Page 29 of Alien in the Attic

“The fuck just happened?” Sofia yelled. “I thought I was about to be turned inside out.”

“Are you okay?” Carmen asked, not sure if she was herself.

“I think so,” Sofia said. “I’m not bleeding from my eyes or anything. Am I?”

Carmen shook her head. She looked at Elena. The youngest sister was frantically typing through what looked like a thousand holograms. “Is everything safe?”

“As far as I can tell,” Elena answered. “I don’t know what happened. I thought I was putting in some flight coordinates. Instead, I seem to have activated the autopilot. I can’t get any of the navigational controls to respond.”

“Autopilot?” Sofia asked, her breathing speeding up. “Doesn’t that mean we have no control over where we’re headed? What if we’re about to fly into the sun as a self-destruct thing? Like, what if it has a protocol to kill itself if aliens gain control?”

“Deeper breaths,” Carmen said, forcing her voice to remain calm. “You’re going to pass out if you keep going on like that.” She was saying that just as much for herself as Sofia. Jumping from Earth to the stars like that wasn’t only uncomfortable but terrifying. The old fear that this might be a mistake came back.

“According to the path laid out on this map, we won’t be going anywhere near the sun,” Elena explained. She pinched the middle of the three-dimensional map and zoomed in as if she were enlarging a picture on her phone. “This green line looks like it’s taking us directly to Thryal. Perhaps instead of a self-destruct protocol, it had an automatic return function in case of emergencies.”

Visibly relieved, Sofia closed her eyes and tilted her head back against the seat. “Is anyone else really happy I brought that wine?” she asked.

Tension successfully broken, the Flores sisters broke into laughter.

Space travel wasn’t what Carmen had expected. Time was impossible to track. Elena did her best to decipher the symbols that appeared to count like a digital clock, but she couldn’t make sense of them. Minutes, hours, even days were indistinguishable. Everyone’s sleep cycle was out of whack, making for three irritable and cranky sisters.

Stars didn’t blur past the windows as they did in movies, to Carmen’s disappointment. If anything, the distant points of brilliant, burning gasses never got any closer. This made tracking distance just as difficult as time. She couldn’t tell which direction they were going, how far they’d traveled, or how much time had elapsed.

It made for a surreal nonexistence. The three of them inhabited a bubble where they and everything inside it progressed, but nothing else did.

Carmen began to wonder if they were even awake. She had a secret theory that she refused to share with the others for fear of sounding unhinged that the ship had knocked them out and was keeping them asleep in stasis. Isn’t that how space travel worked in science fiction?

They tried to monitor their progress by playing games, estimating how long each hand of cards took and marking them down. Reading was out of the question, for Carmen, at least. Each time she opened a book in the hopes of getting lost in a story, the words blurred together. When she felt exceptionally tired, they floated off of the page. Did this psychological phenomenon have to do with space travel, or was it exhaustion? She couldn’t tell.

Things started to pick up when they entered the nebula. None of them were astronomers. Therefore, they didn’t know what its name was. So Sofia decided to call it the Flores Nebula. “As far as we know, we’re the first humans to have discovered it,” she said.

The enormous cloud of gas lingered in the cosmos, reflecting light across the color spectrum. Carmen leaned over the controls to get a better view from the front.

Blazing reds swirled around shining yellows. Sapphire mingled with violet and smoldering orange. Light streaked across her face, reminding her of multicolored soaps cascading down the windshield at a carwash. It was like being surrounded by magic.

“Now this is more like it,” Sofia said from over Carmen’s shoulder. “We are officially in outer space.”

Elena wasn’t as entranced. “Sit down, please.” Her voice was clipped, not angry.

“Why?” Carmen asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe just sit down and strap in again,” was all Elena would say.

Carmen did as instructed, but Sofia needed an extra nudge. Once both sisters were safely snug in their seats, Carmen asked again what was wrong.

Elena sounded nervous. More nervous than when the autopilot shot them into space without warning. “Well, the good news is we could be very close to Thryal,” she told her sisters. “Couldbeing the operative word.”

“So, there’s bad news?” Sofia asked. “What’s the bad news?”

“I wouldn’t say the news is bad, necessarily,” Elena said. “More like uncertain news.”

Carmen noticed her brainy sister pulled the straps extra tight. She did the same.

“Just tell us what you think,” Carmen said. “It’s better to rip the bandage off.”

“Well, I noticed this spherical ball of light,” Elena said. “I thought it was pretty and hoped we might get a little closer so I could see it better. Turns out the ship is headed straight for it.”

A fist pressed itself into Carmen’s lungs. “What do you think that means?”

---