Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 3.x (Bonus Chapter)

Day 30

I exchanged no transmissions during my return to the dome. Most buildings had to be reconstructed rather hastily, I could tell. They were dull and straight, lacking any of the angled walls that had granted them their charm before. Any glint was gone from them, too. So were the holograms that used to dance in this shiny metropolis. The lighting had been reduced to the bare minimum necessary not to bump into a wall. For beings used to having anything instantly repaired, it must have felt like living in a bombed-down Dresden.

Speaking of Dresden, how did the Germans feel after that war? How did they feel, once they learned what they had enabled Hitler to do? How did they justify that before their kids?

How do I justify my cooperation with Sye?

Hitler came to the Germans when they were most desperate. When their economy was broken and everyone hated them. He blamed it all on the Jews and the Germans didn't even care if it was true. All they cared for was someone promising help.

Sye wasn't nearly as bad as Hitler - maybe this alien Ted Kaczynski was the hero of their own story. I could see parallels, however.

I just wanted to punch myself.

Crick and Helix occasionally came by and took checks if the terrorists had implanted anything into me. I could understand if they utterly hated me now.

As I had been informed, Sye spent their time wasting away in a cryo-prison. Their body had been frozen whilst their mind persisted in virtual reality so that they could consciously experience their imprisonment.

Would that happen to me, too? Or would they do anything worse, like torture?

I curled up in my dome and sobbed. Most of the seven days following the Sye incident had been spent sleeping.

In the time I was awake, I harmed myself so that they wouldn't do it. It was an odd habit I picked up back when people bullied me in high school. Would it deter them? No, but it made me feel better. This self-harm was how I experienced my autistic meltdowns. Any time the memory from the trauma came up, it was like an inner volcano boiling inside me. The only way I could leave off steam was by giving myself incredible pain.

I won't go into too much detail, but here is what I did.

I often picked up sharp sticks and sliced my arms and wrists open until my blood covered the sand. I didn't bleed out, thanks to the nanodocs, but it was the pain that mattered. When the sticks didn't do it, I searched for shards. Again, suicide wasn't the point. It was pain. Sometimes, I bit my flesh as well. When that wasn't enough, I butted my head against the walls of my dome as hard as I could. I did it as often as I could until I got a concussion and they had to fix me. When I didn't have the time for self-harm, I just cried day and night. The moment I regained my energy, I harmed myself again. To an outsider, this method of leaving off steam made me look like a freak, but to the Seizers, it was an odd curiosity.

Eventually, they medicated me until I stopped.

My face was so sunk in gloom, I didn't even notice Crick and Helix until they stood right before my doorstep.

"How is your state of mind?" Crick asked.

The phrasing was neutral, but I could feel from the transmission that they were anything but happy to see me.

"I'm sorry," I transmitted.

Ignoring my regrets, Helix sent another message. "How much did you know about the terrorists?"

I uncurled my body and took a seat on a rock, straightening my back as much as possible. Even in the company of aliens that understood no body language, it did no good to look like a baby.