Chosen by the Alien Above 1: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance Serial (3 page)

REMOTE_USER: I’d rather not say.

CG: You massaged my computer camera?

REMOTE_USER: No. But it would be trivial to do. You should cover the lens with black tape.

CG: Don’t massage my computer camera!!!

REMOTE_USER: You have my word.

How else could he be watching me? He was probably bullshitting. He found out where I was and knowing it was hot and infested with mosquitos wasn’t exactly a news flash in Florida. He was messing with me.

CG: If you are watching me, then tell me what I’m wearing.

REMOTE_USER: Isn’t that an inappropriate question, Ms. Gabarro?

CG: Why?

REMOTE_USER: Because you’re naked.

I screamed, jumped into the damp puddle that was my bed and covered myself with sheets. I crept back to the chair, swaddled in clingy fabric.

REMOTE_USER: I apologize. It’s been a long while since I’ve had regular contact with anyone outside my business. It’s entirely possible, even likely, that my compass for socially acceptable behavior is askew.

CG: Obviously. So how are you watching me?

REMOTE_USER: I’d rather not say. I’m not the only one who can massage computers.
 

CG: Stop watching me!

REMOTE_USER: Granted.

CG: Are you watching me?

REMOTE_USER: No. You just asked me to stop.

CG: Technically, it wasn’t a question.

REMOTE_USER: Life is a question. Especially yours.

CG: Inappropriate, Mr. Sinclair.

REMOTE_USER: Stop calling me Mr. Sinclair! Reminds me of my dad. I’m not that ancient yet.

CG: How am I supposed to know if you actually stopped or not?

REMOTE_USER: You’ll have to trust me.

CG: Forgive me for stating the obvious. You haven’t done much yet that is trustworthy.

REMOTE_USER: I hope to remedy that, Ms. Gabarro. Now get some sleep. Try sleeping on your side.

CG: I’m quite capable of—

REMOTE_USER: I look forward to your arrival tomorrow. Don’t be late.

( o) ( o) - - - - - - (__(__)
 

:0

The chat window vanished, leaving me staring at an Alaskan landscape desktop. Crystal blue icebergs tinged with the warmth of sunset. I picked it out the summer before starting college. It was supposed to be a graduation present to myself. Now, it wasn’t likely I’d log either achievement.

Maybe this was my last big thing. The only big thing to be honest.

If so, I was gonna suck the life out of it.

Director Chu tightened the belt restraints over my chest. She had a quick wit and a reassuring smile. More importantly, she’d flown more missions than any other astronaut over her twenty year career with NASA. Sinclair Industries tempted her into early retirement.

She told me Noah kidnapped her from her country and she hadn’t managed yet to escape. I was pretty sure she was joking.

She stood above me, which was weird. It looked like she was walking on the back wall of the small closet that passed for a space shuttle cockpit. I was technically sitting, but my inner ear and the push of gravity on my chest affirmed that I was laying back in the seat, facing up. The whole cabin was on its side.
 

“So why do I have to be laying down for launch?”

“Human bodies handle the g’s better in a perpendicular orientation to gravity,” she said. “Early tests for the Apollo missions showed that a parallel orientation caused damage to the spinal column.”

I shifted in the bright orange g-suit.
 
It made the hot cocoon of steamy bedsheets from last night feel like heaven. I pawed at the sweat on my forehead, and jabbed a finger in my eye instead.
 

Chu dabbed me with a white cloth.

“The suit will cool down once it’s pressurized and the circulatory systems activate.”

“Thank god.”

“On the bright side,” she said, “it clashes beautifully with your hair.”

I laughed. It came out in a high-pitched blast.
 

Nerves.

Buckets of them.

The suit was a bulky monster that made you feel like a two-year-old learning to walk for the first time. Chu had to lead me by the hand to prevent me from keeling over.

I sat in one of two seats in the cockpit. The other was empty. A bewildering array of instruments, knobs, buttons, and gizmos littered the wall in front of me. Did anyone actually know how to operate this thing?

And if so, why wasn’t that person sitting next to me?
 

I asked Chu that very question this morning when it became clear that I was going up alone. She assured me that Cosmo was more reliable than any human could hope to be. She said it with a grimace, like she wished it weren’t true.

Cosmo. The artificial intelligence Mr. Sinclair created to run his space station. It later learned how to operate shuttle launches. Sinclair Industries hadn’t depended on a human-controlled launch in years.

I sincerely hoped it was as good as Chu claimed.

“Why is it named Cosmo,” I said.

“You want to answer that, Cosmo,” Chu said.

“I will if that is your preference, Director Chu,” Cosmo said over the cabin’s comms.

“It is my preference,” she said.
 

“I am named in honor of the first human in space the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” Chu said. “Another theory is that Mr. Sinclair has an unnatural affection for the Jetsons—a campy kids cartoon from the 80’s about a family that lived in space. He thinks of you like the cranky boss Cosmo Spacely.”

Great.
   

I was about to trust an artificial intelligence named after a children’s cartoon character to launch me off planet Earth.

Could this get any worse?

This was suicidal. My doctors were right. I had a death wish and it was about to be granted.

My heart raced, the singular beats blurred. My palms poured puddles into the thick gloves. The flashing lights on the wall glared and glowed. My body took two steps back behind itself. A high-pitched ringing echoed in my ears. My lungs sucked air in short, staccato bursts.

Panic.

I was panicking.

The realization didn’t help. Didn’t stop it. If anything, it got more intense because I knew I was freaking out. I wasn’t ready. I was going to die and never again know the feeling of grass between my toes, of a spring mist settling on my cheeks.

I wasn’t ready to die!

Chu lifted my chin and held my gaze until my eyes focused.

“Ms. Gabarro is showing elevated—“ Cosmo said over the cabin’s comms.

“Butt out, Cosmo,” Chu said. “Slow your rate of respiration, Ms. Gabarro.”

I realized I was panting like I’d run a marathon.

“Deep, slow breaths,” she said.

I inhaled, held it a moment, and then blew it out.

“Better?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. I’m kinda nervous.”

“Totally understandable,” she said. “I know it doesn’t help one bit, but you’re going to be fine. Mr. Sinclair doesn’t pay me to lose cargo.”

“I’m cargo?”

“We’re all cargo, honey,” she said. “You’re more precious than most.”

“That’s something I guess.”

She laughed.

“That’s the spirit. Let’s get your helmet on. It’s about time to say goodbye.”

She lowered a large white dome over my head. Thankfully, the visor was still up. She clicked it into place.
 

“Ready to confirm pressure,” she said.
 

I nodded. She walked me through the entire procedure early this morning when I arrived at Kennedy Space Center. It was exciting then, on the ground, in a briefing room.
 

It was terrifying now, in the cockpit, strapped to a fifteen-story tank filled with tons of highly explosive liquid hydrogen. Flown by Cosmo, Mr. Sinclair’s pet program named after a cranky cartoon boss.

Terrifying didn’t cover it by half.

Chu dropped the visor and sealed it. She punched some buttons on my chair. A rush of air filled my ears. I felt like a stick puppet stuck in a balloon. Chu scanned the tablet in her hands.
 

“Suit systems Go,” she said. “Cosmo confirm.”

“Suit systems confirmed a Go, Director Chu.”

She looked at me.
 

 
“Ms. Gabarro, confirm Go or No-Go.”

“Yea,” I said, “I think so. Feels weird.”

She waited. The barest dip of a frown crept across her mouth. She didn’t like maybes. She made that clear this morning. The mission was a Go or a No Go. Not a Maybe Go.

“Yes,” I said. “Go.”

She smiled and nodded.

She pointed to a digital counter in the center of the dash. Twenty minutes, thirty one seconds. The seconds spun down uncomfortably fast.

“If all systems continue Go,” she said, “launch will be in…”

She paused with her finger on the display. The seconds flew by.

“T minus twenty minutes.”

She gave me the thumbs up. I tried to return the gesture through the thick suit and gloves.

“Have fun, Ms. Gabarro,” she said. “Many envy your position.”

“Thank you for everything.”

“That’s my job,” she said and then added, “It’s been a pleasure.”

She turned to leave and then paused.

“One thing,” she said.
 

“Yes?”

“Tell the boss if we’re going to work through lunch, the least he could do is buy us a sandwich,” she said with a grin. She winked and stepped out of the hatch.

She looked through the open hatch and nodded. A serious look on her face.

“Cosmo, seal and pressurize the cabin,” she said.

“Confirm, seal and pressurize the cabin,” it said.

The door slid shut and a moment later the hiss of pressurized air filled the cabin.

“Cabin sealed and pressurized.”

I never saw her again.

“T minus sixty seconds,” Chu’s voice echoed in the suit’s comms. “Cosmo, stay off comms unless otherwise requested.”

“Yes, Director Chu.”

“Don’t be hard on him, Nancy.”

“Noah? We’re about to launch for Christ sake. If you say another word, I’ll scrub this mission.”

The world quaked like I’d chosen to hike across the San Andreas on the day the big one hit. The shaking blurred the cabin. The countdown timer split into three copies of itself. All of them unreadable.

The orange juice in my belly sloshed and splashed in a sickening way. I should’ve eaten something at breakfast. The suit stank like a hospital hallway. I grunted on my exhales, practicing the high g technique Chu taught me. It was supposed to keep you from passing out.
 

Which was weird because the rocket hadn’t launched yet and I already felt close to shutting down.

“Slow your respiration, Ms. Gabarro,” Chu’s voice echoed in my ear. “Mr. Sinclair would be displeased with an abort sequence.”

Her voice sounded far away, like it came through a tunnel before it hit my consciousness. Something told me I should reply, but it was hard to find the words.

“Ms. Gabarro, if you don’t slow down your breathing, I’ll have to abort. Respond!”

The crack in her voice snapped me back into the moment. I took a slow, deep breath.

Keep it together Cora.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Better,” she said, “but only a little. I want to see your vitals stabilized.”

I measured my breaths and my brain slipped back into my body. I gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering.

“Keep that up,” she said. “T minus thirty-one seconds. Cargo is Go.”

“Can you please come up with another word for me?” I said.

“Livestock?”

“No,” I said.

“Payload?”

“Better,” I said, “but only a little.”

Chu laughed in the comm and then cut herself off.

“Cosmo, confirm Go for launch.”

“All systems Go for launch, Director Chu.”

“T minus six seconds.”

Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.

“T minus zero. Lift-off.”

On the sixth Oh shit, an invisible hand slammed into my chest. My body crushed into the padded chair and my lower back noticed the padding there could be thicker.

I gripped my hands together and tried to keep my arms from tearing off. The shaking was overwhelming. My brain rattled in its cage.

It was too much.

More than I could take.

I tiptoed at the limit of what my body could handle.

And then my stomach dropped out.

I clamped my throat shut and grunted out an exhale. Some remote corner of my brain registered that the grunting seemed to help. Seemed to take the insane edge off the utterly terrifying.

Chu said it helped. I was supposed to be doing it. I focused and grunted out every exhale.

The sensation of forward movement crept into the intense quaking. The ship must be starting to climb. The hint of forward movement lingered in the background. The world being torn asunder didn’t leave much room for subtler phenomena.
 

It must be just pushing off, building the momentum to really get going. Any second now I’d leave the surface behind.

Please let it be any second now.

The vibration chafed my nipples on the tight cotton bra. One of the more minor miseries on the list.

I grunted with every exhale like a proud mother bringing a baby into the world.

Would I ever know that particular joy and pain?

No. Besides, I’d never knowingly pass on these defective genes. The only thing worse than going through it myself would be to watch a loved one go through it, knowing it was my fault.

“Eighty-two seconds Mission Elapsed Time,” Chu’s voice echoed. “Altitude forty thousand and climbing.”

“What?” I said.

No way. I was already higher than most commercial planes flew!

Insane.

The quaking eventually subsided. The hand on my chest did not. The insanity of the situation hit me. This was happening. Me. Cora the Explorer. Astronaut to the stars.

This was big.

It qualified. I ran through the rolodex of every crazy thing I’d done. Jumped off that cliff in Cabo, half-drunk and all-stupid. I hit the water with my legs bent. The impact slapped the back of my legs like a concrete paddle. The huge purple-blue bruises lasted for a month. Tried to tip a cow that turned out to be a bull. I still had the shirt with the giant hole gored out where its horn just missed my belly. It had a giant orange stain where I puked all over myself after getting away. That was insane. There were others.