armageddon_20xx t1_iuij5ox wrote
Who's running a tractor-trailer outside at 3 AM? I yawned, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. Sitting up on the bed, I shielded my face from the bright beam coming through the window, looking down at the curtains I'd been putting off installing.
Thump. I jumped as thoughts of a burglar ran through my mind, suddenly wishing that I had opted for that home alarm when I bought the house. Instinctively, I looked around for the source, and when I saw none I threw myself on the floor, thinking I would roll under the bed. Thump. A cracking sound came from the direction of the window, and as I worked on getting under the bed as fast as I could, the reflection of glass shards on the floor met my eye. Please, please, I thought, just leave me alone.
Crash! The window exploded, glass transforming into shrapnel. Pain seared through my thigh. I looked down transfixed in fear as blood slowly spilled from the wound out onto the floor, not noticing the enormous green tentacle that was squirming like a serpent toward me until it was within inches of my face. "Uhh, uhh, uhhhhhh!" I tried to scream in terror, but could only manage a squeal as it wrapped itself around my body and began retracting. Within moments I was in the air, firmly within its grasp as it took me to... a ship?
The craft was small, no larger than the truck I first envisioned as the source of the beam, its top a shiny surface that glowed in the moonlight. The light it emitted downward in all directions was as blinding as it had been when I awoke, fully illuminating the nearby woods almost as if it were the sun. Suddenly more curious than terrified, I tried to study every detail as the tentacle pulled me towards a hole in the bottom of the ship.
A dark orange light bathed the chamber inside, making the details of what I was looking at hard to see. Strange instruments and panels lined the walls, occasionally lighting up or speaking in some kind of high-pitch whinny sound. Most strange was a mirror in which my reflection didn't quite look right. On it was a younger version of myself, perhaps from a few years ago before I decided to go bald as a result of hair loss.
I looked at the mirror closely for several moments, trying to decipher the meaning, when the figure inside suddenly moved in the direction opposite of where it should have been based on my own movements. It was only then that I realized it wasn't a mirror at all - I was looking at a younger doppelganger of myself! The green tentacle had grabbed the other me and was already pushing them downwards outside of the hole. "Wait!" I said to no one at all as I looked down the hole, calculating if I could somehow escape by sliding down that very same tentacle.
No sooner than had I formulated a plan, the hole closed all at once and the light in the room changed from orange to red. Something clicked in my brain and suddenly the whinny noises made sense.
"Welcome home, Unit EARTH#132232. Please approach the pod for data collection."
I did what I was told, suddenly remembering exactly where I needed to go to get there, my eyes having instantly adjusted to the red light in the ship such that everything was more than crystal clear. Yes, I had forgotten how poor human eyesight really was. When I arrived at the machine I knew exactly where to place the nodes so that the data from my mission could be sent to the central computer.
Yet I could still feel my human form, remember my years down there in the primitive hellscape they called Earth. There was the touch of my wife's hand on my face, the taste of the water untainted with uranium, and the gatherings with friends that my victim had made where camaraderie was shared. For a brief moment, I questioned the morality of the mission, my thoughts abetted by my recollection that the other version of me was already dead and that the arm was just putting the body back in the bed for them to discover in the morning.
The nodes washed away the last of those thoughts.
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