The wetness and the sound of rain falling all around Bain woke him from his restless sleep. He opened his eyes slowly, finding himself lying face down on a crushed slate and stone landscape in, what he guessed, was the early hours of the morning.  

“What on earth?” He muttered roughly, his throat parched from heavy drinking the night before, as he glanced down at his silk pajamas, already soaked through from the steady sparse rain drops. The sky around was softly lit, almost as though there was a distant fog curtain suspended in the air that was being lit by a glowing moon somewhere above.  

Bain’s attention was drawn to a buzzing sound near his feet where a soft glowing light suddenly vanished before he could turn his head, leaving him in the near darkness as he slowly pushed himself up to his knees.  

“Where am I?” He asked the stillness as he slowly stood up. The increased vantage point allowed him to see further off into the distance and to spy other soft glowing sources of light in the distance. Blue swirling ovals hovered over prone figures on broken sheets of rock, at least six that he could make out in the distance.  

“Hey! Can anyone hear me?” Bain shouted into the distance as he stepped forward with raised hands as though he could reach out and bring the other people closer simply by desire. His shout must have reached the next person because Bain could see them shaking their head as they stirred from slumber.  

“Ouch!” Bain cried as his bare foot found a jutting stone, forcing him to flinch in pain. 

The swirling light winked out from behind the waking figure just as soon as they raised their head, making them less visible. Bain could have sworn that it might have been a woman, based on the hint of long hair that the soft blue light had provided. The voice he heard calling from her direction a moment later confirmed his guess. 

“Ch̀wy d̂wy!” The older woman cried, clearly in another language before she seemed to enter a state of panic, her voice and words speeding up as she stood up and spun around in fright.  

Bain had never heard the language before and quickly put her out of his mind as he rubbed his foot, finding it still whole, before carefully stepping off of the slate stone he was on and making his way towards the other five glowing disks still hovering above their slumbering victims. If he could get to them before they woke up, he might be able to search them for anything useful, even their extra clothes might serve him as wraps for his feet.  

If they resisted him, then he would simply put them down. Just as he did to everyone else who did not give him what he wanted. Walking in the near darkness was fraught with hazards, making his trek slow and laborious as he listened to the bumbling fear of the woman slowly tapering off.  

“Why are you shutting up now? I was using you as a sound marker,” He muttered as he became aware of the sky as it began to lighten and change. A steadily increasing thrumming sound was coming from above, growing ever more powerful enough to even be felt through his bare feet against the stone. He shuffled slowly to a stop and glanced upwards, noticing that the other five disks winked out at nearly the same time as the sky had begun to change. The others had woken up as well, it seemed.  

“What is happening? Where am I?” Bain heard a man yell in the distance, making him imagine that he was foreign, perhaps Australian or British. It didn’t matter to Bain at the moment because of what he saw manifesting above them all had his whole attention. 

A hole appeared in the sky and through it crawled or undulated something that could only be described as nightmare fuel. It was nigh impossible to describe simply because its shape or shapes along its surface continually deformed, hardened into spikes, and then morphed either into pustules or gaping mouths. Bain heard voices scream in the distance and he would have joined them as well if he had been able to breathe through the fright that he felt flooding his body. There were clouds up there in the distance and whatever was lowering itself towards him made him look like a grain of sand in comparison to a football stadium as it pushed through the thin film. 

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Hundreds of long spiky tentacles darted out from the bubbling surface of the impossible monster, threading down through the sky, and rapidly spearing towards the people standing below.  

They were all going to die. 

“No!” Bain screamed as he felt the sharp points stab into his back and arms. They felt like needles and the sharp pain startled him awake, causing him to sit up in bed inside his massive bedroom. He was alone in the dim morning light of his huge mansion.  

With shuddering movements Bain reached his hands behind his back to feel at his spine and neck, finding his skin whole and undamaged. 

“What a horrible nightmare!” He whispered with closed eyes.  

“Goodmorning, Bain Vanzile. It is time for you to choose to serve humanity,” A voice suddenly said at the foot of the bed, startling and causing Bain to freeze in place. With practiced smoothness he quickly reached beneath his pillow to grab his Colt 45 that he always slept with before swiftly swinging it in line with the intruder in his room. 

Before him, at the foot of his bed, stood a beautiful young woman who looked like she had Middle Eastern genes. She was clothed in a white dress that was adorned with pearls and gold scrollwork, making her look more like a princess from a royal family rather than the kind of woman that frequented his bedroom. The most startling thing about her were her eyes, they seemed to glow like fire opals even in the soft light. 

None of that mattered to Bain as he smirked slightly, pulling the trigger of his gun several times, and causing a blast of hot lead to fly at the young woman, centering the projectiles around her face and neck.  

She… caught the bullets out of the air with one hand before simply dropping them onto the bed near Bain’s covered feet. Her eyes hadn’t even moved, making her catching the bullets seem beneath her and not even worth her attention. 

The smoking gun slowly slid from Bain’s grip as he tried to not make any more threatening moves. In the brief instant that the girl had moved, Bain could have sworn that her hands had morphed into the grotesque tentacles that he had seen attack everyone in his dream. 

“Every day you will have two choices,” the woman continued, as though nothing had happened, “to serve and to work to benefit your people via entering the blue portal behind me, or to wander this world as a ghost. Each day that you spend in service of humanity will gain you one second of time back on earth to visit.”  

Everything that the woman/monster said made truly little sense to Bain. His brain cranked through every word that she uttered, leaving him with just one question. 

“Am I dead?” 

“No, your body is currently in suspended medical animation while your mind inhabits this avatar of your former physical body. Only the evilest of earth were deemed eligible for this form of banishment and you certainly fit the bill,” she said as a screen appeared in the air next to her listing all of his crimes against humanity.  

His eyes widened as the list started to scroll, displaying all the murders that he had ever done, including the ones he had managed to do in secret.  

They knew everything that he had ever done.  

Every. Last. Thing. 

“So, earth has finally been invaded by aliens?” he asked, swinging his hairy tattooed legs out of bed, and heading for the broad expanse of windows. A brief glance at his left leg proved just how capable these aliens were at copying a human body; they had reproduced every scar down to the dog bite that happened in his youth. Back when his father had thought it would be funny to see how his son would do inside a dog fighting pit.  

“Of a sort, yes. We are fixers and your planet was due for some... fixing. Final question.” 

Outside where he expected to see acres of exotic trees instead all that met his sight was a hazy mist filled with a never-ending expanse of blue. 

“Where am I?” 

“You are on the seventh planet from your sun. I believe you call it Uranus, a fitting name for where your kind would end up.” She said before she vanished.