FULLER

The blue ribbons of light vanished abruptly. Frank Fuller could have sworn he had seen them receding brutally, emptying the black tunnel of the ISS like a liquid. But that might have been an illusion of sorts.

He had blanked. Probably. There was a discontinuity of sorts in his consciousness.

But he was still alive. And the internal heat he had felt was gone. Although he felt awful. He tried to work out his mouth… and felt nothing.

Juliana!

He tried to shout, but nothing happened.

The darkness was not absolute. From under him, light still came into the blacked station through the glass panels of the Cupola. He tried to move, to grasp something, as he felt like he was free-floating, having lost his grasp on the many handholds on the station’s walls.

The arm didn’t feel quite right. Bloated, even.

Blue light swarmed the station, and Frank Fuller, former fighter pilot, a veteran of five years of rigorous NASA astronaut training, cringed. The light swirled, briefly delimiting the inner volume of the station’s corridor, and he could have sworn there was a shape barely silhouetted. His brain seemed to have problems seeing because he could swear he saw the light behind the shape, yet they stopped at the edge of the oblong shape… with sticks.

A person. Juliana.

He tried to shout again, to no avail. Even more worrying, it did not feel like his mouth was shut, obstructed, or taped.

It felt like there was no mouth to begin with. No mouth, no… jaw bone working.

Fuck?

Before he could think anything, the blue light vanished again, leaving the station in near-total darkness again. He tried squinting to where he’d seen the shape. There was a vague hint, like a small reflection of things. It didn’t have a color, but Frank knew that, in low light conditions, color was the first thing to go.

His fingers touched something. Something cold and hard. He grasped at it and felt the hand closing.

Three digits.

He only felt three digits. Two and a thumb. More or less.

Goddamn, I must be a mess. How am I even alive?

He focused. As long as he lived, he’d assume he was still going to. Fighter pilots and NASA astronauts did not quit.

‟Juliana”, he tried.

His mouth was not working. But he still tried.

‟Frank?”

Yes, he answered automatically, but the mouth didn’t work. And he realized, belatedly, that the answer sounded all wrong.

‟Yes,” he tried again.

‟What the fuck?” was the answer.

‟I thought we were goners,” he replied, the right way to speak coming a bit more naturally.

He needed to focus on talking because his mouth was missing. At least he couldn’t feel it.

Wait, how do I breathe?

‟The Cupola,” Juliana – he assumed, the voice sounded off – said.

‟Can you?” he asked.

The vague shape ahead twisted and bounced, off a wall he assumed.

He tried to orient himself, and dizziness hit. He tried to swallow, failed, and pushed from the handhold he’d grasped, going “down”.

‟We made…” he said, before he stopped, looking.

In the light from Earth below, what he’d taken to be Juliana was… not what he’d anticipated.

The shape was roughly humanoid and of the correct size for the commander. But jutting from the tee-shirt – the very same one Juliana had been wearing, he belatedly realized – was blubbery leather. A thick tegument suggesting some industrial covering rather than skin. There was a rough head shape, over a very thick neck stretching the tee-shirt neck opening, and too-short arms.

With three digits.

He raised his hand, now that light was enough to see.

His hand was the same leather blubber substance. And had only the three digits he had felt. The same three digits he saw on the other’s shape.

‟Who are you? WHAT are you…” the voice came.

‟Shuko! ANYONE!” the shout came.

Frank raised one of his hands to placate the alien form, keeping the hold in what amounted to a death grip.

So, he was surprised to hear something distant.

‟Who?”

‟Shuko?”

“Yes.”

“Juliana here. Where are you? I am in the Cupola with an…”

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

He heard her stop as she looked at her hand she’d raised defensively.

‟Not an alien. Just me. Frank,” he said, realizing it sounded lame.

There was a distinctive lack of reflective surfaces in the Cupola, but the alien shape of Juliana Newman, his commander in the ISS, touched herself everywhere.

He tried to shrug but failed. He had shoulders, probably, based on what he was seeing on Juliana’s shape, but they worked wrong.

At least he had an explanation for why he had problems with his mouth. Juliana didn’t have one he could see.

‟Commander,” the distant voice came.

‟Shuko? You’re still in the Central?”

‟I am. It’s all dark in here. And the ventilation is off. Wait…”

Frank took the occasion to look outside. If he had a mouth and jaw, he’d have dropped it.

The ISS was flying over a sea of hexagonal shapes.

From up there, it looked like the entire atmosphere was delimited by bright blue hexagons of a different color than the Pacific. They were almost upon the land, and the slightly irregular hexagons extended over it, making an impossible grid overlaid on Earth.

And from some of the hexagons came blue light, like the one that had hit the station. And them.

‟I hear Radanovich. He’s still in the Zvezda module… he thinks. I don’t know how I hear him. It looks like sound bounces across the walls… but that’s not quite right. Isn’t it?”

‟Same as you hear me. Do… do you have a mouth?”

‟Weird question, commander Newman… but… I can’t quite feel it.”

‟I hoped you…”

Frank saw it coming.

‟Incoming blue lights,” he yelled.

The blue light from below entered the ISS, but almost immediately vanished. It looked like the station had clipped the edge of one of the hexagons.

The shape of Juliana twirled and looked at him again, and he realized another thing that had been bothering him on a subconscious level.

‟Juliana? You have… how many eyes?”

As he asked the question, he realized he should have noticed before. Because he was looking forward along the orbit, trying to see which hexagons had lights coming from, and simultaneously looking back to the receding blue light plume they’d just gone through.

‟Okay. I am spooked,” she admitted to him as the same realization came to her.

‟All to Cupola,” Juliana shouted across the ISS.

Frank was starting to think that what he was hearing wasn’t sound. The commander simultaneously sounded louder and not louder, and his brain was turning itself into pretzels trying to parse the voice. He took a metal tool strapped on the Cupola’s border, and hit the edge, while they waited.

No sound at all.

He did it again on the other side of the entrance, to no more results. He should have not been surprised, as Juliana’s head shape did not seem to have ears. Outside of the eyes, it was more of a mask, or a leather bag stretching over what might be a skull shape.

Yaytsev Baranov’s voice finally sounded across the ISS, a jumble of Russian curse words Frank recognized. He’d been training in Russia a few years ago when it sounded like he’d be coming up on a Russian ship.

The second Russian cosmonaut was supposed to be sleeping for an off-shift schedule, he knew. He might have been sleeping when the shutdown happened, and the light moved across the ISS.

But if he was hearing him… did it mean he’d been Changed too?

Probably. No, certainly. Shuko too, at least.

And if Shuko and Ivan could talk to each other… then everyone had been affected.

From further into the station, he spotted something. There shouldn’t be light enough to see up there, but there was a little something.

‟God,” he heard Juliana.

Like the shout, it felt like she was whispering, but not truly whispering.

The silhouette he saw was wearing shorts and a ripped T-shirt. The floral print on the shirt was enough to recognize Shuko. The leathery skin was weird enough, and the head was like nothing, but it was different from Juliana’s. Frank wished again he had a reflective surface, to see himself.

The silhouette stopped as it neared the Cupola.

‟That’s us, Shuko,” Frank said.

‟You’re not… not…” the Japanese was missing words.

‟The lights did not spare anyone, I think,” Juliana said. ‟You look weird yourself.”

‟I thought I had broken things. But I felt fine otherwise,” he replied.

‟So do I. Obviously, what happened is not a massive radiation overdose. That’s not a comic book biology violation.”

Frank spotted a shape moving distantly.

‟Ivan?” he asked, almost at the same time as the two others.

‟Da. Yes. I take back everything about being the worst looking of the crew.”

Frank laughed or rather tried to. It looked like what passed as voice did not work quite well for laughter or the rest.

‟How are we talking, by the way?” he asked.

The three others shifted, startled by the question.

‟You’re right, Frank.”

‟We have no ears. I tried banging on metal, no sound at all. Unless the station entirely depressurized, and we survived…”

One of the figures – Shuko, he thought – pulled a rectangle of paper and waved it.

‟Moves across the air. There’s a drag, resistance,” he said. Then he slapped his hand on the wall, bouncing and catching himself.

‟No sound. You’re right, Fuller.”

‟I’m not even going to consider the question of how we’re breathing. The only orifices we seem to have are our eyes… and there are too many of those.”

‟Where’s Yaytsev? YAYTSEV,” Juliana shouted.

‟At EU Lab,” the voice from inside the station replied.

‟What are you doing there? I asked everyone at the Cupola. It’s the only place with some light right now.”

‟Incorrect, Commander. I’m looking at the big magnet there.”

“There’s light?”

“No. But I see it. There is… a kind of aura around. That I can see. Or touch. Or something like that?”

‟…”

The surprise somehow sounded, even without words, Frank noted.

‟I hypothesize that I’m seeing the magnetic flux lines around it,” Yaytsev said from across the station.

‟Really?” Frank blurted, and the Russian heard him.

‟It vaguely feels like the lines that should be coming from that magnet’s shape. I’ve been mainly in charge of that experiment, after all. I should know what shape they hold in models.”

He knew Juliana enough to feel she was thinking furiously. But she was not trained as Station Commander for nothing, and she did not dwell on the new fact for long.

‟That’s not going to help us. Unless we have lots of magnets to use as lamps.”

‟It does not seem to light very much, Commander.”

‟Then drop it. We have to figure out our next move. Everything’s down, and the station won’t last long in that configuration. No air circulation, no recycling, and no thermal balancing outside of the passives? Anything else?”

‟Integrity should be okay. Everything is designed to resist a main power bus drop,” Yaytsev replied from inside.

‟Can we restart it? The solar panels alone should still be providing…” Ivan asked.

‟No,” both Frank and Juliana replied simultaneously.

‟Even things on battery are powered down,” Frank took over. ‟Tablet, portable lamps. It’s not electric input, it’s like electricity doesn’t exist anymore.”

‟No breaking physics or our reality would have chan…” Shuko started before stopping.

‟We have.”

‟We look like we still obey normal physics. We just look like aliens,” Frank offered.

‟So? We’re stuck in a space station where nothing works?” Ivan asked.

‟No. Remember Ops, Juliana?” he said.

‟Byrne said NASA had lost a satellite over the Northwest, but they were bringing it back up.”

‟Then, when we leave whatever, it’s going to come back?” Ivan asked again.

‟Probably,” Juliana said.

Frank twisted in place, reorienting himself so he was looking across instead of straight down. He raised his stubby arm, pointing to the horizon.

‟And the hexagons are ending. We’re moving out.”

‟Yaytsev?”

‟Heard. If we get power back, you should have central first. Power control there. Switches for the network… most computers… that depend on how much power we get back.”

‟How long to get back online?” the commander asked.

‟Between two and nine minutes. Can’t be better.”

Frank was watching the border where the hexagons ended. Although they were small, at least from this altitude, he could see them. Imperfect, but they made a sort-of grid across the upper atmosphere. As the border rushed toward them, he could swear he was seeing incomplete ones, whose edges were somehow elongating.

The zone is growing, he realized with a chill.

Frank braced himself for whatever was going to happen. Then the ISS crossed over the invisible limit.