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So you’d think that temporary jobs would be perfect for me, right?
Right!
Except for the whole paying the mortgage and the phone bill and the electricity and... well, you know. Living.
So there I was, sitting on the roof of the house—yes, yes, shack—staring up at the stars.
It had been a space-based farming sim, the game. I’d had fun working on it, and I’d helped develop characters and interactions and a veritable maze of possibilities. Farming sims were huge business, and I’d thought about giving up on getting a decent regular programming job and just making my own game.
But that would take years, and the mortgage needed to be paid this year.
And of course, once I got another job, programming jobs were time-intensive, so I couldn’t just spend my “free time” building a new game while working for someone else.
Maybe if I got a nice quiet job at a coffee shop or as a grocery bagger. Would that cover the mortgage, though? Probably not.
I took a sip of my hot chocolate, wrapping my hands tight around the mug, leeching the warmth from the ceramic sides into my chilled digits. It didn’t usually get all that cold in the Appalachians, but the last few winters had been brutal in the shack. Firewood might get me through, but if I lost electricity because I couldn’t pay the bill...
Well. Things weren’t that bad yet. Maybe I’d find a new job in time and not have a huge gap to cover. If I was very careful, the final paycheck would get me through December.
Good thing I still liked ramen.
I turned to head back through the bedroom window, out of the cold and into my nest of blankets, and that was the moment I just... jerked upward. It was like falling—the same uncontrolled way my legs seemed to slide out from under me, the same swoop in my stomach, the same panicked moment of terror for where I was going to land and what bones might end up broken—but then my brain reassessed and came to the conclusion that falling up wasn’t a thing that happened.
There was nothing wrong with gravity, apparent from the fact that my cup of cocoa was still sitting there on the window ledge beneath me. The window ledge that was getting farther and farther away with every passing second, as I was pulled upward.
I was hallucinating. That was the only possible answer.
Dad’s Alzheimer’s hadn’t started out with hallucinations, but they’d happened later on. Maybe if it came on young, it caused them right away. It didn’t seem likely, but it was at least as likely as me unwillingly learning how to fly, or—
Everything flashed, and I fell into a strong pair of arms, only to be dropped quickly back down to my feet. I threw my hands up, desperate to keep my glasses from falling off, and spun to face the...
Giant.
Blue.
Alien.
There was a giant blue alien behind me. Okay, well no, he was in front of me now, but he was... seriously. An alien. A real alien. Looking at me like I was a bug, and he was the alien queen, about to stuff a face hugger down my throat to set up someone else’s epic space horror story.
I took a step back, away from him, eyeing him up and down. “Who are you? What do you want?”
Way to open your mouth, Wes, give him a big old target for the upcoming impregnation.
But... he didn’t really look that much like an alien queen. I mean, sure, he had the same flat-eyed stare, with as much emotion as a wall, but—
He lifted a giant blue arm, the shoulder of which was covered with a lacy silver circular design, pointing to a spot to our sides. Neither of us turned to look. “You require cleansing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Cleansing,” he repeated. “You must be bathed.” He scrunched up his nose like I smelled bad, which... well, jeez. I mean, maybe I’d gone a little light on the showers for the last week or so, but I’d been working fifteen-hour days. What the hell did he want?
He waved with his hand, like he was shooing me to the door, and just as I was afraid he was going to sock me or something, another—alien?—appeared.
This guy didn’t look all that much like an alien, though. I mean, he did, in that he was like seven feet tall and slightly bluish and had no freaking whites in his eyes—yikes. He was also covered from neck to... well, where his flat belly met his pants... in those same silvery patterns as big blue.
Unlike the angry blue guy, he put a hand on my shoulder and led me over to the wall. Door. It was a door, and it opened by itself, and that was the fucking coolest thing ever. Yeah, I know, grocery store technology, but this was way cooler.
If nothing else, it was on a spaceship.
