Playing Host to the Zidani

This short story was commissioned by Christian and written by Vanessa Foxe (breedorbebred)

* * * * * * * * * *

"Wait, he was sleeping with Jessica, too?" The look on Mara's face as she spoke was a mixture of sympathy for her longtime friend's plight, and disgust at her friend's ex-boyfriend's sheer gall. Her red, wavy hair bobbed as he shook her head derisively. She had never liked what's-his-name. "What a piece of shit."

Lisa, for her part, just looked sad. The tall blonde had started the evening with an attitude of defiance towards her loser of an ex... but after a few glasses of wine, that false bravado had drained away and left behind just the feelings of betrayal, bitterness, and rejection.

"Yeah, he was sleeping with his stupid, slutty receptionist," she sighed. "What a fucking cliché."

Despite Mara's initial dislike of her friend's boyfriend--now ex-boyfriend, Lisa reminded herself-- Lisa had thought of him as quite a catch. He was tall and handsome, charming and intelligent, not to mention his being a fairly successful lawyer. But then she'd found the sexual texts on the phone he had accidentally left unlocked. When she had accused him over the elicit messages, the whole truth had come out: her boyfriend, who she had thought was the love of her life, was a serial cheater.

Ever the pillar of emotional support, Mara squeezed her friend's hand even tighter. Lisa couldn't even remember when Mara had grabbed her hand, but wasn't surprised-- Mara had always been the more touchy-feely of the two of them.

Where Lisa had been more interested in her studies and grades, Mara spent more time looking outwards. Lisa hadn't had a boyfriend until the last few months of high school, and had only dated one or two guys while they were in university. She'd watched in a mixture of respect and envy over the years as her red-headed friend had flitted from guy to guy-- and even a girl or two.

"You'll find someone better," Mara promised. She looked straight into Lisa's icy-blue eyes as she spoke, trying to force her words to sink into her friend's skull. "You're smart, clever, and kind. Plus, you're a hot blonde who's like seven feet tall. They'll line right up for you. And the best way to get over a guy is to get under another."

Lisa laughed at that, a smile finally returning to her tear-streaked face. "I'm, like, a hair over six feet. And that's not as much of a perk in the dating world as you might think. Guys don't like it when women are taller than them."

"I wouldn't know," Mara shot back.

In a lot of ways, Mara and Lisa were a study of opposites. Mara was short where Lisa was tall, heavyset and curvy where the other was slim and athletic, and outgoing to Lisa's introversion. But their differences had only brought them closer. Lisa had always been able to provide sound advice to her more impulsive friend, while Mara had managed to coax Lisa into coming out of her shell over their decade or so of friendship. Now, as they sat on the too-plush couch in her small home, Mara worried her friend was going to pull back into her shell all over again.

"I don't think I want to date again anytime soon," the blonde whispered into her half-empty wineglass.

"Then take some time away from the dating scene. Fuck 'em." Mara took a deep sip of the fruity red wine to punctuate the statement. "We're only twenty-five, babe. We're too damn young to be worried about tying ourselves down for the rest of our lives."

The other woman sniffed and nodded, dutifully smiling at her friend's attempt at encouragement. "Yeah. Fuck them."

"I'll drink to that," Mara declared happily, and the two clinked their glasses lightly together before draining them. "Do we have another bottle?"

"No, no more for me. I'm tapped."

"Oh, boo," the red-head teased. "Do you want to at least finish the movie?"

The two turned to the large flat-screen that dominated Mara's living room. It showed a girl looking up at some generically handsome man with big, dewy eyes. It was the big love confession scene in some cheesy romcom Mara had put on to cheer her friend up. She'd paused the movie when Lisa had suddenly started bawling... an hour ago? Maybe two?

"Yeah, sure, Mar. I'm just dying to see how it ends."

That much was a joke. While Lisa had enjoyed the over-the-top cheesiness of the film, it wasn't exactly a mystery what would happen next: the protagonist would declare her love, the bland and handsome love interest would sweep her up into a big kiss, and the orchestra would play some stirring music. Happily ever after, roll the credits.

Things always worked out in the movies.

Mara could sense her friend's obvious detachment and lingering sadness, but there wasn't much more she could do for her tonight. Sometimes you just had to let someone cry the emotions out. She pressed play, and they watched in silence as the pretty little actress confessed her love.

Just as the man acting across from her leaned in for the Big Kiss, there was a sudden popping noise and everything went black.

"Oh, son of a bitch," Mara cussed at the sudden power outage. "Right now? Seriously?"

"How will we ever know how it ends?" Lisa joked, earning a snort from her friend.

"These old houses have the worst wiring, I swear."

The two women patted the space around them, looking for their phones. Who needs readily accessible flashlights around the house when everyone has a cellphone with a flashlight function?

Lisa found her phone first, and clicked the button on the side to turn on the screen. She frowned in the unbroken darkness as the screen's light failed to materialise, and clicked the button a few more times. When that failed to yield a useful result, she held the power button down to restart it. Nothing.

"What the hell?" Lisa muttered at her obviously-dead phone. "I just charged you this morning."

Beside her in the darkness, Mara had also managed to locate her phone and was having a similar lack of luck. The battery was so depleted that the phone didn't even display the "low battery" symbol when she tried to turn it on.

"Any luck with your phone, Lis?" Mara asked, although based on Lisa's unhappy grumbling, the answer was fairly obvious. "Okay, I'm going to look for a flashlight. Hold on a moment."

Lisa was all too happy to let her friend go off in search of a light. While she'd spent a lot of time in this house over the years of friendship she'd shared with Mara, she didn't know the space half as well as her friend. Mara had grown up in this home, after all.

Mara moved with deliberate slowness, stretching out her foot to feel around before taking a step. The last thing she wanted was to bash her shin into a piece of furniture. At least her childhood home wasn't large, so it would be a short trip from the living room to the kitchen where she kept an old flashlight in a drawer full of the extra cooking utensils.

If either woman had been sober, they might have been more alarmed by the fact that both of their phones were dead. Lisa's cell had been at twenty or thirty percent battery life, and Mara had just been charging hers while they played cards before they'd settled in for a movie. But neither was fully clear-headed, so they didn't consider how impossible it was for a simple power outage to affect handheld devices. Mara, in her slightly intoxicated state, thought the biggest danger in the house was bumping into a table and bruising her knee or shin.

She was missing the bigger picture, as she so often did.

Lisa was the first to understand their danger. While the house was utterly powerless, there was still some ambient light. The curtains in the next room weren't drawn, and a bit of refracted light made it to where she was sitting. It wasn't much light, but it was just enough to make out a slightly deeper shadow amidst the darkness. It moved-- how was something moving when there was no power in the house?-- shifting towards her.

By the time she realised that the shadow was actually a silhouette and that the two women weren't alone in the house, the form was on her. Lisa drew in a breath to scream, right at the same time as the slight hissing noise of a pressurised canister releasing a gas.

Whatever chemical or drug she inhaled worked almost instantly, and the scream Lisa had been preparing to let loose came out instead as a long sigh. She slumped forward and fell from the couch, but gentle hands caught her before she could go face-first into the floor. The whole encounter took no more than a second or two, and the shorter woman was so distracted by drunkenly patting down her counters to find the right drawer that she didn't hear a thing.

This other entity, having laid out the first of the two victims on the floor, ghosted towards the kitchen's doorway. Unlike the two vulnerable targets, darkness seemed to be no obstacle for the intruder.

Through sheer determination, Mara found the right drawer. She pulled it open and sorted through the contents with two hands, finally settling on the comfortably familiar shape of a flashlight. It was just one of those cheap ones that took a couple of small batteries and had half a dozen LED bulbs, but it would be perfect.

She pushed the drawer closed, or at least tried to. It bounced back open, and did the same when she shoved it more aggressively. She pictured a whisk or soup ladle standing on its side and blocking the drawer from closing, and quietly swore. After a second of frustration, she decided she didn't care anyway-- the drawer could wait until the morning when she'd slept off the bottle of wine.

"Lisa?" she called out into the darkness. After a moment without an answer, Mara rolled her eyes. "Did you seriously pass out in the middle of a power outage? That is so typical. I swear, if you weren't--"

Unlike her friend, Mara never saw the shadowy shape. She didn't know they weren't alone until she felt a powerful hand grab her shoulder. The fingers were hard, strong, holding her in a vice-like grip. If she'd had better lighting and more time, she might have noticed that the fingers on said hand were shaped all wrong... and that there were one too many.

Instead, she hissed in a gasp of air that turned out to be an aerosolized tranquilliser. Her knees buckled immediately, but she didn't hit the ground. Despite her weighing more than her longtime friend, the figure had no problem catching Mara's weight.

The intruder hefted Mara into its arms and carried her towards the back door even as two more unseen figures entered from that direction. The two women were effortlessly removed from the home, and the door was even locked again from the outside. No one looking into the home would even notice any signs of struggles, except for one kitchen drawer left half-open and a dead flashlight laying on the ground.

The two women slept deeply, dreamlessly, undisturbed by the noises or lights around them.

It was Mara who awoke first, jolting upright in bed. She pushed aside the grey sheets, not even stopping to notice their luxurious softness, and looked around.

As she started moving, the room's built-in sensors detected her wakefulness and began increasing the ambient light.

There weren't any visible lights that Mara could see. Instead, the entire ceiling seemed to emit a gentle glow like one giant fluorescent bulb. She blinked and groaned as the illumination slowly increased. The slow introduction of light was a mercy in her slightly hungover state. She tried and failed to remember what she'd done last night... Everything after the power outage was a bit of a blank.

When Mara spotted her friend, she felt simultaneously relieved and worried. While it was good to see that Lisa had joined her on whatever late-night caper Mara had gotten herself into, it made no sense that the two of them would be staying in a room together on two separate beds. Mara's family home had only two bedrooms, and each of those had only one bed each. So, if they weren't at her house, where were they?

"Lis?" Mara called in a strained voice. She blinked in surprise at her hoarseness. Her immediate assumption was that she'd drunk too much and gotten rowdy enough to wear out her voice.

Her voice obviously being insufficient, Mara shambled unsteadily across the room to shake her friend awake. She was wearing the pair of pyjamas she'd put on before watching that silly romance movie with Lisa.

The taller woman snapped into sudden wakefulness, and the first sound she made was a scream. That was surprising enough that Mara screamed, too, although she didn't know what she was supposed to be afraid of. After a second, Lisa recognized her friend crouched over her, and lunged forward to hug her.

"Oh, God, Mar," Lisa stuttered between hyperventilating gasps. "Someone was in the house, someone attacked-- where the hell are we?"

"I don't know, babe." Mara rubbed her hand in circles on Lisa's back as she spoke, trying to coax her friend out of a panic spiral. For all that Lisa was the smarter of the two, it had always been Mara that was quicker to come up with a concrete plan to solve difficult situations. "But we're together. We're safe."

Taking those last two words as a cue, the room spoke. It would be more accurate to say that the microfilament mesh on one wall became taught and then vibrated, functioning as one massive speaker that projected a smooth, computerised voice. But for two mere humans who had never seen or heard of such technology, it may as well have been the room itself that spoke to them.

"Yes, you are safe," the soft, calm voice said.

While the point of origin was one entire wall across from them, the way the sound projected from such a wide surface at such a low volume had the effect of making it seem like the voice came from everywhere at once. In that way, it was a lot like the ambient light coming from above, which resulted from dim light projecting out of so many discrete points that it seemed like one monolithic, unbroken light source.

The women whipped their heads back and forth, looking for the speaker. All that they found was a plain room with four off-grey walls, two twin-sized beds with darker grey sheets, and a small steel-grey table with two matching chairs. There were no windows, no doors, no visible vents.

Certainly, there was no one in the room with them.

"Who's there?" Mara demanded in the boldest voice she could manage. Sure, she was terrified as hell, but she was doing her best to seem brave in front of her friend.

"I am this facility's Integrated Virtual Intelligence, or IVI," the omnipresent voice answered. The tone of voice was perfectly modulated to seem calm and reasonable, the better to promote confidence from the listeners. "If anthropomorphising me brings you comfort, you could pronounce those letters as 'Ivy'. I am here to see to your environmental needs and introduce you to your new home."

"Can you let us out?" Lisa asked at the same time as Mara shouted, "What the fuck?"

"While you are free to walk around and explore," the computerised Ivy answered, "it is not advised to do so until we have completed your orientation."

"I'm going to orient my foot into your ass!" the redheaded woman shouted at the ceiling. "Did you kidnap us? Are you the fucking feds?"

"What does she mean 'our new home'?" Lisa asked, clinging onto Mara like there was anything the shorter woman could do to help her. "Mara, where the hell are we?"

"I will answer your questions in sequence." The virtual intelligence was well aware of the two humans' increased agitation, and it modulated its voice to be quieter and even softer in response. While the system could have easily increased the volume to speak over the frenzied questions, it had determined that such an action would likely escalate the two women's aggression and further damage their trust. Thus, a softer approach was selected.

The light above shifted towards a gentle yellowish tone that was designed to feel less harsh and institutional, the change so slow that neither of the humans even noticed it was happening.

"First, we are not agents of your federal government," the IVI assured them. "We represent no institutions from Earth. This facility was constructed on a planet outside of your solar system. The actual name of our planet of origin is not easy or necessary for a human to pronounce, but 'Zidan' is a close approximation. The inhabitants of that planet are known as the Zidani."

As the inhuman voice explained its inhuman providence, the wall nearest to the women changed. Just like the filaments changing to create ambient light from above or vibrating to serve as a speaker, the micron-thin filaments on the entire wall illuminated in various colours to transform the entire surface into one massive screen. It was like going to the theatre and seeing a film on the big screen, except the wall display was being used to list key points as the VI explained.

First, the image of a large planet dominated the view. It was labelled "Zidan", and underneath that it said "The Zidani". The planet shrunk down to a fist-sized orb as the view zoomed out, showing a foreign solar system with only six planets. A dotted line emerged from the planet and crossed the length of the wall to make contact with a model of Earth's own solar system.

Had the images been shown at real scale, each solar system would be a nearly-invisible speck on the screen to illustrate the thirty or so light years that separate the two planets.

The screen also displayed a silhouetted figure against the dark blue background on one side of the screen. It was a vaguely human-like form-- a head, two arms, two legs. It was a bit too tall and too narrow to look completely familiar to the humans, however. It also had an additional pair of some squiggly-looking protrusions, but the image was too shadowy for the women to discern any details.

"What the fuck?" Mara asked again, whipping her face between the alien silhouette and the image of her own home planet. The system determined that this was a general exclamation, not a specific question, and elected not to answer.

"Second, we are located inside of an intergalactic transportation vessel. A spaceship, if you will." The image of the two solar systems shrunk down and was moved over to one half of the wall-sized viewscreen. In the newly-opened space, the computer displayed a picture of some sleek vessel that looked like it had been taken right out of the pages of a science-fiction novel. "Although this ship has been modified since landing to better serve as a stationary outpost for the time being. The site is located beneath your Pacific Ocean, approximately two miles from the shores of the American city of Los Angeles."

The image of the ship shifted as a watery-background was added to it, superimposed over a geographical map of the continental United States with a red circle denoting where the ship was located.

"We're under the ocean?" Lisa's chin was trembling as she spoke, but she refused to let her tears fall. None of this made sense! There had to be some mistake!

"Correct," the digital voice answered. The wall to their left suddenly changed into a massive screen as well, showing a depiction of the water outside of the ship. It was a deep, unrelenting blue, dim even in the middle of the day as little light could penetrate so deep. A large silhouette moved slowly across the top of the screen. "This is a real-time view from our location. The form at the top of your view is a member of Eschrichtius robustus, or a grey whale."

This image of nature was intended to calm the two women, but it had quite the opposite effect. The sight of unbroken ocean all around and pressing down only served to increase their anxiety, which the VI immediately determined based on biometric readings of their blood pressure, heart rate, and vasodilation. The oceanic image cut abruptly to be replaced by the simple grey-white wall once more.