Page 4 of Alien Desire
The thing will get hungry eventually, or realise his friends aren’t coming back (especially as I’m blocking up that vent) and then he’ll leave.
Over the next two days, I occupy my time by making a detailed inventory of the supplies in the system, checking the fuel tanks and pumps, and fiddling with one of the snow mobiles. Once I bring it to life, I journey backward and forward to the crash site, sifting through the remains for anything of use. I hope that maybe I can salvage parts of the computer and use it to upgrade the communication system, send a more direct and efficient help signal. However, the ship’s computer is a burnt out husk, blackened and destroyed.
On these journeys I try not to look at my crewmates. The ground is frozen and hard, and I have no suitable tool to dig graves. I suppose I could cremate their bodies instead, but I worry that the rescue mission will want to return their remains to their families.
Once I’d listened to a documentary about Everest, the highest mountain on Earth. Centuries ago, men and women climbed this mountain without the technology we have today, and many died in the extreme conditions, frozen to death in the cold temperatures, or weakened by the lack of oxygen. Up there on the mountain peak, their bodies never decayed. They remained perfectly preserved ghosts haunting all those that came after them.
I wonder if Georgio, Ling and Jacob will haunt me too.
The fluff ball remains in the cupboard of the sleeping bay despite the fact that his family has not returned. I wonder if he is sick, so telling myself I am being ridiculous, I bring him a dish of water and some dried crackers.
He eyes them suspiciously, but when I return later, they are both empty. After that he ventures from the safety of his nest and watches me from large distances as I search through the store rooms for anything of interest. I find myself leaving him more and more gifts of food.
In my search, I find a treadmill, and an ancient music device some traveller lost here decades, maybe centuries, before. I connect it up to the computer and have it play me songs from so long ago not one is familiar.
There’s also a stack of paperback books, yellowed and musty. It has been a long time since I held a book in my hands, and I lift it to my nose, inhaling the aroma that takes me straight back to classrooms and my childhood bed.
There is one bed in the bay where I pile the books around the base, along with the clothes and toiletries I’ve solicited as my own. It begins to resemble something homely, especially when the fluff ball takes to sleeping on the floor beside me, even though he scurries away whenever I attempt to reach out and stroke him.
On the fourth day, I wake and find the pale blue sky and the faint yellow sun masked by thick heavy clouds. All colour has drained from this world as the white land and the white sky merge into one another in a blur of blankness. And then it snows.
I haven’t seen snow since I was a child and then I only saw it once. The phenomenon is rare now back on Earth and the planets I’ve visited on my assignments have all been baking hot deserts or vast steamy rainforests.
White crystals drift in the air and I can’t help but rush outside and stand among them, opening my hand to try to catch the delicate flakes. They are weightless, feather-like. It feels like being in a dream. I swirl around with my arms outstretched and my head tilted back and I laugh, the fluffy dog watching me from the doorway with his head tilted. The noise of my laughter is strange. The short blunt messages of the computer are the only human sounds I’ve heard in days.
It’s short lived. Soon the snowflakes morph to ice, hard bullets that assault my body. I’m forced inside where they hammer against the windows and batter the roof, like some deranged monster determined to get in.
The storm lasts for five days. Five days, I’m trapped inside this station with only the computer and the fluff ball for company.
For days I listen to the insistent smashing of the ice against the roof. I think I will go mad. I make the computer play tracks of music unfamiliar to me as loud as it can to try to drown out the noise. But it is futile, the ice another base to the melody of the tunes.
The boredom eats away at me. I know it has been only a few days but I’m used to being busy, to having people in charge dictating my every waking hour, commanding me to do this job or that duty. Being left to my own devices, my own entertainment, is as alien as this planet.
There’re the books and the music and the treadmill. There’s my daily inspection and the logging of supplies. But the days are endless seconds and minutes and hours to fill.
I decide I’m going to make friends with the fluff ball (who in my head I have named Fluffy - it seems apt) and spend one afternoon sitting on the bedroom floor coaxing him closer and closer with bits of food.
He is wary at first. I offer him the gift, but he keeps an arm’s length away from me at all times, sniffing anxiously at the air. When he realises this isn’t a trick, but a satisfactory supply of tasty food, he’s willing to venture a little closer.
Eyeing me closely, he snaps his jaws at the cracker and snatches it from my hand. He drags it a few meters away and nibbles at it greedily while watching me. Then he comes back for another. And another. Finally he eats straight from my fingers, allowing me to stroke his soft fur as he munches away.
After this, he’s happy to follow me around, often curling up at my feet and welcoming tummy rubs and ear tickles. However, I can’t tempt him with a game of chase or fetch and so his ability to distract me is limited.
I scour the computer for morsels of diversions instead. Finally, I come up trumps.
Chess.
I settle myself down on the chair in front of the screen and challenge the computer to a match.
To my utter surprise, the computer lets out a hearty chuckle. “You’re challengingmeto a game of chess, human?”
What?
“You sure you wanna lose?” she asks me. “I don’t want to make you cry.”
She’s been nothing but polite and perfunctory up until now. But it seems whoever programmed chess into this machine did so with a tonne load of shit talk.
I roll my eyes at whoever the idiot was who did this.
