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“Uhh, seriously? Didn’t your people put them in here?”
My people? No.
“But…”
They are Xiphos. I am Xyphas.
I tilt my head. “Isn’t xiphos a type of Greek sword?”
It is the closest your language can come to our name.He points at the other two wounded aliens in the room.The Greeks, as you call them, named their weapon after them many years ago in your history.
“Wait… are you saying aliens visited earth and showed themselves?”
Long ago. Yes.Humanity was not ready, so the Xiphos made people forget.
“Let me make sure I understand you. When you said ‘I am Xyphas,’ you’re talking about your… species? That’s not your name.”
Correct. The Xiphos and Xyphas are from the same world. Two civilizations. We do not get along. The Xiphos are arrogant and warlike. My kind favor intelligence and science.Xiphos are war. Xyphas are learning. As humans have a need for names, you may think of me as Xaan.
Wow. If someone had told me I’d be standing around naked and having a conversation with an alien on a UFO tonight, I’d have insisted they be drug tested. Speaking of naked… I start rummaging the clothing in the giant box, looking for anything close to my size. The top layer is mostly men’s stuff. While I do enjoy lounging around in a huge man’s flannel shirt sometimes, that’s something to do at home—not in the middle of an alien abduction. I’d take it over having nothing on, but let me see if there are any better choices first.
I keep digging. The deeper I get in the pile, the older the fashion looks. A beat-up leather wallet falls out of a dirty pair of jeans. Curious, I pick it up and look. Along with a bit of cash, it contains a driver’s license for one Ernest J. Kellerman. No picture on the license… and it expires in August of 1964.
Umm. What?
This craft was last on Earth some time ago,says the nice alien, his voice echoing in my mind.The items from earlier specimens were left in the storage unit. The Xiphos can be lazy in matters not related to conquest. A Human comparison would be procrastinating at taking refuse out to a disposal site.
Wow. I whistle under my breath. As I get near the bottom of the bin in search of something to wear, the clothing style definitely screams 1960-ish. “If all this old clothing is still here, what happened to the people?”
They were brought to our homeworld for study and experimentation.
Right. I should not have asked. Now that’s a horrifying thought. ‘Study and experimentation’ doesn’t sound like a very healthy process. Only the complete lack of child-sized clothing gives me a little nugget of positivity to cling to. Welp, so much for this. I go back to the surface layer where the closer-to-modern stuff is and settle on a beige T-shirt with a 1980s wrestler on it plus a pair of hiker’s shorts. The shorts promptly fall to the floor as soon as I let go of them. Damn. Too big. I grab a few more pairs of shorts, all of which are for men and slip right off my hips. One pair of jeans smells like cow manure so I don’t even touch it. Finally, I discover a skirt that’ll fit me. It’s kinda cheerleadery, dark blue with pleats. A thigh-length almost-miniskirt isn’t the best choice of attire for what I’m sure is going to become a battle scene… but it’s better than nothing. Yes, there are plenty of underpants in this bin taken from abductees—but no, some lines I’m not willing to cross.
The Xiphos are aggressive and arrogant, thinking themselves superior to all other creatures. You are correct when you thought some humans are released after study. Others are kept to be brought back to the homeworld for… more thorough experiments.
“I’m not sure I want to know what they do to them.”
You would have found out…
I stare at Xaan. “What?”
They intended to keep you. They found you fascinating. I am unsure how it is you resisted the anesthesia. They wanted to know.
“Well, they can just keep wanting to know.” I study the tanks. “Make you a deal. If you are sincere about not being a threat… and you tell me how to open these tanks, I’ll let you out, too.”
We have an arrangement.
As Xaan stares at me, the room spins. He seems to float closer to me while everything in my peripheral vision moves away. Okay, weird. All of a sudden, I know the tanks operate via wireless remote control. The modules to do so are on the belts of the two Xiphos aliens.
I hurry over to the unconscious one draped across the surgical table and grab the controller for the tanks. I’m pointing it at the first and hitting the button before it occurs to me that I just seemed to know which device to grab. Wow. Guess the nice alien gave me a brain upload.
Yes. It is much more efficient to pass information directly rather than stretching it out into words.
One by one, I click the device at the occupied tanks, including the tank holding Xaan. Soft mechanical noises come from everywhere. The people sink to the bottom as if the fluid’s buoyancy changed. More bizarre than that, once they’re settled on the tank floor, the liquid simply ceases to exist rather than drains out.
It did not stop existing,says Xaan, stepping down.It changed to a gaseous state, then vented. Much more efficient. It is also more pleasant for the subjects to have their lungs drained via gaseous conversion than to be awake with fluid inside them.
I shiver, then remember to push a different sequence of buttons on the controller to disable the memory altering gas. Evidently, these aliens have a gas that, when inhaled, suppresses the human brain’s ability to record memory. Apparently, a person feels normal in the moment, but can’t remember anything after about ten seconds. Kinda like a goldfish.
