by J. Blanes
Apart from the tail, the whole fuselage was completely white and featureless, except at the front. There, a black tinted window, almost identically shaped as a motorcycle’s helmet visor, was the only other feature that caught Dylan’s attention. The window was very big; in fact, it spanned the whole ship’s front. From this angle, Dylan could not see if the window was transparent enough to see the inside of the ship. He looked back again at the ship’s body, trying to locate more windows. He couldn’t find even one, and more surprisingly, there were no doors either, not even a hint of their presence. If this was a prank or a hoax, someone had spent a lot of money building an incredibly inoperative and bizarre spaceship. That thought made him feel uneasy because it was very improbable that someone would ever venture to do something so stupid.
As Dylan was lost in the mechanical aspects of the spaceship, Albert had been occupied with his own analysis. He had been silent, thinking, analyzing, until one theory came to his mind.
“Dylan, Keira, could you go back a few steps?” he asked them.
“We’re not afraid,” Keira replied, thinking that he wanted to protect them.
“It’s not that,” Albert explained. “I need to confirm a theory. Please, just a few steps back,” he insisted.
Keira frowned. Why would he ask that? However, she knew Albert would not give them any hints of what he had in mind until they did as he said, so they complied.
Albert didn’t look at them, but at the ship. Then, as they were about to take their third step back, the ship vanished again into thin air, as if it had never been there.
“Just what I thought!” Albert exclaimed triumphantly. He looked back at them, grinning. It was clear that he had found out something about the ship. Keira had a hunch of what it could be. Dylan had no idea.
They started walking again toward Albert when the ship rematerialized. This time, instead of being surprised, Keira smiled at Albert, her hunch confirmed. Dylan was as amazed and shocked as the first time, until he saw their smiling, complicit faces. He found it so frustrating when they did that.
“Would you care to explain?” he asked with curiosity.
“The ship senses our position,” Albert revealed, “and only appears when we’re all close to it.”
“Really?” Dylan was not convinced. “Let’s see.” He started walking back, but this time nothing happened and the ship remained there. “Aha!” he exclaimed, feeling so good to be the one who nailed it for once.
“I don’t understand. I really thought that was it.” Albert was perplexed. He put his forefinger on his lips as he always did when something was bothering him and he needed to think deeper.
“I thought you were right, too,” Keira admitted. Then, she moved back with Dylan.
“The ship! It’s gone again!” Albert exclaimed. Then he quickly turned to Dylan and told him to come back. As he expected, this time the ship didn’t come back. “It’s not Dylan. It’s you, Keira, whom the ship is sensing.”
Keira approached the ship, and as expected, it appeared again. “It’s really me!” She couldn’t believe it. She moved back and forth several times, and each time the ship reacted accordingly.
“What about you?” she asked Albert. “Why don’t you try it?”
Albert retreated and the ship vanished. After that, they made several more tests until they realized that the ship didn’t care about Dylan’s position at all, but if Keira or Albert moved away from the ship, it simply vanished.
“That’s great,” Dylan said, disappointed at not being the center of the ship’s attention. “But how does it come and go so fast without any noise?”
“That’s because it’s always been here,” Albert replied enigmatically. “It never left.”
They were both surprised at this revelation; not even Keira had expected something like this.
“Let me show you.” Albert made the ship disappear by moving back. Then, he told them to carefully approach the spot where the ship was supposed to be. Keira did as Albert said and started her approach with caution, but Dylan, as skeptical as ever, went ahead fast, a move he soon regretted.
“Watch out!” Albert warned him, but it was too late.
“Ouch!” Dylan screamed with tears showing in his eyes and blood running from his nostrils. Keira offered him a tissue that she had in her pocket. He took it and pressed it hard against his nostrils to stop the bleeding.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” he replied, his pride hurt.
She gently examined his nose. “I don’t think it’s broken,” she told him.
“But how?” He still didn’t understand what had happened.
“You hit the ship,” she said plainly.
Once recovered, Dylan looked ahead trying to confirm what Keira said. His eyes couldn’t see anything, but he’d definitively hit something that stopped him in his tracks and almost broke his nose. He raised his hand, trying to feel the space in front of him with his palm. He extended his arm slowly until his hand touched something that felt cold and smooth, like metal. He pushed harder, but his hand could not advance farther.
Keira copied him, and they both stared at each other in amazement. There was something there; they really could feel it, even when their eyes were telling them otherwise.
Albert told them to remain as they were while he stepped forward. The spot they were feeling with their hands was now visibly filled with the ship’s surface. What they were touching before, without seeing it, was definitively the ship. After having proved his point, Albert finally approached them.
“It’s some kind of advanced invisibility cloaking tech—” he started explaining, but Dylan interrupted him almost immediately.
“An advanced what?”
“Invisibility cloaking technology. It’s a technology that can turn things invisible at will,” Albert clarified. “The problem is, it’s too advanced and perfect to be ours.”
Dylan, suspecting that Albert had been right the whole time, had no doubt that he was right again. Any remaining skepticism had been wiped out when he hit the ship with his nose, destroying his will to argue anymore about it.
“Anything on your mind?” Keira asked Albert. He looked troubled.
“There’s something that’s bothering me. There’s no one else here, so from what I see, I’m the only one who received the signal that guided us here, and the ship is clearly reacting to our presence here. Well, except for Dylan’s. For some reason, we were targeted to come here and discover it, so I’m wondering why nothing else happens. I mean, all this trouble just to show us this piece of technology? It makes no sense at all.”
“Maybe you’re the only one who could decipher the signal,” Keira suggested.
Albert dismissed the idea. “I don’t think so. It was too easy. I must have been targeted from the start.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
“Too soon to tell. I need to think about it.”
“It’s because you don’t think someone will believe us?”
“On the contrary,” Albert rectified her. “I’m sure someone will believe us sooner or later, and that’s precisely why we have to carefully ponder about our next step. Whether we like it or not, we have a great responsibility on our hands, and it’s not a trivial one. This technology would do a lot of damage if it fell into the wrong hands.”
“Are you suggesting that some government or criminal organization could steal the technology and make us disappear?” Dylan was too fond of government conspiracies, but Albert had a gut feeling that this time he was not far from a plausible outcome.
“If it’s the government, they probably won’t make us disappear; it’d be too risky,” he said, himself unsure of it, “but they could dismiss the whole thing by spreading rumors that it was just an elaborate hoax, while covertly transporting the ship to any secret facility, or w
hatever other scheme they had planned. It’d be hopeless trying to stop them.”
“So, you agree with Dylan?” This was a first for Keira, but she found herself also believing them. “You’re afraid that someone will steal and use this technology for their own profit?”
“Yes, any government would kill to be the only one to have this kind of technology. It would give them a great deal of advantage, don’t you think? For now, it’s best to keep it among ourselves. We must devise a plan, a good one, before making a decision. You should take as many pictures as you can; then we’ll leave,” he said firmly, closing the discussion.
Keira had just started her photographic session, using Albert and Dylan as a reference for size, when they all heard a soft sound. They shut up at once and listened in silence, trying to identify it. It was a supple, electrical buzzing sound, with no specific source, as it came at them from every direction. They stayed still for a while, until Dylan spoke.
“Now it would be a good time to show us your magic and tell us what’s going on.” He was talking to Albert, half joking, half serious, hoping he would solve this mystery as fast as he had the invisibility one. But this time, Albert was as puzzled as the others, and shrugged his shoulders.
The sound intensity was increasing steadily, and Dylan couldn’t stand it anymore. “I’m out of here,” he said before starting walking back to the pickup. Keira looked at Albert, undecided about what to do. Albert made a slight sideways movement with his head, indicating that she should follow Dylan. She turned around and called Dylan to wait for her, and then she saw him stumble backward onto the ground, his nose bleeding again.
“Not again!” he screamed in pain, his hands on his nose. He had run into something invisible again.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Albert looking back at Dylan. “It can’t be,” he whispered in terror.
“What’s going on?” Keira had seen the fear in Albert’s face, and that scared the hell out of her.
Albert ignored her and hurriedly passed by Dylan, who was still on the ground. He raised his hands in front of him and started moving them forward until they couldn’t advance anymore. He moved a few steps to his right, repeating the same routine with the same result. No matter how high or low he tried, his hands always touched some invisible wall that prevented their advance.
His worse suspicions were confirmed. “We’re trapped,” he announced with a trembling voice.
“No, it can’t be.” Keira said while looking at Albert’s weird movements in the air, as if he were a mime trapped by an invisible-air wall. Except this time, the wall was real.
She quickly ran up next to him on his right, and Dylan did the same on his left. They also felt the invisible wall and pushed with all their strength. When their efforts got no result, they spread farther, trying again in vain to go through an invisible wall that extended left and right, up and down. No matter how far they went, the invisible wall was always there.
“The wall is moving!” Keira suddenly screamed, terrified by its implication.
Albert and Dylan also noticed the movement. The wall was steadily moving toward them, pushing them backward. They renewed their efforts and pushed as hard as they could, but the wall didn’t yield an inch.
“It’s pointless,” Albert finally said, defeated. “It’s some kind of force field, stronger than us.”
They retreated a few steps from the wall. “What do you mean by pointless? There must be a way!” she yelled at Albert, as if this was all his fault.
“Calm down, there’s always a way,” Dylan told her.
She calmed herself after a while and felt embarrassed for having lost her temper. It was not like her to lose it like that, and she promised to control herself in the future. “I’m sorry,” she apologized to Albert. “It won’t happen again.”
Albert was about to say something when another sound came from behind him. This time its source was obvious, as it came from the ship. A ramp on the ship’s side, near the front, was lowering slowly.
“Where did that come from?” Dylan was mystified. He remembered that just a few minutes before he had meticulously examined the ship’s surface and found no sign, not even a small joint, of any door. But now, a ramp the width of three men and the height of Albert had just come into sight. “Well, it seems the aliens are about to greet us,” he joked in a childish, futile attempt to alleviate the tension. However, this only made things worse for Keira, because it was exactly what she had feared the most.
They waited, motionless, for some kind of alien creature to emerge from the ship. They didn’t speak, or even blink, for a few long seconds, but nothing happened, until the invisible force field pushed them again from behind, waking them to reality. Keira and Dylan resisted as much as they could, but the wall continued its unwavering advance. Albert, however, seemed to not care about it anymore, letting the wall push him without fighting it and staring blankly at the ramp, which had already lowered completely.
“Hey!” Dylan shouted at him. “Wake up! What are you doing? Do you want to become alien food?”
“I don’t think there are any aliens,” Albert replied coldly. “I think the ship wants us to go inside.”
FIVE
A few steps before the ramp, Keira and Dylan finally realized the painful truth of Albert’s last words, and ceased their efforts. They had been unsuccessfully fighting the pushing from that invisible wall for several minutes, and they were exhausted.
Albert was the first to climb the ramp, looking at each detail with an almost obsessive curiosity. To his surprise, he realized that he didn’t feel any emotion: no fear, no joy, no sadness, nothing that would be considered normal in this situation. He felt like a soulless robot programmed to follow an inescapable set of instructions: move ahead, climb the ramp, get on the ship, stop.
After him, Keira and Dylan climbed the ramp together. Unlike Albert, a range of emotions burned inside them, but the dominant one by far was fear. They realized that the moment they stepped on the ramp, their fate would be inevitably sealed and linked to that ship.
They got on the ship and found themselves in an empty room except for four seats in a row, similar to the ones found on the first-class section of a plane. The room was dark, almost black, with no other doors or windows. It had the depth of the ship, the height of two average men, and a width of about ten feet. They saw Albert bent forward, examining the seats from every angle.
“What now?” Keira asked in a blend of anger and concern.
The answer came just a second later. The ramp started closing behind them, much faster than when it had lowered, leaving them no time to react and trapping them inside the ship. When it closed, it left the room completely in darkness. Dylan tried pushing the ramp down again, but as he expected, it didn’t budge an inch.
They waited for something else to happen, and as they were waiting, they started to see a dim, blue light coming from the seats. At first, it was hard to notice, but as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they could see it clearly. It was not a direct light but more like a fluorescence, a glowing, and it was all over the seats, giving them a ghostly appearance. Albert, of course, studied the lights as carefully as he had the seats.
“It has no obvious source,” he said. “It radiates directly from the seat’s material.”
“Very useful,” Dylan said sarcastically. “For my part, I’m tired and I’m going to make them useful.” Having said that, he sat on the closest one.
When he sat down, a pair of straps surfaced from the edges of the seat, just above his shoulders, and quickly crawled down over him, one from left to right, the other in the opposite direction; they crossed over his chest and buried themselves again into the seat beside his hips. In the end, they had effectively fastened Dylan to the seat.
“Hey!” Dylan exclaimed, surprised, attracting Albert’s and Keira’s attention. He struggled frantically to break himself free of
his restraints. Albert and Keira tried to help, but the straps were too strong and firmly secured. After some fruitless attempts, they gave up.
Then Dylan remembered something. “My pocket! Search inside my right pocket!”
Albert frowned, but he did what he asked and soon found out the reason for his request: a Swiss army knife.
“Aha!” Dylan exclaimed exultantly. “Let’s see how strong they are now!”
He soon found out how strong they were. Albert used the knife on one of the straps, which seemed to be made of some kind of cloth fabric, but it could not make a notch on it. Whatever the fabric was, it was stronger than the knife’s metal. He tried again several times, but on each occasion, the straps defeated the knife’s efforts.
“I’m sorry,” Albert finally said. “It’s useless.”
“There must be a manual release for the straps,” Keira said hopefully.
“Everything until now has been controlled by the ship itself,” Albert remarked. “The invisibility, the force field, and the ramp. Why would you think this could be any different?”
