1
I woke up in a small room, maybe ten by six. It had a bed, a toilet, and a door.
I was on the bed and it was narrow but comfortable, with a deep mattress and a full set of white sheets. The toilet was one piece of solid metal with a sensor and no water in the bowl. The door was riveted metal. The walls were smooth and featureless.
A few seconds after I woke up, a female voice full of authority boomed out from a speaker. It said something I couldn't understand.
As I looked around the voice continued, and after a moment I realized I could control what it said depending on where I looked. When I looked at the toilet, I heard a word. When I looked at the door, a different word.
The voice was teaching me the language by giving me words for the things I could see.
It was disconcerting to note that no matter how I tilted my head, the voice still seemed to know with perfect accuracy exactly what I was looking at.
That was my reality for the first month of this ... strange existence. After the first few hours, images appeared on the wall across from the bed. Since I'd established that no matter what I tried, whoever it was knew exactly where I was looking, I decided not to speak.
I was in a prison, being observed as though I were some sort of experiment. My thoughts, at least, would remain my own.
Besides, it seemed likely given how I was being taught that even if I did say something, I wouldn't be understood.
The 'lessons' were still able to advance despite my silence because eventually, every fifty words or so, the voice began calling out words that weren't what I was looking at. When I looked at the image on the wall that correctly corresponded to the word used, there was a sharp clicking sound and all the images vanished except the correct one.
Every day the language lesson was unceasing, and obviously controlled by computer. It started as soon as I opened my eyes, and ended only when I closed them to go to sleep, which I was only allowed to do after some predetermined amount of time. If I tried to ignore the lesson or sleep early, I was shocked — quite literally — by a bolt of static discharge from whatever wall I happened to be closest to. It didn't care if I spoke, but whatever was teaching me wouldn't let me ignore the lesson entirely.
Every day I was subjected to a strange mist that filled the room, then was sucked out again. That mist seemed to keep me clean, because after it passed I noticed I couldn't smell myself anymore.
One meal a day was served to me, and that was the only real means I had of judging time. It marked the end of the day and I was only allowed to sleep after I received it. I had nothing to brush my teeth, but the food I was being given left my mouth feeling fresh, so I could only assume my teeth wouldn't rot. The food was bland, so much so that I couldn't even get tired of the taste because it had no taste.
By the time I'd received thirty meals, I had a vocabulary in excess of a thousand words. By the time I'd received sixty meals, it was over three thousand words and I'd learned the alphanumeric system along with the basic computational symbols.
At first, I hadn't spoken out of a sense of defiance and futility. Eventually, I didn't bother to speak because I really didn't think anyone would answer me no matter what language I used.
I had an apparently acceptable grasp of the language in ninety days, because I was woken on the ninety-first day by a novel experience.
The door opened.
I sat up, twisting sideways to sit on the edge of the bed. I left the sheet over me because the person standing in the doorway was obviously female.
Female, but not human, though there were some superficial similarities.
Her body was scaled and hairless, but the scales were snake-like rather than crocodilian, and the pattern was of brown-and-black striping where visible.
She was pretty in an understated sort of way. Her clothing was a jumpsuit sort of thing, sleeveless and primarily navy blue with silver trim. Despite being scaled, she filled it out nicely. Her angular face had all the same features as a human save the eyebrows, which were missing, but they were all a bit different. Her eyes were slitted and larger than normal, with blue irises. Her nose preceded smoothly from her brows. She had high cheekbones and surprisingly full lips, considering they were drawn into a hard line.
She looked at me with eyes I couldn't read, then — in the language I'd just spent the last three months being force-fed — said, "Stand up."
I chose not to obey for two reasons. The first and more important was that I wanted to see if I would be tased for disobedience, and the second was that I had never been given any good reason to do anything these people wanted me to do.
Over the course of the last few months I'd had a lot of time to think about my circumstances. The method being used to train me was similar to one I'd used myself to train dogs. Similar, but not the same. The difference was that I'd been given no positive reinforcement, leaving me with no particular desire to make the people ordering me around happy.
The answer to my question came very quickly as, after several seconds of awkward silence, I was hit in the back of the neck by a bolt from the wall behind me.
She said again, "Stand up."
A second, much stronger shock hit me after a few seconds more, and this one made me twitch a bit. It was more powerful than any other shock I'd received to that point.
She said, "I know you can understand me. You will stand up or you will be hurt."
Anger isn't new to me. I've dealt with it for most of my life, and I'm man enough to admit that patience isn't my strong suit. But in the last few months I hadn't been angry. I had accepted my new reality for reasons I chose not to think about, but that had to do with my anger.
In a way, anger had brought me to where I now sat. It had put me here, but the last few months I had been able to live without it. While strange and dehumanizing, the circumstances I'd found myself in were tolerable, and that was an improvement over where I'd been before. I'd had no cause to be angry.
Now, I felt it again, and because I was angry I refused to stand. Instead, I slipped back under the covers and put my head on the mattress, closing my eyes.
The shock hit my elbow and was so powerful the involuntary convulsion threw me twitching to the floor next to the bed in a tangle of bedsheets.
The woman, whoever ... whatever she was, then made a mistake.
She came to crouch next to me and began to speak in a tone of sharp reprimand. I paid no attention to what she was saying. I simply reached out with both hands, caught her head, and broke her neck.
It was surprisingly easy too. I was shocked at how delicate she was and used far more force than necessary.
I expected to be killed, but that was all right. It'd already happened once, let it happen again. Death no longer held any mystery for me. I remembered my life, but nothing after that. I felt it unlikely that I could escape from whatever facility I was being kept in. After all, my meals had been provided to me through a slot at the bottom of the door. I could be electrocuted through any surface. The surveillance was so good they could track my eyes from any angle. There was simply no point trying to be clever.
At the least I would die unbroken, and I wouldn't go alone.
Seconds passed, and I got my second surprise of the day. I wasn't killed.
The door slammed shut, but that was all.
Blinking, I got up, threw the sheet back on the bed, and stared down at the body, pondering it and the implications it presented.
I wondered who she'd been. What was her story? Why was she here?
So many questions.
I doubted she'd come to work with any idea that she would die. I felt bad that she hadn't even had time to scream. People — even aliens — should be given a moment or two for realization to set in so they could make peace with whatever cosmological constant they believed in before their lives were taken.
In her case, I simply hadn't had the luxury of giving her that time. Since she'd obviously been controlling the shocks, giving her time would have simply let her save herself. Whoever had sent her wouldn't have learned anything that way.
That might have been my mistake.
It was unlikely that the system administering shocks to me wasn't powerful enough to actually kill me if necessary. Given the technology I'd been subject to I thought that possibility so remote as to be unworthy of consideration. The obvious conclusion was, therefore, that I personally was more valuable to whoever ran this facility than the creature at my feet.
It was also possible that whoever was monitoring things didn't have the authority to kill me. So it might happen later, after authorization had been sought and granted.
Either way, I had more to learn from the body in front of me. I picked up the pad and looked it over, but the face of it was blank and there seemed no way to turn it on or off, so I set it aside and had a longer look at the corpse.
Her scales seemed to cover her everywhere and though her fingers had claws rather than fingernails they were down to nubs, probably to allow her to manipulate the pad she'd been holding. I ripped open the front of the jumpsuit and saw the scales covered her belly and breasts as well, though they were so fine as to feel like skin against my fingers.
Her body was warm, but had no real muscular definition, which surprised me somewhat. I always imagined aliens to be physically superior to humans, but this one had died so quickly and easily that it left me with doubts.
I lifted one of her arms, taking the forearm in both hands, and applied gradually increasing pressure.
The forearm had two bones — just like my own — but both cracked, then snapped well before I applied maximum pressure.
Weak bones, weak body.
Carefully opening the corpse's mouth, I examined the teeth. They seemed to indicate the creature had been an omnivore. Sharp, cutting teeth in front with molars in the back. No fangs.
Taking her footwear off was a simple matter: they zipped up over the heel. The feet were much like my own, plantigrade, though they too had claws rather than nails. These too were sanded down to nubs, though, presumably so she could wear her shoes.
No natural weapons to speak of and a terribly weak frame. While it was definitely an alien, it was so weak that I couldn't really even imagine being threatened by one now that I'd been allowed to examine the corpse.
These things were nothing.
The silence was loud and obtrusive. It was the first time I hadn't been subjected to a non-stop language lesson since arriving, and I wondered what the people on the other side of my cell door were thinking as I moved the body to the far side of my cell before it fouled itself. Then I sat on my bed, idly experimenting with the data pad the creature'd brought in as I waited to see what would happen.
A quiet hour went by. The smell of excrement grew obnoxious, but the cleaning fog descended, filling the room for much longer than usual. When it cleared, so had the smell.
Once the mist was gone a new voice sounded in my cell and for the very first time seemed to be asking me a direct question.
"Why did you kill her?"
In order to answer, I would either have to speak, or get creative.
I didn't want to speak. My silence had become part of my identity in this new, unexpected second life I was living. I didn't want to cheapen it by wasting my first words on the answer to a stupid question, so I said nothing.
The door opened again and a person — male or female I couldn't tell — in what looked to me like a set of power armor straight out of science fiction stepped into the room with me.
The armor was black save for the faceplate, which was reflective gold. The only other detail worth noting to me was that the armor looked to be somewhere around nine feet tall if I used my own six foot two for comparison. I couldn't be certain, though, because I didn't trust that the body I inhabited was actually my own.
I watched impassively as the giant armored figure squared up to look down at me while a second in similar armor stepped behind the first and unceremoniously dragged the body out of my cell.
I took the opportunity to look at myself, using the armor's reflective faceplate as a mirror.
My brown hair, which had been completely shaved when I woke up in this cell, had grown but was still fairly short. My beard was full and thick. I had that familiar Roman nose and hazel eyes. It was indisputably my face. I'd more than half expected to find a stranger in my reflection, but no, it was really me. Which meant my height estimate was probably accurate, leaving me to question if I was actually being held captive by multiple races of alien. The dead one had been slightly taller than I was but not by more than a few inches. There was no way she'd have fit in one of these armored suits unless it was more like a mechanized vehicle. While possible, there was no real motive to make such a thing bipedal.
Once the body was out the first figure seemed to hesitate a moment, then it too left.
Neither had spoken a single word to me.
Despite having learned an entirely new language in the past few months, what I learned that day had infinitely more value.
I had been reborn, but into what world, and for what purpose?
The means of my revival were of no interest. I was not a scientist and felt confident that an explanation of my present circumstances would sound like magic in any case. The armor was clearly more advanced than anything available in my time, or place. The eye tracking was so good that I rather suspected my captors could see through them. Whoever had brought me here had almost complete control over my life.
I had one consolation: they did not know my thoughts. They could not read my mind. Because they couldn't do that, I was still my own man no matter my circumstances.
In that moment, I decided that I would remain silent. For all they knew, I couldn't speak. It was precious knowledge. As long as I could keep that secret, I could keep others.