"In Airwolf," said Ernest Borgnine's character. "We ain't got no friends. Remember that."

I thought about this line when I got captured again.

It started with me talking to the other Ernie, watching her knitting a muffler in Harry Potter colors.

The alien was listening to some plucking harpsichord song by Bernstein. Her claws turned the volume knob on her stereo to cover our voices. She stared at me through the air register for a moment, then turned her head forward. "I wish I could see you."

"Yeah," I muttered. "Not going to happen."

Her shoulder plates sagged. "We tried to rescue you, but it didn't work out."

"You suck at saving people," I found myself saying without remembering exactly why. "You do know that, don't you?"

The creature sighed. "I admit I have far too often unwittingly played the angel of death. Not a day goes by in which I do not foolishly pray for the Lord to bring me back in time to at least one fateful moment of my days on that planet to do something over, save one life that I hadn't before, but alas..."

"You prayed for time travel."

"Among other things. It would be wonderful if many of the events we experienced on LV 426 had merely been a bad dream, but sadly this was not to be."

"That's just great," I groaned. "Why don't you pray for something useful, like a way out of that cell?"

Ernie sighed. "It is safer for the humans if I stay here."

"No," I said. "No it's not."

I told her about the experiments with the facehuggers.

She moaned and covered her face. "My God! Would that my ssidizalu were cut off and unable to lay!" she turned around to face me. "You must understand, I never wanted to hurt anyone. This isn't something I can control. The eggs just come out of my body. Those scientists...!"

Not wanting to draw attention to me, she turned back around. "So they're trying to put human minds into Ss'sik'chtokiwij..."

"That's not all," I said.

I told her about the shadow men.

The alien fell silent, contemplating this for so long that I feared she thought me crazy.

At last she said, "I cannot believe in Jesus without believing in his enemies as well, particularly Satan and his minions. I hope and pray that you are mistaken, but a demonically possessed Ss'sik'chtokiwij is not outside the ream of possibility.

"As you may remember, my aunt Ssorzechola's body was once possessed by a blasphemous demonic parasite. It does not surprise me, therefore, that others should exist as well."

I didn't remember that incident at all.

What I did remember, however, was watching a Twilight Zone episode on one of dad's flash drives. Jeffrey Myrtlebank, I think the episode was titled. A guy woke up inside a coffin and became a new man that nobody recognized.

The scary thing was where the video became corrupted. It was the scene where the old guys were sitting around in the general store, gossiping about the guy that had just come back to life. The doctor talked about how he stuck pins in the corpse, held a mirror to the guy's mouth to see his breath, and then another guy from the town said, "Where could he have been those last forty eight hours? How do we know the man who crawled out of that coffin is really Jeff Myrtlebank?"

When asked to explain, he said, "My grandmother told stories about evil spirits roaming the world, trying to find a body to take over, steal a corpse before a man is good and dead."

The doctor replied, "You just threw kindling on a fire that's been smoldering in my brain ever since the funeral."

And that's when the video got garbled and wouldn't play anymore.

Ironically, that episode was followed by the one about the old man who trapped Satan in a dungeon.

I remembered the scary image of the devil, dressed as Dracula, disappearing in a puff of smoke. Rod Sterling concluded the episode by saying, "You can catch the devil, but you can't hold him long."

I heard scratching sounds outside my compartment. I thought it could be some kind of machinery, but I had no way of telling for certain that it wasn't...something else. A shiver ran down my back.

"You really think it's demonic? You don't think that maybe they're just, I don't know, alien beings from the fourth dimension or something?"

"We know not where demons come from, nor where they go when they depart. What universe they inhabit is not nearly as important as the fact that they are making their presence felt. If what you say is true, they have some evil purpose in inhabiting the bodies of my offspring."

Ernie folded her claws.

I groaned. "So you're just going to pray."

"Just!" she said. "How can you ever hope to make a good decision without bringing it before the Lord?"

I rubbed my face in frustration, slumping on the aluminum sheeting of the compartment.

"I face a terrible dilemma," said Ernie. "I have essentially been raped, and now have children I did not intend to birth. Worst, if what you say is correct, they are demonically possessed. More now than ever I need the Lord's aid."

After a moment's prayer, she muttered, "If and when I am released from my imprisonment, I shall have my work cut out for me, not only with exorcisms, but also with the daunting task of teaching my children the sanctity of human life."

"About that..." I said. "Do you have a spaceship?"

"I once did, but misfortune struck me, and we no longer have access to it."

"Is it still here?"

Ernie shook her big head. "It seems a technical error sent the vehicle away from us to parts unknown."

I sighed. "So we really have no way of getting out of here."

"Not unless you count the theft of a human spacecraft as an option."

"Can you show me where one of those...human spacecrafts can be found?"

"Newt, stealing is a sin..."

"So is using live human beings as incubators."

"That doesn't-" she began, but I stopped her.

"I'm not stealing, I'm commandeering. Like how the Americans stole tanks from the Nazis in the Second World War. It's to save lives."

She purred. "I see you have thought this through."

But then she spread her arms, indicating her bulky body and large egg sac. "Unfortunately..."

"What are you saying? You're as useful as an asshole on my elbow?"

Ernie uttered a growl of annoyance. "Have you spoken to Ripley at all?"

"No," I said. "But she's spoken of me." I suppressed a sob. "The mean bitch doesn't love me anymore. She doesn't even know who I am!"

I was doing the sneezing/crying thing. I couldn't help it.

"I wish I could reach up and hug you," Ernie said.

I had nothing to say to this. I just cried some more, until the crying jags stopped.

"Admittedly," Ernie said. "She isn't the woman you once knew, but she does care. Before we got captured, she was assisting me in your rescue. I suggest you speak to her again."

I sniffed, nodded. "You think she's hiding something?"

"I'm assuming so. She is a clever girl."

I wasn't satisfied with that. "When..." I was about to say `The Bitch,' but offending Ernie would serve no purpose. "When The Queen had all that stuff on her body, she still was able to chase me and Ripley. She just kinda...pulled herself away."

"I know," said Ernie. "But doing that hurts! Honestly, considering how badly Ripley wounded her, I don't blame her for trying to kill you."

"You take that back!" I snarled.

The alien flinched. "Newt. I'm sorry. I meant no offense. I was merely trying to explain how painful it is to disengage such an apparatus. You'll understand when you get older."

I shuddered to think of myself like that, sitting in a hive full of eggs that I personally laid, killing people... "So how the hell am I going to find a spaceship?"

"The same way you found me."

"Ernie, there's a bunch of innocent people trapped in cryogenic stasis, and they're going to die if we don't do something!"

"What do you want me to do? I'm a prisoner here, presumably just like yourself."

I didn't have an immediate answer to that.

"Newt," she said. "Don't kill my babies."

My stomach turned the moment my brain processed those words. I understood the emotion, but really didn't want to.

Gritting my teeth, I answered, "You don't understand what's at stake here. If your babies get within a foot of the people I'm trying to save, they're dead."

Before she could utter a word of protest, I crawled away from there, frustrated and angry.

They used to screen people before allowing them to go into space. You had to be physically fit, mentally stable. I guess they wanted the bland perfection depicted in Lost In Space.

That was before private companies like Virgin and Google started offering deals and programs. On certain projects, like stope mining, nobody cared how perfect you were. They just wanted, in the words of Johnny Cash, `A mind that's weak and a back that's strong.' Google Mining didn't care about such things as alcoholism or bipolar disorder, as long as you kept the quota going. Sure, they paid lip service to it, but in reality they didn't do shit.

Dad was drilling for Google when he met mom. At the time she was working at Laundry Services. I don't know how they got free from their indentured servitude, but they did somehow, and they had me.

This is all to explain why, as a human girl, I once threw a `temper tantrum' and clawed at my own face.

I don't remember the particulars of the incident, just the fact that I cried and hurt myself. Maybe it was because I didn't want to go to school, I don't know.

Mom and dad took me to Mental Health Services. I remember playing with a dollhouse as a doctor spoke to me. It probably cost mom and dad a fair amount of money, but I didn't really think about the economics at the time.

My thoughts returned to this when the soldiers dragged me screaming back to my cage.

I had found the frozen human beings, successfully thawing three of them out, but they were scared of me. One woman ran and hit her head on an overhanging wall fixture.

They weren't doing so great. After being in cold storage so long, they shivered, puked out fluids, couldn't even keep balance or see where they were going.

I never experienced such joys. Still it would have been preferable to this.

By the time I had the people awake, and convinced that I wasn't a threat, the people in charge had already sent their security agents swarming after me.

I fought them, ran to a loading dock where they inventoried shipments on a computer, then got stopped in the middle of a metal frame staircase.

I saw an X-Men comic one time where Magneto was trying to assemble a 3-D map of something with his mutant powers, but he kept screwing up and blew the model to pieces. I think of that every time I put together the snowflake puzzle.

That, and all those episodes of NCIS the scientists beamed into my cell, the ones where Gibbs builds and builds and builds a boat in his basement, then just destroys it to start all over again. Maybe I didn't want to solve the snowflake puzzle.

Really, it's a metaphor for what's going on in my brain. I have most the pieces, but they no longer fit together.

A long time ago, I asked Claudia, "Have you ever had problems remembering stuff?"

"All the time," she said.

"How did you bring something back when it's lost?"

She gave me a shrug. "I don't know."

After a thoughtful pause, she said, "Have you ever heard of the Memory Palace theory?"

"No?"

She told me that it's a mnemonic trick. You create a place inside your mind, like the level of a video game or something, and you place all the stuff you want to remember in strategic locations so you can pull them up later.

She told me about how characters in the Sherlock television show often used memory palaces, how one villain could just sit in an empty room, dig through his imaginary file cabinet, and bring up scandalous material on anyone he liked. She mentioned Hannibal Lector's memory palace and the `Memory Warehouse' of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.

At the time, I filed all of this under the `Bullshit section of my memory warehouse', but later I began to experiment with it. I'd make jokes with Claudia about going into my memory palace.

No. That's not right. She wasn't the one who told me.

But if it wasn't her, who did, dammit?

No matter. I an constructing a timeline.

In my memory palace, there is a classroom from Hadley's Hope. It has a markerboard...no, a powder board, because we couldn't afford to keep shipping in markers and chalk all the time. A powder board has a special surface that picks up gravel dust. You scratch anything you want into the surface with a stylus, then erase it all by simply dumping a layer of dust over the whole thing like an Etch-A-Sketch.

On the powder board, I wrote down my personal history, from birth to present, connecting it, the best I can, in a straight line. Every day I try to put a new detail on it, try to fill in the holes.

So many damned gaps.

So far I've been able to use my memory palace to recover my birth certificate and social security number. I keep both documents in the top drawer of Mrs. Davis' desk. Thanks to those little details, the scientists know exactly who I am, even if they don't believe it.

There's also a computer on the desk containing the names of most of my classmates, but most the entires are nothing more than names, a face here and there, but by and large blank files. I'm still working to recover the data.

I'M SORRY THINGS DID NOT WORK OUT STOP I HAD HOPED THAT YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO TAKE THOSE HUMANS TO SAFETY

I could read Big Bird's messages without the card now. "Not as sorry as those poor people are going to be!"

Immediately after my capture, General Perez had made a special trip to my cell. His sharp words, delivered in his distinct Bronx accent, still echoed in my mind.

"Are you deliberately trying to piss me off, Becky?" He yelled. "`Cuz it's working! You know how much (G.D.) money I spent getting those human popsicles over here in the first place? You got three guys all woke up and whining about how they've been kidnapped, and I got to calm the motherfuckers down! I was just going to keep them on ice until the impregnations began, but now I got to feed them, provide them with accommodations, and, most importantly, keep them from calling the (G.D.) authorities! Now how do you think that makes me feel?"

"How gives a shit?" I muttered.

He glared at me. "What did you say?"

"I said fuck you."

Perez held a hand to his ear, feigning deafness. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch that."

I slowly extended my middle claw.

Perez retaliated by blasting me with liquid nitrogen. "Fuck with me again, alien bitch, and I'll use your (G.D.) head for an ashtray." He stormed out of the room.

While I thought about this little incident, Big Bird had been sending me messages. Messages I'd ignored. "I'm sorry, what?"

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT?

"General Perez is an asshole. I know it's wrong, but I just want to-" I distended my jaw, making my mouth claw pop out like I were cracking the man's skull open.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. WOULD DESTROYING GENERAL PEREZ NOT SAVE MANY LIVES?

"No," I said. "Not with all those other guys carrying out his work."

I SEE

The security door to my cell suddenly clicked open, and in rushed Claudia.

"Oh God oh God oh God!" she cried, shoving the door closed behind her.

Once certain that the cell had been locked all the way, she turned around, back pressed against the metal.

She stared at me, pale, breaking into a cold sweat. "Oh God, Oh Jesus," she muttered under her breath.

The woman slowly raised a trembling hand, giving me a nervous wave. "Hi. Mind if I stay here for awhile?"

A second later, I heard somebody screaming. Blood splashed across the viewing window.

"Oh Jesus," Claudia cried, squatting low to the floor. "Oh God." It sounded almost like a prayer.

Maybe it was.