Princess of the Void: An Alien Abduction Romance

"Remember the 90% of your training?" Drake parks himself in a folding chair across a card table from Grant. "You're about to get the last 10. But it's time to sign another NDA. This is the big deal NDA."

He pushes a novella across the table. "Read that."

Grant takes it gingerly, like it'll burn him. His shoulder still smarts from the blood sample they just took (to scan for foreign contaminants). "Is this something I can, uh. Could I take it home, have someone read it for me?"

"You can't take it home," Drake says. "You can't go home, until you've read it and signed it. Take your time."

He sits back. What if I don't agree to it ? Grant wants to say. Instead he picks it up and reads.

Ten minutes later he lowers the page and looks up. "This part." He flips the packet around. "Section 11 subsection F. Liquidation. What's liquidation mean?"

Drake doesn't reply.

Grant realizes after 30 seconds of silence that he isn't going to. The page in his hand trembles. "I didn't sign up for this."

Drake shakes his head. "Yes, you did."

"This is fucking bullshit. This is. This is insane. Is that a person in there?"

"Keep reading, and sign it," Drake says. "And then I'll brief you."

Grant's stomach sinks into the floor as he goes through the rest of the agreement in a fugue state. Nothing sticks. It's all just contingencies and penalties and liquidation keeps going through his mind. Liquidation, liquidation.

Drake's hand at the edge of the paper is a jump scare. Its broad finger taps a vacant line of typed underscores. "Sign that," he says. "And initial every page."

"I don't want to. I need to talk to someone. Can we get a supervisor down here?"

Drake stands up. He walks to the door and stands in front of it. His hands fold in front of him. "Sign it and initial it." His voice is a droned monotone.

Drake's moving on procedure, Grant realizes. He's gone automatic. This is what people do before they shoot other people. A dizzy dread animates his hand. He signs the page. He moves back through the sheaf of papers and lays his initials on each of them. With every scratchy pronouncement of the pen, Drake's humanity returns, in visible increments.

The document's done, and the big security guard slides it into a manila folder as he takes his seat again. "I didn't think we'd have to do this, Hyde. And I'm sorry we do." He drums his fingers on the table. "All the serious stuff happens during the day. It's never shown itself to a night shifter. What I want you to do right now is breathe with me, all right? Deep breath." He demonstrates and Grant tries shakily to imitate him. "The thing to remember: you're gonna be okay. There is nothing it can do to you from where it's at, and night-shift security is a button press away. We're relying on you to be the eyes on Batty. The rest of us are here to contain it."

Grant is not worried about what the creature can do to him. He's worried about the gun on Drake's hip. "Batty? That's her name?"

"Its designation," Drake says, "is Subject B-31. We call it Batty for short, on account of it hangs like a bat. And the eyes and the teeth and the ears. B-31 was discovered at the crash site of what we thought was a meteor. Then we found the ship."

"The ship." Grant's ears are ringing. "It's an alien."

"Yep. Came down on a vessel shaped like a bullet, the size of a rowboat. Made of alloys we don't even have names for. And B-31 was sealed inside, in either restraints or a life-support system. There's disagreement on that. It breathes our air, it can eat our food. On MRIs, its brain looks human, almost, but it has an enlarged frontal lobe with a protuberance around the part on humans we call Broca's area. That controls speech production and articulation."

"What does that all mean?"

"Fucked if I know, cause it sure don't talk. Our psych people have run it through tests and put it at around orangutan level intelligence. It doesn't communicate in anything like a language. Just grunts and growls."

That wasn't a grunt or a growl Grant heard. That was syllabic.

He stays silent.

"More important for you—since you're never gonna talk to it—it has the strength of a human many times its size, it has razor-sharp fangs, and it has optical camouflage."

"So she can go invisible?"

"It's imperfect, especially at speed. But yes. Listen, though, newbie. Listen good." Drake holds up a finger. "Never, ever, ever call it a she . We shouldn't have called it Batty, to be honest. But it's faster than Subject Bee Thirty One. Psychological resilience is gonna be key to doing your job right. Batty is not a person . You can't think of it like that. You can look into its eyes and see something in them. You can assume a lot about what's going on up there. You can think it's cute. You think it's cute?"

He says nothing.

"I think it's cute. Three-foot tall nudist with a Hollywood rack, running around swinging on a jungle gym. But you know nothing about it. Not the first thing . The social cues you've developed, we don't know how they apply to it. That thing is a black box. You ran into it outside that room, who knows what it would do to you. Eat you, maybe. Its fangs have a potent neurotoxin in them. The eggheads think it evolved to suck blood. Like a goddamn space vampire. Do not communicate with it. Read nothing into its body language. Go nowhere near it. Stay in your room, play your guitar, cash your checks, go home to your family." Drake gives him a tight grin. "And you'll be okay."

I don't have a family, Grant thinks. You know I don't.

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One week passes. B-31 makes no further appearances. Grant punches in, sits in his box, and does his job. Now that he knows what's happening in there, and the role he has as captor, every anomaly he sees brings a flinch of guilt.

He searches his office for cameras pointed his way and finds none. Could they be watching him out of some hidden enclosure? Is he really the only guy watching this place? Is that so crazy? These people aren't federal. They're contractors, and most contractors Grant's met have been the penny-pinchingest bastards he's ever known. Everyone cuts corners somewhere. Is he a cut corner, if she's never been active at night before?

It. Remember: it.

There are flashes. He knows to look for them now. A distortion around the monkey bars or on the edges of the enclosure.

He never sees her eat. He presumes they feed her during the day. Most of the time he's here, he must be watching her sleep.

She doesn't have a bed. She's sleeping on the floor, or on that jungle gym.

It , a voice that sounds like Drake insists. And you don't know if it even sleeps.

If enough time passes, he thinks, he'll forget the beautiful woman with the sad red eyes. She's clearly decided not to trust him. All he has to do is keep doing what he's doing, and his qualms will fade. If he does nothing, he'll learn to live with it.

He makes his decision on day 12.

He waits for a fifteen minute window of zero activity, and engages the loop function on the cameras. Then he opens the CHAMBER door and pushes the swivel chair out, to the front of the glass enclosure. He sits in it and rests his head on his chin.

"You are a dumb fucking dumbfuck, Grant," he says to himself.

He reaches out and knocks on the pane of glass.

A shimmer in the air, at the top of the jungle gym. Grant knocks again.

The hair is what appears first. The rest of her flickers back in little scale-shapes, from the crown of her head to the tip of her tail. She's laying atop the monkey bars, curled like a cat, staring warily at him with those bright red eyes.

"Hi," he says.

B-31 swings up to a sitting position, still silent.

"I guess you probably don't understand me," he says. "And you may not want anything to do with me. But I wanted to say sorry. Uh. That you're stuck here. And that when we met, I didn't help you. I'm not sure I can help you now , even. But I am sorry."

"Sorry," she says. Sah-rih.

He perks up. "That's right."

"Thaz ryde."

"Well, now you're just copying me."

Her tail swishes. "Wellnau yurjaz goppingmi."

He chuckles.

Her tail wraps around the monkey bars and she slips off of them. She hangs upside down from the jungle gym.

Gravity does interesting things to her chest.

He blinks back his untoward stare. "Do you have a name?"

"Name," she repeats.

"I'm Grant," he says. "Grant Hyde." He points at his laminated ID. "My name. Name. Is Grant Hyde."

She points at him, too. "Grantyde. Name."

He nods. "How about you?" He points at her. "What's your name?"

She watches his finger. Her head tilts.

He chuckles. "I can't just keep calling you Batty."

"Ba-tee." She repeats it. "Grantyde name. Batty name."

He sucks air through his teeth. "I feel like I'm not explaining this quite right."

She delivers another babbling brook of syllables. "Batty," she concludes.

"Okay. We'll go with Batty for now." He looks around the chamber. He settles on his palm, which he presses against the glass. "Hand," he says.

She reaches down and loosens her tail until her hands press against the floor. She back-bends onto her feet. She approaches her side of the enclosure. "Hand," she says.

"That's right." He points at himself. "Grant." He points at his hand. "Hand."

Batty shakes her head and points at him. "Grant yde." There's a sassiness to it. Or maybe he's reading into it, like Drake said. Interpreting the cock of her hip and the pulling back of her lip wrong.

"Grant Hyde." He emphasizes the space.

"Grantyde."

"Grant."

"Grantyde." Her head bobs left and right. "Grantyde Grantyde Grantyde." A burst of syllables. "Grantyde."

"All right, all right. I concede." He puts his hands up. "Grantyde."

She folds her arms and smirks. Fuck you, Drake. Black box, social cues. This is communication. He won't bullshit himself into believing otherwise.

This is a person.

He waits for the fireworks. For Drake to call him in and show him footage of himself being the mother of all dunces. For him to get fired or worse. Nothing happens. He goes through security. His coworkers nod and smile.

The next night, he brings his guitar with him. He slides the case through the security checkpoint and watches carefully as the guard opens it and checks it. Grant's heart skips, and freezes, and then restarts when the guard nods, and puts the guitar back in the case, and ushers him through.

That's something you learn working night shifts. Once the sun goes down, everyone stops giving a fuck and wants to go home. Everyone but him.

He shows Batty. He taps his knuckle against it. "This is a guitar. An instrument."

"Gee-dar," Batty replies. "Instroomand."

"Yes ma'am." He slips a guitar pick into his hand and strums a c-chord. "Music. You know music?"

She gasps. Her ears fan outward. He cracks a grin.

"Geedar," she says. "Meu-sik."

"Uh huh. You want to hear a song?"

Her tail's wagging. He imitates another strum and she nods rapidly.

What's the first song you play for a woman from another planet? He clears his throat.

Grant isn't proud of very much that's happened in his life. As far as he can tell, he made some mistake a few years ago, some miscue on the release, and now he's a slow gutterball. Too late to change the way things roll. Just watch it coast toward the dark and hope you'll get another shot once it's done. Back before he gave up on sleeping through the night, he'd keep himself up trying to pinpoint exactly what it was he messed up. There's plenty of options.

The one unimpeachable thing, the one piece of pride in his life, is his singing voice. It's not a modern sort of sound. Not something he could ride to any genuine success today. But for the plainspoken bleeding-out sound of the old songs, the songs about watching the train leave the station without you, it's perfect.

He rolls out the first dusty E major riff of "I'm so Lonesome I Could Cry."

Batty coos with quiet awe as the song unspools. Her head nods back and forth to the rhythm. Her big red eyes close.

He ambles into the last verse, and the words prick at his heart.

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are

I'm so lonesome I could cry

She claps and whistles. He grins sheepishly. Didn't know aliens clapped.

She crawls forward and he tries not to stare at the swaying of her body. She taps on the glass. "Grantyde hand?"

"What do you mean?"

She points to her right palm and makes a grabby gesture. "Grantyde hand. Uh, uh." She chews her lip. "Music instrument."

"Oh." Grant holds it up. "That's a pick."

"Pick," she says. She moves along the perimeter of the cell. She taps on a piece of the wall on the far side.

He scoots the chair over to where she's moved to.

There's a little handle here. Batty pushes another one on her side and a sliver of glass protrudes out. It's a drawer. One of those two-way chute things like in movies about prisons. Batty points at it. "Pick."

He stares at the drawer. "Uh. I don't know about that."

"Grantyde." Her voice gets an edge to it. She looks intense. Her pupils shrink, and for a moment her eyes become strange and reflective, glinting in what light there is. "Hand Batty pick."

He looks at her. He glances around her cell. Nothing there. Not a single possession. And she clearly wants this thing badly.

Hell, it's just a pick. He has like a dozen of these per square foot. Loses them all the time.

He places the pick in the drawer and slips it through. "There you go," he says. "Can't exactly fit the guitar, but…"

She grabs the pick and scurries onto the jungle gym, staring at it, her tail wagging rapidly. "Pick," she says. She turns it over and threads it between her fingers. "Pick pick pick." She looks up at him like the tortoiseshell chip he gave her is made of solid gold. Her eyes are alight.

He grins. "You hide that thing, right? Maybe, uh… He points at the poster. "Behind that, maybe."

Her head darts up to his. Her eyes gleam. "Hide," she says, and there's vehemence in it that catches him offguard. "Hide pick. Hide, Grantyde."

"Uh, right. Exactly." He stands up. "Okay, Batty. I gotta go now." He gestures to the door. "Gotta go home soon."

"Go home soon," she repeats. "Home."

"But I'll be back tomorrow. Do some more songs for you."

Batty climbs down her jungle gym bars and leans against the glass wall. Grant's attention strays to her body, the press of her chest. His eyes snap back up to hers. They've never left his face.

Her broad hips sway a slow circle, back and forth.

"Grantyde," she whispers. "Home. Grantyde." She sings his name, draws its syllables out. She taps the glass. That glow in her eyes again; another flow of syllables. "Grantyde. Batty. Home."

He isn't sure what that means. But it's enough to provoke another stupid decision.

He reaches into his guitar's sound hole and feels around its hollow body. There's his phone, duct taped to the inside of the instrument. He peels it out and carefully tugs it from between the strings.

"Can you, uh. I need to take a picture of you. Picture." He mimics a camera and makes a clicking noise in his throat. "I'm trying to be a whistleblower here," he says. "Not start up an alien OnlyFans. And if you're standing like that, it's, uh…"

Her body smushes further against the pane. She imitates his clicking noise and laughs. It's a light, chiming sound. Her nipples are blue, too, where they flatten against the glass. Dark blue.

He tries a shooing gesture and she finally gets it. She steps away from the glass. Fascination is plain in her as he raises the camera and takes a series of photos.

She has horns, he suddenly realizes. Horns sticking out of her silky hair. Has she always had those?

"Okay." He lowers the phone. Her gaze follows it. "No idea who gets these or how I prove they're not fake," he says, "but it's a start." Maybe he just uploads them somewhere? Spreads them across some anonymous imageboard? Do people still pay attention to that sort of thing?

"Issa start," she says. "Home."

She looks up, to the cold metal ceiling. "Home," she murmurs.