and seen it on IMAX and it would have been more impressive and way less trouble.” Funny how the mind works, isn’t it?
Anyway, our pilot, with a leary eye in my direction, gets up and opens the sliding door of the minivan as we disentangle ourselves from the spider web seat belt bullshit that I still don’t understand why we need when the minivan carries its own internal gravitational atmosphere — whatever, I think I’m probably overthinking all this and I need to mellow out with the whole ‘Fuck you! Why isn’t this infinitely more impressive than it is?!’ attitude going on inside my head. I am, after all, on the fucking moon, at a secret base, where I have never been before as far as I can recall, amongst at least two folks who think I’m full of shit and secretly running the show — or at least know something about who is. Deep breath, count to ten. Ok maybe twenty.
I am untangled and out of the minivan like I’ve done it before (maybe?) whilst my other two companions are still struggling their way out of their nets. Our pilot is standing next to a yellow line painted down the center of the floor of the hanger facing back towards me as I walk up. He gives me a ‘just wait’ glance. I start taking deep breaths. One. Why the hell did you wake me up and bring me to the moon mall. Two. I really want to punch you in the face until you answer question one. Three. What color will your blood make when I smear it across that big yellow line on the floor with your face. Four. Why, oh why, did I not bring a gun, that would have made this so much easier, what with all the instant gratification that a gun offers. Five…
“Ok,” our pilot says, “now that you’re all here.”
Apparently I was so lost in my thoughts of evil genius I failed to notice that my other two companions had managed to extricate themselves from the minivan of space. Evil genius does have its downsides, like being distracted by thoughts of it. Damn it!
“All you need to do now,” he continues, “is to follow this yellow line to those doors over there, and then,” at this he looks me directly in the eyes, “you’re someone else’s problem. Got it? Good.” As he walks away rather briskly, like someone who wants to run but doesn’t want to be seen to, possibly because of stories that might be told about him later.
So I start walking down the line towards the doors. Now that we’re moving, Hector lopes up along side me.
“So Boss, what happens now?” he asks.
“If you keep talking to me like I’m your prison guard, I’m gonna beat you like a bitch. That’s what.” Apparently Hector’s been to jail, or at least knows someone who has, because that gets an immediate reaction of a step away and hands up in an ‘Ok buddy, that’s cool’ kind of gesture. The girl with the frizzy hair is staying directly behind me, like a shadow, and not saying a damn thing.
While we’ve still got some distance to the door I turn to Hector and say, “Look bro, we’re cool, but seriously, if I’m undercover here or something, I’m so deep that I don’t even know it, so I need you to chill the fuck out with that shit, ok? ‘Cause I got no fuckin’ idea what we’re really gettin’ into here, and if I do secretly have some kind of advantage, I need for you to not give it away, because we might fuckin’ need it. You feel me?”
At this, Hector takes a deep breath and gives me a wide eyed, wide mouthed look, and then begins to grin as his flattened hand flows out towards the doors, in effect saying, ‘Ok buddy, you first’.
As we walk through the double doors there are two “Brown Shirts” (also colloquially known as “Brown Shits”) standing there, one to each side. Obviously some type of security farce, sorry, I mean force — at least their uniforms look more like the Boy Scouts of America than fucking Nazis from the Night of Broken Glass (if you don’t know about Nazi Brownshirts, educate thyself). Both are similar in age (mid to late twenties) and appearance. Exceedingly average, almost six foot tall, brown wavy hair (one a bit longer and straighter, one a bit shorter and curlier), slight paunch hanging over the belt, neither one of them handsome nor hideous. Nothing striking about them.
As I’m crossing the threshold short and curly, on the left, is mumbling something along the lines of, “Unit X-31 received, hale and hearty, issuing instruction,” into a police style shoulder mic. His face is a bit shorter and narrower, with a lighter brow and rounder nose than his compatriot.
Who says, “Follow the blue line on the floor to the first door it comes to, enter, and await further instruction.” He is a hair taller, with a slightly longer face and more hawkish nose. Now that I think of it, his compatriot is a bit more owlish. Hmmm…whatever.
I lead my scraggly little band, such as we are, through the doors, a second set of identical doors (much like one would find in a Mall, to preserve the A/C, except that these appear to have far superior air seals) and into a hallway that would be at home in almost any middle school that anyone in the U.S. went to between the years of 1965 and 1986. Yeah, our shit got old, but at least it lasted back then.
There is, no shit, a rainbow on the floor, laid out institutional style in separate lines to follow to your destination. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Roy G. Biv. A strange itch in the back of my brain tells me that this is significant, but I don’t really understand. I follow the blue line about eight yards down the hallway to the right, where it turns left into a glass single door, which has two windows to either side. As I open the door the sound of many excited voices pours through. Not exactly loud, but the kind of constant, thick susurrus that carries a lot of weight. It occurs to me that this is not regular glass in this door, or I would have heard this all the way down the hall. The blanket of talk sounds just like a bunch of students getting to know each other on their first day at a new school, because that’s exactly what it is. Oh my God, the moon mall has just turned into Moon Valley High — please, someone kill me now.