Starship Rex

A whirring noise loudly resounded in my ears.

“Ugh…” I groaned. I felt cold and that coupled with a pain in my lower back was what welcomed my return to wakefulness. I rolled onto my side to help alleviate the feeling, fumbling for the missing duvet that should have been keeping me warm.

But as I quickly learned, this was not my bed.

I fell unceremoniously off the uncomfortable surface I had been lying on to collide with the much less comfortable floor beneath me, letting out an appropriately manly noises of surprise and pain as I landed, having hurt my arm and shoulder as I first hit the floor on my side and then rolling onto my back. Just to add to it all, the momentum made it so my head conked against the hard metal floor too.

Dazed and disoriented, I slowly stumbled to my feet.

Instinctively, I reached out to balance myself on the surface I had been lying on. It felt like some kind of padded leather beneath my fingers with metal too. Blinking, I took in my surroundings.

It was dark, the room lit primarily by small lights coming out from where the walls met the ceiling. The lights were dim, enough to get a vague outline of what I was looking at but I couldn’t tell anything about the room I had found myself in.

I was distracted from further inspection of my surroundings when I realised next that I was cold because I was naked!

“What the fuck?” I said intelligently. “I definitely put on pjs before bed.”

I leaned on the side of what I charitably assumed was meant to be a bed as I took in this embarrassing detail of my current predicament. But there was nothing I could do about that right now.

“Where the hell am I?” I muttered to myself quietly, still discombobulated. I reached up to the back of my head, finding it a bit sore but there wasn’t any blood or anything. I’d probably get a nasty bump based on how it throbbed, but I hopefully wouldn’t need to see a doctor anytime soon.

“Okay, okay,” I told myself, trying to remain calm. I couldn’t let myself panic. I needed to figure things out if I wanted to get out of here, wherever the hell here was. I mentally put together my current situation.

I’d been kidnapped, stripped, and then abandoned in a dark room that had probably been prepared for me.

That… didn’t help with the panicking, to be entirely honest.

“Okay first thing, I need some lights,” I said more firmly, trying to ground myself. I wasn’t going to be achieving anything if I couldn’t bloody see.

The moment I said the word my vision went white as the lights in the room immediately lit up.

“Agh!” I gasped, closing my eyes and lifting a hand to cover them as the bright light assaulted my vision.

Blinking again, I realised that there must’ve been some audio sensor on the lights. That was only reinforced when I took in my surroundings properly.

It… was scifi.

I had woken up in someone’s attempt at recreating something out of Star Trek, albeit in this case the colours were a lot darker, blacks rather than whites that reflected the light slightly with a metallic sheen. The floor was a deep blue and the ceiling matching it.

The surface I had been lying on had a little console next to it with a touch screen that was now lit up with text in a language I didn’t recognise, a graph of some sort and buttons lit up in a variety of colours. There was a round desk in one corner of the room, overlooking the bed I had been lying on and there were a trio of screens set to face whoever was sat there. It was clearly a mockup of a medical bay of some kind. There was only one bed though, the one I had woken up on.

It was a good setup, I thought cynically as I took in the sight of what had to be some sort of joke, someone trying to trick me into thinking I’d been kidnapped by aliens or something. Whoever had actually kidnapped me must have forgotten to tie me up and just left me here unconscious maybe? I had no idea. Whatever it was, the room was empty of life except my own.

A doorway was visible on one side of the room. It looked like some kind of automatic thing, there was a button to the side that would presumably open it. Again, very sci-fi, wow.

Another look around showed there were no obvious cupboards or anything I could see and no clothing visible for me to wear. That was annoying, but getting out of wherever the hell I was took priority. If I got arrested for public indecency then that’d only mean I’d get to explain what was going on to the police faster.

I approached the door slowly, ears listening carefully for any sounds.

There was a gentle hum of technology, the sound of air moving and I shivered instinctively as the cool air touched my bare skin.

I could try waiting for my captor to return, ambush them, I thought. It would probably be smarter just to leg it though. I didn’t need to beat anyone up, just get to safety. There was no need for machoness right now, I reminded myself.

Not that I was in any way macho, mind you. A lifetime of comfortable living, deskwork and no exercise had left me definitely on the soft and pudgy side of things.

I reached for the door button. Either the button would work and the door would open, or I’d have to manually force the prop to open with my hands.

With a whooshing noise I was relieved to see the door did open. It led into a corridor that was styled in the same black and blue as the medical room had been.

I listened for any reaction, rushing feet or a noise of alarm but there was none.

With trepidation I poked my head out and looked around.

The corridor was empty. There was no reaction from whoever had brought me here.

Well I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and there was no time to waste. I decided to go left and headed in that direction.

The corridor lit up before me as I walked. Soft lighting illuminated the way, easy to see by even with the dark decor. The walls were slightly reflective too which helped a bit. The way the lights seemed to be turning on based on sensors was disconcerting, eerie. I couldn’t see any signs of an actual motion sensor or anything like that but I could only assume there were or my captor would’ve probably shown themselves. But then I had no idea what was going on, did I?

I came to another door quickly. It was the same as the one I had left the medical room through. The door opened at the press of a button revealing what seemed like living quarters with some nice looking seats arranged around a couple of tables. There was what might’ve been a cooking area on one side of the room. I disregarded it and continued on.

There were another couple of doors separating the corridor into sections but they all opened for me. Unfortunately it seemed I had made the wrong call as my explorations only revealed more of the set. There was what was probably supposed to be captain’s quarters based on the size of the bed and then I finally found my way to the end. It was a final door at the end of the corridor and through that I found the cockpit.

It didn’t light up as I entered, but there was enough light to see by anyway. There was one seat with a few small screens arrayed in front of it. There were a bunch of buttons and knobs and a joystick controller. It all looked very science fictioney. The only thing to detract from it all was the fact nothing appeared to be turned on.

They’d done a good job too, I thought dryly as I beheld the night sky, or rather space through the angled glass panels in front of the seat. Whoever had set this up had done a better job than could be found at any amusement park, I thought as I beheld bits of scrap and metal floating around in the distance outside.

It was beautiful, almost enough to bring up the excited wanderlust of exploring a galaxy and for a moment I did.

Too late to explore the world, too early to explore the cosmos. That was the saying and the view before ignited that mild dismay that exploring the stars would never happen in my lifetime.

There was more than just the stars. it looked like I was supposed to be in some sort of space graveyard, surrounded by other destroyed spaceships and such. In the end though it wasn’t anything different than what I had seen in the movies or Tv over the course of my life. I rolled my eyes and turned around.

It wasn’t real, obviously, and I couldn’t help but resent whoever had kidnapped me just a little bit more as I turned away.

Only for the door I had entered to slide shut right in front of me.

I took a step back in surprise and it was then that a sound of static and the light whirring of electronics caught my attention.

I turned around as the various dials and buttons lit up, screens coming to life with writing and information that wasn’t in English. It was obviously a purposefully made-up alien language of some sort. Like Kingon, or American English.

I turned back to the door to try the button to open it but I was stopped short as suddenly an electronic voice spoke around me.

“Greetings Captain,” the vaguely feminine voice said. “Welcome to Starship Rex.”

“Yeah… no,” I said flatly, looking around for the camera, or cameras, wherever they might be.

To my annoyance I didn’t see any cameras, but I knew they had to be there. Whoever had arranged all this could presumably hear and see me. Unless that audio was just a prearranged recording like everything else seemed to be.

None of this made sense. Who would even go through all the effort of this? It wasn’t like I had any enemies, kidnapping me from my bed would be difficult all on its own and I was sure I went to bed last night as normal. I wasn’t special enough to go to this sort of trouble.

“Look,” I said, allowing a pleading note into my tone. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m not going to play whatever game this is. I just want to go home.”

There was no response for several seconds.

“Starship Rex has quarters designated for the Captain,” the audio came out from the walls.

I huffed, almost amused at the ridiculousness of all this.

“Look, you can stop,” I said with exasperation this time. “It’s all very pretty but I’m not buying it. I’m not going to be your Captain, so stop pretending.”

“Starship Rex must have a Captain,” replied what I guessed was meant to be some sort of AI.

“Well it’s not me, I refuse,” I repeated my previous statement.

“Calculating.”

There was a pause.

“No additional candidates for captain can be identified,” said the digital voice.

There was another pause.

“Initiating self-destruct.”