Page 43 of Bred

“Youshouldn’t be alive,” I snipe back in shock. “What do you mean, my shuttle detonated? I’d be dead if that happened, and I’m clearly not.”

“Clearly,” he glowers.

“Obviously,” I snarl.

“That’s enough,” the doctor interjects. “Listen, she clearly has not been involved in an explosion. There are no signs of burning, singeing, any wounds at all. She was not on a shuttle that detonated.”

“But she boarded the shuttle, took off in the shuttle, and had just checked in with Beijing before an explosion was detected, so explain that,” he snaps back.

“Aliens!” I pipe up.

“Aliens?”

“Yes it must have been aliens,” I nod. I have no idea what is going on. I don’t recall anything as interesting as this having happened to me. As far as I’m concerned, I was just minding my own business and I woke up here.

“Do you recall having an alien encounter?”

“I don’t recall anything.”

The man with the flat hair paces back and forth, his arms behind his back, except when he brings one finger forward to gesticulate at me and the universe in general.

“Well, you didn’t fall from orbit and land in one piece. And you were in the shuttle that detonated, so that leaves the unlikely theory of alien interference.”

“So I was abducted?”

“Perhaps.”

“Wow.” I shake my head. “That’s trippy.”

“Trippy? Perhaps. Concerning. Yes. With any luck, over the coming days, you will be able to formulate more useful responses, Officer. We need to know what happened to you. We cannot have our shuttles exploding in orbit, our pilots going missing. It creates havoc with the paperwork.”

I stare at him blankly until he cracks a smile. “Investigator humor,” he says. “Look, I know you’ve been through hell. Try to relax. We’ll get to the bottom of all of this.”

It turns out over the following hours that I really can’t remember anything. I can remember the repetitions of habit, the way I get up, get dressed, go up to orbit and come back down, but I can’t remember the specifics of days. It’s as if my mind has reset to the last stable state it had, erased whatever happened in between.

Something happened. Something definitely happened. I just don’t know what.

The feeling is not so much frightening as it is frustrating. I can feel the truth curling at the corners of my mind, but it is so much at the periphery, I know there’s no way I can retrieve it.

The harder I try, the less comes. I can’t make sense of anything that has happened. Little flashes of fragmentary memory don’t make things any easier. I see darkness. I see hard brows. I see a man who smiles, though it is like a dream and I can’t make out any of his features properly.

* * *

“Just relax.”

The therapist is trying to help me, but it’s not working. It has been several weeks since I woke up, and nothing has changed. I remember all my training and all my experiences as an officer, but the period from my crash until now is a total blank. I’m ready to put it behind me and just get on with my life.

“When do I get to go back on patrol?”

She’s a nice lady. She’s good at making sympathetic expressions. It’s not her fault that they make me want to scream. I don’t want empathy. I want answers.

“Oh, well, that’s one of the things we need to discuss.”

“Okay...” That doesn’t sound encouraging at all.

“You know officer standards are high, physically, mentally...”

“And you’re not going to let someone with amnesia who already destroyed a shuttle once get back into space, no matter what I say or what I do. My career is over.”

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