There’s a very bright light, so bright I have to close my eyes again. This is weird. Even if the bedroom lights were left on when I went to bed, they’ve never been this bright.

Unless—no way! Did I die in my sleep? Is this one of those near-death experiences? Oh come on, that’s not fair. Okay, that was an entire bottle of wine last night in front of a very weepy movie. Guilty as charged, but a mom’s gotta do something when her other half takes the kids to visit his parents for the weekend. That’s what me time is for. The small price of a hangover in the morning wouldn’t have been at all surprising. But dying in my sleep? That’s not fair at all.

As my eyes get used to it that light becomes round and high, in the apex of what appears to be a dome-shaped chamber. There are things hanging down around it, metallic tendrils, each one with some nasty-looking instrument at the end of it. Well, this isn’t what heaven’s supposed to look like. Where are all the angels? Where’s the choir invisible? Where are all my dead relatives waiting to greet me? Where’s God? Or is this the other place? No one goes to the other place in a near-death experience. Correction: Almost no one goes to the other place in a near-death experience. Well, isn’t this just peachy? My near-death experience is the other place: an eternal visit to the dentist, probably with no anesthetic. We left fairness behind a long time ago.

Time to wake up. My body is waiting for me in a nice, warm, cozy bed, which this surface I’m lying on most definitely isn’t. It’s cold and very hard. Moreover, only my eyes can move. I peer down over my cheeks to find four figures standing in a semicircle around my feet. They look like doctors, very short doctors but all of them wearing white scrubs. They should be wearing surgical masks and caps as well. Instead, this bunch seems to be wearing Halloween masks: green triangular things with a small mouth at the bottom, two big almond-shaped black eyes above, and nothing more than two nostrils in between.

There’s a name for this, sleep paralysis, and it usually involves being abducted by aliens. Wait. You cannot be serious. Abducted by aliens! Things like that don’t happen to me. I’m normal, ordinary. I live in a normal, ordinary house in a normal, ordinary neighborhood with my normal, ordinary family. The weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me is finding my car keys aren’t where I swear I left them.

This has to be a dream, a really unpleasant one that has me sweating between the sheets because my heart is racing and I really would like to wake up now. Come on! Wake up! Except now one of those creatures is stepping forward. Its three-fingered hand reaches for one of those instruments hanging down from the light. It wants me to have a look at it, the big grip with the thinner nozzle that’s several inches in length. See? It’s wonderful, perfectly crafted for its purpose. And look. When this button is pressed, this thin sliver of a very long needle slips out the end of it.

No! No! Don’t you come near me with that thing. Don’t you dare come near me with that thing. My eye. You are not going to stick that thing in my eye. Don’t you even think about sticking that thing in my—you goddamn son of a—

There’s a sound, hissy like a snake with a stutter, and the probe alien’s head explodes.

What the hell!

As what’s left of it slowly collapses, a fountain of green gunk splatters everywhere, some of it onto me. The snake spits again and the other three lose their heads too, with a whole lot more green gunk splattering everywhere.

Oh my God! Oh my God!

In the deathly silence that follows, because it isn’t even possible for me to scream, something moves into my field of vision. It’s a woman. She’s tall, with short, dark hair and a slim, athletic body. She’s also holding a very big gun which she continues to point at the bodies on the floor. That’s okay by me. My head’s fine where it is, if it’s all the same to you.

After a few moments, satisfied that all four of them are now very dead and no longer a threat, she looks down at me through deep dark brown eyes, coolly unconcerned with the slaughterhouse she’s just made of this chamber.

“Are you harmed?”

No, not physically anyway, but getting the hell off this table would be nice. That comes out as a series of muffled squeaks. Somehow she understands and, reaching down and under the table, she does something. The invisible hand pinning me here disappears and I’m on my feet, backing away from her and almost slipping up on all that green gunk.

“What did you do? You killed all the alien guys. Where are you from, Chicago? They were aliens, weren’t they?”

“If by aliens you mean not of your kind, then yes. Would you prefer me not to have killed them?”

Standing in among them now, and looking back at all those tendrils ending in nasty instruments, the answer to that question is pretty damned obvious.

“No! Who are these guys anyway, and what were they going to do to me, apart from sticking that needle in my eye for who knows what reason because they’re a bunch of sadists who get off on that kind of thing? For that matter, who are you?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. They tried to memory-block me. It’s rather like having a corrupted data file inside your head. I can remember bits and pieces here and there but everything in between is gone. For instance, right now we’re aboard their ship. There’s a planet below us. It’s blue but I don’t know what planet it is. I don’t know what part of the universe we’re in either. Nor do I know why I’m on this ship.”

“Wait. We’re on a ship? You mean a spaceship?”

“Yes. Why? Where did you think you were?”

“I thought I was in bed dreaming, or at least I hoped I was. So I actually have been abducted by aliens and we’re on a spaceship orbiting Earth. That’s what we call that blue planet. It’s my home, and I think I’d rather like to go back now.”

“You can’t.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I think I killed them all, but there might be one or two left. If so they will have sent a distress call. When that call is received, others will come and they’ll be looking for this ship. They’ll be looking for us too. Before that happens we need to be a long way from here.”

“A long way from here? Are you serious? I can’t just leave. I have a family. I have friends. I have a cat.”

“You don’t have a choice, unless you want to be here when they come looking. Your Earth, your family, and your cat are not a threat to them. They’ll be perfectly safe. We aren’t. We need to be a long way—”

“You can’t be sure of that. You said your memory was blocked, like a corrupt data file.”

“It is, and I’m not. Do you want to take the chance? Now get dressed. We’ve wasted enough time already.”

Oh my God, she’s right. Look at me standing here butt naked and covered in green gunk. It’s sticky, it’s yucky, and it has a very peculiar smell. “Ew. Do they have any showers on this ship?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t come across any, but don’t worry, it’s not corrosive. Here, use this.” She tosses a shirt at me. It comes from among all the clothing piled against the curved wall like flotsam on a reef.

“My God, how many people have these aliens abducted, and what happened to them if their clothes were left—corrosive! What do you mean, corrosive? This stuff isn’t going to eat through the hull, is it?”

“No. It hasn’t eaten through you, has it? So why would you think it might eat through the hull?”

It was rather a silly thought, put like that, and this woman, whoever she is, clearly doesn’t do silly. “No reason. It’s just something I saw once. It doesn’t matter.”

The shirt does a moderately good job of wiping me clean, enough to live with anyway. After that my own clothes are easily found: a dark green t-shirt and tartan pajama bottoms because that’s what they abducted me in. It’s not exactly what anyone would call a fetching ensemble, but then who expects to be abducted by aliens in the middle of the night? Some dingy sneakers that almost fit finish it off. Whoever owned them when they were taken isn’t exactly going to kick up a fuss about it.

“Okay. I’m good to go. What? You don’t like it?”

She’s dressed all in black: flat-heeled boots, skin-tight pants, and a jacket that might be leather, might be faux or might be something else entirely. Either way it’s very functional, and yet at the same time quietly chic. She could walk a catwalk anytime she wanted to on Earth. She’s even got that sense of hauteur they do it with, or it might simply be more of the total lack of emotional engagement she’s shown so far. Then again, it could be fascination because it’s not what I’m wearing she’s looking at. It’s my hair, shoulder-length and now swept back behind my ears.

“What color is that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen hair that color before.”

“I’m a redhead. Or a ginger if you want to be a dick about it.”

“And does everyone on your planet have hair that color?”

“No. My ancestors came from a place where the sun only came out once a year and the rest of the time it rained. UV is not our friend.”

She nods slowly, fascinated enough to briefly forget any sense of urgency. Then she snaps out of it, and without another word spoken, leads the way out of this chamber. I’m expected to simply follow on behind apparently. Not a very promising start to a relationship, but then the only other choice is to wait here for more of them to turn up. It’ll be the strong, silent mass murderer for me then, and we’ll get to work on her communication skills later.

The passageway beyond is dimly lit but just as littered. So are all the ones that follow and all the rooms leading off them. Housekeeping may be a chore, but really, if this were my spaceship I’d be ashamed to bring abductees aboard. But then it’s not my spaceship. It’s not theirs anymore either. It’s my new best friend’s. It’s also a maze, one I’d be lost in instantly, and it’s by no means certain she knows her way through it either. It’s pretty obvious where she’s come from though because of all the headless aliens she’s left behind, which might be what she’s following.

“My God, how many of these guys did you kill?”

“A lot but, like I said, there might be the odd one or two left so keep your voice down and your eyes open.”

For a while we walk on in silence. It’s horrible. This isn’t a ship so much as a crypt filled with ghouls who might jump out at us at any moment, except these ghouls are green aliens. Not that it really matters. Ghouls or aliens: If they’re out to get you, they’re out to get you, and these guys, if there are any of them left, are definitely out to get us. The silence is becoming oppressive, morbid even, cloying and stifling like too much cheap perfume. Finally it just has to be filled.

“So what should I call you? Only I forgot to ask.”

She gives a little shrug. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Because they memory-blocked you. How does that work?”

“I don’t know. I know they have that kind of tech because they used it on me. It’s highly likely they were going to use it on you too. That way you wouldn’t have been able to remember any of this once they’d finished with you.”

“I don’t know about that. There are an awful lot of people on Earth who do remember, or at least they think they do.”

“Yes. Judging by all that clothing these aliens have been busy, which is interesting. And with that many people, it’s hardly surprising if some of them were ineffectively blocked. As for me, I think they were going to block me entirely and then dump me on your planet with no way home, wherever home is, but it didn’t go so well. I woke up and the training kicked in, or at least I’m assuming it’s some kind of training. That’s something else I can’t remember.”

“That’s the second time you’ve called it my planet. Does that mean you’re not from Earth? You certainly look human.”

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about that too. Unfortunately I don’t have an answer. I know I’m not from Earth because this isn’t the only spaceship I can remember being on. I can remember other planets too, and the beings who live on them. One in particular feels like home. I remember a big city filled with tall buildings and bright lights. The streets are teeming but no one is in a hurry. Everyone is very polite. Everyone is quietly happy.”

“Can’t be New York then. They’ll eat you alive as soon as look at you.”

Still lost in memories, she doesn’t hear me. “There’s a building too, with lots of security. There are people in uniforms. I think I must be one of them but I can’t remember who they are.”

“Sounds like a police precinct or maybe even the Pentagon. Wait a minute—that works. You’re some sort of agent. Yeah, someone sent you out here to get on board this ship and they memory-blocked you and now you can’t remember why. That would also explain your training. You’re some sort of super spy.”

This time she does hear me, although it might have been better if she hadn’t. There’s a glance, mildly indulgent, as if I’m prattling on about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.

“Do you always run off into flights of fantasy like that?”

“Pretty much. That’s who I am, and by the way, my name is Debbie. Since you can’t remember yours, I think I’ll call you Ellen because she was good at kicking alien ass too.”

We turn into another passageway. This one ends in a blank wall with a strange bluish tinge to it, as if it is covered in a layer of cellophane. It’s fascinating to look at, but a dead-end is a dead-end. There aren’t even any headless aliens so it looks like the maze has finally defeated her.

“We’re lost, aren’t we? We could be wandering around this ship forever, slowly dying of thirst in orbit around a planet that’s three-fifths water. That’s if more of these aliens don’t turn up first. Where are we supposed to be going anyway?”

“We’re trying to get to the bridge. This—I know this. It’s some sort of door. It could take us straight there if I could remember how it works.” Reaching out a finger, she stabs at it, causing little ripples to spread out around her fingertip. Apart from that, nothing happens.

“Maybe you’re supposed to tell it where you want to go, like it’s voice-activated.”

She thinks about it, shrugs, and stabs again. “Bridge.”

Still nothing happens.

It must be some kind of AI, the kind that’s so sophisticated it completely fails to understand anything said to it. I’m sorry, could you repeat that? And we’re still gazing at a blue-tinged wall, a very uncooperative blue-tinged wall. Maybe this AI is waiting to hear the magic word because somebody decided even machines have feelings. I’m sorry; your request cannot be processed at this time due to your lack of courtesy. Please try again later when you’ve learned some manners.

Reaching past Ellen, I try a tap of my own. “Bridge, please.”

An even more indulgent gaze is turned on me. “You actually thought that would work?”

“It might have.”

“Well, it didn’t, so it looks like we’re walking. Come on.” She heads back the way we came, which strikes me as giving up way too easily. They might not call it the bridge. They might call it something else, like Helm or Command Center.

My first tap produces nothing and she’s calling back to me, “Come on. We’re walking.”

My second tap causes the wall to shimmer. Now we’re getting somewhere. “Ellen. Look, I’ve made it work.”

Or not, because gazing back at me from the other side with its big black eyes is one of them. If its triangular face with that tiny mouth could wear something as recognizable as a smirk, it probably would be. Who knows, perhaps it is. It can gurgle though, which might be laughter. Well, the joke’s on you pal. My friend has a really big gun and you don’t. But then, I don’t have one either.

“Ellen!”

There’s no answer. It’s just me and the gurgler, and the gurgler might as well be saying, “Run if you want but I’m still gonna getcha.”

This is not good.

“Ellen!”

Feet slap the floor behind me. There’s the end of the passageway. Which way did she go: left or right? I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe she’s gone left. Maybe she’s gone right. Those feet are closing on me. There’s nothing to choose between the passageways. In both directions there’s a growing gloom and the certainty that this passageway will run into a dead-end at some point.

“Ellen! Help! Now would be good.”

I run to the left, with those feet slapping harder and closer. Please God, let there be something more than a dead-end ahead of me—and there is. It’s an opening to my left that leads into a long chamber filled with benches. Clutter is everywhere. It looks like some kind of laboratory. There are all sorts of science stuff like glassware, more nasty-looking instruments and strange apparatus: small bench-top things and big, bulky stand-alone things with control panels filled with lights. My situation just got very much worse. Rats don’t walk into laboratories, let alone run, especially when they’re being chased by a mad scientist. The one chasing me is now very mad—gibbering mad, in fact. As it leaps up onto a bench and sees me scurrying along the floor, my pursuer picks up one of those bench-top things, a particularly big and heavy-looking one, and launches it across the chamber, only narrowly missing me.

The instrument bounces off the edge of a bench and clatters to the floor, which only serves to infuriate my pursuer further. What was an abductor in white scrubs is now a big, green and very angry chimpanzee. Screaming, it jumps from bench-top to bench-top scattering everything in its path: other instruments, glassware, and all manner of junk and clutter. Debris is flying everywhere and this rat is scurrying away, trying only to avoid the potshots that keep coming every time it catches sight of me.

Then the floor runs out. One more scurry, one more turn, and the only thing in front of me is the meeting of two walls. Screeching and gibbering, my pursuer perches on the edge of a bench above me. There’s something big and heavy in its hand, and there’s nowhere left for me to go but to squeeze into that corner. But for some reason my pursuer hesitates. Maybe it’s savoring the moment. Somewhere inside the green gunk that is its brain it’s probably thinking, Gotcha! Now let’s see what human brains look like.

Big mistake! The stuttering snake hisses from the far side of the room and my pursuer’s head explodes, leaving the rest of it to topple slowly to the floor. It wanted to see red blood splattered across the wall. Instead that blood is green, with some of it once again splattered on me, and here’s Ellen standing over me as coolly unemotional as ever. For her it’s just another day in the office.

“Are you harmed?”

“Harmed? Am I harmed? Well, let’s see, shall we? My heart is running a half marathon, my nerves are looking for the exit, the emotional scars may never heal and I’ve only been here fifteen minutes.”

“So you’re not harmed then.”

Really! Come on, Ellen, show some empathy. Someone needs a hug and maybe a shoulder to cry on. She’s offering neither, which isn’t really that much of a surprise. One thing she definitely isn’t is a hugger. At least she’s taking time out of her busy day of slaughtering aliens to ask.

“No, I’m not harmed. It was pretty close though.”

“I got here as soon as I could. Now we seriously need to find the bridge. That thing has had more than enough time to send out a distress call. So come on. Get up. Sitting there isn’t getting us anywhere.”

And that’s it. A helping hand hauls me to my feet and there isn’t even time to find something to wipe the gunk away. She’s in too much of a hurry and apparently not in the least bit concerned that this stuff might be full of who knows what diseases. After a couple of dabs at it and watching it ooze between my finger and thumb, that certainly concerns me.

“So how come you can go wandering around the universe without any kind of protection—y’know, hazmat suits and the like?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

That figures. I could already be dying here. Bacteria could be hacking their way through my skin with machetes and standing in awe at the new world they’ve found to conquer. They could be setting up base camps, founding colonies like pimples on a Petri dish or invading my internal organs in search of natural resources. But never mind. We have to get to the bridge, and this time I’m sticking close by my new best friend. I might drop dead at any moment but at least it won’t be an enraged chimpanzee that kills me.

We go along the passageway and climb up stairwells to higher decks. This ship isn’t simply a maze. It’s a maze on top of a maze, and then another maze on top of that one. The occasional alien corpse suggests Ellen knows where she’s going but it would have been so much easier and quicker if that glowing doorway had worked.

“So how come that thing back there didn’t take us straight to the bridge? It worked for one of them after all.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right and it’s voice-activated. It worked for one of them because it understands their language. It didn’t work for us because it didn’t understand your language or mine.”

“Your language? I’m pretty sure you’re speaking the same language as me. Otherwise how could I understand you?”

“That’s not possible. I’ve never been to Earth and you’ve never been to my home world. We can’t be speaking the same language.”

“And yet here we are, and you’re speaking English. Are you sure you’re not from Earth? Like maybe you’re another abductee and you just forgot?”

“Forgot. How would I forget something like that?”

“They memory-blocked you, didn’t they? So what if you didn’t escape like you think you did? What if they were about to release you? What if you watched too many science fiction movies as a kid and all that stuff you think you remember is nothing more than a fantasy you’ve created out of all the bits of memory you have left? What if—?”

“Me fantasizing! You’re the one creating entire narratives out of next to nothing. First I’m some kind of spy. Then I’m another abductee. Just quit with it, will you? We have more important things to deal with.”

Oops. Looks like somebody might have a little bit of a temper after all. Best keep quiet then, for now at least, especially since she’s the one with the gun.

Fortunately this ever-so-slightly awkward silence doesn’t last too long. One more stairway takes us into a chamber that looks more like a hacker’s basement than a bridge. Behind us is a straight wall with another of those blue panels in its center, the doorway we would’ve stepped through if we had been able to make it work. Directly in front of us is a console. It’s filled with open windows and gently slopes toward the chair behind it. “Chair” is a rather loose description. It looks more like a big egg with the front sliced off. There are more consoles and chairs around a semicircular wall, all rooted to the floor by thick stems.

Then there are the screens, hanging in mid-air like movies being projected onto diaphanous curtains. There are small ones on both sides of us, all of them alive with graphics that flash and pulse and scroll. They’re quite fascinating to watch but totally unintelligible, at least to me. At the very front of the bridge is a screen so big it fills the wall from floor to ceiling. In its bottom third is the blue curve of Earth, with nothing but the blackness of space above. Of course I’ve seen the photographs and watched the videos, but still, this is a moment that should take anyone’s breath away.

“Wow. It’s beautiful, and you really can’t see any stars.”

“That’s right. This close to one, you can only see the rest of the universe in the shadow of a planet. Why? Did you think it had all suddenly disappeared?”

“No. I’ve never been in space before, that’s all. Seeing it first-hand is a whole different experience.”

Ellen almost smiles, and then sits in the egg before the central console. That must be the captain’s console. After a moment, she very deliberately sits forward to begin tapping and sliding on the console with her finger, scrolling through windows and muttering as she pours over them. “Now. Can I remember how to do this?”

That’s not so good. All those graphics and pictographs and streams of text might be as meaningless to her as they are to me.

“It’s a pity you can’t talk to it. You could do that, couldn’t you? If you weren’t stuck speaking English.”

“I would if I could but I can’t so I’m not. Now shush. I need to find us a destination.”

Looking at Earth, so serenely blue and beautiful down there below us, suddenly I’m having second thoughts. “Are you sure about this? I mean, it’s this ship they’ll be looking for, isn’t it? What if we just went down there and forgot about it? Maybe they would too. I could go back to my life, and you could hide out in our basement until you’ve learned how everything works on Earth. You could have a good life: get married, settle down, have some kids. How would they ever find us? How would they even know it was us who did it?”

“Because this ship would still be here. To have abducted that many people, they must have been here for quite some time. They know your capabilities, or lack of them. If this ship is still here with no one on board, they’ll know the only place we could be is down there. As to knowing who it was, they’ll certainly know it was you. They keep records, y’know. If this ship is still here, the first place they’ll go looking is the coordinates you were abducted from. If this ship is gone, they’ll likely think we took it and probably not bother going down there at all.”

“Likely? Probably? Is that the best you’ve got?”

“Would you prefer the alternative, which is pretty much a certainty?”

“Not when you put it like that, no.”

“Good. Then let’s stop wasting time and find somewhere to go.” She taps something on the console and all the lights go out. An instant later they come back on again. It could be my imagination, but is that just a hint of embarrassment I see on her face? Probably best not to say anything. She taps something else and that faint hum that I’d never noticed before whines down to nothing. Nope, still not saying anything.

Restoring the hum, she sits back for a moment to think. Then she starts moving windows around until she finds one that’s a list, each item contained within its own little rectangle. They could be anything. The one thing they definitely aren’t is in English. Her finger scrolls and hovers, then scrolls and hovers again, every item on that list indistinguishable from all the others except for their different but unreadable text. At last, with a little shrug—because what the hell?—she stabs at one. The item lights up, flashing red. More importantly, Earth disappears from the main screen. In its place is the image of some other planet.

“Whoa! Where did that come from?”

Ellen is just as mystified as me. “I don’t know. It must be how the system works. So what do you think? It’s as good as anywhere.”

Possibly, but neither of us can know since the text running down either side of the planet is unreadable. The photographs embedded in the text are clear enough though, each of them linked to a different region. There’s a band of mottled yellow-brown-ocher extending some way out from the equator, with photographs of desert landscapes attached. A band of greens and blues then extends all the way to the white barrenness of the poles. Within it are thick forests, plains and farmland, great lakes and even greater cities, each one highlighted with a photograph of some local landmark. It looks an awful lot like a travel brochure, tempting us with all the interesting places we might visit.

While I’m still taking that in, the ship shudders. It’s weird, rather like an earth tremor that fills the air with a frisson of static. It’s vaguely orgasmic, as if the great whale that is our ship just had a wet dream, if great whales have wet dreams. I don’t know, but who’s to say they don’t?

When it’s all over, Ellen is sitting back in the captain’s egg with a tiny grin creeping up the corners of her mouth. “There. We’ve arrived.”