From the Shadows

Thursday, April 23, 2016/I’ve no idea what this universe’s dating system is.

Iwoke up in a coffin.

I screamed. Nobody but a vampire ever expects such a thing.

I banged and clawed and desperately tried to see or feel something, anything, that would get me out.

(In retrospect, really glad that didn’t happen, or I would be dead and in a real coffin now.)

Andrew once accidentally shut me in our huge, walk-in closet the first year we were married, and I went ballistic. There was still plenty of room to move around, but he’d turned off the light and closed the door, forgetting I was in there (we were such newlyweds, we kept being startled by the fact that we were living with another person) until I started to scream. That was the first time either of us realized the depth of my claustrophobia.

This was so much worse. I couldn’t even raise my arms above my head; all my scratching and pounding had to happen at my sides. The top of the container didn’t quite touch my face, but it was close enough I could sense it, right above me. My legs and feet were firmly pinned.

I don’t know how long I was in there. Long enough to move from panic, to hyperventilating, to the one tiny part of my brain that always remains functional no matter how bad everything else gets whispering I would die right then and there if I didn’t get a grip on myself, to numb horror interspersed with moments of squirming and screaming again, in hopes that this time I’d be able to get free.

I never even questioned why I was there, didn’t ask how I went from falling asleep on my couch to waking up in a grave. I didn’t consider for one second that it was a nightmare. I know nightmares, they’ve been my close companions for a year. This was all too real, and it didn’t matter how it had happened. All that mattered was making it stop.

It was in one of my hopelessly quiet stretches that something grabbed my coffin and dragged it around. From within my metal womb, it felt like a giant hand lifting me—or no, not a hand, more like a giant dog snatching me up in its mouth and shaking me to and fro.

Naturally I started screaming again, only this time it wasn’t just because of terror, I actually hoped there was someone around to hear. Even if it was a beast.

When I had to pause to drag in a gasping, sobbing breath, I heard voices. And then my coffin went clangggg! and landed on something hard.

Then, at last, I could hear hands scrambling to get the coffin lid off.

They lifted it up, and I promptly thought I was going to die again. The light that streamed in was so bright, it sliced through my eyes and went straight to my brain.

I was too hoarse to scream anymore at that point. I think I let loose with a weak Augh! as I flung myself desperately out of the coffin, tipped over the side, and landed in a huddle on the cold, hard metal floor with my arms flung around my head.

I hadn’t even managed one glimpse of my rescuers.

They tugged on me a bit, babbling in my ears, but I was concentrating on not throwing up and not exposing my eyes to the light, and managed to ignore them. What seemed like dozens of voices fired off questions in various languages.

At last I heard, in English, a precise voice saying, Do you understand this?

I managed a nod, though how they saw me do it through my arms and hands protecting my face I’m not sure. A new voice cut through all the rest, and I couldn’t help but listen to him.

For goodness’ sake, you idiots, back off and give her some room! Henderson, dim the lights, can’t you see it’s too bright? You’d be screaming in pain too if some moron exposed your eyes to bright light after being in the dark for 500 years.

His words were angry, but his voice was beautiful, a deep baritone with the slightest hint of a burr underneath it. Even at that moment, with my stomach trying to heave itself out my mouth, I thought he’d make a fantastic singer.

Then one hand gently rested on my shoulder, in direct contrast to the many hands pushing and prodding me moments before.

Don’t worry, he said, and now that lovely voice was a gentle purr. Take your time. We’ve turned down the lights. There’s no rush. When you feel ready, go ahead and open your eyes. You’re safe here. No one is going to hurt you. We want to help. I know you’re confused. We’re a little puzzled ourselves. It’s going to be all right. We’ll all figure this out together.

I cautiously lowered my arms and blinked once, quickly. When my vision didn’t explode into starbursts of pain, I opened my eyes fully.

Squatting in front of me, with his hand on my shoulder still, was the man with the Voice. I had to blink a few more times to get the tears clear, but then, at last, I could make out details.

He was a big guy, that much was obvious even when he was resting on his heels. Big shoulders, big chest, really tall ... not surprising, given how deep his voice was. His face was ordinary—I’d half expected him to be breathtakingly handsome, to match his voice, but he was pretty plain, really. Not ugly, but nothing to write home about.

Brown eyes, brown hair, light brown skin that seemed to have an almost blue tint to it—at first I hazily thought he must be cold, but then I figured it was just the dim lighting playing tricks on eyes.

Appearance-wise, maybe about five years older than me, but I’d always been lousy at guessing people’s ages by their face.

All right? he asked.

Not even close, but since I figured he was talking about my vision, I managed a nod.

Do you know who you are?

That was a weird question—why wouldn’t I?—but also an easy one. Riss—uh, Nerissa Waldon, I croaked, then clamped my mouth shut again.

I was really nauseous, way more than could be accounted for by the claustrophobia.

Do you have any idea where you are?

I shook my head once, not daring to try to speak again.

A new voice entered our conversation, the one that had first spoken to me in English. He moved closer, but didn’t bend down so I could see his face. Jerk. I had a lovely view of his shiny brown boots, though.

You are aboard my ship, he said, his words clipped and his rs strongly pronounced, with not quite an English accent but almost.

I muzzily thought of boats and oceans, and wondered why, if I was on a ship, I couldn’t hear any waves splashing against the side, feel any rocking, or smell salt in the air. For some reason, I had thought we were in some kind of warehouse. I guessed that I could be on a really huge ship, or even a submarine, but—

Your pod was part of a convoy of a dozen biochemically frozen individuals we came across, floating in space, Not-English Guy continued. Yours alone showed signs of life. We brought your pod in and released you.

Biochemically frozen? Like the ad I’d seen? Wait—did he say space?

I had kept my head downward inclined this entire time, not willing to risk puking by looking up, but I couldn’t bear it any longer. I sat upright on my knees and looked around.

We were in a room that looked like a warehouse, big and square-ish and utilitarian. Filling most of it was a really weird plane/rocket thing. Andrew might have been able to tell what it was just by looking, but it was beyond me.

Next to it, looking really small and horrible, was my shiny silver coffin, what Not-English Guy had called my pod (Scottish! my brain filled in. He was Scottish—or his voice was, at least).

Filling in the rest of the empty space between those items and me were people.

Scottish Guy had a gorgeous, sculptured face, golden-brown with sharp cheekbones and a chiseled jaw and piercing black eyes. His hair was black, too, and looked like it might have been curly if he let it grow a little bit more. If I’d seen him before hearing him speak, I would have guessed he was from India or a Middle Eastern country—which I suppose he still could have been, ethnically. His firm mouth was set in a definite frown as he stared down at me.

Then I couldn’t look at him anymore, because all the other people in the room grabbed my attention.

A stunningly beautiful black woman, watching me with an unreadable expression; an Asian girl with her hand resting on a weird-looking gun holstered at her hip (that freaked me out more than a little); a guy who looked like one of Tolkien’s elves, with pointed ears, paper-white skin, weird vertical ridges on his cheeks, and long, flowing locks of shiny blond hair (he had to be in costume, right, even though that would be weird?); a woman with really black skin, I mean black, not the dark African or West Indian coloring we call black, and four arms; an older white guy with grey hair and cold blue eyes set in a tanned face; and a man with shimmering silver skin (literally, it kept catching the light and sparkling) and lively golden eyes, with a huge grin on his face like this was the most fun he’d had in ages.

I think it was the four arms that did me in. I dove for my coffin but didn’t quite make it before I threw up all over the floor.

Beautiful Voice followed me, ordering the others to stay back in his grumpy tone again. He didn’t pat my shoulder or rub my back, which I would have hated, but he pulled my hair away from my face and silently waited for me to finish emptying my guts.

I don’t understand any of this, I finally stammered, stuffing my humiliation at throwing up in front of so many strangers, even if half of them were freaks, firmly down where it wouldn’t interfere with what was important right now. Last night I went to sleep on the couch in my apartment, like I always do. When I woke up, I was in there. I waved at the pod, then moved away from my sickness and sat shakily on the floor.

Beautiful Voice sat down next to me, bringing his knees up in front of him and resting his hands on them. You didn’t join any program in the year 2016 to be biochemically frozen and sent into space for—

Settling of new, terraformed worlds once we’d developed enough to do that sort of thing? I finished for him. No. I saw the ad, but I didn’t sign up. I thought the whole thing was bizarre.

I wasn’t about to tell strangers how tempted I had been, how appealing the idea of sleeping for a few hundred years and then waking up to start a brand new life away from my family and the shards of my old life had been to me. I had never really considered it seriously (though a few more phone calls from my sisters might have changed that), but the advertisement was tempting, even if in the end I decided it was insanity.

Good instincts, said the stunning woman (the one who was African-type black, not the four-armed Really-Black one).

I was starting to be able to look at the obviously not-human people without my insides wanting to shrivel. Not that any of them were hideous, but my brain just kept screaming at me that they were wrong, they were impossible.

I’ve always loved fantasy and sci-fi, especially space opera. I think all those books and TV shows and movies allowed me to start reasoning through what I was seeing and what Beautiful Voice and Scottish Guy were saying, and to piece it together. I’ve always been good at puzzles, fitting together weird bits to make the big picture make sense.

You’re from the future. My future, I said.

Beautiful Voice nodded, his eyebrows going up like he was impressed.

And I was somehow floating in space with the people who signed up for bio-freezing. Even though I didn’t do that. And ... you said none of them survived, but somehow I did. And woke up from the freezing, which I didn’t do but obviously must have because I couldn’t have survived in a coffin in space for however many years, all on my own, before you guys showed up. And then you grabbed my coffin with some sort of tractor beam or space grappling hook, and now I’m on your ... spaceship. Starship. Imperial cruiser. Whatever you call it. I covered my mouth with my hand as the desire to puke surged again.

The nausea is a side effect of awakening from the bio-freeze, Beautiful Voice informed me, the professional tone settling his role firmly in my mind. This guy had to be the ship’s doctor. It made sense, the way he was making sure I was all right and how he bossed everyone else around.

That meant that Scottish Guy had to be the captain. I looked at him again. He still seemed annoyed, and not at all impressed by my brilliant logic. Which, considering that I could have been screaming and panicking instead of sitting there talking mostly-calmly about it, kind of bugged me.

We call it a space-going vessel, he informed me now. "Spaceship will do. A space corvette belonging to the Alliance Exploratory Forces, to be specific. Not a passenger vessel."

It was a really bad plan, Stunning Woman said, ignoring this. The bio-freezing and terraforming, she clarified. About a hundred years after they did the freezing, technology finally advanced to where they could send the ship out. Except they didn’t have any planet for it to land on yet, just proof that there were such planets. So they sent out the ship anyway, manned by computers, with instructions to land on the first terraform-able planet it came across, and unfreeze the people once there, so that they could begin the process of transforming the planet to make it livable. Hard to imagine anything going wrong with such a brilliant, foolproof plan as that, isn’t there? Her mouth turned up on one side, and despite everything, a smile tried to quiver around my mouth in response.

It didn’t work, she continued. The ship vanished from their sensors almost immediately. Nobody could ever find any trace of it, until Ru El here, she nodded to Elf-Guy, picked up your life signs in the middle of the debris field way out here in deep space, and we put two and two together. We didn’t expect that you been part of the trip without ever, you know, having been part of it.

Elf-Guy—Ru El, as she called him, spoke in a misty, far-away voice. By your reckoning, it is the year 2526. You have been asleep for 510 years. So very strange.

Time travel, bio-freezing, mysterious abduction from my own couch, aliens and spaceships. I grabbed my head with both hands.

And here comes the headache, said Beautiful Voice. Another side effect from the freezing. Come on, Nerissa, he said, standing up and holding his hand out to me. Let’s get you to sickbay.

He and Silver-Skin hustled me down the corridors (cream and brown, rounded walls, and would have been utterly fascinating if my head hadn’t felt like Athena was trying to burst forth from it fully grown) to the sickbay, a room full of beds and clear cases and weird instruments, and then Doctor Beautiful Voice pumped me full of drugs.

I dozed off for a while, and when I woke up he’d brought me my journal, rescued from the shuttle bay by Silver-Skin. I fell asleep last night with it in my hands. It’s brand-new, I bought it in hopes it would inspire me to start writing poetry and songs again.

I tried writing last night—or 510 years ago—but my emotions were too much for me. I’d fallen asleep with it in my hands, thinking about Andrew and all the events of the past year, but unable to get any of them out. It must have transferred to the pod with me.

I’m so glad to have it. Not only does it give me a place to record all these bizarre things happening to me, it’s a little piece of home, some proof that I haven’t turned into a character in a movie, but am still Riss.

Thank you, I said, stammering a little over the lump in my throat. And thank—whatever his name is, the, um, person who got it out of the pod.

Chief Petty Officer Tyler, Doctor Beautiful Voice said. "Well, his real name is something like Ty’le’rehonorogh’mumblemumble, but he allows everyone to call him Tyler. He’s our Chief Engineer."

At this point, I opened up my journal and started jotting down notes so I could keep people straight. And, uh, he’s not human?

A hint of a smile quirked the corners of the doctor’s mouth. No. He cleared his throat. My name’s Selby, by the way. If you’re keeping track. Gideon Selby, chief medical officer aboard this ship. And for the record, I myself am only half human.

I tried to keep my jaw from dropping; Roz always says—said—that makes me look like a halfwit. That explains the blueish skin, then, I said, striving for a neutral tone.

He nodded. My mother’s people are completely blue, with black markings covering their entire bodies. I’ve just got the patterns on my arms and legs. He obligingly rolled up his sleeves, and sure enough, black swirls and dots danced up and down his brown arms, just touching his wrists, looking like the most elegant tattoos I’d ever seen.

I ... see, I said. I industriously wrote this down as well, mostly in hopes that the writing of it would make it seem more real (it hasn’t, not yet. Maybe reading it, and filling in more details as I go, will. One can hope). And the others?

Doctor Selby rested his hip against the corner of his desk. The Captain is one Arthur Miles. Wholly human.

And wholly has a stick up his rear, I thought but didn’t say aloud. I don’t think Dr. Selby is the type to idolize his captain, but one never knows.

His first mate is Commander Sapphira Osei-Koné, also wholly human.

Which one was she?

The one who talked to you about the bio-freezing.

Stunning Woman, then. Not the four-armed one or the jittery gun-toting one. Well, the wholly human bit probably ruled out the four-armed one, anyway, but hey, for all I knew, they had made some crazy genetic advances in the last 500 years.

500 years! Anything could have happened. Spaceships and aliens and time travel, oh my.

Who was the four-armed woman?

Our navigator, Adele Vreean. As you might have guessed, not human. From the planet Driiviia, in fact. She tells our helmsman where to fly the ship.

And the helmsman is ...?

Ru El. Of Koloth. He was the one with the pointy ears and lovely blond locks.

Not an elf. Not that I really believe in elves in space, but given everything else that’s happened, believe and not believe are starting to blend together.

And that just leaves Lieutenant Natalie Christensen, our head of security. Human, Selby added.

That must have been the jittery gun girl. It explained the jitters and the gun—until I came out of the pod and started talking, nobody here would have had no idea if I was hostile or friendly.

I rubbed my head again. Dr. Selby took note.

I think it’s time for you to get some sleep, Nerissa, he said.

Just let me write a little bit more, I pleaded. Seriously, if I didn’t get all this down, how would I remember?

He loomed over me with a scowl. Five minutes, and then you must sleep, or I’m taking it away.

I finished filling this out more quickly than I’ve ever written anything in my life.

So concludes today’s adventures. I’m not sure I’m ready to think about tomorrow’s yet.

Friday, April 24, 2016/I know it’s not really, but how else am I supposed to