Peek and Boo

“It is similar to why your human children enjoy ‘peek-and-boo.’”

“You mean peek-a-boo?” I ask. I pull at my tether to make sure it’s still there. It pulls back, and I bob. My suit hisses. I stabilize. My stomach growls and I’m glad that he can’t hear it.

The Thing in front of me doesn’t bob or drift at all, but he does glance at my midsection.

“Is there not always both peek with boo?” he asks. “Hence the ‘and’?”

“That’s just what it’s called,” I say. I feel more unsure of the answer than I ought to. He wouldn’t know, would he? I would know. I do know.

“Of course,” he says. Long, tendril-like fingers punch in empty space. A glowing console built from rivulets of light blinks into existence as his digits make contact. Each button glows so brightly that the space around it gets hazy. It’s like a sunset reflected in rippling pond water.

“Your larvae very much enjoy the game,” he says. His fingers stop moving. The console disappears.

“We don’t call them lar-”

“And they enjoy it,” he says, “because they are on the brink of mastering ‘object as a permanence.’ Their primitive brains recognizing that objects persist, even if they are not seen.”

I stare at him. Past him. Past his alligator-like tail and into the vast, hopeless depths of space. I feel for my tether. Still there. Another soft bob. Another hiss.

“Play peek-and-a-book with a larvae too young,” he says, “and they fail to enjoy it.”

The three corners of his mouths pucker together. I chew on my tongue.

“To these very small ones,” he says, “the grown human’s face is not just hidden. It is gone! Completely gone from existence. Never was nor will be again. This would be horror, if only they could remember that the face had ever been!”

He lets out a rhythmic, choppy, thumping noise that sounds like a gwap-gwap-gwap-gwap.

I think I’ve heard that before. The object permanence part, not whatever the hell the rest of that was. Why can I hear him at all? For the fifth time in our conversation, that thought pops into my head and for the fifth time I shake it away.

Bigger fish to fry.

He’s very big.

I wish my helmet were gone so I could rip out my own hair.

I wish that wondering ‘how is sound working in a vacuum’ was in the top fifty of my most pressing questions.

“If the world disappears with closed eyes,” the creature says, “do your larvae not cry because they prefer oblivion?”

I’m a nanosecond away from asking the Thing if he’s ever going to answer my goddam questions when a red indicator on my sleeve flashes. A triplet beep. The soft voice in my helmet brings her own, automated contribution to this runway train of a conversation.

“Fuel low. Eight percent. Secondary systems suspended. Recommend solar panel realignment.”

“I know,” I mutter, breaking my stare to press the silence button. The solar panels are up, they’ve been up for three days, they aren’t doing a damned thing and I was at nine percent when I first started talking to this…alien? Hallucination?

“I asked what you’re doing here,” I say. I speak slowly, bringing my hands up and down as though setting each individual word out in front of me. “What. Are. You. Doing. Here.”

The alien takes a moment, then raises one arm.

“It is similar to your youngling game of peek and - ” he looks down at the glowing console which is once again back in front of him. “Peek-oh-boo. You see, for a small larva - “

“Hold on,” I say. My voice is breathy, holding back panic by a thread. I put my hands in a “T” position, the universal sign for “time-out.” Though perhaps not as universal as I’d once imagined.

The creature moves two of his hands into a “T” as well. The spindly, anemone-like digits wiggle at the tips and it is incomprehensible and nauseating.

I taste bile and, for the first time, I am happy that my stomach is empty.

My microwave oven is a secondary system.

“You already said that,” I say. “It’s not an answer to my question.”

He sits with this for a moment. Tilts his face to the side. Or rotates it. It’s hard to tell which. He’s silent for forty-seven seconds which I know because I count each one out in my head to keep from screaming.

“What are you doing here?” the Thing asks.

My mouth falls open.

We’re getting nowhere. Not only are we not getting anywhere, but I’m running out of time.

“Auxiliary power at seven percent,” chimes my ship.

We’re not getting anywhere close to anywhere, so I decide to answer. Because I’m out of other ideas.

“I was…” I start to say. This whole thing is absurd. “I - we - were sent by the Coalition. To investigate the Ring. Collect data. Send it back. See if there was any way to stop it. Not us, but the people back home.”

Out of habit, I use my fingers to trace a ring shape in front of me.

The alien traces a shape with his appendages, except what he traces is a three-dimensional sphere.

“It was…uh….”

I can’t stop staring at his hands.

“It was closing in. The Ring. Not the same everywhere. We went in different directions, used every ship and scattered.”

The creature leans his body sideways, looking past me and into my ship.

“I’m the only one here,” I say.

He leans back. Appendages punch in the air. The glowing console blinks into existence and the out again.

There’s a moment of silence.

My stomach growls.

“So,” he says, finally. “You are doing human things.”

“No, actually,” I say, jumping in too quickly with pressurized speech. “No, not at all. This has never been done before. It was a scramble. An emergency! This is totally unprecedented. We only have years left before -”

“But it is humans doing these things?”

“Yes,” I say, shoulders dropping. I gesture at myself as though to confirm I am a human.

“Human things, then.”

“Ok. I guess so.”

Each of the eight fingers on all four of his hands wiggle excitedly. He makes a hooting noise.

“Good and yes,” he says. “I am doing grzz-oo-zlo things.”

The platinum translator around his neck abandons any attempts to bridge that word. A sound - his real voice? - comes through instead. A deep, tumbling sound like a pair of sneakers in a dryer.

All his appendages come together in a single point in front of his scale-plated torso. As though he has just presented an elegant and self-evident point.

I open my hands and spread my arms. Could I be out of oxygen already? Could I be dying? Dead?

“What question is it to ask ‘what are you doing here?’” he says, peering at me. “Human things. They are the doing. Grzz-oo-zlo things. They are the doing. And we are here! It is done.”

I press my gloves to my helmet. They stop well short of my face and I can easily see through my fingers. See that he’s still there. I squeeze my eyes shut so tightly that white blotches flash in the dark.

I don’t even know what this Thing is named. What he goes by. If he is a ‘he.’

I cannot bear the thought of asking him any of these questions.

The Thing seems to take note of my exasperation and he shudders. A wave of soft, flapping ripples that run down the deep violet of his body.

His fingers make the same motion as before, drawing out a sphere in the space in front of him.

“In a similarity to your game of ‘peek-oh-boo’ -”

“Stop!” I scream. There’s no echo, just the twang of feedback in my mic. My hands are thrown behind me, fists balled. “Just stop it!”

His appendages pause in the air.

Then they carefully, slowly move to make a “T” sign.

This fills me with rage and I see red.

“Forget where you are from!”

I’m shouting now. Screaming at an alien. Fog builds in my helmet, creeping into the edges of my view.

“I don’t care why you’re here! I don’t care what you are! All I need to know is whether or not you can help me! Help us!”

My body heaves up and down, pitching on the waves of every breath. I’ve lost my cool and I don’t care to have it back. We’re wasting time. Time that I have so little of left. He, this Thing, should have been a life raft but he is an anchor pulling me under and I’m flailing.

I shouldn’t even be here. Not me. There should have been better people but there weren’t and I’m here, experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime miracle of an opportunity for some help because all I want is some help and I’m blowing it.

My fists release.

Blowing it.

A long, hot breath seeps out through my clenched teeth while fragments of rationality start to congeal.

I’m blowing it.

The alien in front of me says nothing. He doesn’t move and his stillness seems severe.

He’s almost perfectly still, except for those tendril hands still holding a “T”.

Dammit.

I should try and send a message back home. Cut my losses. Divert the last bits of power. I might have enough. Might. I definitely do not have enough time to figure out what to tell everybody or how to say it.

“Power at three percent.”

“Look,” I say, preparing to give a very underwhelming and rushed apology.

It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time to get it out.

His tail swings back and forth very much like an alligator’s. It shouldn’t do anything. It should not be a mode of a propulsion.

It is, though, and he moves. Very quickly. He stops six inches in front of me. I swear I feel a gust of air follow behind him.

He’s massive. Scales metallic and glistening, reflecting bits of starlight.

My heart is in my throat.

My fingertips tingling.

Shit.

“I didn’t mean to…offend you,” I stammer. My voice is so quiet I don’t know if he hears.

He plucks the translator from his own neck and extends it toward me. There is an icepick sized needle in the center. Aimed at my forehead, moving toward my helmet. Toward the thin layer of glass separating me from space.

“Wait!”

A flash.

Unbelievably bright light. Destabilizing. I squeeze my eyelids closed but the hot, yellow brightness surges through the skin like it was nothing.

“Greez-boro”

His voice. The growling, tumbling roar. The vibration moves through me.

“Open eyes.”

The words I hear are not the words I actually hear. My ears hear his voice. His real voice. But I can tell what he’s saying. It’s effortless.

I open my eyes.

“Peek,” he says.

Light is everywhere. Shimmering golden neon of incredible brightness. Ropes and ribbons and streams of it, coursing in every direction. There are cords the length of bridges and the thickness of tree trunks. Between our bodies run threads as fine as fishing line, zipping past us and into the void. Hundreds of thousands of light-lines cascade around us in a forest of glowing fibrils.

We stand in the tangle, completely engulfed by it.

The longer I stare, the more out of focus it becomes. Like staring into a lightbulb filament, my vision is burning out.

“I don’t understand,” I say. It’s barely a whimper.

“Your ‘The Ring’ is not of first,” he says, each word rolling thunder. “Will not be the last. But it will not hurt you.”

“What is this?” I say. “What am I seeing?” Tears are welling in my eyes, only in part from brightness tipping into pain.

“Seeing of the Ring was our fault,” he says. His voice is plodding, but ginger. “It was…”

He pauses.

I don’t count the seconds.

“It was too big of a ‘boo.’”

My eyes move to the spike in my helmet. Passing through the glass without disturbing it. The tip barely grazes my forehead. The faintest warmth at the point of contact.

“We give you an apology, little larva,” he says. “Please share it.” He reaches a hand, gripping the end of the translator. “We will let you grow a little older.”

Everything snaps out of view.

The infinite lights.

The Thing.

It’s all gone. There are only the stars. They are imposters in their dimness. No afterglow in my vision. No blurring to blink away. I am alone, tethered to my ship.

A soft, female voice chimes in my helmet. “Power at 95%. Solar panels charging.”

A ding.

My microwave has turned back on.