Fic: Enough part 1
Enough
Series: Transformers (2007)
Ratings/Warnings: PG for possible minor swearing, but I'm pretty sure there's not any. Warnings for first person and OCs, and journeys of self-discovery emotional and spiritual themes.
Pairings/Characters: None and two OCs.
Summary: I expected to live an ordinary life: I was wrong. I was kidnapped, captured, by Decepticons. They needed a human hostage.
For weeks, I knew I was going to die. I didn't know when. And I lived with that... It changes you.
This is my story.
Enough
I think the magic of science is in looking at everything with fresh eyes, with being astounded by the little things that go overlooked. Nothing amazes me like trees grown out of carbon they pulled from the air, or the way the human body is put together, and how it works: it’s all so complex! That grass can grow is incredible. That birds can fly, or even that birds can live, even more so.
I believe the world is a miracle.
I was twenty-three when I graduated from college with a degree in biology. I was hired by a good research firm, and I worked hard: I enjoyed it. In the evenings I played with my dog, a silly golden retriever called Grace who never lived up to her name, and on the weekends we went camping or hiking, Gracie and I. My apartment just outside of town was nothing special-but then, I didn’t need it to be.
I graduated six years ago, now. I’ll be turning thirty in five months. I’ve had three sisters call me up in a tizzy about that exact same thing over the years, but I really don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal.
But things aren’t quite normal for me anymore. I used to be quite average; boringly average, if it weren’t for my gift for science-and that’s fairly boring in and of itself. Well, I say science, but it’s biology, really. I never did manage to break my C-plus average in high school chemistry.
I don’t know what I would think about turning thirty, though, if things hadn’t changed, a few years ago. I must have been twenty-five or twenty-six, then, a real adult for the first time, almost-nobody’s grown up at eighteen or even twenty-one, it takes longer than that. Your mid-twenties at the very least. I didn’t realize that at the time, of course, but everyone’s hindsight is twenty-twenty at the very least. Mine’s probably twenty-forty.
I was walking. At the time, I hadn’t known that my life was about to change. Almost end, really. Figuratively, I supposed it changed enough that, in a way, it did end. I wasn’t the same person afterwards.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was walking, and I was angry. I still remember almost every little detail of the whole thing, but what stands out, ridiculously clearly, was that I was angry.
It was a coworker. Considering that I’m just not capable of being angry at Gracie-the closest I’ve ever come is extremely annoyed when she ruined a new couch-and other than that the only real presence in my life other than family (and I get along well with them, usually) was work, it wasn’t that surprising. I wasn’t angry often, but when I was it was almost always someone from the lab.
His name was Luca and he was good-looking, brilliant and charming. Underneath all that he was an utter ass, I was convinced. In hindsight (and you know what I have to say about that) he was just cripplingly incapable of admitting when he was wrong. Not all that unusual, at my job. Scientists, especially brilliant ones, tend to have some personality trait that makes up for their gifts, usually a personality problem. It’s like balancing stats in a role-playing game-there’s a certain number of positive points, and too many in one field unbalances another. That was Luca all over. I would’ve fallen for him hard if I’d just met him in a bar or something, but as things were I had to work with him and I loathed that man with a passion-which probably means that I was half in love with him anyways.
So I wasn’t paying much attention to some things. Like always, I was half-noticing the vegetation and focused intently on the birdlife of the region: I’d been keeping a life list, a list of every bird I’d ever seen, for just a year or so and it was something of a novelty, but bird watching has always been a passion of mine.
It was everything else that I wasn’t focusing on at all. I don’t know what it would have changed if I had been. Not much, probably. All those theories about alternate universes? If they’re true, it just means that there’s an almost endless number of universes out there almost exactly like ours. Some would be startlingly different, of course, but a lot more would be just like this one. Theoretically, Martin Luther King, Jr. taking a left turn where he usually made a right at nine years of age could cause him to be run over in a tragic accident causing a delay in equal civil rights for black people becoming widely accepted, but it would probably just mean that he took a left turn instead of a right. And that’s a decision, an unknown, and it would cause a splintered-off universe, but it would be almost identical.
I wasn’t concentrating, so I didn’t notice it wasn’t my car when I got in. Outwardly, it looked exactly like mine, right down to the occasional scratch, although it was slightly cleaner, and the inside was remarkably similar.
I’m not a car person, you see. Never have been. My car ran and had reasonable gas mileage, and that was all I asked it to do. It wasn’t particularly attractive, true, but neither was I. It worked.
And I was so much not-a-car-person that I didn’t really keep anything in the car. I mean, I used it to carry things, there were always books or stacks of paper or whatever else, but they were never permanent residents. The interior of the thing was often surprisingly clean.
I didn’t realize it wasn’t my car until I reached to turn on my music and my CDs weren’t there.
And then my life plunged out of normalcy and into something like an unbelievable sci-fi flick. It’s a lot scarier when it’s actually happening to you.
I probably sound pretty calm about all this now, but let me tell you, it wasn’t like that back then.
I find myself floundering for words. I’ve never really been a verbal person: I can manage a lab report when I have to, and I’ve got a handful of essays and the beginning of a local birding guide squirreled away in dark cupboards where I won’t come upon them accidentally, but I’m not a language sort of person.
So it’s hard to come up with something to say that describes the sheer, overwhelming panic of facing a Decepticon-or any Transformer, I suppose, although I wouldn’t know for sure what it would be like, having an Autobot be your first introduction into the whole mess, seeing as it didn’t happen to me.
No, I got one who wanted to kill me. And all my friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers and ex-classmates. Not because it-he-had anything against me in particular. He just felt that way about all human life. He was a Decepticon, to start with, and that’s their general line when it comes to things like that. More to the point, and more personally, we-humans-had destroyed the Allspark and killed Megatron and, along with that, doomed the future of the Cybertronian species. It was like genocide through forced sterilization, to him. We didn’t actually do much killing, but we insured that a new member of their kind would never come into being ever again.
I didn’t know this at the time. Hell, I didn’t even know about the ‘wanting-to-kill-me’ bit. Just the part where my car suddenly turned out to not be my car after all, and then turned out to be, and turned into, a giant robot. Who promptly grabbed me and squeezed, holding me probably twenty, thirty feet off the ground.
I’ve never been so terrified in my life. It’s a hyperbolic statement ordinarily, but for me it’s completely true, no exaggeration.
Again, in retrospect, he probably wasn’t actually squeezing me all that hard. He didn’t want me to die, you see, and that’s remarkably easy to do accidentally when you’re that much bigger than somebody. Like a human holding a mouse: don’t squeeze. Or more like, a human in plate armor holding a mouse.
(Well, I suppose he did want me dead, he wanted the whole human race dead. He just wanted this particular specimen of it to serve his purposes first.)
I don’t know why he chose me in particular. I suppose because I was somewhat respectable looking, even in my hiking clothes-my oldest sister has told me that I was born middle-aged. I suppose it all evens out: after my three sisters, my mother needed an easy child. It was simply coincidence, to some point, too: I suppose in an alternate reality out there somewhere, assuming that parallel universe theory is correct, someone else got picked and things turned out differently.
I’ve told you about how I think most parallel universes would be numbingly familiar, right? This is one time when I think it wouldn’t be the same, at all.
Not because I’m particularly stuck-up, and think that I, personally, made such a huge difference just by virtue of being who I am. Actually, I suppose that that is what I think, in a way, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. I think it was sheer luck and coincidence that I happened to be the right person for this situation. That I had the right combination of factors that made me enough like who I needed to be to actually make a difference.
That came later, though. At first, I just freaked out. Things went fuzzy. Shock set in, of course. Even the calm, nonreactive bit of me that’s usually analyzing a situation, the perfectly removed scientist inside me, had disappeared. I was a bundle of raw nerve and instinct held together with spit and the fact that if I did drop out of the hand that was holding me (and how could it be so big?) I would probably die. I didn’t struggle much.
The sky was very blue that day, like it sometimes is in late spring or early fall, one of the times when the weather’s mild and the sky’s something you can fall into. I remember: it was spring, because the birds were nesting. They’d been loud and obvious, defending nests and chicks, as I’d been walking.
I wondered, vaguely, if I was hallucinating. Or dead.
The world made no sense, which was startlingly frightening for someone who’d dedicated their life to making things make sense-although I didn’t really realize that until later, when the more immediate, more obvious, less insidious fears started to wear themselves down, like a toddler having a temper tantrum.
Logic and order. Science. Figuring out why something is the way it is, why something works. I believed in it. I believe in it, but I’m a bit more-open-minded, now.
I screamed, and the thing holding me spoke.
“Shut up,” he hissed, voice ugly. I didn’t. I suppose I was beyond listening, beyond reason. That and I’ve never been good at following orders, although I’m almost always more subtle about things when I disobey. A subtle rebel, rather than an overt one. I made a horrible teenager.
So he shook me, and it-it was indescribable. I wasn’t afraid of heights, before that, although I’d never been truly comfortable around them, but since then-I’ve had trouble going up certain bridges, or being in airplanes. It’s too similar to that world-shattering fear.
I stopped screaming. I think I started crying, but I’m not sure, even now.
When I woke up I was, remarkably, fairly calm. True, I did have that shaky post-panic, loose-limbed feeling, but I’ve always half-liked it. It feels tired and sleepy and slow, syrupy.
I didn’t know where I was, but it was warm and dark and I didn’t really care.
…At first, at least.
But, of course, that changed. Especially with the shattered, bloody-edged panic-vivid fragments of memory lodged in my mind. I clearly remember thinking, the thought cutting through my mind, ‘Jesus Christ, my car.’
And then I decided that I had been hallucinating, for whatever reason-and at that point, I was ready to consider some pretty improbable ones. Hallucinogenic mold growing in my irregularly-cleaned water bottle; really, really late-onset schizophrenia (not possible, and not the right symptoms: maybe I would be the first documented case of a rare psychological disorder? I might even have it named after me…)
Or maybe the hippies you tend to see in trailhead parking lots (second-most commonly sighted species after health freaks) had slipped something into the packed lunch I’d left in my car while I visited the foul pit toilet the parks service had had installed.
Scary stuff, let me tell you. The good-natured too-tired-to-move, too-content-to-feel-like-moving feeling had passed, to be replaced with too-scared-to-move.
At some point my head hit the door handle, and I realized that it was dark because it was a) night and b) a long ways away from the city-a city, any city-and that it was warm because c) the car heater was running although d) the car did not appear to be on and e) ‘the car’ was in fact my own (apparently) despite the disappearance of my emergency hairbrush and notebooks, and the embarrassingly ever-present stacks of papers, from the backseat and despite the fact that my car had f) turned into a giant robot.
If life was a movie, that moment of realization would be followed, after a suitable moment of building tension, by the car somehow ejecting me and then standing up as a giant robot, or doing something equally mysterious. It didn’t. The moment of realization flashed by, and then the tension rose and rose and rose until I thought I would burst, and then slowly dropped as my body obeyed biology, and the adrenaline faded, and my tension dropped.
And then the car rumbled to life and I screamed.
“Shut up,” said the car’s speakers briskly in that deep baritone voice, with the rumbling overtones and the strange mechanical flavor to it that was, in the weirdest way imaginable, somewhat appropriate for a talking car.
“Okay,” I said, struck dumb (dumb as in stupid but not, disappointingly, unable to speak) by the circumstances and the demand and the mess that was my life at the moment.
“I told you to stop talking, organic,” said the car, and this time I actually didn’t respond, although some hysterical, suicidal and highly-amused part of me wanted to say ‘Yes.’ Or possibly even ‘Yes, sir.’
“Good,” said the car slowly, after a while. “Good. I am a Decepticon: an autonomous robotic organism. I am from the planet Cybertron, and I’ve come to earth to extinguish the human race. Also on earth are the Autobots: they’re more like me, if lesser beings. We’re all mixed in with you, hiding in plain sight. Almost none of you know of us.
“The slagging Autobots, for whatever stupid reasons they have, want to save humanity. I want to kill you all, after what one of you squishy little things did to Megatron, our glorious leader, and the Allspark. You should all die for your sins.” There was a brief pause and, again, I had enough of a survival instinct to not say anything.
“Our leader Starscream has ordered us to prepare to launch a second attack. You are our bargaining chip, now. Prime will hesitate before he’ll cause the death of an innocent human, and the choice will be out of his hands entirely when it’s aired on international television.”
I sat back, reeling, stunned.
I’d been kidnapped by my giant alien robot car to be used as a hostage in his bid to destroy humanity.
I went numb and then we drove for a while. At first I vaguely recognized the area we drove through, and then I didn’t. And I continued not to for a long time.
We stopped again, in the middle of nowhere. The sky was as spectacular as I can remember it: I can count the number of times I’ve seen the milky way on my two hands, and none of the others can hold a candle up to the stars that were out that night, wheeling above us. It was dizzying.
“Get out,” the car said as we pulled to a gradual halt, stopping just short of a little rustic cabin. I could see an outhouse and a pump. The whole thing look unused since the time when that hand-pump had been new and innovative.
I did as I was told.
And then I stood there for probably fifteen minutes. It’s why I remember those stars so well. They’re burned into my mind: those countless millions (and millions more I couldn’t see, I know) and the black spots where fir trees blocked out the light. I thought I heard a stream running, far off in the distance, and it made me thirsty. It was a clear, cold night, and I started to shiver not long after I got out of the car. The robot.
“Oh,” the car said at last, disgust and condescension clear in its voice. “You may sleep now. Don’t die-yet.”
The cabin smelled unpleasantly of mold and old food. There was a layer of dust over everything, and an oily sheen covered most of the kitchen. I didn’t see any cockroaches, and was grateful.
I slept.
In the morning I stumbled gracelessly back outside. I wasn’t even really thinking of the car, although it was on my mind-I peed, forgoing the foul outhouse in favor of the woods, and then drank and drank mouthfuls of water out of the rusty pump, waiting just until it started to run clean.
When I looked back up from drinking, water running down my face, my car was gone and the robot was there.
“You will tell me who you are,” he said, and it wasn’t even a demand, let alone a question. It was merely a statement, no more true or false than saying ‘the sky is blue.’
The sky was blue that day, stretching on overhead into eternity, as deep as the sky had been flat last night.
It was beautiful. The woods were full of life. I was going to be dead in a matter of days or weeks, whenever my usefulness ran its course. I believed the thing that was holding me captive. I had no reason not to.
I gave him my name. “Lauren Smithing,” I said simply. I didn’t know he wanted anything more.
“Twenty-five years old. Two parking tickets and one speeding violation. Graduate of York High School and Rice University.”
“Yes.”
“…You’re a scientist.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t even notice how he paused over that. I’ve only realized it’s there at all in retrospect, and that means that it’s probably imagined. I was paying rapt attention to his words, of course.
“Family?”
“My mother and father, three older sisters.: Eliza, Sophie and Beth.” I said the words and then my throat froze with panic, as I realized what I could have just done. I started to shake. I hadn’t thought-
“-Oh no-”
“It’s not worth my time to track down your genetic donors and their other offspring,” sneered the Decepticon in that deep voice of his. It cut into my stomach and vibrated, pulling out the fear in me, making it bleed out of me, or into me. “You’re unimportant except as negotiation material. Will they notice you’re gone?”
I thought frantically. How should I answer the question…?
“Don’t lie,” he rumbled quietly, and I didn’t dare to. I didn’t even know why he was asking, anyways, so I wouldn’t know which lie to make, or even if I needed to.
“Little Lizzie, Beth’s first child, turns four next Friday. She’ll know something’s wrong if I don’t call. If Mom calls, or Dad-they’d be worried if I didn’t call back within a few days.”
“Work?”
I had been hiking on Saturday. Today was Sunday, then. “If I’m not at work tomorrow they’ll call,” I said blankly. We were in the middle of a big push, and it wasn’t like me to just not show up-I’d come in once with a fever of 102 degrees and stayed until they’d pushed me back home mid-morning, when I started throwing up.
“Where do you work?”
I named the research institute I worked at. There was a slight shift of the metallic plates that made up his face that seemed to suggest a cold, calculating smile.
“Good. You’re telling me the truth-at least sometimes. And friends?”
“No,” I said, painfully honest. I had friends, of course, but work kept me to busy to keep in touch with anyone regularly; the only person I saw outside of the lab more than once a month, on average, was my dog.
My-
Dog-
“Gracie,” I said, voice small and weak.
Metallic not-really-flesh narrowed around not-really-eyes. “Explain yourself.”
“My dog,” I said, feeling truly lost for the first time. I missed her terribly, of course, but it was also the straw that broke the camel’s back-or more, it was the straw that made the camel realize that her back was already broken.
“That thing you let inside me? By the side of the road somewhere. It’s lucky I didn’t step on it.” There was a cold tilt to his voice that implied that he had tried to-I don’t know if he actually had, or if he just wanted another way to keep me in line.
It didn’t have the effect he’d expected, either way. I fell apart.
He gave up and drove somewhere else, after a while-he needed information out of me, and gibbered panic-driven babble wouldn’t help him cobble together a picture of the person he was going to either kill or use to kill others.
It helped to have people be attached to the victim, right? A faceless threat of murder was one thing, but to threaten the life of someone the-the audience knew a little about, someone sympathetic, someone they could connect to… That would be something else entirely.
The day passed in a blur. I was still shocky. Even though I was alone, I didn’t think about escaping: what would I do? Call the police? -That would go over well. Start a militia? Run as far as I could as fast as I could? Like that would work-even if I thought I had the money, I had no doubt that he could track withdrawals from my bank account: he’d known the place I worked (I couldn’t lie to him, and it didn’t occur to me to think that he was lying to me) and that was supposed to be secure. Some of what we got assigned was ‘sensitive,’ and they wanted things to be better safe than sorry.
There was a little food in the cabin, but not much. I took some of the worst cans, rusted and dented and one that was bulging, and tossed them into the pit toilet, holding my breath even before I opened the door. I didn’t know how long I’d be in the cabin, and I didn’t want to assume that an inorganic alien would even remember that I needed to eat, let alone decide that he wanted to indulge my human frailties. I didn’t want to be tempted by something only potentially toxic-which could happen, if I got hungry enough.
I could see movement in the jar of flour even through the clinging film of grease-soaked dust covering the glass container, and I left it outside the front door, a judicial distance away from the porch, along with a jumble of slimy potatoes half rotted through.
I attempted to clean, but I didn’t do much. I didn’t want to shake the rugs, because I didn’t want to know what would come out; I didn’t want to sweep out the dark corners because of what might be hiding in them, and I didn’t want to stick my hands anywhere that I couldn’t see clearly.
Finally, I just stopped, because it was worse knowing the state of the cabin than it was not-knowing. The last thing I did was to haul the (mercifully mostly clean) blankets out to air.
Then I sat in the lengthening shadows at the edge of the woods and watched the birds. Somehow, my backpack had stayed with me: I flipped listlessly through my bird guide, but didn’t see anything I didn’t already know. I cried for Gracie, and then I cried a little for myself.
I woke up with a start, but I was still alone. I wondered why the car-robot had disappeared, if there had been a change of plans, and if I would ever see anyone-anyone human-again. Before I’d finished my breakfast he pulled back into the driveway.
We both didn’t mention that he’d been gone. I didn’t say anything, except when I ended up talking softly aloud to myself, by accident, and except when there was a question directed at me by the still-commanding Decepticon.
It was very quiet. I’d gotten used to the city, even though I’d grown up almost in the woods. I was used to people talking, too, and to responding to them.
Mostly, I was left alone.
That was the first day I wondered what I would do about laundry. I had no other clothes to wear.
oOo
In the next three days I learned how to fight against the woodstove and win, how to scrape food up for myself (I wasn’t useless in a kitchen, but it was different when you had electricity and clean pots and ingredients, and possibly a cookbook and a real stove and oven) and how to heat enough water for dishes or a sponge-bath.
The morning of the fourth day my clothes were tacky with dirt and filth, so I stripped to my underwear and washed them as well as I could in a pan of quickly-cooling water with a sliver of rough soap, then hung them outside to dry, in the thin late-autumn sun and the day’s light wind.
I’d been ignored all the days before, not a word spoken to me. This day started out the same, looked to be just like it.
It wasn’t. Sometime around noon I slunk out, buck-naked, to check on my drying clothes. They were still damp, and I shifted them back into the sun, trying to ignore the apparently-normal car sitting in the rough driveway and wishing desperately that there was a back door, so I at least would have a house between us. I didn’t want to walk far on my city-tender bare feet.
It’s funny how being naked almost bothered me more than being the captive of a giant alien robot-albeit one who mostly left me alone. These things ingrain themselves into our being. He didn’t care, of course. Nudity meant nothing to him. I could guess at that, at the very least-non-clothes-wearing apparently non-gendered species with no reason to have our same cultural taboos, right?-but it still bothered me, and deeply.
I was attempting to slink back into the house while keeping as much of me covered as I could when he spoke to me again. I jumped and screamed shortly and swiveled around quickly.
“Human,” he said, using the same tone I would if I’d just called someone ‘filth.’ “We’re leaving.”
I froze. Was this the end?
“You will dress yourself. We will return to your dwelling-” I didn’t own a cell phone to call from “-you will call in sick to your workplace and you will cancel your other engagements. You will do this in as non-suspicious a way as possible. After that, we will return here.”
“Yes,” I muttered dully, after a minute.
There wasn’t any other response, so after waiting a while longer I went back to the bush and pulled on my still-damp clothes.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I sat down, and winced. My eyes were puffy from sleeping badly, there were infected insect bites over my face and disappearing down my shirt, over my arms (hopefully from mosquitoes) my hair was tangled and knotted, snarled (fingers could only do so much) and the clothes were still wrinkled, damp in places and dirty, despite my best attempts.
The driver’s door was open when I walked back out of the cabin with my hiking boots on, the only shoes I had. Still, I hesitated before I sat down.
I was smart enough not to actually try to take the wheel.
I stumbled into the house and thought longingly of clean clothes, of calamine lotion for the bug bites, of real food, of a shower, but I ignored the urges and fumbled straight to my phone.
There were seven messages: one from my sister reminding me about Lizzie’s birthday, one from a neighbor inviting me to the neighborhood potluck, and the remaining five from people at the lab, three of them jokingly asking whether I was dead or just on the brink of it. My working-while-sick story had earned me a reputation.
I wanted to call them all back and say that no, I wasn’t dead, but I would be soon. I didn’t, though.
There was a knock on the door, and I cut short the stilted conversation I was trying to force with the woman a floor below me and to the right to answer it. It was another woman in the apartment building: it seemed to draw lonely widows, bachelors and maiden aunts like flies to honey.
“I have your dog, honey,” she said, and I burst into tears.
She looked a little stunned by my reaction-how could she understand? She didn’t know about my car-and I muttered some half-sensical qualifiers about how worried I’d been and how much Gracie meant to me.
After that, though, I couldn’t ask her to watch the dog for me, to come in twice a day to feed her and give her fresh water and let her out. I didn’t know what to do.
So I called my mother. It was the only thing I did for myself in my apartment. I was so afraid to do otherwise-I don’t know why-that to disobey his orders just didn’t cross my mind. It was inconceivable.
I asked her to pick Grace up the next day, since it was so late, and watch her for a while-I told her that I was so busy with work I didn’t have time to give her the attention she needed. It wasn’t a bad lie, as lies go. It was more than I’d expected under the circumstances.
I was careful to leave my dog locked inside the apartment as I made my way back down to my kidnapper.
I fell into a sort of numb daze-it’s always been an easy state for me to reach on car trips. It passes the time. It means I don’t have to think, not deeply, about anything. And it was a long, long drive: we’d left a little noon, and it was almost ten o’clock when we started the trip back. I don’t know if I would have been able to actually fall asleep (probably, though; car rides are incredibly soporific, for me) and it helped to pass the time.
So I was startled when we pulled into a supermarket parking lot, not even half an hour from my apartment. I just wasn’t expecting it: I’d been waiting for the landmarks we would pass: things I drove past every day, and then things I drove past regularly, and then things that were vaguely familiar, and then nothing I recognized, as we moved towards the cabin.
“Get whatever you need,” the car growled, and so I did.
Food, mostly, and instant coffee. Stuff that was filling and easy to prepare and would last without refrigeration. I got enough for a good long while: I didn’t know how long I’d be waiting, and whether or not this trip would be repeated. It seemed unlikely.
I slipped a change of clothes-sweatpants and a loose shirt, something warm that would be close enough to the right size to work-into the cart, and halfway down the next aisle went back and added a second set, almost identical. I bought soap, for myself and dishes, and a bottle of bleach (to be mixed with a little bit of water) for the rest of the house.
It’s funny, what you decide is essential. My two extravagances were a packet of plain MnMs (easy to make last a long time) and toilet paper.
I wished, desperately and for the first time, ever, that I had a cell phone. I was starting to get lonely. I’ve never been all that sociable, but then again, I’d never been isolated the way I was in that cabin.
I bought a long novel instead-some cheap romance I knew I’d hate, the only thing you ever find in a supermarket like the one I was in.
Good. That meant it would take me longer to read it.
I did fall asleep. When I didn’t think about how I was the one supposedly ‘driving,’ that I was the one sitting in the driver’s seat, it was remarkably like being driven around by anyone else.
My position was awkward and my neck hurt. My body had had that slight, subtle all-over ache that comes from sleeping on a bad mattress for too many nights in a row already, and I felt stiff whenever I woke up enough to be really conscious about the matter.
There weren’t any stars out that night: clouds had pulled in, blocking out the sky.
I woke up around midnight and couldn’t fall back asleep. After a while, in the dark and with the road unlit-even the car’s, the Decepticon’s, headlights were off; some sort of infrared filter, I guessed, or something more high-tech-and with the silence only magnified by the constant rumble of a moving car, I began to feel, eerily, as if I was being watched.
I probably was, I realized, and felt the back of my neck prickle.
Scary stuff, let me tell you. They say that the undefined nightmares, the times when you’re not sure quite what is out there, are the worst, but I’m not so sure.
Of course, there were a lot of undefineds in my own fear equations. Like when, exactly, I was going to be paraded on national television in an attempt to get the good guys to do something or other.
And then I would probably die.
The fear shook off the last vestiges of my sleepiness, and I pulled myself fully upright, wincing at the stiffness in my neck and the still-tired still-alert feeling of too little sleep mixed with adrenaline.
I wondered where we were, vaguely, but mostly I… Drifted. You know when you’re there, but not really thinking? Time just slips through your fingers, nothing really matters too much, and it’s just... All a blur.
I jumped, badly, when the Decepticon spoke to me, jerking me out of the peaceful, numbly meditative state I’d been in.
“What was the last project you were assigned to within your work place?” he demanded.
I wanted to ask him ‘Don’t you already know this? You broke into the system database, you shouldn’t need to ask me,’ but I didn’t. One of the first things I’d decided, way back on the first day-it felt like an eternity by now-was to never question my captor.
I don’t know why I was fighting to stay alive, because I knew I was going to die when it came time for me to be a captor, or shortly afterwards. I knew my number had been up since I opened his door and slid, willingly and unknowingly, inside. I suppose hope springs eternal-and it’s probably a good sign that I’m not suicidal. Or heroic, either, but those tend to be the same, I’ve decided. Only I’m not sure heroics are a bad thing.
“There’s a species of frog that freezes solid and then revives in the spring, when it defrosts. We’re working through a series of experiments investigating the mechanics of the process, and then we’ll be investigating how that can be applied to humans, if it can,” I said mechanically. It was unessential, unimportant information-we were hardly the only group that had worked with them, or the most high-profile. It was hardly ground-breaking, let alone something that would interest a giant robotic killing machine-or I thought so, at least.
“Why did you decide to train as a scientist?”
Looking back, after all this had finished, I would realize that this question stood out from the others-it was different. That wasn’t something he’d use in the biography of my life as a sympathy-winning device-I mean, unless I had said ‘As part of my devotion to God and Christian values, and my service to our great democratic nation,’ or something like that.
I didn’t realize it back then: I was too numb. I just answered the question, like I’d answered every other question I’d been given.
“I don’t know,” I said, and that was true. “Because it’s interesting. Eight years ago I would have said… I don’t know, something idealistic. That was before I graduated. How I wanted to make a difference, improve the quality of life in third-world countries, discover something new and innovative. I like nature, like the outdoors, and biology’s my only real gift…”
Why had I-well, not become a scientist, everyone needed a job, but why had I devoted my life to it so completely? I didn’t know.
I wanted nothing more to be outside of this car-it was suddenly stiflingly hot and I could still feel eyes watching me, prickling against the back of my neck-no, outside of this monster and just outdoors. There would be trees, and birds. Some sort of fir. I’d always loved fir trees, after the first time-age nine years old-when I’d gotten to correct my mother that what she was calling the tree we’d bought for Christmas-she kept on calling it a pine-was, in fact, a fir.
The world seemed incredibly, overwhelmingly beautiful. It was a revelation of sorts-like rediscovering yourself as a child, when the world’s still magic. I started crying, silently.
“The world’s beautiful,” I said, out loud, still trying to answer the question. The car was silent; my voice was choked with tears. “It’s-all incredible. Knowing a tree grows out of the carbon in carbon dioxide doesn’t make it any less of a miracle. Knowing the biological adaptations of each bird, and the ones common to all birds-or most all birds-makes them more awe-inspiring, even the fifty little identical brown upright-perching birds that live out in these woods you need to identify by call because they look so similar-”
I didn’t have the words. I still don’t. The-The love that swept through me, the sheer fierce love of everything around me, still defies understanding, let alone speech.
The Decepticon didn’t respond and I fell silent, pitifully grateful that he hadn’t voiced his contempt.
On to part 2
(On to part 3)
Series: Transformers (2007)
Ratings/Warnings: PG for possible minor swearing, but I'm pretty sure there's not any. Warnings for first person and OCs, and journeys of self-discovery emotional and spiritual themes.
Pairings/Characters: None and two OCs.
Summary: I expected to live an ordinary life: I was wrong. I was kidnapped, captured, by Decepticons. They needed a human hostage.
For weeks, I knew I was going to die. I didn't know when. And I lived with that... It changes you.
This is my story.
Enough
I think the magic of science is in looking at everything with fresh eyes, with being astounded by the little things that go overlooked. Nothing amazes me like trees grown out of carbon they pulled from the air, or the way the human body is put together, and how it works: it’s all so complex! That grass can grow is incredible. That birds can fly, or even that birds can live, even more so.
I believe the world is a miracle.
I was twenty-three when I graduated from college with a degree in biology. I was hired by a good research firm, and I worked hard: I enjoyed it. In the evenings I played with my dog, a silly golden retriever called Grace who never lived up to her name, and on the weekends we went camping or hiking, Gracie and I. My apartment just outside of town was nothing special-but then, I didn’t need it to be.
I graduated six years ago, now. I’ll be turning thirty in five months. I’ve had three sisters call me up in a tizzy about that exact same thing over the years, but I really don’t think it’ll be that big of a deal.
But things aren’t quite normal for me anymore. I used to be quite average; boringly average, if it weren’t for my gift for science-and that’s fairly boring in and of itself. Well, I say science, but it’s biology, really. I never did manage to break my C-plus average in high school chemistry.
I don’t know what I would think about turning thirty, though, if things hadn’t changed, a few years ago. I must have been twenty-five or twenty-six, then, a real adult for the first time, almost-nobody’s grown up at eighteen or even twenty-one, it takes longer than that. Your mid-twenties at the very least. I didn’t realize that at the time, of course, but everyone’s hindsight is twenty-twenty at the very least. Mine’s probably twenty-forty.
I was walking. At the time, I hadn’t known that my life was about to change. Almost end, really. Figuratively, I supposed it changed enough that, in a way, it did end. I wasn’t the same person afterwards.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I was walking, and I was angry. I still remember almost every little detail of the whole thing, but what stands out, ridiculously clearly, was that I was angry.
It was a coworker. Considering that I’m just not capable of being angry at Gracie-the closest I’ve ever come is extremely annoyed when she ruined a new couch-and other than that the only real presence in my life other than family (and I get along well with them, usually) was work, it wasn’t that surprising. I wasn’t angry often, but when I was it was almost always someone from the lab.
His name was Luca and he was good-looking, brilliant and charming. Underneath all that he was an utter ass, I was convinced. In hindsight (and you know what I have to say about that) he was just cripplingly incapable of admitting when he was wrong. Not all that unusual, at my job. Scientists, especially brilliant ones, tend to have some personality trait that makes up for their gifts, usually a personality problem. It’s like balancing stats in a role-playing game-there’s a certain number of positive points, and too many in one field unbalances another. That was Luca all over. I would’ve fallen for him hard if I’d just met him in a bar or something, but as things were I had to work with him and I loathed that man with a passion-which probably means that I was half in love with him anyways.
So I wasn’t paying much attention to some things. Like always, I was half-noticing the vegetation and focused intently on the birdlife of the region: I’d been keeping a life list, a list of every bird I’d ever seen, for just a year or so and it was something of a novelty, but bird watching has always been a passion of mine.
It was everything else that I wasn’t focusing on at all. I don’t know what it would have changed if I had been. Not much, probably. All those theories about alternate universes? If they’re true, it just means that there’s an almost endless number of universes out there almost exactly like ours. Some would be startlingly different, of course, but a lot more would be just like this one. Theoretically, Martin Luther King, Jr. taking a left turn where he usually made a right at nine years of age could cause him to be run over in a tragic accident causing a delay in equal civil rights for black people becoming widely accepted, but it would probably just mean that he took a left turn instead of a right. And that’s a decision, an unknown, and it would cause a splintered-off universe, but it would be almost identical.
I wasn’t concentrating, so I didn’t notice it wasn’t my car when I got in. Outwardly, it looked exactly like mine, right down to the occasional scratch, although it was slightly cleaner, and the inside was remarkably similar.
I’m not a car person, you see. Never have been. My car ran and had reasonable gas mileage, and that was all I asked it to do. It wasn’t particularly attractive, true, but neither was I. It worked.
And I was so much not-a-car-person that I didn’t really keep anything in the car. I mean, I used it to carry things, there were always books or stacks of paper or whatever else, but they were never permanent residents. The interior of the thing was often surprisingly clean.
I didn’t realize it wasn’t my car until I reached to turn on my music and my CDs weren’t there.
And then my life plunged out of normalcy and into something like an unbelievable sci-fi flick. It’s a lot scarier when it’s actually happening to you.
I probably sound pretty calm about all this now, but let me tell you, it wasn’t like that back then.
I find myself floundering for words. I’ve never really been a verbal person: I can manage a lab report when I have to, and I’ve got a handful of essays and the beginning of a local birding guide squirreled away in dark cupboards where I won’t come upon them accidentally, but I’m not a language sort of person.
So it’s hard to come up with something to say that describes the sheer, overwhelming panic of facing a Decepticon-or any Transformer, I suppose, although I wouldn’t know for sure what it would be like, having an Autobot be your first introduction into the whole mess, seeing as it didn’t happen to me.
No, I got one who wanted to kill me. And all my friends, relatives, neighbors, coworkers and ex-classmates. Not because it-he-had anything against me in particular. He just felt that way about all human life. He was a Decepticon, to start with, and that’s their general line when it comes to things like that. More to the point, and more personally, we-humans-had destroyed the Allspark and killed Megatron and, along with that, doomed the future of the Cybertronian species. It was like genocide through forced sterilization, to him. We didn’t actually do much killing, but we insured that a new member of their kind would never come into being ever again.
I didn’t know this at the time. Hell, I didn’t even know about the ‘wanting-to-kill-me’ bit. Just the part where my car suddenly turned out to not be my car after all, and then turned out to be, and turned into, a giant robot. Who promptly grabbed me and squeezed, holding me probably twenty, thirty feet off the ground.
I’ve never been so terrified in my life. It’s a hyperbolic statement ordinarily, but for me it’s completely true, no exaggeration.
Again, in retrospect, he probably wasn’t actually squeezing me all that hard. He didn’t want me to die, you see, and that’s remarkably easy to do accidentally when you’re that much bigger than somebody. Like a human holding a mouse: don’t squeeze. Or more like, a human in plate armor holding a mouse.
(Well, I suppose he did want me dead, he wanted the whole human race dead. He just wanted this particular specimen of it to serve his purposes first.)
I don’t know why he chose me in particular. I suppose because I was somewhat respectable looking, even in my hiking clothes-my oldest sister has told me that I was born middle-aged. I suppose it all evens out: after my three sisters, my mother needed an easy child. It was simply coincidence, to some point, too: I suppose in an alternate reality out there somewhere, assuming that parallel universe theory is correct, someone else got picked and things turned out differently.
I’ve told you about how I think most parallel universes would be numbingly familiar, right? This is one time when I think it wouldn’t be the same, at all.
Not because I’m particularly stuck-up, and think that I, personally, made such a huge difference just by virtue of being who I am. Actually, I suppose that that is what I think, in a way, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. I think it was sheer luck and coincidence that I happened to be the right person for this situation. That I had the right combination of factors that made me enough like who I needed to be to actually make a difference.
That came later, though. At first, I just freaked out. Things went fuzzy. Shock set in, of course. Even the calm, nonreactive bit of me that’s usually analyzing a situation, the perfectly removed scientist inside me, had disappeared. I was a bundle of raw nerve and instinct held together with spit and the fact that if I did drop out of the hand that was holding me (and how could it be so big?) I would probably die. I didn’t struggle much.
The sky was very blue that day, like it sometimes is in late spring or early fall, one of the times when the weather’s mild and the sky’s something you can fall into. I remember: it was spring, because the birds were nesting. They’d been loud and obvious, defending nests and chicks, as I’d been walking.
I wondered, vaguely, if I was hallucinating. Or dead.
The world made no sense, which was startlingly frightening for someone who’d dedicated their life to making things make sense-although I didn’t really realize that until later, when the more immediate, more obvious, less insidious fears started to wear themselves down, like a toddler having a temper tantrum.
Logic and order. Science. Figuring out why something is the way it is, why something works. I believed in it. I believe in it, but I’m a bit more-open-minded, now.
I screamed, and the thing holding me spoke.
“Shut up,” he hissed, voice ugly. I didn’t. I suppose I was beyond listening, beyond reason. That and I’ve never been good at following orders, although I’m almost always more subtle about things when I disobey. A subtle rebel, rather than an overt one. I made a horrible teenager.
So he shook me, and it-it was indescribable. I wasn’t afraid of heights, before that, although I’d never been truly comfortable around them, but since then-I’ve had trouble going up certain bridges, or being in airplanes. It’s too similar to that world-shattering fear.
I stopped screaming. I think I started crying, but I’m not sure, even now.
When I woke up I was, remarkably, fairly calm. True, I did have that shaky post-panic, loose-limbed feeling, but I’ve always half-liked it. It feels tired and sleepy and slow, syrupy.
I didn’t know where I was, but it was warm and dark and I didn’t really care.
…At first, at least.
But, of course, that changed. Especially with the shattered, bloody-edged panic-vivid fragments of memory lodged in my mind. I clearly remember thinking, the thought cutting through my mind, ‘Jesus Christ, my car.’
And then I decided that I had been hallucinating, for whatever reason-and at that point, I was ready to consider some pretty improbable ones. Hallucinogenic mold growing in my irregularly-cleaned water bottle; really, really late-onset schizophrenia (not possible, and not the right symptoms: maybe I would be the first documented case of a rare psychological disorder? I might even have it named after me…)
Or maybe the hippies you tend to see in trailhead parking lots (second-most commonly sighted species after health freaks) had slipped something into the packed lunch I’d left in my car while I visited the foul pit toilet the parks service had had installed.
Scary stuff, let me tell you. The good-natured too-tired-to-move, too-content-to-feel-like-moving feeling had passed, to be replaced with too-scared-to-move.
At some point my head hit the door handle, and I realized that it was dark because it was a) night and b) a long ways away from the city-a city, any city-and that it was warm because c) the car heater was running although d) the car did not appear to be on and e) ‘the car’ was in fact my own (apparently) despite the disappearance of my emergency hairbrush and notebooks, and the embarrassingly ever-present stacks of papers, from the backseat and despite the fact that my car had f) turned into a giant robot.
If life was a movie, that moment of realization would be followed, after a suitable moment of building tension, by the car somehow ejecting me and then standing up as a giant robot, or doing something equally mysterious. It didn’t. The moment of realization flashed by, and then the tension rose and rose and rose until I thought I would burst, and then slowly dropped as my body obeyed biology, and the adrenaline faded, and my tension dropped.
And then the car rumbled to life and I screamed.
“Shut up,” said the car’s speakers briskly in that deep baritone voice, with the rumbling overtones and the strange mechanical flavor to it that was, in the weirdest way imaginable, somewhat appropriate for a talking car.
“Okay,” I said, struck dumb (dumb as in stupid but not, disappointingly, unable to speak) by the circumstances and the demand and the mess that was my life at the moment.
“I told you to stop talking, organic,” said the car, and this time I actually didn’t respond, although some hysterical, suicidal and highly-amused part of me wanted to say ‘Yes.’ Or possibly even ‘Yes, sir.’
“Good,” said the car slowly, after a while. “Good. I am a Decepticon: an autonomous robotic organism. I am from the planet Cybertron, and I’ve come to earth to extinguish the human race. Also on earth are the Autobots: they’re more like me, if lesser beings. We’re all mixed in with you, hiding in plain sight. Almost none of you know of us.
“The slagging Autobots, for whatever stupid reasons they have, want to save humanity. I want to kill you all, after what one of you squishy little things did to Megatron, our glorious leader, and the Allspark. You should all die for your sins.” There was a brief pause and, again, I had enough of a survival instinct to not say anything.
“Our leader Starscream has ordered us to prepare to launch a second attack. You are our bargaining chip, now. Prime will hesitate before he’ll cause the death of an innocent human, and the choice will be out of his hands entirely when it’s aired on international television.”
I sat back, reeling, stunned.
I’d been kidnapped by my giant alien robot car to be used as a hostage in his bid to destroy humanity.
I went numb and then we drove for a while. At first I vaguely recognized the area we drove through, and then I didn’t. And I continued not to for a long time.
We stopped again, in the middle of nowhere. The sky was as spectacular as I can remember it: I can count the number of times I’ve seen the milky way on my two hands, and none of the others can hold a candle up to the stars that were out that night, wheeling above us. It was dizzying.
“Get out,” the car said as we pulled to a gradual halt, stopping just short of a little rustic cabin. I could see an outhouse and a pump. The whole thing look unused since the time when that hand-pump had been new and innovative.
I did as I was told.
And then I stood there for probably fifteen minutes. It’s why I remember those stars so well. They’re burned into my mind: those countless millions (and millions more I couldn’t see, I know) and the black spots where fir trees blocked out the light. I thought I heard a stream running, far off in the distance, and it made me thirsty. It was a clear, cold night, and I started to shiver not long after I got out of the car. The robot.
“Oh,” the car said at last, disgust and condescension clear in its voice. “You may sleep now. Don’t die-yet.”
The cabin smelled unpleasantly of mold and old food. There was a layer of dust over everything, and an oily sheen covered most of the kitchen. I didn’t see any cockroaches, and was grateful.
I slept.
In the morning I stumbled gracelessly back outside. I wasn’t even really thinking of the car, although it was on my mind-I peed, forgoing the foul outhouse in favor of the woods, and then drank and drank mouthfuls of water out of the rusty pump, waiting just until it started to run clean.
When I looked back up from drinking, water running down my face, my car was gone and the robot was there.
“You will tell me who you are,” he said, and it wasn’t even a demand, let alone a question. It was merely a statement, no more true or false than saying ‘the sky is blue.’
The sky was blue that day, stretching on overhead into eternity, as deep as the sky had been flat last night.
It was beautiful. The woods were full of life. I was going to be dead in a matter of days or weeks, whenever my usefulness ran its course. I believed the thing that was holding me captive. I had no reason not to.
I gave him my name. “Lauren Smithing,” I said simply. I didn’t know he wanted anything more.
“Twenty-five years old. Two parking tickets and one speeding violation. Graduate of York High School and Rice University.”
“Yes.”
“…You’re a scientist.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t even notice how he paused over that. I’ve only realized it’s there at all in retrospect, and that means that it’s probably imagined. I was paying rapt attention to his words, of course.
“Family?”
“My mother and father, three older sisters.: Eliza, Sophie and Beth.” I said the words and then my throat froze with panic, as I realized what I could have just done. I started to shake. I hadn’t thought-
“-Oh no-”
“It’s not worth my time to track down your genetic donors and their other offspring,” sneered the Decepticon in that deep voice of his. It cut into my stomach and vibrated, pulling out the fear in me, making it bleed out of me, or into me. “You’re unimportant except as negotiation material. Will they notice you’re gone?”
I thought frantically. How should I answer the question…?
“Don’t lie,” he rumbled quietly, and I didn’t dare to. I didn’t even know why he was asking, anyways, so I wouldn’t know which lie to make, or even if I needed to.
“Little Lizzie, Beth’s first child, turns four next Friday. She’ll know something’s wrong if I don’t call. If Mom calls, or Dad-they’d be worried if I didn’t call back within a few days.”
“Work?”
I had been hiking on Saturday. Today was Sunday, then. “If I’m not at work tomorrow they’ll call,” I said blankly. We were in the middle of a big push, and it wasn’t like me to just not show up-I’d come in once with a fever of 102 degrees and stayed until they’d pushed me back home mid-morning, when I started throwing up.
“Where do you work?”
I named the research institute I worked at. There was a slight shift of the metallic plates that made up his face that seemed to suggest a cold, calculating smile.
“Good. You’re telling me the truth-at least sometimes. And friends?”
“No,” I said, painfully honest. I had friends, of course, but work kept me to busy to keep in touch with anyone regularly; the only person I saw outside of the lab more than once a month, on average, was my dog.
My-
Dog-
“Gracie,” I said, voice small and weak.
Metallic not-really-flesh narrowed around not-really-eyes. “Explain yourself.”
“My dog,” I said, feeling truly lost for the first time. I missed her terribly, of course, but it was also the straw that broke the camel’s back-or more, it was the straw that made the camel realize that her back was already broken.
“That thing you let inside me? By the side of the road somewhere. It’s lucky I didn’t step on it.” There was a cold tilt to his voice that implied that he had tried to-I don’t know if he actually had, or if he just wanted another way to keep me in line.
It didn’t have the effect he’d expected, either way. I fell apart.
He gave up and drove somewhere else, after a while-he needed information out of me, and gibbered panic-driven babble wouldn’t help him cobble together a picture of the person he was going to either kill or use to kill others.
It helped to have people be attached to the victim, right? A faceless threat of murder was one thing, but to threaten the life of someone the-the audience knew a little about, someone sympathetic, someone they could connect to… That would be something else entirely.
The day passed in a blur. I was still shocky. Even though I was alone, I didn’t think about escaping: what would I do? Call the police? -That would go over well. Start a militia? Run as far as I could as fast as I could? Like that would work-even if I thought I had the money, I had no doubt that he could track withdrawals from my bank account: he’d known the place I worked (I couldn’t lie to him, and it didn’t occur to me to think that he was lying to me) and that was supposed to be secure. Some of what we got assigned was ‘sensitive,’ and they wanted things to be better safe than sorry.
There was a little food in the cabin, but not much. I took some of the worst cans, rusted and dented and one that was bulging, and tossed them into the pit toilet, holding my breath even before I opened the door. I didn’t know how long I’d be in the cabin, and I didn’t want to assume that an inorganic alien would even remember that I needed to eat, let alone decide that he wanted to indulge my human frailties. I didn’t want to be tempted by something only potentially toxic-which could happen, if I got hungry enough.
I could see movement in the jar of flour even through the clinging film of grease-soaked dust covering the glass container, and I left it outside the front door, a judicial distance away from the porch, along with a jumble of slimy potatoes half rotted through.
I attempted to clean, but I didn’t do much. I didn’t want to shake the rugs, because I didn’t want to know what would come out; I didn’t want to sweep out the dark corners because of what might be hiding in them, and I didn’t want to stick my hands anywhere that I couldn’t see clearly.
Finally, I just stopped, because it was worse knowing the state of the cabin than it was not-knowing. The last thing I did was to haul the (mercifully mostly clean) blankets out to air.
Then I sat in the lengthening shadows at the edge of the woods and watched the birds. Somehow, my backpack had stayed with me: I flipped listlessly through my bird guide, but didn’t see anything I didn’t already know. I cried for Gracie, and then I cried a little for myself.
I woke up with a start, but I was still alone. I wondered why the car-robot had disappeared, if there had been a change of plans, and if I would ever see anyone-anyone human-again. Before I’d finished my breakfast he pulled back into the driveway.
We both didn’t mention that he’d been gone. I didn’t say anything, except when I ended up talking softly aloud to myself, by accident, and except when there was a question directed at me by the still-commanding Decepticon.
It was very quiet. I’d gotten used to the city, even though I’d grown up almost in the woods. I was used to people talking, too, and to responding to them.
Mostly, I was left alone.
That was the first day I wondered what I would do about laundry. I had no other clothes to wear.
oOo
In the next three days I learned how to fight against the woodstove and win, how to scrape food up for myself (I wasn’t useless in a kitchen, but it was different when you had electricity and clean pots and ingredients, and possibly a cookbook and a real stove and oven) and how to heat enough water for dishes or a sponge-bath.
The morning of the fourth day my clothes were tacky with dirt and filth, so I stripped to my underwear and washed them as well as I could in a pan of quickly-cooling water with a sliver of rough soap, then hung them outside to dry, in the thin late-autumn sun and the day’s light wind.
I’d been ignored all the days before, not a word spoken to me. This day started out the same, looked to be just like it.
It wasn’t. Sometime around noon I slunk out, buck-naked, to check on my drying clothes. They were still damp, and I shifted them back into the sun, trying to ignore the apparently-normal car sitting in the rough driveway and wishing desperately that there was a back door, so I at least would have a house between us. I didn’t want to walk far on my city-tender bare feet.
It’s funny how being naked almost bothered me more than being the captive of a giant alien robot-albeit one who mostly left me alone. These things ingrain themselves into our being. He didn’t care, of course. Nudity meant nothing to him. I could guess at that, at the very least-non-clothes-wearing apparently non-gendered species with no reason to have our same cultural taboos, right?-but it still bothered me, and deeply.
I was attempting to slink back into the house while keeping as much of me covered as I could when he spoke to me again. I jumped and screamed shortly and swiveled around quickly.
“Human,” he said, using the same tone I would if I’d just called someone ‘filth.’ “We’re leaving.”
I froze. Was this the end?
“You will dress yourself. We will return to your dwelling-” I didn’t own a cell phone to call from “-you will call in sick to your workplace and you will cancel your other engagements. You will do this in as non-suspicious a way as possible. After that, we will return here.”
“Yes,” I muttered dully, after a minute.
There wasn’t any other response, so after waiting a while longer I went back to the bush and pulled on my still-damp clothes.
I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I sat down, and winced. My eyes were puffy from sleeping badly, there were infected insect bites over my face and disappearing down my shirt, over my arms (hopefully from mosquitoes) my hair was tangled and knotted, snarled (fingers could only do so much) and the clothes were still wrinkled, damp in places and dirty, despite my best attempts.
The driver’s door was open when I walked back out of the cabin with my hiking boots on, the only shoes I had. Still, I hesitated before I sat down.
I was smart enough not to actually try to take the wheel.
I stumbled into the house and thought longingly of clean clothes, of calamine lotion for the bug bites, of real food, of a shower, but I ignored the urges and fumbled straight to my phone.
There were seven messages: one from my sister reminding me about Lizzie’s birthday, one from a neighbor inviting me to the neighborhood potluck, and the remaining five from people at the lab, three of them jokingly asking whether I was dead or just on the brink of it. My working-while-sick story had earned me a reputation.
I wanted to call them all back and say that no, I wasn’t dead, but I would be soon. I didn’t, though.
There was a knock on the door, and I cut short the stilted conversation I was trying to force with the woman a floor below me and to the right to answer it. It was another woman in the apartment building: it seemed to draw lonely widows, bachelors and maiden aunts like flies to honey.
“I have your dog, honey,” she said, and I burst into tears.
She looked a little stunned by my reaction-how could she understand? She didn’t know about my car-and I muttered some half-sensical qualifiers about how worried I’d been and how much Gracie meant to me.
After that, though, I couldn’t ask her to watch the dog for me, to come in twice a day to feed her and give her fresh water and let her out. I didn’t know what to do.
So I called my mother. It was the only thing I did for myself in my apartment. I was so afraid to do otherwise-I don’t know why-that to disobey his orders just didn’t cross my mind. It was inconceivable.
I asked her to pick Grace up the next day, since it was so late, and watch her for a while-I told her that I was so busy with work I didn’t have time to give her the attention she needed. It wasn’t a bad lie, as lies go. It was more than I’d expected under the circumstances.
I was careful to leave my dog locked inside the apartment as I made my way back down to my kidnapper.
I fell into a sort of numb daze-it’s always been an easy state for me to reach on car trips. It passes the time. It means I don’t have to think, not deeply, about anything. And it was a long, long drive: we’d left a little noon, and it was almost ten o’clock when we started the trip back. I don’t know if I would have been able to actually fall asleep (probably, though; car rides are incredibly soporific, for me) and it helped to pass the time.
So I was startled when we pulled into a supermarket parking lot, not even half an hour from my apartment. I just wasn’t expecting it: I’d been waiting for the landmarks we would pass: things I drove past every day, and then things I drove past regularly, and then things that were vaguely familiar, and then nothing I recognized, as we moved towards the cabin.
“Get whatever you need,” the car growled, and so I did.
Food, mostly, and instant coffee. Stuff that was filling and easy to prepare and would last without refrigeration. I got enough for a good long while: I didn’t know how long I’d be waiting, and whether or not this trip would be repeated. It seemed unlikely.
I slipped a change of clothes-sweatpants and a loose shirt, something warm that would be close enough to the right size to work-into the cart, and halfway down the next aisle went back and added a second set, almost identical. I bought soap, for myself and dishes, and a bottle of bleach (to be mixed with a little bit of water) for the rest of the house.
It’s funny, what you decide is essential. My two extravagances were a packet of plain MnMs (easy to make last a long time) and toilet paper.
I wished, desperately and for the first time, ever, that I had a cell phone. I was starting to get lonely. I’ve never been all that sociable, but then again, I’d never been isolated the way I was in that cabin.
I bought a long novel instead-some cheap romance I knew I’d hate, the only thing you ever find in a supermarket like the one I was in.
Good. That meant it would take me longer to read it.
I did fall asleep. When I didn’t think about how I was the one supposedly ‘driving,’ that I was the one sitting in the driver’s seat, it was remarkably like being driven around by anyone else.
My position was awkward and my neck hurt. My body had had that slight, subtle all-over ache that comes from sleeping on a bad mattress for too many nights in a row already, and I felt stiff whenever I woke up enough to be really conscious about the matter.
There weren’t any stars out that night: clouds had pulled in, blocking out the sky.
I woke up around midnight and couldn’t fall back asleep. After a while, in the dark and with the road unlit-even the car’s, the Decepticon’s, headlights were off; some sort of infrared filter, I guessed, or something more high-tech-and with the silence only magnified by the constant rumble of a moving car, I began to feel, eerily, as if I was being watched.
I probably was, I realized, and felt the back of my neck prickle.
Scary stuff, let me tell you. They say that the undefined nightmares, the times when you’re not sure quite what is out there, are the worst, but I’m not so sure.
Of course, there were a lot of undefineds in my own fear equations. Like when, exactly, I was going to be paraded on national television in an attempt to get the good guys to do something or other.
And then I would probably die.
The fear shook off the last vestiges of my sleepiness, and I pulled myself fully upright, wincing at the stiffness in my neck and the still-tired still-alert feeling of too little sleep mixed with adrenaline.
I wondered where we were, vaguely, but mostly I… Drifted. You know when you’re there, but not really thinking? Time just slips through your fingers, nothing really matters too much, and it’s just... All a blur.
I jumped, badly, when the Decepticon spoke to me, jerking me out of the peaceful, numbly meditative state I’d been in.
“What was the last project you were assigned to within your work place?” he demanded.
I wanted to ask him ‘Don’t you already know this? You broke into the system database, you shouldn’t need to ask me,’ but I didn’t. One of the first things I’d decided, way back on the first day-it felt like an eternity by now-was to never question my captor.
I don’t know why I was fighting to stay alive, because I knew I was going to die when it came time for me to be a captor, or shortly afterwards. I knew my number had been up since I opened his door and slid, willingly and unknowingly, inside. I suppose hope springs eternal-and it’s probably a good sign that I’m not suicidal. Or heroic, either, but those tend to be the same, I’ve decided. Only I’m not sure heroics are a bad thing.
“There’s a species of frog that freezes solid and then revives in the spring, when it defrosts. We’re working through a series of experiments investigating the mechanics of the process, and then we’ll be investigating how that can be applied to humans, if it can,” I said mechanically. It was unessential, unimportant information-we were hardly the only group that had worked with them, or the most high-profile. It was hardly ground-breaking, let alone something that would interest a giant robotic killing machine-or I thought so, at least.
“Why did you decide to train as a scientist?”
Looking back, after all this had finished, I would realize that this question stood out from the others-it was different. That wasn’t something he’d use in the biography of my life as a sympathy-winning device-I mean, unless I had said ‘As part of my devotion to God and Christian values, and my service to our great democratic nation,’ or something like that.
I didn’t realize it back then: I was too numb. I just answered the question, like I’d answered every other question I’d been given.
“I don’t know,” I said, and that was true. “Because it’s interesting. Eight years ago I would have said… I don’t know, something idealistic. That was before I graduated. How I wanted to make a difference, improve the quality of life in third-world countries, discover something new and innovative. I like nature, like the outdoors, and biology’s my only real gift…”
Why had I-well, not become a scientist, everyone needed a job, but why had I devoted my life to it so completely? I didn’t know.
I wanted nothing more to be outside of this car-it was suddenly stiflingly hot and I could still feel eyes watching me, prickling against the back of my neck-no, outside of this monster and just outdoors. There would be trees, and birds. Some sort of fir. I’d always loved fir trees, after the first time-age nine years old-when I’d gotten to correct my mother that what she was calling the tree we’d bought for Christmas-she kept on calling it a pine-was, in fact, a fir.
The world seemed incredibly, overwhelmingly beautiful. It was a revelation of sorts-like rediscovering yourself as a child, when the world’s still magic. I started crying, silently.
“The world’s beautiful,” I said, out loud, still trying to answer the question. The car was silent; my voice was choked with tears. “It’s-all incredible. Knowing a tree grows out of the carbon in carbon dioxide doesn’t make it any less of a miracle. Knowing the biological adaptations of each bird, and the ones common to all birds-or most all birds-makes them more awe-inspiring, even the fifty little identical brown upright-perching birds that live out in these woods you need to identify by call because they look so similar-”
I didn’t have the words. I still don’t. The-The love that swept through me, the sheer fierce love of everything around me, still defies understanding, let alone speech.
The Decepticon didn’t respond and I fell silent, pitifully grateful that he hadn’t voiced his contempt.
On to part 2
(On to part 3)