Every time I meet another one of them, I feel smaller and more animal.
“I just wish they’d put clothes on,” I mumble to myself.
“She doesn’t think we’re clothed?” The alien heard me clearly.
“She can’t see the clothes,” Freak explains. “She can see the underwear, but not the metaphysical trappings.”
“Humans can’t see metaphysical adornments?”
“They see what is there, and not what is not. Well, some of the time. It is possible to activate their imaginations sufficiently that they are able to create soft realities, but on a base level… no. They cannot.”
“So she thinks we’re all in our underwear?”
“I mean, in a sense, we are all in our underwear,” Freak smiles.
The alien throws back his head and laughs. “Oh, my god. What a priceless little thing. I should get one for my own. No. I couldn’t possibly. I don’t have the time to train one. They’re basically wild, aren’t they?”
I turn out to be a very controversial appendage. Another alien approaches our little group and begins to weigh in without so much as a by your leave.
“Really, Tasin. A human. They’re barely sentient. They count on their fingers and toes. They don’t have the capacity to understand what we understand. They live in a three-dimensional world of cause and effect. What could you possibly have in common with her?”
“She’s my pet,” he says. “She belongs to me, and with me. We all know better than to question why things happen at this point, don’t we?”
They have to agree to that, because, as far as I can tell, they all think that everything already happened. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s how Freak has explained it to me.
I hope we’re not going to stay here. This isn’t a real place. It feels like being in a simulation of somewhere real. I am uncomfortable here, all the way to my bones. I wonder if this is how animal pets feel when they are taken from the wild. Probably not, I imagine. Human homes always seem so comfortable. Creatures sleep on beds, steal food from tables, and generally live a much more comfortable life than they would in the wild.
“I really need to get out of here,” I tell him. “It’s bad here.”
He snugs me closer, wrapping his arms around me and holding me tight. “Not too much longer, pet.”
* * *
Freak
I was worried about this. The realms in which my kind meets are not kind to human minds. But I needed to come here. I needed to see family. I want to know what the hell happened that I was taken.
I take my pet and I go and find the only woman who can make any difference.
“Alara, I need to speak with you, and then I need to go. My pet is not tolerating the lack of concrete existence here well.”
“What happens, happens,” Alara says. “You know that. We cannot change the past, and the future is the past…”
“Except when it isn’t,” I remind her. “There are stories that there are those among us who can affect timelines. There are rumors that the universe might not be entirely pre-ordained. In which case, I was betrayed.”
“That’s a serious charge, verging on the hysterical,” she says.
“Wow, gaslighting much?” Mara pipes up. “The guy was in a torture situation for ages, and you call him hysterical? How would you like it if you were in a vessel with wires and stuff coming out of you, and…”
“Thank you, pet,” I say, covering her mouth with my hand before she says something I wish she wouldn’t. She does not know the specifics of what was done to me, and I plan to keep it that way.
“You’re a warrior. You chose that path. You were captured by our enemies and they tried to use you to make tech that is more effective at killing us. You didn’t allow it to happen,” Alara says. “You were strong. You are strong. Whatever was done will ultimately be to your benefit. It may already be.”
Bullshit.
My pet thinks the word so loudly everybody in the realm can hear it. I can’t punish her for it, because she really doesn’t have control of her thoughts. I hear laughter from some further afield. Alara does not laugh.
“I think it’s time you took that little thing to a place that suits her more,” she says.
