Alien Desire by Hannah Haze
Chapter two - Emma
Iwake to the faint sound of whining. At first it infiltrates my dreams and I mistake it for the drone of the spaceship. When I open my eyes, I’m completely disoriented until my brain pulls out the memories of the day before.
Lying on my back, I gasp for air as a wave of panic and grief courses over me. I let it pass, and then my attention is drawn back to the noise.
It’s coming from the cupboard again. Have those hairballs returned? I should have sorted out the vent properly last night.
Picking up the discarded blaster from yesterday, I go to investigate.
This time I find just one of the fluffy creatures, small and curled into a ball in the corner. His eyes are big and round but all his other features and limbs are lost under the matt of black fur. He quivers as I stare down at him and whines again.
“Go,” I tell him, gesturing my blaster in his direction. “Go on, go. Your friends already left.”
Or maybe they were his family. The dogs seem to have dragged the stuffing from one of the mattresses into the bottom of this cupboard, and formed a soft sort of den, almost like a nest.
The fluffy thing lifts its head, holds my stare, and then sinks back down and whines a third time.
Reluctantly, I poke out a foot in his direction and prod it gently with my toe. It merely watches the action of my leg, but refuses to budge. I try again with a little more force, the fur ticking my foot, but when he remains where he is, I give up. It’s not worth a bite or a scratch.
“Fine,” I say, “stay if you want.”
The thing will get hungry eventually, or realise his friends aren’t coming back (especially as I’m blocking up that vent) and then he’ll leave.
Over the next two days, I occupy my time by making a detailed inventory of the supplies in the system, checking the fuel tanks and pumps, and fiddling with one of the snow mobiles. Once I bring it to life, I journey backward and forward to the crash site, sifting through the remains for anything of use. I hope that maybe I can salvage parts of the computer and use it to upgrade the communication system, send a more direct and efficient help signal. However, the ship’s computer is a burnt out husk, blackened and destroyed.
On these journeys I try not to look at my crewmates. The ground is frozen and hard, and I have no suitable tool to dig graves. I suppose I could cremate their bodies instead, but I worry that the rescue mission will want to return their remains to their families.
Once I’d listened to a documentary about Everest, the highest mountain on Earth. Centuries ago, men and women climbed this mountain without the technology we have today, and many died in the extreme conditions, frozen to death in the cold temperatures, or weakened by the lack of oxygen. Up there on the mountain peak, their bodies never decayed. They remained perfectly preserved ghosts haunting all those that came after them.
I wonder if Georgio, Ling and Jacob will haunt me too.
The fluff ball remains in the cupboard of the sleeping bay despite the fact that his family has not returned. I wonder if he is sick, so telling myself I am being ridiculous, I bring him a dish of water and some dried crackers.
He eyes them suspiciously, but when I return later, they are both empty. After that he ventures from the safety of his nest and watches me from large distances as I search through the store rooms for anything of interest. I find myself leaving him more and more gifts of food.
In my search, I find a treadmill, and an ancient music device some traveller lost here decades, maybe centuries, before. I connect it up to the computer and have it play me songs from so long ago not one is familiar.
There’s also a stack of paperback books, yellowed and musty. It has been a long time since I held a book in my hands, and I lift it to my nose, inhaling the aroma that takes me straight back to classrooms and my childhood bed.
There is one bed in the bay where I pile the books around the base, along with the clothes and toiletries I’ve solicited as my own. It begins to resemble something homely, especially when the fluff ball takes to sleeping on the floor beside me, even though he scurries away whenever I attempt to reach out and stroke him.
On the fourth day, I wake and find the pale blue sky and the faint yellow sun masked by thick heavy clouds. All colour has drained from this world as the white land and the white sky merge into one another in a blur of blankness. And then it snows.
I haven’t seen snow since I was a child and then I only saw it once. The phenomenon is rare now back on Earth and the planets I’ve visited on my assignments have all been baking hot deserts or vast steamy rainforests.
White crystals drift in the air and I can’t help but rush outside and stand among them, opening my hand to try to catch the delicate flakes. They are weightless, feather-like. It feels like being in a dream. I swirl around with my arms outstretched and my head tilted back and I laugh, the fluffy dog watching me from the doorway with his head tilted. The noise of my laughter is strange. The short blunt messages of the computer are the only human sounds I’ve heard in days.
It’s short lived. Soon the snowflakes morph to ice, hard bullets that assault my body. I’m forced inside where they hammer against the windows and batter the roof, like some deranged monster determined to get in.
The storm lasts for five days. Five days, I’m trapped inside this station with only the computer and the fluff ball for company.
For days I listen to the insistent smashing of the ice against the roof. I think I will go mad. I make the computer play tracks of music unfamiliar to me as loud as it can to try to drown out the noise. But it is futile, the ice another base to the melody of the tunes.
The boredom eats away at me. I know it has been only a few days but I’m used to being busy, to having people in charge dictating my every waking hour, commanding me to do this job or that duty. Being left to my own devices, my own entertainment, is as alien as this planet.
There’re the books and the music and the treadmill. There’s my daily inspection and the logging of supplies. But the days are endless seconds and minutes and hours to fill.
I decide I’m going to make friends with the fluff ball (who in my head I have named Fluffy - it seems apt) and spend one afternoon sitting on the bedroom floor coaxing him closer and closer with bits of food.
He is wary at first. I offer him the gift, but he keeps an arm’s length away from me at all times, sniffing anxiously at the air. When he realises this isn’t a trick, but a satisfactory supply of tasty food, he’s willing to venture a little closer.
Eyeing me closely, he snaps his jaws at the cracker and snatches it from my hand. He drags it a few meters away and nibbles at it greedily while watching me. Then he comes back for another. And another. Finally he eats straight from my fingers, allowing me to stroke his soft fur as he munches away.
After this, he’s happy to follow me around, often curling up at my feet and welcoming tummy rubs and ear tickles. However, I can’t tempt him with a game of chase or fetch and so his ability to distract me is limited.
I scour the computer for morsels of diversions instead. Finally, I come up trumps.
Chess.
I settle myself down on the chair in front of the screen and challenge the computer to a match.
To my utter surprise, the computer lets out a hearty chuckle. “You’re challenging me to a game of chess, human?”
What?
“You sure you wanna lose?” she asks me. “I don’t want to make you cry.”
She’s been nothing but polite and perfunctory up until now. But it seems whoever programmed chess into this machine did so with a tonne load of shit talk.
I roll my eyes at whoever the idiot was who did this.
“Keep doing that,” the computer says in the same chirpy voice, although with a tad more aggression, “and maybe you’ll find a brain cell back there.”
“Nice,” I moan. “Do you have a name, computer?”
“No. But you can call me Grand Master.”
“You need a name if you’re going to talk to me like this.” I drum my fingers on the table, searching around for inspiration. “Hmmm, Sheila.”
“Sheila,” she replies flatly.
I laugh. “Yep, it suits you.”
“So are we going to sit around and chat like grandmas all day, or are we playing?”
She beats me. Of course. And makes the noise of someone sucking in air through their teeth. “Shame,” she says with a large dollop of sarcasm.
I am bantering with an AI machine. I’m clearly losing my sanity.
I wonder if anyone will come, if I’ll be left alone here in this box forever, slowly going mad as I natter with a computer.
One of the reasons I joined the space cadets was knowing I’d always be surrounded by other people. Even when we slept. A replacement for the family I’d lost. I’m not used to being alone.
Another was the adventure. The opportunity to see the universe — planets and places so different, so strange from my own. I relished every moment of our journey here, even the endless days in space, even the hard work, even the claustrophobia of our spacecraft. It was worth all that for the reward of glimpsing the beauty of the universe.
As if to prove just how crazy I am, I tell the computer to crank up the loudest, rockiest music she has and I dance around the station, drumming and strumming the air, thrashing my head backward and forward, and skidding about in my socks. Fluffy chases me, confused, and I swerve and skip around him until he’s barking and yapping in excitement.
“We could form a band,” I tell him, before collapsing on my bed breathless.
But on the sixth day I wake and find the colour black has returned. It is night. I’d lost all sense of time in the monotony of the storm, but now it has passed and the vast sky, the window into space through which I cannot climb, has returned.
I rush outside and stare up into its bottomless depths; the stars appearing one at a time to greet me like long missed friends. I think I almost hear them twinkling to me.
“Is anyone coming?” I ask them but they do not reply.
I mark the passing days on the wall by my bunk. I think it is what prisoners do to record the time until release and it seems apt stranded here.
The row of carved lines grows longer and longer, marching across the wall. I run my finger over them before I sleep at night and try not to think about how many days have come and gone without rescue.
One day at a time, Emma, one day at a time.
I keep myself disciplined. The training to become a space cadet, trusted to undertake missions across the universe, was a fierce and competitive one. The recruiting officer looked me up and down the day I’d finished school and gone to sign up and laughed. She’d seen my small frame, only just scraping over five foot, and concluded I wouldn’t last the distance.
“I give it a week,” she said, “sure you want to do this?”
I’d lasted longer than a week. I lasted the entire three years, watching as others quit or failed to make the cut during that time.
See, appearances can be deceptive. I looked like someone that could be broken emotionally, but losing my family had done that to me already and I’d survived. I’m tough.
I tell myself that every day when I open my eyes and force myself out of bed to start the routine I’ve created for myself.
Before I let myself eat, I run on the ancient treadmill. Fluffy jumps and barks around me, keen to join in the activity. Occasionally, he attempts to scrabble up onto the moving boards with me, but the motion confuses him and he always slides straight back off with a yelp.
After my run, I shower, insisting Sheila play a new tune from her vast collection of dated music as I do. Then it’s time to cook breakfast and feed Fluffy from the tins of stewed meat — the closest looking thing to pet food I can find.
My daily inventory of the food and medicine supply comes next, listing the items to Sheila for her to log and record. She assures me every day that this isn’t necessary and that her programming has already undergone this task, but it keeps me busy and so she indulges me. It’s probably silly. There is plenty here, and Fluffy and I make only a small dent in the stock.
Then I check the communications system, scour the frequencies for any messages and voices. Sometimes I allow myself to fiddle with the coding, but it always ends in frustration. I can’t find a way to upgrade the system. And there is never, ever a response, a reply, not even a sign that my message is making its way slowly through the universe.
If the day is clear, I’ll head out exploring after lunch, with Fluffy always keen to trot alongside, even though there’s little to find. The land is flat and featureless except for its unclimbable ragged rocks and miles and miles of ice.
Occasionally, from the corner of my eyes, I see a flitting movement, which I assume must be the others from the pack of dogs. They are quick and I fail to obtain a proper look at them. I suppose I should count my blessings that they leave me alone. They never come close, and Fluffy simply glances at them with disinterest, sniffing the air and huffing.
If the day is stormy, I bunker down and read, fuss over Fluffy or play chess with Sheila. Occasionally I sketch.
At night I eat my dinner, listening to the music from long ago that now seems less strange. Afterwards I stargaze. The pattern across the sky is becoming familiar. Always the same.
Until it isn’t.
On the 171st day of my stranding, I see something new.
A streak of colour rushes across the sky, a ball of neon hues that grows in size. A rumble accompanies its arrival, shaking the ground. The ball streaks towards the ice and a huge flash of light hits the earth, a loud boom exploding into the silence, forcing me to hunker down and cover my ears.
When I stand, I can see fire raging in the distance.
I am no longer alone.