Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 2c (Bonus Chapter)

Day 17

I woke up in a room completely unlike the one before. Literally, all five senses of mine were tapping in the dark. Whilst the previous room didn't let any spot unlit, this one was black in a way you rarely found in nature. Whilst the previous room echoed louder than a cave, this one absorbed any sound. I didn't even have walls to touch for orientation. Technically, I did, but it took me long to find them. With my ankle repaired by the Seizers, I could afford to saunter around for quite a while. Once I reached a wall, I walked to the other side to get an idea of how large the room was - always in a straight line, of course. There were fifteen to twenty steps between the walls. Any time it took me longer than that meant I had changed my direction without realizing it.

This was never pleasant. I had to recite a mantra of various star names to remain calm until I reached a wall again.

Not even that helped against the fact that the silence itself was driving me mad. Even trained astronauts couldn't survive more than forty-five minutes in complete silence without getting auditory hallucinations.

If the point was to break my spirit, they were damn good at it.

I don't want to describe the worst of it, so why not just jump to the point when something distracted me, okay?

Eventually, they had brought a monitor into my room that shone brightly. At first, I had confused its silver lights for another UFO.

The first thing its screen provided was a mirror for me. All that did was make me realize how long I hadn't looked in one.

With my skeletal limbs, my greasy blonde hair, and my hunchback, it was as if my age had doubled. I didn't look or feel like a healthy twenty-year-old at all anymore. Well, I still had acne. Beard hairs occupied places where they didn't belong and contracted cheeks testified to the length of my fasting in the desert.

I was always rather small and skinny, but seeing me like that made me severely doubt if their liquid had fed me at all.

I haven't mentioned the oddest detail yet. When I leaned forward to look at the state of my hair, I realized the white helmet I had worn. It was under the helmet of my spacesuit and looked almost like a swimming cap. Whatever it was made of felt harder than rubber though and, judging by the cables connecting it to the monitor, its purpose was to read more of my thoughts.

When I clutched my helmet in panic, the screen turned black again. At first, I thought it was a defect, but then I realized it was just changing colors. First, it was dark purple, then blue, and then purple again. This switching went on for a while, but the violet became less frequent and the shades of blue became lighter and lighter. Finally, it became cyan, then turquoise, then green, and then finally yellow. It went back and forth again, but the general trend was towards colors with longer wavelengths. As you might expect, it eventually became red before ending in infrared light that my brain perceived as a blank screen.

This was a scientific experiment. They showed me all possible wavelengths and the helmet recorded how my brain reacted to them.

The cap on my scalp was an experiment, too, in a weird way. The mirror disappeared once I tried to touch my cap.

This was surely not a coincidence, but some sort of mirror test. You know, these intelligence tests we do on animals. Take an animal, show it its reflection, paint a spot on its forehead, and see how it reacts. Dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants, but also non-mammals, such as magpies or even ants pass this test. Its effectiveness in demonstrating intelligence is controversial, but it's so simple that even aliens know it.

Don't think they ran out of colors though.

The screen displayed a pale white, the only color missing so far. As you may or may not know, white is not part of the color spectrum, but all wavelengths at once.