1. I Love Lucy

   The ‘I Love Lucy’ theme song drifted brassily through the alien rocket ship which had been orbiting Earth since 1951.

   No one noticed. Well, no one important enough to do anything about it, anyway. There was a great deal of junk orbiting Earth. One small alien ship, even a traffic-cone orange ship like the Audacity, didn’t register as a threat.

   The ship had a single occupant who watched, with a smile which broke open his pale blue face like a piñata, as the grainy black and white heart scrawled across the screen of a boxy, rabbit eared television.

   He’d seen every episode at least a dozen times, but pretending each time it was going to be different kept the depression at bay for a while. He had become very good at pretending.

   The picture wobbled, and Lucy seemed to be caught in a freak snowstorm accompanied by a fuzzy sound. A literal shadow fell across the TV; a figurative shadow fell across the alien face. The viewscreen behind him was no longer illuminated by Earth’s sun.

   He vaulted over the back of the couch and leapt up the orange shag stairs to the control loft.

Outside, so close he could see his own ship reflected in it like a neon orange grain of rice, another, much larger ship blocked out the sun and the TV signal. The loss of Lucy was the least of his worries.

“By O’Zeno’s ingrown armpit hair…That’s the Peacemaker.”

   He pressed the Button That Typically Made The Ship Go, but the ship did not go. He pressed it thirty-three times in quick succession. The ship stayed put.

   The flash of an explosion whited out the viewscreen.

   Debris from the explosion pinged against the hull of the Audacity, and he tried again to get the ship moving, anxious that the debris might nick the paint.

   But something caught his eye. Something had snagged on a jagged tooth of metal knifing out of the Peacemaker’s ruined side.

   Someone, actually.

    He flailed at the control panel, pressing every button he could find, hoping at least one of them would be a tractor beam. As luck would have it, one of them was.

 

2. Classic Abduction Scene

   May was elbow deep in the 29-year-old guts of her father’s 1989 turbocharged Honda Civic when her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was work. She knew this, not because she had any aptitude for ESP, but because no one else ever messaged her.

   She decided she hadn’t felt her phone vibrate. If she ignored it, it never happened.

   Besides, if Kathy was asking her to come in early, as she suspected, she’d hate to refuse the extra pay, but she would hate even more to interrupt this repair session. After a long shift at Sonic, she doubted she would remember where all the parts she’d just removed were supposed to go.

   She’d applied for the job because she enjoyed roller skating and she needed the money. She’d kept the job, even after they’d banned roller skating on account of the liability, because she needed the money.       She’d bought their approved skates and got to use them on three shifts before the ban took effect.

It was beginning to seem, to May, like fun was actually becoming illegal as she aged.

   Growing up she had been told that her father had quit racing when she was born, and so she assumed that having children meant giving up on fun hobbies and resolved never to have children. Well, clearly, that hadn’t saved her.

   Her phone vibrated again, and this time she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t felt it.

   “Neeed u @ 4 2nite” Kathy’s text read. Kathy, May’s manager, had a touch screen phone, but she had learned to text in 2004 and never adapted.

   “Can’t, busy,” she almost typed.

   “Sorry, no thanks,” she nearly replied.

   “Who is this?” crossed her mind, too.

   Eventually, she typed, “On my way.”

   May had heard that it was nice to be needed, but she’d never understood it. She collected the parts she’d strewn on the ground and tossed them onto the front seat, carefully setting the cup of screws and bolts on the cab floor. She sat in the back seat and strapped on her roller skates, the ones she had bought to make work more fun, but now only used to get to work in a hurry.

   That was something she’d clearly inherited from her father. A strong desire to go nowhere fast.

She grabbed a crumpled blue and red polo from the back seat and sniffed it. It did not smell great. Kathy had asked her to come in for extra shifts every day this week, meaning May hadn’t had a chance to get to the laundry mat so, really, it was Kathy’s fault.

   When she arrived at the Sonic, Kathy told her yet another new hire had failed to show up for their shift. “It’s those damn cars, excuse my language,” Kathy said, eyes squinted and arms crossed as if some sane part of her was still resistant to this apparent truth. “People going missing left and right lately.”

“Hm,” May acknowledged her verbally as she read through the order list and washed her hands.

In the event you’re reading this in the far future, from a distant planet, or in another reality, it’s important to note that in May’s reality, old cars didn’t ordinarily fall from the sky. Yet, across planet Earth, reports abounded of AMC Gremlins descending from the heavens, abducting whoever was unlucky enough to be nearest, and leaving.

   May was troubled by this. Not by the cars—she figured it was some kind of new marketing scheme or mass prank. No, it was the people who wouldn’t stop talking about the cars that troubled her. Mainly because it seemed every single customer brought it up. And now her manager was, too.

“Hear about them cars?” they’d ask conspiratorially, as if they were about to share with her the gospel itself.

   Long ago, May had become numb to being asked the same question fifty-seven times in a single day.

“No,” she’d say, sans inflection, allowing them to enlighten her over and over again as she counted their change.

   Tonight was no different. Ten hours of listening to people talk about old cars she didn’t give a wet slap about when all she wanted to do was get back to fixing the one old car she did care about.

Finally, her shift ended. May grabbed the nearest damp towel and swiped it over the counter to more evenly distribute the germs.

   “Going home?” Kathy asked, closing out May’s register. Kathy was in nearly every way May’s visual opposite. Thin blond wisps, thin pink-painted lips, thin sense of humor, and sharp little blue eyes.

   “Oh no, the night is young. I have a debutante ball after this.” May pulled out the trash bag, twirled it closed, and slung it over her shoulder, giving Kathy a tired, crooked smile.

   Kathy squinted at her. “You’re being sarcastic again.”

   “Yep. Night, Kathy. Make lots of tips.”

   Kathy snorted, fiddling with the register. “The only tips I get here are men telling me I should pull my shirt down more.”

   May pushed open the sticky back door, ignoring the squelch of garbage juice which had dripped into her shoes as she walked into the poorly lit alley, and flung the garbage bag into the dumpster.

She released her coily black hair from its prison under her Sonic cap and fluffed it out with her fingers, aerating her sweaty scalp. Leaning against the dumpster, she pulled a cigarette from the package in her back pocket and lit it.

   The first drag helped her hoist herself off the dumpster.

   The second got her to dig her keys out of her pocket and thread them between her fingers in a makeshift weapon she referred to as ‘Key Fist,’ and looked like a slapdash Wolverine cosplay. Straightening her back, she set her mouth in a tight line and thought murderous thoughts. Thoughts that, May hoped, would seep out of her pores and repel anyone looking for an easy target.

   She started the two-mile skate back to her apartment, ready to studiously ignore any sketchy activity she might encounter on the way.

   The night was cool and quiet. May had the gall, fifteen minutes in, to think that perhaps she wouldn’t see anyone on her way home. It was a nice fantasy, until she passed a particularly nasty alleyway stuffed with piles of wet cardboard, stained rags, and, amid the cardboard and rags, a urine-scented man.

   “Ey, watch yerself out thar,” the man shouted at her. “Thems Gremlins about town—they been a’snatchin folks naw. Up ta no good!”

   May went a little faster. Not that the man was in any state to give chase, she just needed to breathe fresh air again. At last, her apartment loomed darkly before her. The building’s outside lights had been out for months, but the person whose job it was to let someone know about these things hadn’t been paid in months, and the person whose job it was to do something about these things hadn’t cared in months.

   She jammed her key in the lock and wiggled it around for a while until the door finally clicked open. The familiar earthy smell of home greeted her, a sliver of moonlight fighting its way in through the thin window above her front door, which accounted for the only natural light in the apartment.

   The living room—which was also the kitchen, the library, the ballroom, the lounge, the study, the conservatory, and the bedroom—was dark enough she didn’t have to worry about cleaning it. Atop her mini fridge, in a beam of moonlight, sat May’s one faithful companion: Betty, the cactus.

   It was a resilient little prickled lump. May had over-watered it, under-watered it, and left it in a box for a few weeks when she moved in. It just wouldn’t die. It fed off adversity, as if it got a kick out of taking the punches that life threw at it.

   “Hey, Betty, long day?” she asked.

   It converted carbon dioxide into oxygen at her.

   May converted some oxygen back into carbon dioxide in return and gave it a mist of water. Not tired enough to sleep, not awake enough to do much else, May absently pulled another stick from the pack in her back pocket and went outside to sit on the metal steps that lead to the upstairs apartments. She sat on the cold metal, lit her cigarette, and watched a candy wrapper cross the street, aided by a gentle breeze.

   The traffic light at the intersection nearest her flickered through its rounds: green, yellow, red. Giving the go-ahead to no one, suggesting to no one that stopping might be a wise thing to consider, then warning no one that they were now law-bound to stop.

   The night was quiet, as we’ve established. It was quiet because the things that typically make noise in the early morning—birds, crickets, drunks—were avoiding the area around May’s apartment.

   The reason why was about to become clear.

   Down the street, past the traffic light, an engine turned over in a car which loitered in the dark space between two feeble streetlights. May flicked the ash from her cigarette, leaning her head against the railing to get a better view of the car which had broken the silence.

   A single headlight turned on, the other blinked on sleepily, flickered, then shut off in an ominous wink.

   Slowly, as if she might frighten the car if she moved too fast, May lifted her cigarette to her mouth. The car began to move. She let the cigarette drift back down again, unpuffed.

   She could go inside; the idea crossed her mind, anyway. But doing that would be both admitting that the car had freaked her out, which her pride wouldn’t allow, and drawing attention to her presence, which her fear wouldn’t allow. She decided instead to pretend she was part of the architecture. Nothing to see here, just a bit of railing.

   The car inched into the light. It was, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, an AMC Gremlin. What you could not have guessed was that its body work was done out in pickle-green with black racing stripes that swooped nicely upward toward the back of the car where two enormous black thrusters had been welded to it.

   May pressed herself further into the stairwell, but she still made rather unconvincing cast iron.

The car completely disregarded the traffic light’s suggestion that stopping might be a wise thing to consider, further disregarded the concrete median that endeavored to keep it on the proper side of the street, and still further disregarded the sickly hedge that surrounded May’s apartment complex as it screeched toward her.

   Half a second short of turning May into a hood ornament, it stopped.

   May dropped the cigarette.

   A sizzling came from the car window, a pop, and then, over what sounded like a megaphone, someone shouted, “We have come in peace, Earthlin—”

   She heard a thwack which sounded suspiciously like someone being hit over the head with a megaphone, then a different voice.

   “Can I give you a trip?” it asked.

   “I’m sorry?” May said, more out of the habit of customer service than as a way of actually apologizing for anything.

   “Do you need a car? Might I offer you a ride?” The voice was vaguely metallic, and vaguely threatening.

   May knew what this was now. Teenagers. She groaned, stomped on her cigarette, and stood up. “Fuck off,” she proposed, doing her best impression of someone you wouldn’t want to mess with.

   From the car: silence. The megaphone clicked on then off, then on, and off again as the bewildered wielder considered their next words.

   “No thank you,” the voice finally said.

   The headlights grew brighter until white filled her vision. A sudden thump, and May was out.

 

3. You’re Here Now

   The air smelled like copper.

   May’s senses returned one by one, like forest creatures timidly stepping into a clearing to convene. Light. Bright, white light. A piercing whine and a deep, vibrating hum. The bed below her was hard, just a thin mattress on a table. Her left temple felt like it had been frozen and was slowly, painfully thawing out.

   Gaining control of her limbs, May clambered upright, hugging her legs against her chest. Instead of that stiff, rank old Sonic polo, she wore a latex suit. She tried to quantify how much trouble she was in. She appeared to be in an office cubicle so, possibly, quite a lot.

   A figure which appeared to be made of clear gelatin and five ill-anchored googly eyes gestured to a table full of little plastic cups beside her.

   “Might I offer you a refreshment?” When it spoke, the left side of May’s head exploded with electricity. “Juice of the lemon? The helpful gator, perhaps?” It grew an arm and plucked a cup half filled with blue Gatorade from the table, then offered it to May.

   May shook her head. “No thanks,” she mouthed, too disoriented to speak.

   The gelatinous speaker turned its attention back to the table and began to move the cups around, trying rather transparently to appear busy. Transparently because May could see that it wasn’t actually doing anything but shuffling around the cups, and because May could also literally see through its translucent, dripping hands.

   A pale young man with messy dishwater hair entered the cubicle. He was sealed from the neck-down, like May, in latex. He looked human. Not friendly, but human, at least.

   “Are you May?” He looked at her with one bloodshot grey eye and one black eyepatch.

   She nodded, her left eye winking, though the pain in her temple was beginning to dissipate.

   “I’m August. Follow me.” He walked off, his hand trailing behind him with a lazy come-hither finger.

   May followed.

   After passing by a few identical cubicles with trays of Gatorade, May’s voice returned.

   “Where the hell am I?”

   “You’re here now,” he said helpfully.

   The enormous building they were in seemed, to May, to be some sort of hospital hub. She was partially right. The place was enormous, and it was a kind of hospital hub, but it was not a building.

They reached a long wall lined with hundreds of human-sized pneumatic tubes which made her feel like a mouse at a drive-up bank teller. Between each tube, the same poster had been copied and pasted.

   “You’re here now!” it said in cheery blue letters under a stock photo of smiling strangers.

   August stepped into the tube nearest them and stared at her.

   “I’m not getting in there,” May said, crossing her arms. “What’s going on?”

   He tipped his head back as if his neck could no longer bear the terrible weight. “I don’t know, man. They brought me here, like, five months ago and put a chip in my head that translates everything into German so they can boss me around. The food here’s complete scrap, and I miss apples. Would you get in here? I’m supposed to show you to our room.”

   He looked desperate, so May relented. The doors whooshed shut in a science-fiction-movie way that Earth elevators hadn’t quite gotten the hang of, and they shot into the ceiling at a speed Earth elevators would never get the hang of.

   “Our room?” May asked, suspicious.

   “Yes, our room. Don’t worry, I’m not that kind of guy. You can have the bed, I like the chair anyway.”

   “I don’t want the bed, I want to leave,” she said.

   “Well, you can’t.”

   “Why?”

   August ran a hand through his long, greasy hair, somehow making it messier than it had been before.  “I’ll show you.”

   “Fine,” she said.

   The tube came to a stop, and they entered a perfect replica of a dingy hotel hallway. The carpet was a low-pile abstract affair in shades of green and pink that were not on speaking terms, the walls dripped steadily from brown stains in the wallpaper, and rows of numbered doors lined the walls.

May followed him down the corridor to a small alcove, where she expected to see an old ice dispenser, a soda machine, maybe snacks.

   That is not what she saw.

   Through a window, a billboard which read “Forbinated Moringarg: For the distinguished ch’stranda,” and showed a high-res looping video of a creature akin to an over-sized ferret licking gray mash from a bowl.

   May looked back at August, confused.

   It was a Largish Bronda’s Well-Placed Billboard, so named because it scanned for and followed any nearby ships. “Always at the right place, always at the right time! (Time travel features may incur additional cost)” goes the jingle.

   August didn’t know this, however. All he knew was that it was annoying.

   “Hold on, it’ll move.”

   And then it did.

   “Oh, I see,” May said.

   “Uh-huh.”

   “Is that…?”

   “Yep.”

   “Oh. I see.”

   May watched a blue and green marble spin slowly, lit on one side by an enormous yellow dwarf star and on the other by a round hunk of reflective rock. Stars surrounded it, but without Earth’s atmosphere interfering, the stars did not twinkle.

   “Come on, our room’s just around the corner.”

   A strange amalgamation of items decorated the room August brought May to. It looked as if someone had ransacked five different themed motels. On one wall hung a poorly rendered painting of a parrot in a chipped gold gilt frame. Another wall hosted a large but unplugged TV and two paintings of palm trees, which were identical in every way but one. What the difference was, exactly, May couldn’t say.

   It occurred to her she ought to think she was dreaming. Everyone in books and movies always thought they were dreaming when something this unusual happened. How did she know she was awake? Finally, she decided that if she were dreaming, she wouldn’t have the capacity to think she was dreaming. Which wasn’t strictly true, but it made her feel better.

   August fell into a densely stuffed chair beside the bed and closed his eye. May assumed he had another eye under the eyepatch to close, but she was wrong. This is why you should never make assumptions.

   The bed along the wall was plastic-covered and brick-like with a single pancake-thick pillow and no sheet, twisted at an odd angle from the bamboo headboard. She poked it; it crinkled at her.

   “Report to the cafeteria,” said a voice from the ceiling that crackled like milk poured over Rice Krispies.

   August groaned as he stood. “Come on, it’s time for work.”

   “Work?” May asked, following him out of the room.

   “That’s why they brought you here,” August said as he walked. “Needed another server.”

   The cafeteria looked like a Jim Henson-brand sex dungeon.

   Monstrous creatures she had only seen the likes of in cheap sci-fi films, small yellow-green beings that looked uncannily human, Amazonian bipeds which came in shades and hues of purple and with various numbers of eyes and arms, and creatures that looked almost entirely like cicadas in white latex sausage sleeves all stood in a meandering line or sat, eating quietly, at tables. Most were cling-wrapped in the same white latex.

   August towed her along by the arm now, noticing she had paused to gape, and brought her to a narrow doorway at the back of the cafeteria which led to the kitchen. Just a normal, boring industrial kitchen like the one where May had wasted a solid forty hours a week back on Earth.

She’d rather be wasting her time there. Minimum wage was better than nothing.

   Someone who looked an awful lot like a gray-haired grandmother from Minnesota handed May a ladle and patted her shoulder apologetically. “Down at the end, honey.” The woman hobbled out the door they had entered through.

   “Take care, April,” August called after her. “You’re on food service. I’ve got dishes.” He tried to walk away, but May stopped him with a ladle to the shoulder.

   “Her name’s April?” May asked.

   “Yeah.”

   “And you’re August?”

   He nodded.

   “Is this a joke?” she whispered angrily.

   August shrugged. “Not a very funny one, is it?” He pushed the ladle off his shoulder, and left her to her gruel.

   May stared despondently into the pot. The customer at the window banged his tray on the counter to get her attention, and she snapped out of an existential fugue and into a customer-service-job fugue.

   She hadn’t eaten for some time, but she didn’t feel hungry, and the slop she’d been ladling out didn’t inspire her appetite, either.

   At last, the line dwindled. Her final customer wore, rather than the white latex, a neatly pressed double-breasted suit, decorated with various ribbons and medals. She was the color of a ripe plum, except for her right hand which was made of a pale metal. Tightly locked hair was arranged in a neat bun at the nape of her neck, and she sported what May considered a normal number of arms, legs, and eyes. She was at least a foot-and-a-half taller than May, but short in comparison to the other purple bipeds in the cafeteria.

   “I haven’t seen you before. This must be your first day, is that right, May June July?”

   May nodded.

   “I’m General Listay,” she said, smiling warmly. “I oversee defense operations onboard this vessel. I don’t oversee the cafeteria, unfortunately. Here.”

   The General reached into a pack attached to her thigh and produced a shiny, purple, and orange fruit. She set it on the counter and, with her robotic hand, she twirled it like a top on its convex side.

“It’s a llerke. I grow them in my spare time. If you ever need more, come find me. Welcome to the Peacemaker, May.” As the General walked away, May watched her take another fruit from her pack and toss her tray into a disposal slot.

   With no one left to serve, May set down the ladle and hopped onto the counter, picking up the fruit to give it an experimental squeeze. It felt fleshy inside, like a soft mango. Peeling a bit of the skin away from the knot at the top, May found juicy, yellow meat. It smelled sweet and tangy.

   Maybe she was hungry, after all. She touched the fruit with the tip of her tongue, deciding if it didn’t immediately kill her after licking it, she’d probably be fine.

   Aw hell, she thought, if it killed her, so what? Probably, this was all just a dream. If the fruit killed her, she’d just wake up. It was worth it. She took a bite. It was ripe, sweet, and tart and had a lingering aftertaste like the cherry syrup from Sonic. Or maybe a real cherry. Yes, probably more like an actual cherry. It was the tastiest dream-fruit she’d ever had and she closed her eyes to bask in the experience more fully.

   August appeared just as she finished the fruit, a little damper than he had been when they arrived.

   “Looks like you met Listay,” he said, nodding to the pit which she tossed into the empty pot of whatever she’d been serving. “Hot, isn’t she?”

   May blinked meaningfully at him, but he had already begun walking away. She never noticed when people were hot. She wondered if August was hot but doubted it.

   “If you’re into that sort of thing,” she offered.

   “What, aliens? Yeah, I guess my standards have gotten messed up out here. She’s nice, though. And she’s ripped.” August punctuated with a flirtatious growl.

   “She is,” May agreed, following him back to their room.