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Olivia

I wake with a start, a jolt of panic coursing through me. I'm not in my bed. My body is bound, and I'm being carried like a sack of potatoes over someone's shoulder. A masked man. Fear grips me, then rage, and I struggle, but my movements are useless against the tight bindings.

"Let me go!" I scream, my voice muffled by the gag in my mouth. My heart pounds in my chest, a frantic rhythm of terror.

In my panicked thrashing, I catch a glimpse of Timothy. He's standing in the doorway, a smile playing on his lips. My heart sinks as I realize he's watching them take me away. My sister and other brother enter the room, see the commotion, raise their brows, but then roll their eyes and say nothing. They seem more content to converse with Timothy.

"Are you just going to let them take me? Help me!" I scream, but my voice is muffled by the gag, my words falling on deaf ears.

They ignore my pleas, their indifference cutting deeper than any blade. The front door swings open, and the cold night air hits my face. I'm dragged out, my screams swallowed by the darkness as the door slams shut behind me.

Tears blur my vision, the betrayal stinging worse than the ropes cutting into my skin. I'm thrown into a van, the door slamming shut with a finality that echoes through my soul. The engine roars to life, and the van lurches forward, carrying me away.

My mind races, trying to make sense of what's happening. Why would Timothy do this? What could he possibly gain from having me taken away? The questions whirl in my mind, but no answers come.

The van moves through the night, the vibration of the engine lulling me into a state of fearful resignation. I'm trapped, powerless to escape, and the only thing I can do is hope that somewhere, somehow, I'll find a way out of this nightmare.

I close my eyes, trying to shut out the reality of my situation, but the images of my siblings' cold indifference and Timothy's smile are burned into my mind. I've been betrayed by my own family, and the pain of that betrayal is more than I can bear.

The van comes to a stop, and the door slides open. Rough hands pull me out, and I'm dragged toward an unknown destination. The night is silent, the only sounds are my muffled cries and the footsteps of my captors.

I'm thrown into a small, dimly lit room, the door slamming shut behind me. The bindings are removed, and I collapse to the floor, my body aching from the rough treatment. The room is bare, with only a single chair and a small table. I crawl to the corner, curling into a ball as I try to make sense of what's happening.

The percentages don’t align.

Hours pass, or maybe minutes—it's hard to tell. The fear and uncertainty are overwhelming, and I can feel myself slipping into despair.

***

“Aliens,” I say, tasting the word. “Bugs,” I add, instantly knowing that word tastes like bile.

I sniff, remembering the new scent in my cell… but, no, it isn’t bile. I sniff again.

Or bug blood, either. I push down the surge of satisfaction. “Twelve bugs dead,” I sing-song.

I wait for the feeling of relief that usually bubbles up after enumerating, but nothing comes. No feeling of safety. No satisfaction. Numbers aren’t working on this damn ship.

One ship. Twelve dead aliens. Six by the throat. Three from pulling off enough limbs. Two from a crushed head chitin. One through the eyes.

But still… zero safety.

No satisfaction , I grumble internally.

Perhaps it is me having spent so long stuck with my own body and its variant smells and oozes in a confined space, but I am pretty sure there is something foul smelling about the cell I’m in. Something new, that is.

It's not an overpowering smell——and further, albeit demeaning, efforts to sniff myself have proven that I am not the culprit——so putting the smell out of my mind has become infinitely easier.

Well, that’s an exaggeration, the smell is still offensive to my nose but only about as uncomfortable as being stuck in a room with an undetectable source of rotten egg smell that just won’t go away.

Nothing too drastic, but it's the sort of scenario you could live with grudgingly.

Hmm. What could I live with un-grudgingly? Is that a word?

No.

“Doesn’t matter,” I chide.

Luckily I can still remember just about everything I’ve ever read, as much as it has served me well for the mind-wrecking periods of sound torture the bug-men have subjected me to. I can still hear the pinging echoing off the walls and my eye twitches at the memory.

Another one of my many woes since I got here.

I don’t want to think about it, though. “No. No. Remember what’s happening. Don’t let it slip,” I tell myself.

Alright. What has happened?

“Bug aliens,” I remind myself.

Eerily enough, I was quick to accept the fact that I have been kidnapped by aliens because what else could they be? Giant talking bugs that seem to have a bad case of indiscriminate grabbing of parts that have no business being grabbed without permission… yes, aliens.

Traumatizing, but clear enough to comprehend, and luckily their limbs are easy to snap so there is an outlet for my rage.

The next shock point was watching in numb horror as I was partly sedated and subsequently operated on to have my body modified to be as aesthetically pleasing as an oversexualized MAPPA-drawn anime character. Drawn specifically to fit the tastes of no-life pop culture addicts who spend more time digesting Kuroinu than should be legal.

I grab my newly shorn dark-brown hair, yanking it to center myself.

“Not legal,” I hiss out.

Again, mind rending, albeit less frightful and more existential, but still, fairly easy to comprehend and come to terms with. Even when they keep changing their minds and altering me again.

Which brings me to the recent routine I've more or less been subject to over the past couple of… days? Weeks?

I can’t believe I lost count. I should have that number, but I don’t. It makes me feel unmoored.

It’s hard to keep track of time when all you sleep and wake up to is the sight of acerbic lights that are every bit as invasive as the short, bug-like fuckers that brought me here in the first place.

The realization that I hadn't been the only one to be taken did help dull the panic of having to process everything in the brightly lit gray central hallway they allow us to stretch our legs in every now and then. Call it what you will, but there is something about collective misery that just makes the process all the more bearable.

I'd take my own thoughts on the subject with a pinch of salt though, I am no therapist or psychologist, despite the sheer volume of amateurish self-taught information I have on the topic.

Where am I going with this?

“Abduction,” I remind myself.

Right after the wholly nonconsensual body modification that we had been put through, it became apparent that not everyone's body reacted to the change positively.

By “everyone” I simply mean just me. My luck tends to be shitty that way.

Unlike the others, I had to go under the knife again and again. The first time I damn near went into anaphylactic shock barely a few hours after the sedatives wore off, and the second time I had to deal with frequent blackouts that had everything going dark when I was in the middle of something. By “something” I mean pulling books from memory or letting my imagination run freer than I would usually let it. And the next time I regained consciousness, I would be in a situation that was equal parts karmic as it was painful.

“Aliens,” I say, deciding the word tastes bitter and pungent. “Blood,” I mutter, deciding the word tastes sweet.

Revenge is sweet, they say.

The first time I blacked out, I woke up with a squad of the same bug-like aliens beating down on my stiff body as I throttled the last vestiges of life out of one of their own. The sod was already dead, its chitin-covered body having faded to a duller, pallid, purplish tone as its disgusting barbed tongue lolled out of the side of its stupid mouth on its stupid face.

The emotions I felt at that moment rapidly cycled from morbid curiosity, to surprise, to realization, to mild disgust from its fetid death rattle before settling on vicious glee at the realization of what I had just done.

I loved it.

I’ve hit plenty of people in my life, but I always held back. If I had known killing felt this good…

“Loved it. Loved it,” I repeat.

I only registered the assault my body was going through shortly after that epiphany, and the few minutes I spent curled into a ball as they capitalized on my sudden porousness to pain to beat me within what I was sure was a millimeter of my life.

They didn't kill me, though, and I’m not sure why. They must not place much value on their individual lives. Maybe it’s a queen and drone situation?

Ants. Bees. Alien bugs.

“Bugs. Bugs…” I trail off with a long susurration.

The punishment so far has been to limit my interaction with the others. What little time I spend with them is down to the few minutes of mute staring we get just before we are stuffed back into our cells. The rest of my time is spent in one room or the other being prodded, injected, studied, and in some truly twisted version of fate, having my fingers tightly wound around the neck of the next unfortunate piece of chitinous shit that had the fate of being stuck in the same room with me whenever I blacked out.

It feels so damn good , cathartic even to get my revenge in these small ways, not too major to warrant execution... somehow. Despite the dead bodies.

The nice little alien kill count I've wracked up since the beginning leaves me full of smiles no matter how long they spend leering at me from the observation deck with their stupid multi, concaved eyes.

I obey their instructions and allow myself to get stabbed full of vial after vial of panic-inducing substances. A good portion of that panic may or may not be due to the sheer size of the needle used to administer it.

I’ve learned how to placate them. Usually with crying and screaming.

So far so good, it has brought me less pain, and as any well-adjusted human in my current situation would…

How badly adjusted is not good? Thirty… ten… twenty percent.

“Five,” I announce.

It’s a no-brainer that less pain is better for my health than the pain that would come with stubbornly digging my heels in.

One of the other women, the one with creamy skin, and black hair, and a scowl that eerily reminded me of an unhinged animal being put in a cage, seemed to be the most stubborn of our mish-mashed bunch.

She didn’t last long.

Spitfire she may have been, but between the two of us, I like to think I’m making more headway in sticking it back to these psychos by playing the role of the weak, defective human that shies away from everything and cries harder than everyone else when subjected to even the most basic of bodily violations.

Well, until I choke the life out of one of them, of course. But I don’t say no.

Of course I don’t say no.

“Say yes. Say yes,” I nudge.

Not that bodily violations should be tolerated in any form.

“Zero percent,” I hiss out, the number not helping my mind settle at all. “Can’t say no.”

No. It shouldn’t be tolerated, but I like living. You’d think that after killing one of them that acting insane and apologizing wouldn’t work, but it does.

Misdirection. Directions are missed.

“Ninety-five percent,” I disagree. “Not five.”

That article three years ago said that I'd struggle with making my point if I did not outgrow my timidity.

What a load of bull… bull that suddenly makes me aware that I have been silently repeating the same line in my head over and over again as my mind fills up the blanks provided by the silence with its own voiceover of memories past.

Memories… memories.

“Five percent,” I mutter.

My mind is on fire.

Five fires. One fire. Ninety-five fires.

There is plenty to occupy yourself if you have a memory as vivid as mine. The fact that I seem only to have gotten better at it in captivity is just another example of how fucked up I am. Just like they always said.

All the places she sent me to get “fixed.” Twenty-three places in the US. Eight in the UK. That one in Sydney. All the years living away from my only safe space. My room. It did no good.

“Cannot be reformed,” I quote from the files.

Formed and reformed.

I should form something new. That would be nice.

A good thought.

“Five and ninety-five,” I hiss out, then suck my teeth.

Any thought is easier to deal with compared to considering just what little remains of your sanity before it goes careening off the hills at over three hundred kilometers per hour.

“Formed and reformed,” I say in my best American accent. The one I used to blend in. Then switch to British, which I was never quite as good at. “Five formed. Ninety-five reformed.”

Sydney was nice.

" Pākehā have no right to moko ," I recite aloud from memory, more than happy to put all rationalizations of my possible insanity behind me.

I pause, tasting the statement in my mouth to make sure I got the pronunciation right before repeating it again, this time to better grasp the concept behind the message as opposed to its linguistic structure.

The words are just as bitter as when I say “alien.”

" Pākehā have no right to moko …"

It's a line I've recited multiple times, first to pass time and then to better digest its content, which I've been privy to after multiple read-throughs.

It's a dismissive statement, an absolute lodged in no doubt pre-contemporary superstition or something along those lines, and yet, I don't disagree.

Even though it always makes my heart sink.

I touch my chin, where I hoped one day to have the dark lines declaring who I am. Once I figured out what that means, of course.

It seems useless now.

It's a pipe dream—and I mean that in the literal sense that it is the sort of delusion you'd find only through repeated exposure to marijuana blowing——this obsession with solidifying identity that is.

Blame it on my existential crisis sponsored by my mind eating itself over…

What? Something. Some of a thing.

“Five of what?” I ask, jarring my memory.

Right. Whether or not I’m still the same person I was prior to the bodily modifications. That something.

“Classic ship of Theseus-type thoughts,” I titter.

But with the human flesh being the object of interest this time around, I muse . Five rounds of some.

Like my mind wasn't a confusing hot box of identity-based issues before now.

“Cannot be formed or reformed,” I remind myself, pulling myself back from my thoughts shattering.

I touch my chin again.

I don't want an empty symbol. I want a heritage, something to look back on just before I’m gone and die happy with the knowledge that it will live on long after I am gone.

“I’m already gone,” I clarify.

One and gone. Just one. Thing of sums. I won’t die happy.

I've read my fair share of self-help pieces advocating for individual identity or prestige amongst other flowery terms and descriptions, and while it was a good enough consolation for my teenage years, maturity did a good job disabusing me of that notion.

Humans, at our core, are more or less social creatures. The need to identify with a unique group of one's own was as much of a psychological need as it was a social one.

I cannot be reformed because I would prefer to not be part of that society.

Sum of none. One and gone.

“Alone,” I mutter. “One, not five. But am I two?”

Maybe two, but one is better. Safer.

I’m having a bit of trouble finding what group exactly I am supposed to be identifying with.

I'm half white, or pākehā , and half māori, if her hints are true.

“Ariki, Ariki,” I chant.

I know nothing of that second half of my heritage beyond what I read voraciously after she let out a hint.

Just one? One and done?

Just a small hint, but my features and all the odd looks suddenly make sense.

“Just one,” I decide.

I mentally set down the article as a yawn worms its way past my lips. How long have I been here?

I stare listlessly at the single observation window a good meter taller than me and I am unsurprised at seeing nothing but the reflected light bouncing off it.

They get sick of my muttering sometimes. It’s useful.

Technically speaking, the window is not the only potential exit in the room, there is a door… somewhere along the walls. It is the main entrance and has been the route through which they have brought me into the room repeatedly.

“Formed through which,” I say with a snicker.

Form of sum. One and gone.

Stupid door. It has a nasty habit of fading into the monochrome singleness of the room the moment it is shut, and subsequent efforts to pry it open had me pawing at the white walls like a loon until it became clear that the door had either completely disappeared or specifically been designed to become one with the wall to deter escape attempts.

Neat. Very neat. And stupid.

Suddenly it makes sense why the psychotic bugs from the slot above me haven't bothered to bother me despite my fiddling.

“Why does it make sense?” I ask, confused.

I lay down on my back and shut my eyes as a wave of exhaustion washes over me, but not one of sleep.

It’s been a while since I felt the urge to sleep without the compulsion of the containment chamber they stuff me into every... night? Is it possible to have night without a sun?

Sum of sun is none.

If nothing else, at least I'd be more alert to pay attention to what exactly my kidnap-mates spend their time doing before they go to sleep. If I could see them.

“I can’t see them,” I note.

Believe it or not, I haven't paid much attention to the other women prior to now, on account of my less-than-stellar mental state.

“Ninety-five reformed,” I remind myself.

No. No. Five.

My brain burns, and here I am shutting down again. I resist, but then let myself slip and tumble over the abyss of unconsciousness.

***

When I wake up, I hear the chittering. They like to come in when I’m unconscious.

“Just be still,” one of them says.

Say yes. Say yes , I remind myself.

But I can’t. This is new. There are too many of them. Far more than ever before and I just know they plan to kill me.

The fear starts to rise. They aren’t touching me yet and so there is no rage to help me. I get up from the cot shakily.

“I must not fear,” I recite. “Fear is the mind-killer.”

It recedes the moment the first pincher touches my naked skin, glorious rage filling the gap it left behind. I keep up the litany in between crushing whatever limbs are closest to me. The bugs pile against me, and I scream out my rage, fists and elbows flying.

“...there will be,” I punctuate the last word with an elbow to a chitinous throat, “nothing.”

I cry out, staggering when one lands a blow to my shoulder, then get my balance back and kick one of the fuckers right in the chest, the sound of it caving sending a fissure of ecstasy through me.

Then one of them finally manages to knock me off my feet and they rush me as I roar.

“ONLY I WILL FUCKING REMAIN,” I scream out, wriggling, but not able to move the sheer weight of dozens of them on top of me.

I’m panting when a new voice speaks. “She is perfect,” says someone in an oddly wet language. “I will transfer the credits now.”

I try to look past the writhing bugs, but then there is a stinging pain in my neck. Another needle. My vision blurs as I curse.

One and done. One and…

***

When next I open my eyes, I am back in my sleep chamber, mouth dry, remnants of tears sliding down my cheeks, and with a copious pink slime slathered all over my body.

It takes a moment of silence for my brain to catch up with that tidy little bit of info before I squeak in horror and proceed to scrape the offensive stuff off my person with reckless abandon.

I sincerely hope this came from my mind snapping and crushing bugs, anything other than that and I am going to curl up into the fetal position and cry.

I can’t get to my back because something is holding me in place.

Then I realize this is a different chamber.

There is a beep, and then I fall, my legs giving out beneath me. The ground rushes up to meet me, and I crash down hard. Pain shoots through me, but I can't focus on it. Something is in my lungs, burning and choking me. I try to cough it out, but my body is weak and unresponsive. Tears stream down my face, blurring my vision, but I can just make out someone rushing toward me.

She reaches me, her hands gentle but firm as she tries to help. Luckily I can’t move my limbs or I might kill her. Only bugs get that , I remind myself, my lips moving but no sound emerging.

My body is heavy, my movements sluggish, but I manage to expel the gas from my lungs, each cough a battle. A vent system whirs to life, and fresh air fills the room. I can finally breathe, and my vision clears enough to see her face. She's saying something, but it's hard to focus over the pounding in my ears.

Then it clears and I wish it hadn’t.

"Aren't they so delightfully powerless?" a voice says, and I flinch.

The creature I set my eyes upon looks nothing like the bugs I’ve been crushing over the course of the past couple of weeks… or months.

Unlike the scratchy, high chirping sounds those ones made, this one's voice is cruel and grating.

It's face and skin remind me a bit of a dolphin, albeit with the sort of consistency you'd come to expect from a slug, paired with three trunk-like legs akin to an elephant and the copious amounts of slime oozing all over. The perfect image for nightmare fuel.

I want to scream in fright, but it comes off as more of a pathetic whimper after an initial screech.

When I feel a surge of arousal, I know that I have truly lost my mind.

The woman beside me looks at me with a mix of unknown expressions. I want to scream again, to rage, but my voice is caught in my throat. The slug speaks again, and its words make my skin crawl.

"Just imagine them bent over like that for your own purposes."

Suddenly, I find my voice.

"OHFUCKYOUANDYOURPURPOSEYOUSLIMECOVEREDPIECEOFSHIT!"

The horror of it all hits me, and I can't hold back my voice from hurtling into a gibberish-filled scream. The woman grabs my shoulders and I barely restrain myself from lashing out, her voice urgent in my ear. "They won't stop pumping gas in here until you stop screaming. Just…" She doesn't get to finish before another wave of gas makes us cough.

When the air clears again, I'm making terrified moans, my throat raw. The slug keeps talking about our bodies, about how they'll be used. I can feel the woman's arms around me, her whispers trying to soothe me, her touch doing the opposite.

I had settled on the bug situation. I hate change.

Hate. Hate change.

The woman speaks again, interrupting my litany. "I have you. I know this is terrifying, but it only gets worse if you seem scared. They like it."

Tears are streaming down both of our faces now. "Wh-Where are we? What is that?" I manage to ask, my voice trembling.

"On a spaceship. Those aliens captured us," she says.

Spaceship. Another one? The words spin in my head, trying to make sense, and then I slap myself lightly to remind myself that the events of the past couple of days, weeks, or months are not a fever dream, and that I need to stop looning out before this lady figures I am a few bolts short of well-mounted engine block.

I look around, really seeing my surroundings for the first time.

Standing casket-like pods, very much similar to the pod I just fell out of, dominate the room with glass panels through which I see other women lying still, with their features stuck in various states. I look back at the woman, and something about her eyes catches my attention.

I look to my own reflection and see I’ve had a similar modification. Green eyes. Green hair. That’s new. A glance down at my body reveals I don’t have the giant breasts and healing scars the bugs gave me anymore. I look almost… normal.

My mind stutters and I look back at the woman.

"What did they do to your eyes?" I ask, stupidly, before almost kicking myself.

They did the same thing to your eyes dipshit , I screech internally.

I feel unmoored, but then with a start I realize that my thoughts are coming sequentially. They haven’t done that for a while. Not since they started drugging me.

The woman holds back a groan. Her eyes are a vivid shade of aquamarine, completely blue except for the black pupil. It's unsettling, unnatural, albeit beautiful in its own way.

She moves on to another topic before I can backtrack, and I hear the slug snigger something to his asshole colleague before an errant thought pings me at the fore of my mind.

I gesture vaguely at the slugs, careful not to make the motion too obvious. "Why can I understand it?"

Well-read I may be, but I'm pretty sure I never learned to speak snot alien. Or bug chitter, for that matter, but I was too drugged to wonder about it before.

"They put nanites in us that do lots of things, including somehow letting us understand and speak other languages," she explains.

I'd spent ages alternating between isolation and that bleak hall waiting for a crumb of info on what exactly was going on, but it's safe to say that I am not prepared for the info being piled on me.

Nanites. Languages. It's all too much.

Involuntarily, I feel myself one wrong exhale away from a shutdown and I can’t. The last thing I need from her right now is sympathy, so I push the rising panic back down.

"There's a live feed running at all times, and they like it when we watch it. Don't look at it because you'll be able to read the comments," she warns me.

I stare long and hard at the nonsensical-looking strings of characters that pop up in the comments bar and sure enough, I can read the comments with all the fluency of one born into the language.

Did… that…that son of a gun just suggest I …?

Curiosity can be a bit of a bitch sometimes. This is one of those times.

I’m shaking harder, when I turn back to her. "That's anatomically impossible."

She lets out a mirthless chuckle. "I'm a nurse, and so I was sure to point that out to them. They started showing videos of how buyers have sex. Avoid talking about it. Trust me."

At least the bugs weren’t interested in that. This is a new form of hell, it seems.

I gulp, then nod. "My name's Olivia."

"I'm Ree."

The sound of the pneumatic doors hissing open is just about the only warning I get before torture gas floods my airways sending the both of us both into a hacking fit.

It's a while before I gain control of my spasming body again, and when I do, I cling on to her for dear life, my rage at the contact somehow less important than grounding my mind before it fractures for good.

Her arm is wrapped around my waist and mine around her shoulders as tears stream down our faces.

"You have no names until your buyer gives them to you," the slug says to us in a nasty tone.

He goes back to his salesperson's voice. "That concludes our special session. We will bring another of the harem out to play soon."

He turns back to us, his eyes focused on Ree. "Put the green whore back in her chamber."

Ree tries to protest. She spends a few more moments trying and failing to argue with the slime-covered fucker and only ends up choking on gas. Me right along with her.

Knowing a losing battle when I see one, I reluctantly let go of her and climb back into my pod. Tremors wrack my body, but we don't look away from each other. I really want to get another long look at the slug, but it was pretty clear already that they don’t have the spindly neck of the bug men.

Doesn’t matter. It’ll feel just as good to kill a slug as it was the bugs. I know it.