F**K My Life

Dear journal,

****. My. Life.

I'll start with what happened right before my life decided that I wasn't getting enough excitement. It was 2:00 in the morning, the bar had just closed . . . at least for me, so I was making my not-too-steady way towards home. I think I made a wrong turn somewhere, unless the way from the bar to my house had suddenly decided to include a dark alley. There was a bright light. I blacked out.

I woke up strapped to a gurney. At least, that's what I would have preferred it to be in hindsight. Nurses usually look a little better than what was at my bedside, and I've seen some nurses with quite a bit of personality. Rather, waiting to wish me a happy good morning, was a creature straight out of science fiction. It was about three feet tall, papery skin the color of ash, a bulbous, elongated head far too large for its thin body, and large amber eyes the size of golf-balls. Just to make my well-wisher that much more comforting, its eyes didn't appear to have any pupils.

Given the circumstances, I was somewhat discombobulated as to my current location and as to the nature of my visitor, so I politely asked him to explain. What came out of my mouth may have sounded more like "What the **** are you, where the hell am I, and why am I strapped down," but I don't think he understood what I said. I quickly stifled those last two questions as he raised an odd looking syringe and stuck it in my arm. I hadn't finished my uncomplimentary statement about the circumstances of his birth before I was out again.

I swear I don't pass out this often on most days. I really wished I hadn't passed out that last time because I opened my eyes to the bars of a cage. Upon surveying my surroundings, I found I was in a kennel with quite a few other creatures which, if the little grey Yoda hadn't been enough, were evidence that I had been abducted by aliens. It wasn't long before I realized that I was being studied, along with the rest of the animals in the other cages. At first I had hoped they were sentient. Then I saw one of the other inmates ignore his perfectly acceptable daily nutrient supplement in favor of his feces. My aspirations for the other inmates died in similarly disgusting fashions. The other thing that told me that I was different from the rest of the creatures was my cage. All of their cages appeared relatively simple to open, or even break. I was reasonably sure that most of the cages wouldn't have been able to hold a sufficiently determined chihuahua. My cage, on the other hand, was fort Knox without all the gold. Aside from the traditional vertical bars, there were thick horizontal supports, braced by a mesh, encased in a glass box. I was flattered that they thought I warranted such high security, but I doubted it was necessary.

They apparently did not share my opinions, and every time they decided to take me out for testing, they gassed my box with something that put my lights out like a two by four, except without the bruise. That was my life for the next two weeks or so. I can't say exactly how long, since I couldn't see the sun, and I didn't have my watch or any of the other things I'd had in my pockets. By the second week I wasn't looking too good. That, coupled with the fact that I was gassed unconscious every two sleeping periods, made my mood something south of sour. By that time I was starting to be able to recognize the different xenos by height and build.

I counted seven different aliens who would come into the room and either gas my box or do something to one of the other animals, and from the aliens behavior, I could see they were all jerks. All but one. The others seemed to enjoy inflicting pain, or at least didn't feel bad about it, but the shortest (I called him Stumpy) seemed to try to create as little discomfort as possible. If, on the rare occasion, one of the animals had to be put down and he had to do it, Stumpy always seemed sad as he injected the blue syringe of death (my name for it again) into the doomed creature, petting it as it faded away.

That's why I was slightly more than alarmed when, at the beginning of the third week, he entered the room with the blue syringe of death in his hands and started walking towards my box. He hit the button and gas began to leak into my chamber. This time, I didn't take it sitting down. I actually stood up and started attacking the bars with more energy then I'd shown for a while. Stumpy seemed stunned by my sudden outburst, as I'd never been this frantic before. Maybe it was because my heart was trying to escape the body it thought would not need its services much longer. Maybe there was less gas, but I wasn't knocked unconscious, only paralyzed. Waiting until he was sure that I wasn't able to move, Stumpy opened my chamber door, and knelt by my head. I tried to move, but wasn't even able to lift a finger as he inserted the needle into my neck. The lights faded.

I didn't die. Shocker, I know, since I'm writing this, but when I woke up, my body felt like the static from an old TV and I was, once again, on a gurney. The only difference, though, was that the alien by my bedside wasn't a meter tall and grey, but towered over me to something to the tune of four meters, had four legs, two arms, light blue skin stripped with a darker blue, and was making frantic clicking noises to another one. As I looked around, I saw there were quite a few of these new aliens by my bedside, all intent upon the heated clicking battle between the first two. These others were somewhat shorter than the two who were arguing, and also appeared less . . . developed. Or maybe they were more developed, I don't know how these things age. With what happened next, though, I would have given up a bath and some good food to have known what they were saying.

"I want that thing off my ship this instant!" Tnnxz shout-clicked. "We don't know what happened on that Corti ship, and I say it's best not to borrow trouble when you don't have to." He had been in favor of giving the doomed ship a wide berth, but Xkkrk, his favorite mating partner and second in command, though she liked to forget that at opportune moments, had thought differently.

"That ship was transmitting a distress beacon, venting atmosphere, and well on its way to complete hull failure." shouted Xkkrk. "We're the only ship out here for light-years, but you would have had us act as though we hadn't heard it? If we'd done that we might as well have murdered them ourselves!"

Tnnxz snorted. "They didn't need any help in that regard. Do you honestly mean to tell me you think the crew of that science vessel died by naturally tearing their own limbs off and bashing in their own skulls? I don't think a one of them was fully intact, and that's just the ones you could recognize as having once been alive. The others were just smears, if the records about there being a full crew of seven were to be believed. What do you think did that? The animals who were all in their cages, or the one, living, breathing, uneviscerated abomination on that ship?"

"You think this killed them?" Xkkrk motioned toward the strange creature on the ship's one medical bed. She had to admit one thing, it was rather strange to look at. Its pink, squishy skin was covered in a sparse black fur, except for its head, which seemed to be compensating for the rest of the body in the hair department. It was short, somewhat less than half her height, yet it looked dense. She suspected it was stronger than its size suggested, but not so strong as to be able to turn the crew of a Corti zoological vessel into a pulp. "It may have been breathing when we found it, but it wasn't doing much else. Do you think it slaughtered the crew, then fell asleep in a ship which was leaking atmosphere? It's been awake since you started yelling," Tnnxz jumped and quickly looked at the creature in alarm, but she kept going, "and it hasn't moved a muscle. If it were going to attack us it would have done it by now."

"It's a dumb beast, it didn't know the ship was compromised. And it was right next to that headless body holding an empty RotGut syringe."

"Oh, so aside from being able to turn a Corti crew into a fine mist, it's now able to survive a bio-engineered pathogen able to kill every known organism in a few seconds. Next you'll be telling me it can make you last longer than a few [minutes] next time we're alone together." The comment obviously stung him, but Xkkrk could see he knew she was right. The children, who had been listening intently to the conversation, could also see that she had won. Xkkrk could see the youngest, Vtv, was about to ask the same question he had when they'd first found the creature.

"So." He clicked, "Can we keep him?"

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