Page 1 of You're Not My King!

REUBEN

I was pretty sure being abducted by aliens hadn’t been on my bingo card for the year. Then again, the ‘survive a month being poked and probed like a prized cow for auction’ square wasn’t ringing any bells either, so I might’ve skipped a few rounds. It was hardly surprising. I’d spent the first half of the year off my face, and the second—alright, last quarter—struggling to get sober, so lapses in memory were part of the package, right?

It was day thirty of my unplanned vacay in the A&R Space Facility. I would’ve preferred the Maldives—who wouldn’t?—but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Some people never got to leave their hometowns, and yet here I was. In space. Held against my will, sure, but I couldn’t really complain. The aliens hadn’t killed me yet, and I wasn’t in a cage, so… five-star service all round? It didn’t quite compare to a luxury spa resort with crystal-clear water and those coconut cocktails with the cutesy little umbrellas, but I was alive and semi-relaxed.

I’ll have to remember and leave a tip.

Groaning, I collapsed onto my bunk, naturally irritated that the pillows were softer than any I’d face-planted in before. It was a detail that had bugged me on day one, and it bugged me still. I mean, I’d slept on enough cold concrete to count my blessings for fresh sheets, but come on. Egyptian cotton? I was a prisoner, for fuck’s sake. It made me antsy knowing the weirdos holding me hostage actually gave a shit about my comfort—the assessments notwithstanding, though they were pretty gentle in that department, too. Kidnapping was supposed to be gross and violating, and while they had the latter down pat, this place was snug and spotlessly clean, almost clinical. Here I was, thinking the whole ‘existence of aliens’ was the oddest thing to happen to me, but they had to go ahead and prove me wrong with some soap and a mattress.

A memory foam mattress.

I burrowed farther into the cloud of bribery bedding, low-key hoping it would suffocate me. Christ, I sounded delusional, but there was nothing else to gripe about. That was my whole point. Maybe if I felt more in danger, if they starved me or made me shit in a bucket, then I’d have more drive to do something other than just lie there and accept my fate. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to escape. Of course I did. I hated the unknown, the daily tests and medicals were overkill, and like a ghost stuck in purgatory, I had some pretty big affairs back on Earth that needed patching up before I could move on—important shit that couldn’t really be brushed aside for long, but I just felt no urgency to deal with. Not right now, anyway. I wondered if they’d given me some type of sedative among all the other shit.

Wouldn’t be surprised.

I had tried to find a way out in the beginning, kicked and screamed in blind hope that they’d tell me what they wanted, but it had been useless. Three days of making a fuss was all it took for me to realize I couldn’t leave this place. In fact, one peek at the fancy tech and seven-foot-tall, heavily armed dinosaur guards had me debating if I should offer up my mouth or my ass first. Sexual favors were typically my do-or-die; after that, I got nothin’. I wasn’t an optimistic guy. That whole ‘if you’re knocked down, just get back up and try again’ mantra pissed me off—as if scraping your broken pieces off the floor was ever that easy. Besides, there was every chance I hadn’t wanted to make an effort the first time, so why the hell would I bother the second?

I wasn’t smart, either. I knew enough to get by, but I couldn’t tap into the ship’s data or override their systems like in those old sci-fi movies. Hell, a month in and I hadn’t even figured out why I was here, so intelligence definitely wasn’t in my repertoire. I was resilient though, I could credit myself with that. Like a worm that had been chopped in half—never really the same again, but still managing to survive. After everything, I couldn’t tell whether it was a gift or a curse, but it meant I’d experienced some shit and learned when to be patient. Bide my time, wait for a miracle, and pray to fuck that they either killed me quickly or dropped me back on Earth.

No current preference.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d find out the answer to that real soon—the routine change being my main clue, and the sense of foreboding an unwelcome extra. Until now, my time here had been a loop of the same boring ritual. Nothing was ever off track or out of place, except for the tests they did on me. Some required needles and tubes, while others were all about the brain scans or heart monitors. The worst ones though, had to be the actual sit-down, academic exams. That was probably an unpopular opinion among my peers, but I shivered just thinking about it.

Reliving my schoolboy era was fucking traumatic.

There were no tests today. I’d woken up in my cabin this morning as usual, with glaring white lights searing my eyeballs, and breakfast rolling in on a robotic trolley ten minutes later. But after I’d finished nibbling on the nutritional Jell-O cubes, washed my face, and pulled on a clean white tracksuit and space booties, no one had come to collect me. It wasn’t normal, and I hated that I could do nothing but sit on my bunk like an obedient puppy, waiting for Master to lead me to training.

Sheer laziness was the only reason I had given up. It seemed like a waste of brain power, watching the door, wondering when they’d come, or if they even would at all. Instead, I’d spent the hours staring up at the plain walls until I went cross-eyed. There were no clocks, but it didn’t take a genius to know that I’d been left here for a fucking age. I should’ve lain down sooner, maybe tried for a nap, even if I knew it was pointless—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a decent sleep, especially on command, or with the lights on. Why were they taking so long? And why was I so bothered? Being left alone was better than playing the lab rat, but the suspense was unnerving.

Maybe they were finished extracting whatever they needed—they’d definitely been thorough, so it’d be a shocker if they weren’t—and were deciding what to do next. What if they kept me here and made me to do hard labor? Or worse… made me into a personal slave and forced me to massage the boss’s feet? My stomach roiled. That would be my living nightmare. I’d literally rather be killed. I could almost bet that wouldn’t happen, though. Not because it was a totally random and maybe slightly unhinged fear, but because while there were other humans around, being tested like I was, there weren’t any human workers—foot slaves or otherwise. Something told me there was a reason for that, as if this was for a purpose other than just toys for a collection.

Over the last few days, I’d spotted several men and women being escorted to a room with pod-ships like the one I’d been picked up on. It gave me a smidge of hope thatgoing home was a possibility—something that seriously needed to happen, even if it seemed a pointless ambition right now—but it was also just as likely that those guys had been sent somewhere worse. Or showing them the exit was some kind of sick mind game; a ‘this is what you could have won’ before their organs were ripped out and donated to science.

That was always a possibility.

Fuck. What if they’d finally realized I was just a skinny nobody with nothing significant to show for my twenty-six years of life and planned on leaving me here to rot? I doubted I even had anything left worth harvesting—drugs would have fucked up my chances on that front—so forgetting I existed was probably easiest. They wouldn’t have bothered to feed me if that were the case, though, right? Unless breakfast was supposed to be my last meal. Bit disappointing, if it was. Who the hell would want the same mundane cube-food they’d choked down every day for a month to be the last thing they ate? Not me. I’d have killed for a beer and a slice of coconut cream pie.

Then I would have died at least a little happy.

On that cheery note, the cabin doors slid open with a loud whoosh, making all thoughts of joy disintegrate as I damn near levitated out of my skin. Stumbling to my feet, I whirled around to face the culprit, but relaxed as one of the stewards strolled in, all poise and grace, his monocle hooked over the bridge of his pointed nose and his chin raised toward the ceiling. Though I hadn’t met this particular dude before, his species—was that the right word?—was responsible for our well-being. Apparently. Mostly they just floated around the ship, looking very ‘I’m not paid enough for this shit’ while carrying e-tablets in one of their four hands and escorting us to testing. They weren’t as creepy as the ‘doctor’ species—the ones who did all the unpleasant stuff. Those guys were what I’d imagined aliens to look like before I knew they existed: big eyes, bald, and lanky, with thin, translucent white skin.

During lengthier scans, I’d often found myself watching those guys as their green blood pumped through their bodies from their twin hearts. It was kinda fascinating in a morbid sort of way. They also had two brains inside their bulbous skulls, but that was too grim to stare at, even for me. Their fingers were also freakishly long, their legs bowed like the hind legs of a deer, and they never spoke, only blip-blooped and made buzzing noises in their throats as they loomed over me, extracting vials of blood.

Like a scene straight out of a horror movie.

Despite all that, though, they seemed… soft. Not just their skin, but their whole demeanor. I’d had human doctors treat me with less care than those guys. I guessed it went without saying that looks could be deceiving. I mean, the stewards were slightly more… humanoid, and they were assholes. Go figure. Everything about them was cold and precise. They wore lab coats that reached the floor, so their bodies were a mystery, but they were of average height for a human, they had long, slicked-back red hair, small, pointed horns, and elf ears. Oh, and the four arms. The ones I’d interacted with so far had droning voices and severely uninterested expressions on their turquoise faces. Very snobbish vibes, always managing to sneer down at me as if I were vermin and not a living, breathing person. This dude was no different.

In fact, he might have been even more detached.

His white eyes were fixed on the tablet in his hand as he let out a withering sigh. “Reuben Francis Carter?”

I blinked, not only surprised to hear my full namecoming from his downturned mouth—since no one had ever asked for it, and I was known mostly as ‘human 0074’—but also the fluent, monotone English he’d said it in. Here I was thinking everyone just grunted or asked “okay?” whenever they needed my comfort level. Had he always been able to speak English and just chosen not to? Or was he wearing some high-tech translator thingy? And how in the hell did he get my name?

I laughed nervously. “Um, yeah, that’s me.”

“I offer our apologies for the delay,” he drawled, not wasting any effort looking up or even pretending to sound sorry at all. “The directors had to review your case.”

“My… case?”

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