Sample chapter -- Charlie MacNamara

As any decent stargazer will tell you, you can’t do it in the city.  You can’t do it in a town, really, not properly. Too much light  pollution. No, to properly see the stars, you have to wait for a  moonless night and head out far from any electric light source and wait  for your eyes to adjust and then, then you could see the majesty of the  heavens.

I’m a stubborn person, so I had to have casual  beers with three different groups of over-enthusiastic stargazers and  amateur astronomers and spend quite some time on google before actually  accepting the necessity of leaving the kids with Kate and driving out  into the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere for my precious photographs. Now, a  sensible artist would’ve just changed the focus of their piece. Or  borrowed a telescope from one of those hobbyist friends and used that to  make some kind of point about technology helping the appreciation of  spiritual beauty or something. They might even have constructed  something to block the light around the camera and give it a clear shot  of the stars from within the city. But not me. No, I had to go for the  pure shot. I had to be high-achieving. I had to treat a college  photography project that nobody was going to give a shit about as if it  were some deep statement about the purity of all art. I had to see and appreciate what I wanted to photograph, for some stupid reason.

I  know, I sound bitter. I wasn’t actually this regretful when I drove  out, even thought it was cold and I was bored because all my friends had  found better things to do than drive with me for three hours on a  Saturday night. When I was setting up my equipment, turning off  everything that had any kind of light, and puzzling over what exposure  times I should use for my shot series (I’ve never been much for planning  in advance), I still thought this was a great idea. Hell, even packing  it all away again after the twelve minutes of actual photography and  huddling down in my piece-of-junk car to close my eyes for just a quick  second before the drive back, I was feeling pretty good about the  project.

The regret didn’t hit until I woke up again.

I  woke in my car, which was unsurprising. The surprising part was that  the rest of the world seemed to have vanished around it, replaced with a  uniform pale yellow glow. After checking that I wasn’t dreaming and  that the engine was definitely off (I didn’t know the symptoms of carbon  monoxide poisoning and for all I knew they could include vivid  hallucinations), I took another look out through the windscreen, this  time trying to focus on more than just the thought What the fuck?  playing on loop in my head. Yep, pale yellow. Glowing. Uniform. There  was a sort of edge all the way around quite a ways below my eyeline, and  without much except the car for reference, it took a bit to force my  still-waking-up brain to parse what I was seeing: it was where the wall  met the floor. I was in a dome. I twisted to look through the back  window. Yep. Big empty dome. When playing with the rear view mirror  failed to provide any further information, I steeled myself and actually  got out of the car.

With my new, mobile vantage point, I was able to gleam that I was definitely inside a big dome, the walls and floor of which were a uniform pale yellow, and faintly glowing.

Okay then.

There  was no obvious door. So. What did I have? Limited information. A car. A  lot of cheap photography equipment on loan from the college, better be  sure to get that back. Laptop and phone, the normal pens and papers and  painkillers and coins that accumulate in any car, the clothes on my  back, half a packet of potato chips and a few starbursts left over from  my drive snacks, and a quarter of a thermos of cold coffee.

I drank the coffee.

Right. Okay then. Back to work.

Fancy  glowing and featureless space seemed pretty afterlifey to me, so  perhaps I was dead, but only if the afterlife was the schmaltzy home  movie version. I put that theory into the ‘maybe’ pile. Hilarious prank  seemed pretty far-fetched, too, because even if I had friends willing to  drive three hours out into nowhere to scare me, I certainly didn’t have  any who could afford a setup like this. You might be able to get glowy  plastic off ebay or something, but using it to build a huge dome and  move a car containing a sleeping person inside seemed like a pricey  endeavour. One of those prank TV shows? Didn’t they have release forms  and stuff you needed to sign?

The dome itself turned out  to be rather smaller than it had looked from inside the car. It was,  near as I could tell, somewhere between 10 and 15 meters wide. I touched  the wall. This yielded less information than one might expect. It was  vaguely staticky, so something electrical might’ve been happening in  there, but without being able to see or feel anything clearly, I  couldn’t tell if it was plastic or glass or what.

That  seemed like all the information I was going to glean from inside the  dome. Time to find the door. I closed my eyes against the glow, which  was starting to give me a bit of a headache, and paced around the room,  fingertips trailing gently along the wall. The static left my fingers  numb about a third of the way around, but only a few paces after  switching hands, I found the seam, barely more noticeable than the  stuck-down end of a roll of tape. There was no way I could get anything  under it to wedge it open. A key or a credit card just wasn’t going to  fit.

I rummaged through my miscellaneous car pens until I  found a black permanent marker and used it to outline the door. There, I  could keep track of where it was; that meant actually opening it could  be a later problem. It was barely wider than my car. I let myself  imagine a handful of drunk teens (hey, I had no idea who was responsible  for my current predicament, I could imagine them as drunk teens) trying  to very quietly push my old clunker through that door without scraping  the sides or waking me, and laughed. I briefly considered kicking at the  door. No… all of the available explanations for my situations fell into  two groups – one where kicking at anything was ineffectual or where  getting me to freak out was playing right into some idiot’s hands, and I  wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. I smiled to myself, trying to look  vaguely amused by what was going on, and sauntered back to my car.

I finished off my travel snacks.

I  was making my very last starburst last and mentally hating all of  photography in general and my life choices specifically when a loud thud  reverberated through my dome. Truth be told, it probably wasn’t  actually all that loud, but in a featureless space with nothing but my  chewing to fill the silence, it sure sounded like it was. Before I could  be properly irritated by this, a door opened. Not the door I'd marked  out; one further along the wall, where I hadn't checked after being so  damn pleased with myself for finding the first door. Beyond the door was  metal. An actual room of actual metal. On the off-chance that I was  being filmed for television, I tried to look calm and unphased as I got  smoothly out of the car and strolled over.

The room was  only about the size of a very small elevator. I could easily brace my  shoulders against one wall and touch the other with my feet if I wanted.  I stepped in, and the door closed behind me, looking like a piece of  featureless sheet metal indistinguishable from the others. The whole  room was made of panels of sheet metal, interspersed here and there with  dim LEDs. It looked like some kind of industrial cyberpunk nightmare on  a budget, but it was a step up from mysterious glowing. Looking up, I  realised that it was also a lot taller than an elevator. More like an  elevator shaft.

I did not have time to consider the  implications of this cheery thought before noticing a couple of rather  more concerning things. Firstly: I was getting lighter. This is a  difficult thing not to notice, no matter how stressful and confusing the  situation, and in my case was made all the more insistent by the fact  that some kind of force was pushing me into one of the side walls at the  same time. My chips and starbursts were sending insistent messages that  they regretted their recent pasts as much as I did and would very much  like to return to the open air, thank you very much; I was trying to  properly focus on denying this request when my feet left the floor for a  few seconds, before graciously agreeing to make friends with it again. I  hadn’t even intended to jump or anything.

I was still  getting lighter. Soon there wouldn’t be anything to persuade my feet and  the floor to maintain friendly relations at all. The sideways force  vanished, leaving me adrift in the shaft and barely touching the floor; I  pressed my hands and feet against the walls to hold myself down, and  fought the panic that was making me light-headed. Or was that  light-headedness the lack of gravity? I gulped for air.

This  was the point where I noticed that the air was pretty thin. This is  something that’s somewhat harder for the human body to make sense of  than a lack of gravity, but survival-wise, it was rather more  concerning. That was probably contributing to the light-headedness. It  was probably also contributing quite a bit to my panic, and thus  contributing secondarily to said light-headedness, but hey, I’m not a  doctor.

I pushed hard on the door to the glowing room – at  least, I assumed it was the door; I could easily have lost track  between it and the other bits of identical sheet metal – but it wouldn’t  budge. I looked for another way out. Up above me, the top of the shaft  seemed to be open; I pushed off the floor and launched myself skyward.

Now,  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if I was in an area  with low air pressure and no gravity, then heading for an opening would  put me, at best, in an area with low air pressure and no gravity. It  would not solve my problem so much as potentially introduce new ones,  such as the lack of handy nearby walls to hold myself in place, and  quite possibly dangerous pointy things and/or the ire of anyone who  intended for me to stay in the shaft. But I think I can be forgiven for  not thinking straight at this point.

I was not forgiven  for not jumping straight, at least not by the shaft walls. I slammed  into them three times on my way up, like a bowling ball rolled down a  bumper lane by a severely concussed child.

It is an appropriate metaphor, okay? I hit my head on the way up.

The  shaft was only about 15 metres high, which is still way too far to be  freefalling face-down through a narrow steel tube (you think that  jumping in zero gravity feels like moving up? It doesn’t). I  hadn’t put very much force into the jump, so when I rose (fell?) above  (below?) the open mouth of the elevator shaft, realised far too late  that there was nothing to grab, and smacked right into the opposite  surface, I didn’t immediately die of befuddled stupidity. I was even  smart enough to grab at the lip of the shaft when I bounced back down in  that direction.

Go me.

Okay. Time to look around. Get my bearings. I found my phone, which thankfully wasn’t broken, and turned the light app on.

I was in a tube.

I  can’t really think of a better way to describe it. You could call it a  corridor, I suppose, if there was gravity, but it was round and long and  made of rings of something white and smooth. Some kind of fancy  plastic, I assumed. Each “ring” was about two metres high (that is, the  corridor was about two metres high), and about five metres long. Every  three rings or so was a square hatch door with what looked like a car  door handle, all currently closed, none of them seeming to agree on what  part of the tube the floor was.

My elevator shaft had a  hatch. I conscientiously closed it. I wasn’t too worried about being  able to find where I was parked; my ingenious forethought in jumping up  the shaft had left some clear blood smears where I’d busted my lower lip  open on the wall above the hatch. So long as I still had the light of  my phone, I’d be fine.

I checked the charge. Eighty per cent. Yeah, I was fine.

It  was at this point that I figured it was probably a good idea to face  reality. I was in the middle of a hotshot escape, and the idea of this  being a TV show prank was starting to look pretty unlikely. No, one  somebody starts playing with the gravity and the atmosphere… well, at  that point, the list of possible scenarios gets pretty damn small. I  felt stupid for thinking it, but… I had to say it. I made myself say it.

“Aliens,” I hissed through my teeth. “Fuck.”

With  that little detail out of the way, I turned my attention back to  looking for an exit. I swept my light down the tube one way; it opened  into some kind of confusing network of bars and pipes. Perhaps not the  best destination for somebody who couldn’t navigate an empty shaft. I  turned and swept the light in the other direction, which gave me my  first glimpse of the shadow person lurching towards me.

It  was taller than me, about two metres tall – I could tell because its  head touched the top of the tube-corridor and seemed to sort of spread  out, leaking out along the sides like an otherworldly shadow bleeding  into our narrow, circular reality. Its feet bled into the scenery where  they touched it as well. If it had stood still, it probably would have  looked like a vaguely odd silhouette, with arms a bit too long and legs a  bit too thick and no apparent hands or feet, but it moved, and it moved  wrong. I couldn’t tell you how, but knees and elbows didn’t  bend right. The weight didn’t transfer right. Even squinting down a  corridor in bad light I could see that.

Now, at this  point, I was not in what you might call my most stable state of mind.  The lighting changes and narrow shafts was giving me somewhat of a  horror movie vibe. I was gasping in the thin air, unable to tell if I  was suffocating or hyperventilating or both, I’d just taken a couple of  sound knocks to the head and face, and my heart felt like it was trying  to learn to pole dance inside a ribcage that was too narrow and kept  getting clumsily kicked. If the universe or a god or even my own damn  body had had any shred of mercy, it would have let me pass out. But it  did not. For some reason my body decided that survival was more  important than my own precious little feelings, and I was up, shot full  of adrenalin.

Now, adrenalin is a great thing. It’s saved  many a person from enemy spears or big tigers or whatever people used to  have to use it for in the old days. But the ability to focus more  keenly on the approaching horror was not an ability I particularly  relished, a slight strength boost is a terrible thing to give somebody  who’s had less than two minutes to learn how to move in zero gravity,  and if my limbs weren’t already shaking, they definitely were now, which  made grabbing the hatch I’d recently closed and launching myself as  fast as I could out into the tube and away from that thing an even more  difficult task. I did not want to go banging into the walls again; I  wanted to zoom smoothly out of the end of the tube and into the area  with bars and things and grab onto one and… and figure out what to do  next from there.

Physics, as it turns out, didn’t care  what I wanted. What physics cared about was that the corridor was quite  long and my aim wasn’t great. It introduced me to the tube walls a few  more times before dumping me into a wide open space filled with the  pipes of all sizes that I’d glimpsed. They crossed the room, stretching  to walls that I wasn’t going to waste time trying to make out with my  phone light when I should be fleeing for my life; I put the phone  between my teeth and snatched for the nearest one that was small enough  to grab.

The pipe shuddered alarmingly as it stopped my  flight, but held. My phone slipped from my teeth, clattering away into  the darkness. It occurred to me that I had grabbed the pipe without  knowing how strong it was, what was inside, or indeed whether it was  going to burn the skin off my hand. Fortunately, it hadn’t.

Okay, now what?

A  shadow being was hunting me through a shitty factory-style FPS  environment, in the dark. I couldn’t really move; walking was out of the  question and I wasn’t going to blindly jump into the darkness and hope  to slam bodily into another pipe. At most I could slide back and forth  along my pipe, but this struck me as monumentally pointless. I hadn’t,  I’d noticed, passed out, despite the thin air, and my heart’s acrobatics  had nothing to do with actual physical activity, of which I’d done very  little. I was… probably fine, until the shadow thing caught me. I did  need to piss though. That could wait.

It would have to,  because something was approaching. A clear beam of light cut through the  darkness, turning the pipes around me into a cluster of sharp angles  and moving, segmented shadows. The light didn’t hurt; I hadn’t been in  the dark long enough to properly adjust. Forcing myself to try to calm  down. I leaned out from my pipe until I could see the source.

It  was the shadow creature. It had a glowing head now, a bright  searchlight right in the middle of its fucking face sweeping the area as  it swung from pipe to pipe with its arms like a monkey. Those arms  would whip out like tentacles, wrap around a pipe and draw it closer,  then release and approximate the shape of a human arm again until they  once more had to whip out. Its head turned… no, nothing turned, the neck  didn’t move like a neck. The light just migrated around the head, until  it was pointed at me.

Oh, FUCK no.

I  turned, looked for a new pipe, but… then what? I was fleeing from the  only light source, and I couldn’t really escape to anywhere. I had the  vague notion of finding an escape pod or something, but it was becoming  clear that I wouldn’t even know what one looked like, or how to program  it to go to Earth, or even how to launch it. No, there was only one way I  was going to be able to get rid of this fucker.

I turned back. I aimed my jump very carefully. He was getting closer, so close that I couldn’t possibly miss.

I leapt, snarling, hands closing around a throat. Hands moving straight through  a throat. I plunged straight through the figure, bits and pieces of  something sticking to me as I hurtled for the wall and was able to grab a  pipe at the last minute, lit by the head-light which had followed my  movement. In that light, I was able to see that I was a scant couple of  metres from the long tube corridor. I was also able to get a closer look  at the bits of the shadow-thing that had clung to me. They were not  shadow, but something small and hard, with very black wings. Moths? No.  No, they were tiny winged spiders, each about a centimetre long,  clinging to my arms and face and neck. I roared in surprise and brushed  them off firmly. I did not, no matter what anyone might think, shriek in  terror and start smacking at my arms and waving my hands ineffectually  in front of my face, losing my grip on my pipe. You can’t prove  otherwise.

The rest of the spider-being was quickly beside  me, pulling me safely into the corridor. The spiders on me joined the  main mass, apparently picking up on my subtle little hints that I might  prefer some personal space. The light dropped out of its head to be  caught by its stumpy, too-long arm, sinking into the spider mass like a  spoon dropped into pudding. The spiders held it out to me.

It was my dropped phone. The screen wasn’t even cracked.

I  took it. Then I took a long hop backwards, grabbing at hatch cover  protruding from the tube wall to avoid just stupidly floating away.

“Thanks,” I said, to break the awkward silence. I cleared my throat. “So, uh… hello.”

“Hello,”  the mass of spiders repeated in my exact voice. I blinked. The mass  hadn’t opened any sort of mouth or anything. It had just… made sound.  Somehow. Sound emanated from somewhere in the spider cloud, and I wasn’t  about to get close enough again to tell where.

I thumped my chest. “I’m Charlie,” I said. “Char-lie.” Best to start with the basics.

“Hello Charlie,” the spiders said. “I am interpret.”

“You are interpret?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

The  spiders hesitated. There was a faint rustling of some kind in the  spider mass. I felt like I should know the sound but it was pretty low  on my list of priorities right then. “I am the interpreter,” the mass  corrected.

“Oh. Well then. Good.”

The interpreter rustled again. “Are you hurt?”

“No.” I brushed my busted lip. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal. I, uh… did I hurt you?”

“No.”  The interpreter paid no attention to a dead spider that drifted past it  at that particular moment. “I mean, nothing that won’t heal.” A pause,  more rustling. “Can we stop fighting?”

I nodded. My heart  was settling down for the first time in what felt like forever, and  while I wasn’t too happy about the air pressure, I seemed to be getting  better at the gravity. I grinned wide, ignoring the pain in my lip. Pain  didn’t matter; not when I was just realising that I was about to have  to say something I’d always wanted to say.

“I come in peace,” I said. “Take me to your leader.”