Kidnapped by Aliens, Chapter 2. The Awakening

Filed Under Creative Writing, Science Fiction

A Book by EZPowell

Chapter 2. Kidnapped by Aliens

I have been kidnapped by aliens but still I don’t know this. And this is the awakening, in a very strange and unfamiliar place. Yes, for now I am alive, but at a price; the price of a small town and who knows how many people. And what gain for that cost?

So where does this story begin? It starts out with me waking up in a strange bed. Perhaps strange is not the proper way to describe it but
decidedly odd and completely unexpected. I awoke to find myself on a hard mattress-like thing, inside a cocoon-like contraption, with a
raised lid and me staring out at all sorts of pipes and things and bits of metal arranged in a most disorganized and haphazard mess.
There is little to break the deathly silence apart from the occasional odd bleeping sound and the faint hissing noise of compressed air.

I turn my head to the right and see some strange things, mostly unfamiliar but vaguely discernible as to function and utility. One weird
looking thing surrounded by small flashing lights looks very much like a kind of a doorway without a door. Beyond the doorway is a hallway,
again with pipes and functional bits and pieces everywhere, lights of various hues and colors lining the passage beyond, making it more like
a wild path to another part of wherever it is that I am.

The fact is this: it all makes sense at once, but in a funny way, none of it is sensible at all. Everything looks straight-forward and
fairly easy to understand, but none of it feels in any way familiar. To me it looks like something temporary, something traveling.
It also strikes me as odd that what I am lying in is not the only cocoon in the room. There are many others, all open, dark and very empty.

I sit up with a start. There are bits of tape and wires and all sorts of odd medical-looking, monitoring stuff hanging from me. I poke at
a patch of something or other on my torso, realizing it has a sticky back. I pull. Nothing happens. So I get a good grip on one corner and
yank.

“Arrrgghhhh!”

Who was it said that ripping bits of tape off one’s skin hurts less when pulling it off fast, sharply and with the utmost of vigor and
enthusiasm? Who was that idiot? I then proceed to gingerly and very carefully remove other bits of tape with wires behind them, one by one,
hurting myself with due care and attention. I am now thinking that someone needs to seriously rethink how sticky these things are. They look
like monitoring pads and cables, which is of course what they are. They are all plugged into a central console by my feet, a console with
blinking lights and lots of interesting technical stuff, so I assume they are electrodes monitoring the state of my health. The pulling
nearly done, my next thought is a normal reaction, even if the overload on my senses is bordering on circuit-blowing.

“Where the hell am I?” I wonder, and ponder over that point for an unknown span of time, as I am groggy and disoriented.

Reaching down to pull an electrode off my left foot I notice a small screen next to the console where all the wires are plugged in.
That’s when I get my first shock of surprise. It hits me like a poke in the eye with a blunt stick.

What is on the screen is a diagram of a human body with various points shown, quite obviously relating to the various positions where
electrodes had been stuck to me. Those electrodes that I had managed to rip from my tortured skin with more brutality than
abandon.

“Is that normal? Did I enjoy ripping those nasty little sticky things off me or was it just that I had to have them all removed? Perhaps
I am abnormal. My mind is wandering.” I think to myself. My thoughts are scattered and, yes, still rather groggy and disorganized.

There are also some knobs and buttons on the edge of the console that look just like knobs and buttons look on any similar hunk of
electronics. The picture on the screen is myself, in diagrammatic form of course. Nothing is blinking so I assume there is nothing wrong
with me.

“Well, that’ll help,” I think, perhaps my first coherent thought of the day.

Something else strikes me as odd. The numbering or lettering or whatever it is on and around the various knobs, it is like nothing
I have ever seen.

“Hmmmm,” I ponder yet again. I am getting more coherent all the time. An exclamation follows:

“What the f*$! is all this?” I state quietly to myself.

I put my fingers on one of the knobs curiously and it goes click-click-click around in a circle as if selecting different options.
Nothing untoward or unexpected happens on the screen. I just cannot decipher what the numbers or letters or those little symbols are.
Whatever they are, they are lined up next to the gradations, marching around each knob. They certainly are not what I am used to
expecting and nothing like I have ever seen before. They are not Roman numerals, Arabic, Sumerian or Cyrillic or even Braille. They
simply do not make any sense, other than being attached to the knobs.

“They don’t even look human.” I tell myself again.

Then I am struck with another wonderfully discomforting thought. No they don’t look normal, now do they. For some reason they are so
unusual and difficult to decipher that my eyes refuse to focus on them. I realize that my lack of ability to focus on these funky
characters that are so alien and different to me is just that: they are alien, as in not originating from anyone I know, knew, or expect to
meet up with, ever.

“No really. What the f*$! is all this?” I do believe I am talking to myself yet again.

For some unconscious reason, I then decide to look up and around a little once again. Now it’s time for my second shock. Everything
still looks kind of vaguely out of place, out of shape and just kind of misplaced. However, misplaced in a way that whatever it is I am
looking at has sort of just landed there, and that luckily wherever it is, just happens to be the right place for it. Like the writing
there is something odd about the whole place. The maze of pipes and things seem to hang in mid-air somehow. Nothing seems to fit.
Everything looks out of place. Everything.

“So what! I am here, I am alive and everything over there seems to be working so why worry.” I think once again. I decide to worry
about my immediate equipment. I look at my toes and wiggle them. They seem to wiggle without protest or resistance.

“What follows toes?” I ask myself.

What does any man check, and probably first, before any fingers rip sticky things, or any wiggling of toes? My subconscious mind tells
me I have already checked fingers —the painful experience with those nasty sticky things. I do what any man in such a situation does,
even though I am naked, I make sure it’s all still there, first by sight, and of course followed by hand and a lingering feel, first
checking length and width, and finally left nut and right.

“Well, what would you do?” self-consciously asking no one in particular.

There is also a kind of background humming noise, not like that of heavy machinery but something with immense power, swift and
all-encompassing, something the probabilities in my mind simply cannot conceive of, I must conclude.

“Something is seriously odd if not very wrong here”.

My thoughts are still a mess. Even the groggy perception of my current situation surely cannot distort reality this far. Or can it?
Even if I am completely mad and have gone right off my chump, nothing looks right. Everything is familiar but also completely unfamiliar
at the same time, and in the same breath. Whatever it is I am trying to put my finger on just isn’t there enough to have a finger put on it.
As a result, I am now completely confused.

So I think to myself, “When one is confused, what does one do? Investigate!” is my answer to myself.

So I decide to snoop around and see if I can find anything that makes sense, at least in a more complete sense. The kind of a more
complete sense that doesn’t leave that faint hunch in the back of the mind that something just doesn’t look quite right.