Chapter 1:

Sky Lights

My name is Scott. Just Scott, no last name. Common enough, I guess. Wish I could write down my full name. I was always taught that introducing yourself to someone was common courtesy.

But giving my full name would mean I had nothing to hide. That I was a nice, normal guy. But that's wrong. I'm still a nice guy, but I'm no longer normal, and I sure as hell have something to hide. I can't tell you my last name. Or the city where I used to live.

But you'd think that telling you my name is Scott would lead you to assume that I'm a human, right? You'd assume I have arms and legs and a face and a mouth. But names tell you nothing of that.

I am not human.

I WAS a human, once. I was born a human, at least. I have human emotions. But I'm not human.

I'm a normal kid, I guess. Or used to be. Did okay in school. Good in English, bad in science and math. A bit of a nerd. Sci-fi, terraforming, aliens, the whole nine yards. I had dark brown hair, long bangs that kept dipping into my face and eyes. My eyes were…..what color were my eyes? It's been months, and I've already forgotten a lot about what it was like to be human.

Doesn't matter anyway, I guess. Now my eyes, all four of them, are the slit pupils of a reptiles, irises and sclera that literally shine with a soft green glow. My eyes and lack of mouth make me appear expressionless, even when I'm furious or ecstatic. My social mask of carefully-neutral expression that I had developed for survival in high school, was now a reality far more bizarre than the bullies it had been crafted to escape from.

Now you're really lost, right? Yeah, thought so. Look, maybe I should just start from the beginning…

It all started late one night, walking home from school. Stars twinkled overhead, mostly blotted out by the occasional streetlights as I walked along, re-shifting the weight of my backpack with its 20-odd pounds of school books. I chose not to walk the sidewalks of suburbia, but instead cut through some meadows and stuff to get home faster. Mom was serving garlic pasta tonight, one of my favorites.

I breathed in the brisk air. Felt it chill my lungs and reinvigorate me, bringing to mind hot cups of cappuccino at some outdoor coffee house.

I opened my eyes from it and just stared upwards at the stars for a little bit. Nothing interesting to see down here, anyway. My mind sort of wandered. Space, in my imagination, is just far cooler than anything down here. I mean, it's such a big-ass universe that there's got to be SOMEBODY else out there. Otherwise what's even really the point of doing anything at all?

It was just on this train of thought that I saw a new light appear in the sky. Just looked like another star, until it was moving and blinking. I sighed in disappointment. Probably a low-flying plane. Damn.

I kept watching it anyway, as a change from watching the slowly-panning open fields around me. It was weird. I could swear it was getting brighter. A brilliant, blue-white light that I suddenly noticed was moving too fast to be an airplane—then slower and slower as it brightened.

Then, the thing itself came into view and I just about died of shock.

It was a real, honest-to-freaking-god flying saucer. With the whole circular-thing and the round-portholes and the twinkly-lights and the whole nine yards.

I froze, but was inwardly disappointed and outraged. No way, I thought furiously. This is NOT happening. I can't believe that real aliens would be so lame as to conform to popular stereotype like this. I totally felt gypped.

But gyp or not, it was sure as hell real. So that was a small comfort, of some sort. The saucer hovered right above me. It was about as big as three nose-to-nose school buses, for its circumference. Big, but for a spaceship I thought it was pretty small. But then again all I ever knew about spaceships before was books I'd read. Talk about your armchair quarterback.

A beam of light appeared. I only had time to think, come on, how much more cliché can this get? before getting overwhelmed and blacking out.

Consciousness returned abruptly, and my eyes opened quietly. I've always been a fast waker anyway, comes from putting my alarm across the room so I would have to get out of bed to get at it. It actually works pretty well.

I couldn't really make sense of what I was seeing, yet. A few moments passed and I tried to orient myself. Okay, I was horizontal. The room, if you could call it that, was a big round white blur. Weird.

I sat up smoothly and blinked a bit, simply letting my eyes adjust and looking around. My impression seemed to be on the dot. I've always joked that humans are overly fond of rectangles, and this totally exemplified that, since NOTHING in here was anything approaching rectangular. It was all ovals and circles and gentle flowing lines. Like those iPods. It was like Apple got to design a starship or something.

An oval-topped door lay on one wall. The other walls were weird. Blankly featureless underneath, they were covered with things that looked a lot like cocoons. They sort of pulsed and writhed like larva, or frozen maggots. Nasty.

I lay upon a sort of bench in one wall. I did a little inventory check. My backpack was gone, which ridiculously was my greatest cause for alarm at the moment. If my backpack was gone, then I was kind of screwed. All my books and homework and stuff were in there. If those were gone for good, then I was SO getting F's this semester. F's like you wouldn't believe. Dammit.

Besides that, I was untouched, it seemed. Clothes were still fine. Pockets were empty. It was pretty much me vs. the world.

The door opened. They must have seen me wake up or something, despite the lack of noticeable cameras or whatever. I sort of did a double-take and was outraged.

It was a little different, but the alien guy was pretty much the same little grey men we had all seen on bumper stickers or whatever. Big heads, big black eyes, small bodies, long arms, etc. Damn. There went my theory of CREATIVITY in natural evolution.

The guy wore a blue sort of uniform. Looked like a ranked guy. The small mouth opened, and he began to talk. It was weird, because halfway through his sentence some sort of translator seemed to kick in. "Hogren kalach, gah fillat the inconvenience. Your hands are of interest of us, so we have decided to sell you to a clumsy race a couple light-years from here. Your dexterity will be valued."

I blinked, still not quite mentally awake. "Woah, waitasec, you shot who in the what-now? I mean, like, wait, you're selling me into some weird sorta alien slavery?"

Alien-Guy nodded. "We apologize for any inconvenience."

I'm normally pretty polite, but this sort of set me off. "INCONVENIENCE?" I retorted sarcastically. "Oh, SURE, no PROBLEM, it's all FINE, I'll just be carted to some entire other PLANET and working as a…….um, coal miner or something! It's WONDERFUL! JUST the career I was LOOKING FOR!"

The alien nodded again. "We are pleased you approve. You will be fed until the journey ends." Evidently he didn't have the first clue about teenage sarcasm.

He turned around and began to leave. "Woah-woah-whoa-woah, waitasecond here dude," I jabbered, the little nonsense's sort of flowing out as place-holders while I got my thoughts in line. "So that's, like, just IT? Not even a goddamn anal probe?"

"No. We have finished our anal experiments and obtained all the data our scientists need."

"Oh. Umm…..Oh."

Faced with this witty comeback, the alien guy left the room, the door closing behind him.

Damn it. Sold into slavery. This was TOTALLY not happening to me. Slavery was like AIDs, it always happened to "somebody else", not you. In the history textbooks people got enslaved every 5 seconds or something, but this is the 21st century, man! Slavery, like…doesn't work anymore. Or something.

With this brilliant train of thought, I sat back down on my little cot, feeling miserable. The hours blended into one another seamlessly, and I fell asleep after a while from sheer boredom.