Someone growls the word near me. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I am surrounded by conversation of all kinds, most of it high and drunk and crass.
“Pet!” The word comes more insistently. I ignore it again. Doesn’t mean anything to me.
Then someone grabs me from behind. That’s not entirely out of the ordinary. The club can get handsy, especially in the earlier hours. But I am not going to let it stand. I spin around, ready to hit whichever man is stupid enough to touch me.
But it’s not a man who has touched me.
I find myself surrounded by a wall of flesh. Three very big… things… have blocked me out of the crowd, the same way wolves used to pick a deer out of the herd before… well, before. I watch the ancient history channel sometimes. I wish I could have seen the world when it was complete with animals and plants and things besides human debris. They tell us that what’s left down there now is nothing but rats and trash.
“What the fuck do you want?” I ask the question with a real hostile tone while my stomach flips as I look at the predators who have isolated me from my herd.
They’re not human. I’ve never seen aliens before that I know of, though some people insist that there are aliens everywhere around us all the time.
The more I look at them, the more I start to think that these guys are definitely not humans. For one, humans have round pupils, not diamond star-shaped slits in diamanté eyes, or horizontal pupils, or lizard-like slits. I guess eyes could be faked with contact lenses, but then there’s their height. They’re all 6′5 at least. One of them might be 6′8. Stilts? I don’t know.
They’re wearing human-ish clothes to blend in. Denim and leather, or materials that mimic them anyway. One of them is very tall and blond and his shirt is open almost all the way to his navel. His stomach ripples with distracting musculature. He has most of my attention. There’s something about him that draws my eye and… I haven’t gotten laid in three years. It’s usually not a hardship. Suddenly, it feels hard.
I try to think of my alien facts to put my brain in some kind of useful gear. I can feel instinct taking over, a kind of arousal that is dangerous as hell. It feels like my brain is getting fuzzy, like my thoughts are running scared.
Aliens made contact with humans around the year 2028, but most people were too distracted to really notice or care. It was difficult back then, when everyone was stuck on the surface of the planet like basic animals.
It’s 2055 now, and a lot has changed. Various technologies, building projects, and opportunities for work in other reaches of the Milky Way have really taken the pressure off what used to be a crowded planet—and made the whole insufficient women situation even worse.
Some people think aliens blend in with humans. Some insist that everyone around them is an alien. Zeal insists that they would never allow an alien into New New York. The truth is obviously somewhere in the middle. Just like I am now. In the middle.
I don’t know how every eye in the club isn’t on these creatures, but they seem to be making it work. Maybe it’s a mind trick or something. Aliens are tricky. They’re known to fuck with human perceptions from time to time. They have powers that humans don’t, sometimes they steal humans for their personal use, and worse of all they could fuck up the economy at any time. That’s why they’re banned from Earth and her orbit.
I’ve never talked to an alien before, let alone three of them. I know I have to say something, so I default back to my usual spiel.
“Can I get you something?” I have to actually speak, because they’re aliens and they don’t have chips.
They are looking at me with stunned expressions, like they recognize me, but they’re not sure why I’m not responding to them differently.
“Z hires off-worlders now?” I ask the question because I’m pretending that this isn’t nearly as fucked up as it seems. “Are you guys aliens, or what?”
The blond who touched me, whose face is broad, handsome, and almost human, except clearly not, looks at me with an intensity I cannot begin to process. He looks at me like he knows me in a way I do not know myself. He’s evoking something inside me. Something I don’t recognize.
“We have searched the galaxy for you, pet. All these years, and here you are. I was beginning to lose hope…”
Okay, he’s really laying it on thick. I start to get my brain back, and my cynicism along with it.
This is some kind of a bit, I bet. They probably do this to kidnap women. I’ve heard aliens are into humans because ofhow good we are at breeding. We come from a world that is very good at reproduction as a whole. I once listened to a guy completely off his head telling me about how other forms of life tend to live longer, but have a harder time making new versions of themselves. According to him, humans can fuck almost any humanoid alien and have their babies. We’re like the universal donors of sex. I asked him if it went both ways and if he could impregnate an alien lady, but he started talking about how he had babies with four alien women and that’s why he was trying to stay away from the alien baby support collectors. I thought he was crazy. Now I’m wondering.
It’s so confusing.
One of the hardest things about having no memory is being naive about absolutely everything all the time. I learned pretty quickly if I’m doubting something, I should doubt it hard. So I tell myself these aren’t really aliens, just dudes with stilts and prosthetics and that’s why nobody else is reacting because they know a joke when they see it.
“Okay, if you don’t want to buy anything, I gotta move on,” I say, going to leave.
Three big hands place themselves on me firmly. One on my arm. One on my back, and one wrapped around my neck.
A bolt of something like fear jolts through me. But there’s no moving away from them. They all close the distance a little, pinning me in completely. Fuck. Fuck.
The music seems to slow down, deep bass thudding in a kind of melted tempo. The lights flash in a more languid way too. Time is coming to a halt as these creatures hold me in thrall.
I find my voice again, but I don’t sound nearly as confident as I did before.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Strong start. “Aliens aren’t allowed in this club. If they find you here, they’ll ban you and fine you.” Weaker finish. I don’t think any of these creatures give a damn about some corporate Earth fines.
