Cosmosis

Unfamiliar Faces

Who could have guessed ‘otters’?

I sure hadn’t. For the duration of my trip here, my imagination had conjured up looming images of grey featureless hominids or enormous green insects with drooling mandibles. Some enigmatic creature eight feet tall lurking just out of sight, ready to dissect a puny human strapped to a table under a spotlight, that kind of thing. Klingons, the Xenomorph, even Superman: aliens were always bigger than humans for some reason.

Part of me had known I wouldn’t be exactly right—the odds for any given guess must have been trillions-to-one. But we’d known there had to be some kind of intelligence at work. I just hadn’t expected our alien abductors to be smaller than I was.

Not by too much, but it was still unsettling.

Most of them were about five feet tall, give or take, with brown fur of varying shades and densities. Looking at any of them, even with their bulk, I would have been shocked if any of them even approached a hundred and fifty pounds. The biggest of them looked like it would come up to my chin, if I were standing up straight. I hadn’t seen any taller than me.

Still, each one of them looked burly despite their height, not unlike gorillas somehow. Muscles rippled under their fur with every motion. Even small adjustments in their posture looked forceful. It gave them a sort of restrained sense of power in their frames, like they were always holding some strength back.

But worse than that were their eyes. All of them variants of green, yellow, or orange. There was no white to them as far as I could see. Their irises dominated the whole socket. They had triangular pupils that would suddenly tighten or dilate with no warning. It gave the appearance that their eyes were twitching while staying perfectly still. It made my skin crawl.

I’d lost track of the exact number that was parading back and forth outside the cell. But there were half-a-dozen in view at any one time. Half of them wore harnesses affixed with equipment and loose jackets over tighter layers of clothing underneath. The other half wore white coverall suits that stopped at their wrists and ankles.

These were aliens. Real flesh and blood aliens. I started sweating if I looked one in the eye too long.

There was plenty more that had me scared witless right now. The company, the atmosphere, the décor; it was all alien. I didn’t want to be here. I just wanted to be back home. I missed waking up to the obnoxious blare of an alarm clock instead of alien barks.

It felt weak to admit, even to myself, in the face of alien abductors.

“Wishful thinking.” A voice next to me said. I intentionally avoided looking toward it. “We’re not home, so don’t lose focus.”

There was only one thing scaring me more than the aliens and the cell they’d put me in.

I had a stowaway. A tagalong. A delusion that I wasn’t alone in the cell. It sounded like Daniel, the last human being I’d seen before these aliens. He looked like Daniel too, whenever he wandered into my field of view, but I didn’t want to look too closely at him.

No need to indulge my delusions.

“You’re not delusional.” he said, “You’d only be delusional if you didn’t know you were hallucinating.”

I frowned. That specific phrasing was familiar. It seemed like the kind of line to come up in a tv show. It seemed familiar.

“Who cares if it’s from television? It’s the truth.”

I hated that he knew everything that went through my head. I didn’t have to talk back. It was a hallucination. He was in my head, he responded to whatever I was thinking.

“I’m willing to consider the possibility, but I don’t feel much like a hallucination.”

Of course he didn’t. Hallucinations didn’t feel anything. They don’t have senses. He was just a product of my own brain losing a handle on my own senses.

He had to be. I could run my hand right through the space where my eyes told me I was seeing him. He wasn’t really there anymore. He was dead.

“I don’t know… Are you sure I’m dead?”

I was sure. I’d been four feet away from where he got impaled on a jagged metal hunk of spaceship. He hadn’t moved after.

“…Now that you remember it, that does seem familiar. But you passed out right after. And you weren’t in great shape either, but you’re more or less stable now. Maybe these otter aliens patched me up too.”

While that was true, I wasn’t convinced. I hadn’t used the word ‘impaled’ lightly—the point of the spike had been plainly visible protruding through his belly.

Still… he was right about the rest. I had awoken in new surroundings, confined and imprisoned by alien otters. They had put bandages over the gash on my belly and sanitized my smaller cuts that were still stinging.

“Yeah… yeah! They were there, on the ship.”

What? No, they hadn’t. For all intents and purposes, Daniel and I had been alone on the ship. The two of us had scoured every inch of that spaceship. There had been the half-dozen other passengers who hadn’t been as lucky, but they had been human too. No aliens.

“Half-dozen ‘abductees’, Caleb.” he corrected, “We were abducted. Even if you and I lived, I wouldn’t call us lucky.”

Not-Daniel had a point about that. But there hadn’t been any aliens until I’d woken up here— “At the end.” He said, “After the explosion. I can’t tell how long it was, but—”

Memories, images flickered to life in my brain.

“They were definitely there.”

The recollection came to life in my brain. A glow had caught my attention. A hot line had drawn its way across the metal hatch to the spaceship’s cabin. Aliens, wearing form-fitting spacesuits, had torn their way into the ship. They’d grabbed me and dragged me to… it all went black after that. The last piece of the memory was seeing the blood, water, and oil all undulating in zero gravity.

Those aliens had been obscured beneath the spacesuits they’d worn. But having seen the otters standing guard outside my cell, they were visibly the same.

“See though?” he said excitedly, “Maybe I’m not dead. The otters are the only ones who could have staunched your bleeding, and if they got there to save you, maybe they could have saved me too.”

I darkened at that. The otters had abducted us. They had to have. Even the thought of them saving me made my blood start to boil.

“We already know they don’t want us dead.” I said, “There was food and water on the spaceship, enough for way more than just you and me. Why abduct people and not keep them alive?”

The otters outside my cell shifted nervously when I made noise. The two guards both kept a hand on dark purple metal guns affixed to the harnesses they wore.

I bit my tongue. Talking to my own hallucination was a bad habit to start. But my point stood. Even if the otters had stopped my bleeding, even if by some miracle the real Daniel was still alive, these otters had abducted us God knows how many trillion miles away from home.

They wouldn’t get an ounce of gratitude from me.

I had made some very bad decisions on the spaceship—motivated by fear of what was waiting for us on the other end of the ride. It had made sense at the time, even if the results had proved disastrous.

“Remind me? I don’t remember that part.”

He had some odd holes in his memory. Or I guess I did? He was my hallucination after all.

But… I remembered this part just fine. I had been adamant: since the ship that abducted us had been empty—automated, it must be taking us somewhere, towards somewhere, to someone. And whoever it was, we didn’t want to end up in their hands.

Which, of course, here we were now.

Why didn’t my hallucination remember that?

“I really don’t feel like I’m just a part of your imagination.” He said, “But I get why that doesn’t really matter to you. Assuming I’m wrong, and you are just hallucinating, maybe the part of your brain hallucinating doesn’t handle memory?”

That seemed like it made enough sense to be possible. I’d taken a psych class last year, but I didn’t remember which parts of the brain handled memory.

“The hippocampus.” He said, “Which makes sense, it’s not near where you banged your head.”

I glared at him. How had he known that? I didn’t remember that information.

“Well, I do. I was good in biology class, sue me.”

“You can’t have memories that aren’t mine. You’re a hallucination.”

“Says you. We both might have some holes in our memory, but I still remember some stuff about me. I remember I lived in Cali. I remember I was about to go to college. My parents’ names are Darcy and Taylor. We have a retriever. I played—”

Images of the things he talked about forced their way into my mind. Each one flashed painfully into existence. A house with patchy lawn. A bedroom with clutter all over the desk. Two people’s faces that—

“Shut up!” I shouted.

The two otters outside gave another start and dropped into predatory crouches.

I ignored them. My head felt like it was going to split open. I could feel every beat of my heart pounding in my head. I took deep slow breaths trying to fight off false memories. Panic that welled up in my throat. I wasn’t in control of my own brain.

Seconds stretched into minutes and the pain lessened faintly. The otters remained apprehensive about my outburst. Weapons had been drawn, but they weren’t pointed at me directly. Not yet. How much of this was even real? I was already imagining seeing a dead person. It wasn’t a big leap to imagine the rest of this was all in my head too.

I expected Daniel to say something about that. But when he didn’t, I actually looked around and didn’t see him anywhere in the cell.

Where had he gone?

He had better not be getting my hopes up.

An excessive amount of hope wasn’t particularly likely though. The otters were not liking my outburst. So far, two otters had stood observing me, one on each end of the curved window—for maximum coverage, I assumed. There was nowhere in the oblate sealed room that wasn’t in their sight.

That was just with the two of them.

My shouting must have upset them more than I’d realized. My watchers had been joined by two more otters, identically outfitted. All of them had drawn their guns and held them with both hands. Paws. Claws. Whichever.

There was more activity in the room beyond them, but it was harder to make out through the window. Something was imminent.

It was too much. It felt too real, but it couldn’t be. The difference between what I knew I was hallucinating and what I hoped I was hallucinating was overwhelming. It made me furious. Why me? Why abduct anyone like me and Daniel?

I forced myself to stand up, wincing at my litany of cuts and bruises. Even as I walked to the center of the oval cell, the four sentries didn’t aim at me. Although plenty nervous adjustments were made to their grips. I got the overwhelming impression that if I made the wrong sudden move, they would shoot as a matter of course.

I came closer to the transparent barrier and looked the closest otter in the face. The window was several inches thick and oddly, only objects within a few feet of it were in focus. Everything further was increasingly blurry and unidentifiable. The four sentries all stood close enough to be completely, unsettlingly, visible.

Being this close to the otters was terrifying. Leaning against the cell’s back wall, it was harder to appreciate the fangs that peeked out through a few nervous otter jowls. But up close, every detail was in sharp relief. I tried to measure the claws they had against animals in my head. They certainly made the guns seem redundant—more formidable people than me had been mauled by much smaller animals. And unlike mountain lions, these otters were intelligent and armed.

There was… awareness in their weird tripart eyeball. It didn’t break eye contact, unwilling to give up its brazen stare. I was close enough to see finer details that had gone unnoticed so far. The small twitches and quivers in its fur and face. The scarring near its mouth. Small scratches in the metal surfaces of its gun.

One of the other otters barked something to the rest of them and I turned to look at it. Was this one in charge?

But when I started to walk toward it, the new otter gave another shout. A signal.

I noticed a flashing light somewhere beyond the hazy portion of the window, a sharp hissing sound rushed through some pipes in the ceiling and walls. All four soldiers raised their guns further. Not quite aiming yet, but ready to fire.

I wasn’t sure what to focus on.

But a heavy metal thud sounded behind me.

I whirled on the spot. It was the door, or at least, I thought so. There were a few chutes and panels that offered some sort of access into the cell, but only one large enough to walk through.

The world crawled to a halt as I watched the metal bar joints twist the door bolts. The metal slab peeling away from its seal and sliding aside on hydraulic hinge arms.

They were coming in.

I moved.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the otters’ cell. It must have been at least a few days, but I had no way of knowing for sure. But Daniel and I had been stuck hurtling through the lonely vacuum of space for weeks with no end in sight: I had been feeling trapped far longer than the duration I’d spent in the cell.

So, when the door opened, I didn’t question it. I didn’t hesitate. I just tried to get out.

I broke into a full tilt run before the door was even fully open, and I could run. I charged full speed into a tightly packed crowd of otters.

Turns out I was shocked.

Instead of bowling over a group of middle-school-athlete sized otters, I ran into a believable facsimile of fur wrapped around solid stone. Forget ‘approaching’, they all exceeded one-fifty, which put all four of them firmly in a weight class above mine.

The front two otters shoved me back and I tumbled clear of the doorway, well into the middle of the cell.

They were so strong!

I scrambled back to my feet and tried to find the door in the rapidly ensuing chaos.

Nobody inside the cell was quiet for what followed. There was a storm of shouting as four otters wrapped in rubber-plastic suits with face masks all moved into the cell, surrounding me. The four soldiers outside clutched their weapons, all eyes on me.

None of them wanted to be the one to approach first, but I didn’t see any of them. I was only concerned about getting out the door.

I lunged again trying to shove the closest otter aside. It was so heavy! It dropped its stance and grabbed my arm. Just its own weight pulling on my arm yanked me clean over its shoulders, slamming me into the ground.

I craned my head, trying to stay focused on the door. But the otter gripping me held fast. I stamped my foot into its face from the ground. The impact let me pull myself free and I got halfway to my feet again before two of the other otters tackled me back down.

They each tried to hold one of my arms to the ground. One of them failed to complete the pin and I wasn’t nice enough to pass up the opportunity. I kicked and flailed in every direction, battering the closest otter one at a time. The one otter still pinning my arm to the ground got the worst of it. I managed to get my other hand behind its head and slammed its face into the floor.

Somewhere in the mess of it all, I caught a glimpse of dark navy splatters on the interior of one of the masks.

I struggled like that as long as possible, but I could already feel the pain in my feet and wrists. I was hitting bare handed, and these aliens were dense and hard. Even against fur, there was only so long you could go without breaking one of the smaller bones in your foot or hand.

Things stilled after I got to my feet for the third time. For just a moment, no one moved and there was a tense standoff. One of the otters raised an arm toward me. It looked like the air rippled for a moment before—

BAM

Something had just exploded right in front of my face.

I lost my sight and a blasting sound wiped away all the ensuing noise. For a split second, I was blind and deaf to everything except my own brain. I’d always been told that flash bombs in games and movies paled in comparison to the real thing, but even that forewarning did nothing to prepare me.

“Whoa. What was that?” Daniel said.

He was back. Where had he been?

Didn’t matter—danger.

Daniel was perfectly audible, visible, and even in focus, despite everything else being drowned out. I felt something snag both my arms and pull me to the ground. Too slowly, my eyes turned the blindness into merely incomprehensible blurs, one of the otters slithered behind me and put me into something like a wrestling hold. Two more fell onto me, wrangling my arms and legs to a halt.

I could barely move an inch.

The fourth one was the only one to freely move but I still couldn’t make out exactly what it was doing.

I got a sickening idea exactly what when I felt a cold metal jab go just under my ribcage. I screamed and tried to struggle, but the movement stressed painfully against the metal instrument stabbing into me.

I tried to muster up the nerve to struggle anyway. But the three otters pinned me too well. They outweighed me by too much. They were so strong in comparison, that the best I could do was uselessly flop my wrists and ankles.

They stuck me four more agonizing times and I screamed at every one of them. The otter holding my arm and neck from behind even winced at the volume which only had me try to go even louder.

My vision was clearing by the last sample they took. I was treated to the sight of the fourth otter disconnecting a transparent tube filled with red blood from a metal nozzle device with a hex pattern of needles withdrawing from my shoulder. It put the tube of blood next to three others in a clamshell case it had carried in with it.

The three otters didn’t relax for a second. They held me patiently while their ally packed up the bloodied vials and steel equipment. It spoke something briefly while it grabbed round white pads and slapped them over the new holes in my torso.

They stung badly, getting a sharp hiss from me. The ones pinning me down only tightened their hold when I recoiled.

The fourth otter replaced everything it had brought in with it, sealed the case and moved for the door. Seeing it simply walk out of the cell was a cruel taunt. Another subsequent attempt to thrash free didn't even phase them.

There was an audible hiss of pressurized gas as the door sealed again.

Daniel knelt by my head, appearing to inspect the otter behind me.

“I can’t actually see its face.” He said, “It’s just a blurry impression. Try to turn your head and look at it.”

“Shut up.” I said again. It had worked the last time.

The otter behind me growled something that might have been words, but I hadn’t been talking to it.

“Come on, don’t be obstinate. But seriously, try and get a look at him. I think I can only see what you see. But some of the detail sticks around for me, even when you’re not looking at it.”

Humoring my hallucination wasn’t high on my list of priorities, especially when the otters barked between themselves. After a short exchange, one of them let go of my legs and sprang to its feet.

I moved too, trying to wrestle what felt like four-hundred pounds of marsupial off my arms and torso. The remaining two held my arms back firmly, even when I managed to haul my way upright again.

It was an awkward tug-of-war as the two of them tried to wrestle me about the cell, pushing me closer to the window. The third one went to the door, ready for it to open.

The ones outside the cell barked a few lines at their allies inside, all of which was punctuated by guns aiming at my various limbs.

“They’re not going to shoot. You bashed the teeth in for one of them and they didn’t fire, so they’re just trying to threaten us.”

Daniel was actually one step behind me in that regard. Their weapons looked like they fired heavy rounds, but the glass window reminded me of the ultra-sturdy kind in skyscraper floors that hung out over nothing—bulletproof. Besides that, I had an idea of what they were trying to do because of where they were trying to get me to move. I’d never taken my focus off the cell door. The one of them was going to be ready to shut the door, and the two of them were going to let me go and try and shut the door before I could get to it.

Sure enough, I could make out the wave the otter at the cell door gave in the faint reflection of the glass window in front of me. The two holding my arms gave me a shove forward.

Unfortunately, knowing their plan didn’t matter much when I simply failed to act on the knowledge.

They pushed me harder than I expected, hard enough to bump into the thick window and fall over again. They scrambled for the door, and I tried to follow, only for my hand to slip on my own blood and sweat when I pushed myself up.

The moment’s delay was more than enough. The three of them pulled the metal slab shut behind them. I hit my fist against the door in frustration.

“Calm down. You keep hitting crap like that and you’re going to break your hands.” He frowned, and somehow, I could tell that without looking at him.

“You even thought about that. What the hell is up with your head?”

“Shut up!”

“I’m just saying you played all that about as dumbly as you could have.”

“How many times do you want me to say it? Shut up.”

“Hey, if you’re right and I’m just a hallucination, I’m not saying anything you aren’t already thinking.”

“I’m so furious right now, I’d bat your face in if you were solid.”

Daniel swiped a hand through my face, and I flinched. “Get a grip! Any idiot can get angry about this. Anyone would! Sure, you got abducted. Sure this whole thing is screwed up to hell and back. Throwing a tantrum, panicking, getting scared as shit? That all might be the perfectly reasonable response. But the typical, reasonable, response to all this isn’t going to help you for shit. So shut up, and really think about what kind of reaction you want to have to all this.”

“I don’t want to have any reaction!” I hissed, “I know I’m hallucinating. I know you can’t be real. And if I’m seeing things that aren’t real, then how do I know everything isn’t real? Everything in sight, everything that’s happened, every second I’ve known you could be a hallucination. For all I know, I might still be on earth in a coma. I could be bleeding into my brain and you’re just an aberrant neuron ruining what’s left of my sanity.”

“… except you don’t actually believe that.” Daniel said. “Because if your perception is that unreliable… then when did it start?”

He spoke slowly like he was reading into the very thoughts I was trying to keep away from him. He was doing exactly that. How could he not?

“If you really think that this is all a delusion, how far back does it go? If your hallucination starts any point after we left Earth, then something still happened that abducted you from Earth! And if that’s possible, why would you think the rest of this isn’t?”

I fumed at him, willing him to burst into flames or wither and die. Anything to shut him up.

“The only other alternative is that you became delusional before you remember getting abducted, which means you’re right. You’re just back on Earth, probably in a hospital for an aneurysm or something tragic. Poor you.”

“Shut up.”

“You first. You want to pretend none of this is happening? Fine. Then shut up and play along anyway. If you’re right and this is all just your subconscious torturing you because you think I died, then get with the program! If none of this is real, then you risk nothing by pretending it’s real. No matter how you slice it, you KNOW I’m right. Because even if I’m just another part of your hallucination, then you know this has to be your own brain telling you this.”

“Honestly, Caleb, I get it. You’re not the only one scared all this is real. However weird this is for you? You still get to be ‘you’. Something happened to me, and I’m stuck in your head. Imagine everything you’ve got in front of you, plus missing your own body—your own brain. I know this sucks for you, but it sucks for me too. And the only shot I’ve got is you. So please don’t just shut down. Help me, Obi Wan. You’re my only hope.”

“… I always liked Trek more.”

“You would.”

“It’s not that I don’t want it to be real.”

“I know.” Daniel said. I could imagine him reacting to my own feeling that I couldn’t put into words. “But it’s more manageable if it’s either all real or all fake. And since you’re sure at least some of it is fake, because you actually were hallucinating some things back on the ship, it’s easier to process in your mind if all of it’s fake.”

His summary cut deep. I didn’t want to be that person. Someone who shrank back just because it was hard to trust myself. If there was one thing Daniel was right about, it was that I didn’t want to act scared of the unknown. Sure, I was, and would continue to be afraid, but I didn’t want to act on fear.

It was human to want to be brave.

“How am I supposed to know what’s real and what’s not? I know impossible things happened on the spaceship. I don’t just mean strange things; I mean I could feel my own mind. I could feel things I still can’t wrap my head around.”

“You do your best. You try to learn, even if only by exposure. Reality has rules, and the more we can learn, the better we can figure out what’s happening with both your mind and mine. Deal?”

“…You don’t actually have to say it out loud.”

Fine.

“Thank you.” Daniel said.

“We should try to get information somehow.”

“Good idea. Observe and Watch.”

“There’s nothing to watch.” I muttered, “Just the stupid firing squad.”

“Yeah, but look at the line on the ground.”

I looked where he pointed and sure enough, on the ground outside the cell, there was a curved line matching the arc of the window.

The sentry otters stood on the close side of it… “And they’re in focus.” I realized aloud.

Daniel nodded. “Everything past the line is blurry, but it’s not a gradient. It’s just each side of the line.”

That was spooky. It wasn’t noticeable unless you went out of your way to examine the effect. But looking at the details in the floor—where one seam of floor panel ran away from the cell—it went from vivid and crystal clear to murky and fuzzy in a matter of centimeters. And everything past that point was all equally obscured instead of growing progressively muddled.

“The flashbang too.”

My ears were still ringing from it. “What about it?”

“You didn’t feel that vibe?”

What? No.

“Oh man, it was intense. It got my attention a few seconds before it threw it. I don’t know how to describe it. I didn’t get to see much, but it was like something got… I don’t know… dragged in front of its hand.”

“What happened? You weren’t there when they came in.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t realize any time passed.”

The otters had come into the cell, had that just happened by surprise to him? One second, he’s talking about his home life, the next otters are probing the guy who’s hallucinating him.

“This is getting complicated. Let’s not get lost. Just one thing at a time; the flashbang.”

I didn’t like how he tried to avoid the question, but he knew that. I’d figure it out whether he liked it or not. It was just a matter of time.

“…Maybe it wasn’t like an earth one—I mean one you throw. It could have been some kind of emitter built into the hand of the suit.”

“You think alien otters take inspiration from Iron Man?”

“Stranger stuff has happened today.”

It might also have just been too small to see in the chaos. Or it could be a function of the cell itself that the otter had just aimed at their unruly prisoner.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t part of the room. The… shit, I don’t know what to call the feeling, it was like an ‘omen’. But whatever it was, it came from the otter, not anything around you.”

I hadn’t felt anything like what he was talking about. But the way he described it I could almost imagine it. Daniel seemed genuinely surprised and shaken up. And while I was also both of those things, I couldn’t help but notice that we were reacting differently and seemingly unrelated to each other.

The idea of my hallucination having independent reactions was not comforting, but nothing around me was right now.

“Remember that first day on the ship?” Daniel asked.

I did. That hadn’t been a comforting day either, but it had been easier than this. Once we’d found the ship to be totally empty of anyone besides us, the overwhelming terror of the unknown had lost the worst of its edge.

“It all seemed too…”

“Low tech.” I finished. Despite it flying further into space than any manned human craft, every part of the ship we’d been dumped onto had been remarkably ordinary. No holograms, no artificial gravity, no aliens even. What little machines had been available to us had all been operated by analog buttons, dials, and levers. The whole thing had just been us passengers and a lot of eerie silence.

“We should have known better. They’re spacefaring, they would have to have better technology than us. But if you’re abducting some helpless humans…”

I was still fuming at him, but I did get what he was getting at. These otters had things at least similar to science fiction, but why put any of it on the spaceship if they didn’t need to?

Why let it out of their sight?

“I’m not sure any of this helps us.”

Daniel shrugged. “Probably won’t. But every little detail might help, so nothing is too dumb to think about.”

I was already having trouble keeping details straight. Even if Daniel was proving to be at least a conversational hallucination, I didn’t feel in a stable frame of mind. It probably wouldn’t be worth trying to remember most of the stuff we’d noticed.

“Don’t worry about remembering it. I’m writing everything down.”

I turned to look at him closely. Sure enough, he was maybe half a dozen pages deep into a spiral notebook. Where had he gotten the pen?

Wait. Scratch that. He was a hallucination. It wasn’t a real notebook. It wasn’t a real pen.

“Take a moment to think about what you just said.”

“What?”

The notebook.

The pen.

I tapped my own head and it clicked for him.

“Huh. That’s… weird…” He trailed off. He hadn’t noticed before now.

“How long have you been taking notes?”

“It was the first thing I did after seeing the otters. I’ve written down approximations of every word I’ve heard.”

“And you didn’t think about how you didn’t have anything to write with?”

“Well… well no, not really. I just kind of thought ‘I should write stuff down’.”

“Okay, but it’s not a real notebook. It’s in my head, just like you are. How is writing things down in an imaginary notebook any different than just remembering it normally? When you’re remembering what’s written down, how do you know it’s what you wrote down the first time?”

“…It all seems consistent. Here, you read it and we’ll check later.”

I felt ridiculous, but he showed me the notebook’s contents. It was… scattered, but not unfollowable. It helped that I’d been there for the same events.

One of the pages was dedicated to gibbering nonsense. Jobar? Tuen? Iffin? Nuto? And so on. All the words had question marks next to them. It was impossible to be sure about the pronunciation of each one. We’d only heard them in passing through a rather thick slab of glass.

He really had been paying attention to the alien words. None of them were familiar to me…

“But that’s actually good. If this is the first time, you’re recognizing these, you can try to notice them when the otters talk. Then we’ll see if my notebook is staying accurate.”

“Try drawing one of them.” I said, turning my gaze toward the four soldiers.

“I stink at drawing, but I’ll try.”

“You’re not using real hands or a real pen. Just try to get the image I’m seeing. You need my eyes, right?”

He nodded, putting his attention into the notebook. I picked one of the soldiers and tried to pick out details for Daniel. After a few minutes of staring at its face, I could almost imagine what shape its skull was.

Staring at the soldier for so long reminded me of saying a word over and over again. Eventually the word lost meaning and just became a sound.

Of course, once you stopped for even a few minutes, it went back to being a word again. But as long as I was staring at it, the otter seemed a bit less hostile. Just an animal. Animal soldiers equipped with guns, spaceships, and haze-glass, but still just an animal.

“I noticed you called them that earlier; what makes you call them soldiers?”

The weapons had been what first had me think that. But the uniforms were what clinched it for me. Through the window’s haze, it was difficult to confirm how consistent this was. But so far, every otter I’d seen had two pieces of their outfit in common.

They all wore heavy duty boots and the same dark green undersuit. On a human, it would have looked ridiculous, somewhere between long underwear and a onesie. But it seemed like a comfortable fit for the otters’ half-stoop that seemed to be their normal posture.

“Oh duh.” Daniel said.

What had he noticed?

“Of course they’re soldiers, look at the shoulder patch.”

A round patch was plastered over each otter’s left shoulder. It was just a little too far down the arm to be some kind of shoulder pad though. Looking even closer, there was a design etched into it. A large triangle swept over one half of the badge while a small figure clutched the edge of the triangle with one arm, carrying a spear in the other. Definitely some kind of emblem—like the ones on flight suits for fighter pilots.

I was getting Top Gun flashbacks.

“It’s too weird, isn’t it? The clothes?”

It was. The alien clothes were machine woven, just like ones on Earth.

“Funny thing is, I think we were both even half-expecting some kind of jumpsuit. It’s an alien staple, isn’t it?”

Robes. Twenty-four seven armor. Or nothing at all. Those were the staples of alien fashion whenever I thought about it. But these otters’ were disturbingly… mundane. They looked like the same kind utilitarian tough material NASA uniforms were made of, only green instead of blue. It was sensible and spartan. It was creeping the heck out of me.

“It’s creepy because it’s kind of… human.”

He was right. The similarities were limited, but present. Even a cursory comparison between our abductors and humans was… disturbing. Even when something ‘alien’ was recognizable, it still made my skin crawl.

“The décor, the company, atmosphere… add wardrobe to the list of ‘creepy alien culture’.”

No kidding.

Seriously though, otters? How could I have predicted we'd been abducted by alien otters?