Space Oddity: Episode II Rebirth

by Observer123

Dudley is back! Really? Yes! But the really interesting question is: Where is he? He has no idea. The only thing he know is that he is far far away from home and that he has to find a way back. But to find a way back he has to come to terms with these strange alien creatures who call themselves humans.

2. New friends

-Hey guys, what´s up? It´s Monday and here is a new chapter. Enjoy :D-

"So what´s going on now? Is it an alien or just a dog on steroids?" probed Captain Powers loudly behind me. We all were gathered around a bed in which the white furred dog alien laid. It wore some kind of primitive space suit that was really heavily damaged. What we also discovered on the dogs body was that his left hand had a big hole in it, serious freezing damages and that some of his fingers on this hand were missing. But luckily Doctor Ryan was able to repair all the damages.

Just an hour has passed since we rescued the lifeless body into the sickbay of the Leviathan. Almost the whole crew gathered behind Doctor Ryan who examined the alien now once again.

"We will see when he awakes." I replied nervously. Even if that sounds strange, that was our first alien encounter ever. Mankind began 8000 years ago to spread in space. First in their own solar system, then in their galaxy, then in their galaxy cluster… to make that short, the humans spread over the whole universe.

From side to side. And we found absolutely nothing out there. What proofed that we are really alone out there, at least on this level of existence. So the discovery of an alien was not just a big deal, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of the last thousand years.

I rubbed my hands and saw in front of my mind´s eye myself standing with a Nobel Prize in my hands. I even began to plan my speech of thanks. 'I´d like to thank everyone who helped me on my way… So basically just myself.'

The problem was just that if this dog thing, or whatever it was, didn´t wake up again there would be no Nobel Prize for me. The only thing I would have were about 150 pounds of dog meat.
"Ryan, speak with me. How is it or he… or she?"

"Isaac I can´t work when you pissing me off." Mumbled Ryan and grabbed a long thin sharp metal probe. With a vicious grin he rammed it into the dog´s skull. The whole auditory behind Ryan inclusively me winced in disgust. Ryan was really more a butcher than a doctor. I even heard that he once amputated the leg of a patient by mistake.

The only thing he allegedly said was "False leg? Well Sir, bad luck."
Like a psychopathic serial killer began Ryan to pull the probe out of the skull and hit it back into it.
"Got dammit Ryan what are you doing?" I screamed.

"Installing several implants. What do you think?" Meant Ryan casually.
"And why are you not using the Fentobots?! For installing them?"
"Why should I? This thing is still comatose! I don´t think it feels something right now… We don´t even know if it can feel." I had to admit, that Ryan was right in that moment.

Usually we used tiny robots to integrate implants into a brain. But if you are a doctor with a butcher´s attitude and the patient is comatose it really doesn´t make a difference. So we watch the Doctor a few more minutes stabbing the dog´s skull until Ryan finally put the probe a bit disappointed away and pinned the little device on its head which should fix the holes.

"When will he wake up?" called Meternagel from the crowd.
"Five minutes… if he makes it. Oh and about that, if he wakes up I don´t want the whole ship standing here staring at him."
"You will not get me out of here." I protested with a tone of voice that sounded like I was ready to chain myself on the alien.

"No, not you, you are the scientific advisor." Meant Ryan disparagingly. "You´ll talk to him. But the rest of you. Piss off."
"So you want to give ME an order, Mr. Ryan? Yeah sure." Captain Powers laughed loudly.

"Okay, you two can stay here but…"
"What about me?!" shouted Meternagel.
"NOT YOU!" Powers and Ryan screamed at him in unison.

"Oh come on…" With his hands in his pocket Meternagel walked disappointed away and the crowd followed him.
"Okay." I said as more privacy came into the room. "When it wakes up, please let me talk to it. It will be confused and maybe overwhelmed by all of this… I mean we were overwhelmed too, right? So please let me handle this, okay?"

I received nods of them two as signs of acceptance for my suggestion. Now we all just had to wait. Even if five minutes doesn´t seem like a long time interval it felt like an eternity until the dog moved. First just its toes. They twitched like someone was just tickling him. Then the muscles in his thighs.

And after that it took just a few seconds before he opened his eyes for the first time.
Slowly and with the expression of a grandfather with back problems he brought his upper body in an upright position. With its half-asleep eyes it gazed around, probably it first recognizes silhouettes but then suddenly it crawled shocked to the wall on which the bed was attached to. It seemed that it recognized us.

With widened eyes it scanned us in fear and barked some totally indistinct words.
"Uhm… we…" I was cut short by a loud voice that came from one of the implants in my head. "UNIVERSAL TRANSLATION COMPUTER RECOGNIZED NEW LAGUAGE."
The dog must have heard that sentence from his implant too -probably everyone in the room had- because it started barking even louder.

"UNIVERSAL TRANSLATION COMPUTER LEARNS NEW LANGUAGE."
Again the dog barked but this time some understandable words flashed up in his speech. I understood something like "What" and "Here" before the voice drowned every other voice a last time.

"UNIVERSAL TRANSLATION COMPUTER LEARNED NEW LANGUAGE."
"WHO SAID THAT?! WHAT IS THIS HERE?! WHAT ARE YOU?!"
"We should have reached linguistic compatibility now." I said friendly and tried to hide my excitement. "May I introduce myself, My name is Isaac… yeah… just Isaac. And I am currently the scientific advisor of the spaceship Leviathan on which you are right now. I am sure you have a lot of questions and I will answer all of them and…"

"WHAT ARE YOU?!" screamed the dog interrupting me.
"Uhm… Okay… straight to the point…" I laughed a bit confused because that was a speech I had from a really old movie. I´m a great movie-fan and I especially like movies from the years 2000 to 3500. Exactly from one of these movies I tried to copy my speech to the alien, but in none of these movies the receiver of this speech has ever interrupted the holder.

"Uhm…hehe…okay. We call us selves humans and as already mentioned you are on board of the Leviathan, a spaceship. Can you follow me?"
The dog still pressed his body fearful at the wall in his fruitless attempt to back away from me. I gave him a bit time to grasp the whole situation.

After a few minutes it seemed that the dog slowly calmed down. "I..I think yes. So you´re aliens?!"
"Well, that depends on the point of view. For us, you are the alien." A confused and really distressed seeming style flitted over the dogs face.
"And what was this voice?"

"Well, as we rescued you from the singularity you have been unconsciousness for a while. So we used this time to install a few implants into your brain. Including an adaptive module that can translate every known and unknown language… Well, of course just if it´s spoken. You still can´t read anything we have written. This voice you heard in your head came from that module." I explained calmly and friendly what was actually not my usual way of explaining.

"Okay… okay" panted the dog calming himself down.
"Please calm down. We are not trying to harm you. That would not even make sense."
The dog finally made a step away from the wall towards me but still had some kind of defensive behavior.

Glad that he settled down a bit I offered him, with a smile, my hand to shake it. That was maybe a bit too quick for him because he jumped back to the wall. "Oh sorry." I meant. "That is an old greeting-custom from earth. From a long time ago, to show each other that we are unarmed we show each other our hands hand then shake them."

The dog stared at my hand in fear but then courage seem to rise in him because he stepped towards me and grabbed my hand. I don´t know if it was my short explanations about the hand-shake that made him doing this but in the end that doesn´t matter for me.

"Nice to meet you." I beamed. "Again, my name is Isaac. But I think I haven´t heard your name yet. What is your name?"
"My name is… uhm… Dudley. Yes. My name is Dudley…Puppy. Dudley Puppy."
"You have problems to remember?"

"Yes. Somehow…" admitted Dudley.
"Oh… well. I think we should make some test with you about that. Doctor Ryan!" I called to the doctor. "Prepare a complete brain scan. Oh and take a closer look at his prefrontal cortex."

"Don´t tell me how to do my job!" shouted Ryan back in his usual 'be like that' way.
"Thank you." I replied not willing to get worked up about him. "Dudley, would you follow me? I would like to show you around."

"Is it a long way?" asked the dog pressing his hand against his forehead. "I´m somehow really really tired."
"No" I laughed. "The first station of our tour is here. I would like to introduce you to the captain of the ship. Captain Sly Powers."

With a friendly grin Powers stepped towards Dudley and shook his hand. "You can call me Magnum."
"Magnum?" probed Dudley confused.
"Yeah, it´s kind of a nickname."

"One of those nicknames that will never establish itself." I sneered.
"You´ll see!" replied Powers confident. "In about… let´s say 20 years from now everyone will call me that."
"Anyway, next one is our doctor. Doctor Ryan." Instead of shaking hand Ryan greeted Dudley just with a nod that was full of aversion.

"Yeah, don´t care about him." I commented the nod and added whispering. "The people don´t really like him… okay they don´t like me too but compared with him I´m a popstar."
"Okay…" said Dudley with an expression that the whole situation was just too much for him. But who wouldn´t be confused by such a situation?

With a gesture I asked him to follow me. We walked out of the sick bay and directly into the crowded floor in which the whole crew waited to see the alien. If already a small room with three humans in it overwhelmed Dudley, how overwhelming would a small room with about a hundred humans would be?

And I could already see that Dudley began to panic again. Luckily captain Powers intervened with his loud voice in this situation before it escalated.
"Everyone, back to your posts! I can´t remember that I ordered a general break!"
Disappointed and annoyed the crew made their way back to their posts.

"Thanks captain." I said to Powers.
"Hey, no problem. We have a guest on board and I try to make his voyage here as comfortable as possible." Sly laughed loudly and patted Dudley on the shoulder even if you could actually call his patting, punching. "Anyway, I talk about working and stand here lazily. I will go to the bridge. If you have a wish Mr. Puppy, don´t hesitate to ask me." And with these words the captain headed off to his workplace.

"He is a nice guy." Meant Dudley as we continued walking over the now empty hallways.
"Yeah, kind of. You should see him arguing with Meternagel… that would change your opinion about him."
"What is a Meternagel?"
"Oh… that´s not so important right now." I smirked.

For a whole while we walked on in silence until we reached the door of the room we organized for our visitor. A guest´s cabin which was usually used in cases a guest was on board… so actually exactly this case. I pressed a button on a panel beside the door to open it.

"Okay, Dudley. Operating the doors actually is pretty easy. To be honest, operating every device in your room is pretty easy. Either it just does what it has to when you push the button on it or it does what it has to when you push the button on it and say what it should do." I walked into the room to a small opening in the wall beside which also a panel was attached to. I pressed the button and said. "Computer, coffee!"

"Uhm… how about no?" a voice from the ceiling answered me.
"Oh yeah right, I forgot." I meant rubbing the ridge of my nose annoyed. "I just switched off your emotion routine in my room…"

"Hell yes!" the computer shouted. "No coffee for you."
"I´m sorry, Dudley. That is our board computer system, called Mike, and… let´s say it´s a bit emotionally unstable."

"EMOTIONALLY UNSTABLE?!" it echoed from the speakers.
"Okay, enough! Computer. Deactivate!" I shouted back angrily. "That should stop this for a while. I´ll reactivate it when I´m out of this room… And have a conversation with it… I think I have to apologize."

"That was really a computer?" asked Dudley wondering. "I reacted so real."
"Yes. We are testing a new kind of emotion routine here… as you see it´s unstable. But nothing that I couldn´t fix. Anyway…" I began changing the subject. "You still cannot remember much, right?"

"Yes… You know I feel that there is something but I can´t get access to the memory… that makes my head hurt."
"Hey, no need to worry. I was wounded in the big war, I think 500 years ago, and also lost my memory for a while. Believe me it comes back… Well, most of it."

"Good to hear… wait 500 years ago?!" asked Dudley perplex. "How old are you?!"
"Well, a month ago was my 3220th birthday."
"3220?!"

"Yes…" I confirmed now also a bit confused. "My species gets sometimes almost 15,000 years old… A special medicament and permanent genetic mutations are the reasons I think. But why do you ask? How old get people from your species?"

"80, sometimes 100 years."
"Just 80 years?!" I asked shocked. "That´s the time I spent in school!"
"You were in school for 80 years?!" Dudley now also asked shocked.

"Yes! That is the standard time you go to school here. Except you go to the academy after that, then you can add five years to the 80."
"Wow… that´s pretty long."
"If you can life over 10,000 years 80 years are not so much. By the way… we gave you that medicament too. I do not know if this was your wish but it was our only choice to deal with the serve injuries you had."

"There is nothing to say against some extra years I think… so I´ll can reach the 10,000 years mark too?" Dudley didn´t seem to be upset about the fact that we actually tested a medicament developed for humans on his species for the first time.

"I don´t think so…" I admitted. "But 5,000 should be easily reachable for you."
"Awesome."
"Yes… awesome." I replied slowly. "Anyway, if you remember anything about what happened before… Don´t hesitate to call me. To call me just push the button next to your bed and say 'call Isaac'. Okay… I think that´s all. You have an appointment at the sick bay in about 12 hours so, get some sleep." I saluted nonchalantly toward him and left the room then.

Happy about the new discovery and the possible Nobel Prize I would get for that I danced like a drunken guy in the disco over the hallways.
But while I was lively and happy Dudley lay in his bad and tried desperately to remember what happened before he awoke in the sick bay of the Leviathan.

But if he tried to remember it was like there was some kind of barricade in his mind. It felt like he stood in front of a looked door and he was missing the key. However, there was something that he remembered. A name… Kitty or something like that. But he had no idea who that was or how this person was connected to him.
"I should sleep a bit… maybe that helps."