THE FLUID

I awoke in a shiny metal room where the walls bounced soft white light into every corner and way up to the ceiling. The ceiling was as high as a skyscraper. The room was empty except for some crates made of the same metal. The room was as big as a basketball stadium. On one wall was a door 50 metres tall. It was closed.

I got up and stretched. I’d woken just outside the door of one of the crates. Five metres tall, maybe. The floor of the crate was padded. I sat down on it and waited.

I waited and waited. After a few hours a hatch in the crate opened and a brown lump about the size of a chocolate bar popped out. I ate it. I guess it was food. 

I waited longer. The light never changed. My pockets were empty so I couldn't tell how much time was passing but I must have been awake for more than a day. I cowered in my crate. Night never came. I didn’t want to fall asleep. 

When I woke up again there was a tall creature standing over me. It had light golden fur and long arms and legs. It had a tiny skull and two huge eyes. It looked like a fucked up person. “Christ almighty,” I said.

It looked at me kindly. “I am an alien,” it said. 

“And you can talk English,” I said. “Sure.”

It smiled. “You won’t be able to comprehend how it is that I can communicate and you can understand me,” it condescended, “so I won’t try. Wouldn’t you like to know where you are?”

I did like to know where we were. “We are on a spaceship,” the alien said. “It is a multi purpose spaceship. One of its purposes is scientific research. You are a specimen it is bringing back to its home system in the Andromeda Galaxy. You have been asleep for one month. In that time it has travelled more than one trillion kilometres. Your sun is a fleck of dust in the wind. Unfortunately, you will never see planet Earth again.”

I stood up and took a swing at the son of a bitch. “Take it easy,” the alien said. “I am a specimen too. This is the specimen room.”

It really took the wind out of my sails. I sat down on the soft crate floor. “We have to escape,” I told the alien. “Next time they come in here we’ll jump them. We’ll make them take us back to our homes.”

He smiled again. He had a creepy little fucked up mouth. He needed dental work, by Earth standards. “We can’t jump them,” he said. “They are 40 metres tall and covered in a gelatinous poison. I have only seen them once. Two of them came in here to perform, I believe, a mating ritual. When they add a new specimen they gas us to sleep. If anyone misbehaves their nutrient bar is made unpalatable with bitter chemicals until they behave again.”

“Well, what about when we get to their home planet?” I ask. “We’ll find an opportune moment, take something valuable hostage and negotiate our return.” 

The alien looked gloomy. “We will never see their home planet,” he said. “I have been in the specimen room for 600 Earth years. They are waiting for the right time to preserve me. They will take my preserved body home to their planet.”

“What do you mean, ‘preserve’?” I demanded. “Preserved how?”

He sighed. “When you have matured you will be preserved in fluid,” he said. “Come and see.” 

He walked over to one of the high metal walls. At chest height there were two tiny holes, side by side, each about the size of an M&M. I peered through. The holes went right through to the next room. It was hard to see much but I could see what seemed to be an Earth goose suspended in clear fluid.

I went and sat back down in my crate. It was a lot to think about. When my nutrient bar popped up I nibbled it to see if it was bitter but it was fine. I ate it and got an early night.

When I woke up I was devastated. It was a bad time for me. I was in tears. I howled at the alien, whose name was Gnarf, it turned out. I beat my fists on the wall of my crate. I screamed until my throat was hoarse. I screamed so much another alien came out of its crate. It looked like a big wet lizard and crawled around on six legs. It tried to lick my eyes until Gnarf told it something in its own language and it slunk back where it came from. My nutrient bar that day tasted like someone had dumped a bunch of raw onion in it.

The next day Gnarf was asleep. And the next day. He actually ended up sleeping for about 10 years. He told me later that that’s how his species was so long-lived. 

Anyway. I went off the deep end. I hadn’t realised how much Gnarf meant to me until he was gone. Isn’t it always the way. For the next month I cried and screamed and cried. I didn’t bash my head against the wall more than a couple of times because the flavour in the bar after I did that was absolutely fucked. I started keeping track of the days by adding greasy fingerprints to the shiny metal wall. It was the only method of writing I had.

To be honest, the first six months were rough. The first year, frankly. After the first five years I started to level out a little bit. I started to experiment a bit. I did exercises. I ran and jumped and did push ups and handstands. I got fit and strong. I tried to remember every song and story I could and I recited them out loud as dramatic monologues. The lizard alien loved them. Her name was Zzzzyyzzzzsss. Zzzzyyzzzzsss would come and curl up in front of me when I performed them and try and lick my eyes affectionately when I got to the end. Once I actually let her. It was fine. Not for me.

Over time I realised Zzzzyyzzzzsss’s appearance was changing. Her soft skin was getting harder and thornier. One morning I woke up and there was a glass tank in the middle of the floor. Zzzzyyzzzzsss was in it. Floating in fluid. She was a fantastic specimen, I had to admit. Seeing her like this - suspended in three crystal clear dimensions - I saw the value of the fluid preservation. She had matured, and they had preserved her.

Without even Zzzzyyzzzzsss to keep me company it became harder to get up in the morning. I ranted in my crate. “How do you expect me to reach maturity without any stimulation?” I ranted. “I’m all alone, there’s nothing to do, I get the same nutrient bar every day. It’s not fair!”

Hours later a new hatch opened and an alien book popped out. It was the size of a human door. It was filled with strange pictures of creatures and places from the aliens’ homeworld, I assumed. I read it and reread it. Eventually I masturbated to it. They gassed me and took the book away.

It turned out they hadn’t only gassed me to take the book away. There was a new alien in the room. It had the proportions of a guinea pig and the size of a buffalo, with huge segmented moth eyes and a weird little beak. It kept to itself. It was only in there for about 6 weeks before it went in the fluid. 

More aliens came. A sensitive, friendly giant centipede whom I adored. A creature who looked remarkably like Chewbacca. A loudmouth prick from a planet called Hanto who had big jowly baleens to catch insects and who whinged constantly about his nutrient bar. They all reached maturity and went in the fluid. 

For about a year it was just me and sleeping Gnarf. When he woke up I told him about everything that had happened. He seemed to only vaguely remember me at first. As he fully woke up he became more interested. He apologised for not telling me about his hibernation. He listened with interest to my descriptions of the other aliens. After a while he clicked his long, soft fingers. “Say,” he said, “did I ever show you this?”

He shuffled over to a patch of wall that, up close, looked shinier than the rest. He touched it twice with his hand and it dissolved into a window on the space outside, colours shining and refracting as we hurtled along faster than light, bright flashes as we zipped around stars, fizzing interference as we pelted through asteroid belts. “You’re saying,” I said evenly, “that I could have had something to look at for the last 10 years?”

He nodded cheerfully. I beat the shit out of him. I smashed his head into the floor so hard he went into a mini hibernation. He woke up a few months later. My nutrient bar tasted like shit the whole time but I didn’t care. I’d had stars to watch. 

Gnarf apologised for not telling me. I forgave him. We settled into a routine. He helped me train my body and mind. I engaged him in “psychic combat”, which was supposedly how he matured, although I didn’t do anything except stare in his eyes and put up with a mild buzzing inside my skull. I felt myself becoming tougher and shrewder. I knew I was approaching maturity. I accepted that someday soon I wouldn’t wake up at all, but would take my place in the room of fluid tanks to be probed and researched by the alien scientists on the return to their homeworld, to perhaps, in some small way, contribute to intergalactic understanding. I found peace in this acceptance. For the first time in over a decade, for the first time, perhaps, since my last day on Earth, an ordinary day in which I’d jogged around the park with my friend Christo and eaten fried rice for lunch, I felt content.

But that day didn’t come. I just kept waking up. Day after day I’d wake up. Train body, eat bar, go to sleep. Gnarf entered another period of hibernation. Then one more. When he woke up again I was 73 years old.

“Gnarf,” I wailed. “I can’t do this much longer.”

One day a few years after that Gnarf found his way to the fluid. I stood, wheezing and rheumatic, one hand against the glass, to farewell my buddy. My Gnarf. It had been 50 years of me and Gnarf and now he was gone. His big brown eyes stared vacantly past me. I wept bitterly. I wished for a way to pay tribute to him and wrote a poem in fingerprints on the wall. It was crap. I rubbed it off.

Other aliens came and went. I turned into a withered old man. I had once craved fried rice and the friendship of Christo but the cravings were beaten from me by the monotony of routine. I replaced them with a craving for death. Now I raged for it. Maturity? I’d reached my maturity and these alien goons had squandered it. The anger ate at me. The decades of training Gnarf and I had put in. I had turned myself from a below average slob into a god. A perfect Adonis. Brilliant, physically perfect, a compelling performer, a psychic warrior. I was outraged for Gnarf, too. I was his legacy. And now I was falling apart.

One night as I slept I dreamt I was hovering. I hovered out of my crate, up to the ceiling, through an invisible hatch. I realised I wasn’t dreaming. I touched down on a cool metal table, vast and featureless. Slowly, half a dozen giant, gelatinous aliens gathered around me. They hunched over to peer at me. They talked in slow rumbling sounds, like whalesong but deeper. I huddled fearfully until I realised the worst they could do was kill me and that was just fine. “Hey,” I shouted hoarsely, “fuck you!”

They laughed. I could tell that sound just fine. One of them spoke. “Fuck us?” it said. “Fuck you.”

I laughed at that. It was a pretty funny moment, I had to hand it to them. “What kept you?” I wheezed. “I reached maturity years ago. Why have you let me linger for so long?”

“Years work differently for us,” one said. “It may have been an age for you, but for us it was almost no time at all.”

“Also,” it added, “we really needed an old guy. We had already preserved someone of normal human maturity. We wanted a specimen of someone way past their prime. You were perfect,” it said.

Then I dropped into the fluid.