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Alright, I want to go to bed but this is just too important to ignore but I want to try to find more answers or clues about this place and the damn alien that is snoozing just a few feet away from me. Well, I don't know if its actually an alien but if you had a line up different species that you've never seen before then I would bet you could tell If one of them doesn't belong.

Now I'm sure that there's a better explanation for this; after all genetic splicing has come a long way. Maybe this is a genetically engineered man-made species or it was cloned from DNA from some long extinct species. Whatever it is, it's asleep and not causing any trouble so it can wait while I take another look around.

"Close exterior door to specimen." I say to the lab's computer. No response. Maybe it's like Alexa or Siri and It only responds when I specifically address it. "Computer, close the exterior door to the specimen." Still, nothing happens. I'm now extremely thankful that the glass wall is there; I don't really know if it will hold up if this thing wakes and decides to attack me.

Behind the creature is yet another door and about halfway between both of them is another ladder that leads to another hatch. I guess that I'm supposed to interact with this thing that I don't know what it's called. I'll have to start calling it something; I can't just keep calling it, "thing, creature, or alien" but that will just have to wait.

This thing that I can't come up with a name for must be friendly or at least non-aggressive otherwise I wouldn't have to cross into it's area to explore more of the facility. The door behind it has a window just like the one that was separating us and just like before I can't see what's on the other side. There aren't any markings or labels above or around it to indicate what room it is so eventually I'll have to open this door and get past its sleeping guard but I'll take my time; I'm in no rush to get in there just yet so I'll just have another look around the lab.

I'm not really looking at the supplies I have; what I'm really searching for information, a working computer, lab files, documentation, research papers or anything along those lines. Inside the lab table drawers I was able to find a computer, four of them actually. They're Dell laptops complete with small chargers, spare keyboards, mice, along with extra monitors and docking stations if I want to make a more permanent work area. But why would there be four of them? I'm the only one here so these must be back ups. I guess that I could also set up more than one workstation; I could have the main one up here and bring another laptop down to my bed so I can work while I get my strength back up.

I also notice a fairly large floor panel right by the table that's labeled, "Data storage". I open it up and holy shit; it's nothing but gigantic solid state hard drives! Dozens of them lines up neatly in several rows all connected to a server that goes well past what I can see in front of me into some other part of the lab. Warm air comes through the panel but it's a lot cooler than it should be for a setup this large, the amount of heat energy that should be coming out of here would be great enough that I would be able to feel it through my bare feet on the floor. I look at the first drive and check the label. It has the company logo, no surprise there, but the label under that says that it has five thousand terabytes of storage! And that's just the first one; there are literally dozens of these staring at me.

The sheer cost of this system just boggles my mind. Do you know how much a hundred terabyte solid state drives cost? Just a single one cost upwards of forty-thousand dollars and I have dozens of five-thousand terabyte drives that I didn't even know existed until right now. If the cost were the same, at four hundred dollars per terabyte of storage for the smaller drive, I'm looking at about seventy-two million dollars' worth of just pure data storage! That's not even including the cost of the servers that can handle these drives. Again, why is this here? I haven't the slightest clue and I don't even want to try drawing conclusions on this one, so I just close the panel and save it for another time.

That's really all the exploring that I want to do for now until I can get some real clothes on and maybe another meal, if the nanny bot will let me. I also think it would be good to bring down one of the laptops and anything else that I might want. I scooped up a laptop, charger and a computer mouse to take down with me; I'll have to set it up on the floor downstairs for now since I didn't see a desk but I'll live.

Everything was piled nicely into one of my arms, leaving me with one to help my decent. This is going to be another ladder adventure but I'm stronger now. Going down was a massive effort with just one arm, each step down was getting uncomfortable on my bare feet I'm still not used to the physical effort and I feel like a sack of potatoes. 'Good lord I'm heavy.' I thought to myself while making my way to the bottom. You would think that going back down a ladder would be safer and easier than going up one but no; instead of gracefully going down I step onto the last rung at an awkward angle, lose my grip and fall down like an idiot.

I flail out trying to find anything to grasp and let go of all of my computer equipment. I landed on my back and it knocks the wind out of me. The precious laptop crashes into the ground next to my legs, the mouse bounces off my chest which doesn't hurt at all but the charger smacks me square in the forehead. The nanny bot arms rush over but I barely notice since I'm too busy holding the growing welt on my head. 'How heavy is that charger?'

"Physical distress detected." The computer says. "What is your name?"

"Fuck off Galdos!"

"Incorrect."

I remembered that name from something, a movie or game perhaps. Never mind, I'm too focused on the throbbing sensation. A short fall from the bottom of the ladder and a charger the size of a wallet left a bump on my forehead. The same feeling of wrongness strikes me so I pick up the mouse and toss it up into the air. It comes down like it should but it annoys me. Something about falling objects ticks me off and I want to know why. Let's see what I have to work with, I may have an entire lab upstairs and I know how to use it but what is readily available? I look through some of the drawers; I have a digital stopwatch, a tape measure, regular tape, bags of water, a pen, and a laptop that possibly works. Alright, this could work.

I pick up the tape measure, it's metric, maybe I'm in Europe? Whatever, it doesn't matter. Then I grab the stopwatch Its pretty sturdy, it has a hard plastic shell with a rubber ring around it almost like a phone case, undoubtedly waterproof but also completely dead. The LCD screen is blank, I press a few buttons but that does nothing. I turn it over to get a look at the batteries; maybe I can find a drawer with batteries in it if I can find out what kind it takes.

I spot a little red ribbon; give it a pull and it comes out entirely. The stopwatch beeps to life. It's kind of like batteries included toys; the little plastic tab was there to keep the batteries from running down before the owner uses it for the first time.

This is a brand-new stopwatch that looks straight from the factory. This entire facility including the lab was full of brand-new untouched equipment. Clean, tidy, and with no signs of wear; I'm not sure what to make of that. I play with the stopwatch until I figure out the controls, it was pretty simple.

I measure out how far one of the undersides of the drawers is from the ground; it comes out to ninety-one centimeters from the floor. I grab the roll of scotch tape and ready the stopwatch, I drop it from the same height with one hand and time how long it takes to hit the floor with the other. I get about zero point three seven seconds, that's pretty fast. I hope that my own reflexes aren't skewing my readings. I mark down the time on my arm since I haven't found any paper yet then I get ready for the second round of tests. This time I get point three three seconds; I mark the time and run it again.

After doing the same drop twenty times total to get a more accurate set of results while marking each time on my arm I get an average of zero point three four eight seconds. My arm looks like a school whiteboard but that's okay.

"Zero point three four eight seconds." I say out loud. Distance equals one half acceleration times, times squared; so acceleration equals two times distance over time square. These equations come easy to me, almost second nature so I must be skilled with physics. I still try to boot up the computer to use the calculator; I may be good at math but human error still exists, I don't want to come to the wrong conclusion just because of a simple mistake. I turned it on and the screen lights up with flashes of almost neon green and pink; a completely broken monitor but the hardware inside might still be good, I'll have to hook it up to one of the monitors upstairs just to be sure it's not a paperweight.

I sit down and start doing the math on one of my legs and come up with an answer I don't like: The gravity in this room is too high. Its fifteen meters per second per second when it should be nine point eight. That's why things falling feel wrong to me; they're falling too fast. And that's why I'm so weak despite these muscles; everything weighs one and a half times as much as it should.

The thing this is: nothing affects gravity. You can't increase or decrease it, Earth gravity is nine point eight meters per second per second period, and I'm experiencing more than that. There's only one possible explanation: I'm not on Earth.

"Okay, take a breath. Let's not jump to wild conclusions; the gravity is too high, go from there and think of sensible answers."

I could be in a centrifuge; it would have to be pretty big but with Earth's gravity being one G you could have these rooms at an angle running along a track or at the end of a long solid arm. If it's going fast enough you would just need to add one G to the centripetal force and it's possible to get fifteen meters per second gravity.

But why would someone be put in a giant centrifuge with a lab and a hospital bed in it? I don't know, would it even be possible? How big would the radius be and how fast would it need to go? I want answers and I think I know how to do it but I'll need an accurate way to measure; dropping things and timing it is fine for rough estimates but my results are only as good as my reaction time. I'll need an accurate accelerometer and only one thing will work: a piece of string.

I have about half of the drawers down here open and all that I can find are medical supplies of all varieties; there must be enough stuff to be able to open heart surgery on me three times over. I found some suture material that I could use along with oxygen tubing that could work but I would rather use the medical supplies as a last resort since I could end up needing it in the future. After going through the rest of the drawer and finding nothing that I would want to use, I decide to go back up to the lab to search. Using both hands this time to climb I ascend back up the ladder of doom will less noticeable strain, either I'm more energized from the food I had or I have more adrenaline in my system than expected.

The lights come on once again the second I'm all the way up and this time I close the hatch behind me; I've already hurt myself twice, one on the ladder the other with the catheter, and I don't want to cause a third accident just because I'm not paying attention to my footing. This side doesn't have a spinning wheel to close it like the other side, I have to use a special wrench to turn a dial that's nearly flush with the ground except for an indent used to turn said wheel from my side. There's no click that I can feel or hear like with a regular door; with hatches, or technically a scuttle in this case, you just keep turning the wheel until it's in either the fully locked or open position. I guess I'm somewhat familiar with Navy ships or I just know how to get from one room to another on one.

I start with the drawer closest to me and start making my way around the lab. Just like in my living quarters down below, I have about half of the supply drawers open and there's just about every form of lab supplies except string. I'm about to give up when I finally found a spool of nylon thread. "Yes!" I did one of those fist pump motions while I shouted.

I cut off a few feet of thread and cut it with my teeth then I tie a loop in one end and another on the tape measure. The tape measure will be playing the role of, "dead weight" in this experiment I just need something to hang it from. I look above me to see if anything could hold the string but it's all just flat panels that don't look removable. The cameras in the corners are those dome-like ones that are more popular in places like grocery stores so no luck hanging anything from those.

It's strange; the lab doesn't even have fire sprinklers overhead, and now that I've noticed it, neither did the room that I woke up in. That's a pretty fundamental safety feature in any lab along with things like eyewash stations and chemical showers. If something in here catches fire like I don't know, the literal data power house inches below my feet, I think I would like that feature built in. This lab could have another fire suppression system built in that I just don't see, that's another option. But anyway I'm getting distracted from the experiment at hand. Since there's nothing to hang my string from on the ceiling, I stick a pen through the loop opposite of the tape measure and tape both sides of the pen overhead with some duct tape from the drawer.

Then I let the tape measure's weight pull the string taught; now I have a pendulum. Cool thing about pendulums: the time it takes for one to swing forward and backward, the "period", won't change no matter how far it swings. If it's got a lot of energy it'll swing farther and faster but the period will still be the same. This is what mechanical clocks take advantage of to keep time. That "period" ends up being driven by two things and two things only: the length of the pendulum, and gravity.

I pull the pendulum to one side, release it, and start the timer. I count cycles as it sways back and forward, it's not exciting. I almost want to fall asleep but I stay at it. 'Two eleven, two twelve, two thirteen.'

Tap* *tap* *tap*.

The sound catches me off guard and I immediately lose count of the cycles. That wasn't a creepy sound at all; being alone in a lab somewhere outside of Earth I presume, I didn't get to complete my experiment, and hearing a tapping sound coming from the glass wall that a damn alien is sleeping behind. Or at least, the glass wall it was sleeping behind. The moment I realized where the tapping was coming from I dived behind the lab table and peaked over to where my guest is; and there it was, just staring at me and tapping on the glass with one of it's giant claws.

Tap* *tap* *tap*.

The alien, yes I'm going to start calling it that until I have a better name; wasn't curled up like anymore. When uncurled it's body is more of a triangular shape with bowed out sides moving up and around it's environment. I don't think the tapping was to get my attention, based on it's behavior I believe it was more interested in the glass. Its tapping all around the enclosure and pinching at the ladder which leaves a pretty noticeable bend in the metal from where I'm crouched down behind the lab table.

Alright if I'm supposed to interact with it, I should do so before it chews up everything or puts a hole in one of the walls. I start to stand up, and immediately drop back down behind cover. 'This is so stupid! Why am I thinking of walking up to it? It's a damn alien and if this is a horror movie then I'm definitely going to die and it will plant its eggs in my body.' Deep breath in, let it out. Deep breath in, let it out. Let's give this another shot.

Instead of immediately standing up straight I just peak over the desk and find that the alien is staring back at me; it probably saw me ducking down behind the lab table and now I have its undivided attention but I could have sworn its back was towards me. I didn't make any noise when it happened so it must have some other way of gathering information about its environment. Or maybe something around it was reflective enough that it could see me while it was facing the other way.

Either way, it's time to stop hiding. All of its eyes were tracking me as I stood up and walk towards the scuttle and grabbed the wrench to unlock the opening down to the medical area. I'm not running away just yet, I figure it would be smart to have an escape route in case if it's needed. I have the robot arms to give me food and water until I came up with a plan of dealing with this thing in case if things go wrong up here. I wonder how long I could last down below, I would need to find out how many meals the arms have stored to be sure but it has to be at least several weeks worth.

I kept my eyes on the alien as I secured the wrench back onto its stand that was connected to the desk. Taking my time, I stepped closer to the glass wall until I was only a few feet away. It's lying flat on its stomach and yet the highest part of its body is four feet off the ground. Now that its eyes are open I can see that they're bright yellow with vertical slit pupils like most cats and reptiles; that means that this thing is most likely a predator.

Now I start to wonder why the alien didn't have its own set of robot arms to take care of it or any of the tubes that I had. It must have been getting food somehow; I doubt that it was just hibernating the entire time I was asleep. I don't see any obvious signs of atrophy or starvation, no sores on its carapace either. As far as I can tell it looks healthy, but I'm no expert when it comes to alien nutrition or biology.

"Alright so what am I supposed to do with you?" I say to it, "What makes you so special?" The alien just stares back at me without making any movements, its acting as though were in a contest to see who will blink first. Its behavior isn't typical of an animal that's trying to stand its ground or intimidate; no warning sounds telling me to, "Back off" or "this is my tunnel", there isn't any chest puffing to make it look bigger either, just staring. Now that doesn't mean that it won't try to make some kind of attack or stance against me; some larger animals like moose or elephants will stare a person down before charging at them.

I really need to stop having these kinds of thoughts, if this alien was that hostile towards humans then it would be in a cage that didn't cut me off from the rest of the lab. Or ship I guess, if I'm really not on Earth anymore then I need to face the fact that this is likely some type of space faring vessel. I wish my experiment didn't get interrupted, I'll just have to start over after I'm done doing whatever I'm going to do here.

This should be more exciting to me; I mean I'm one of the very few people who get to interact with an alien face to face. If I get back to Earth I'm going to rub it in Mrs. Evergreen's, my English teacher's, face. She said that with my attitude I would never amount to anything. Wait, I just remembered part of my life! I remember that she taught high school English and she was the volleyball coach; she also had a nickname for me I think it was-

Tap* *tap* *tap*

I lose my train of thought and look back at the alien. It just tapped on the glass to get my attention! Did it want to show me something? How intelligent is it if it's trying to get me to focus on it, is it trying to tell me something?

"Oh yes, hello." I give it a wave with my hand and it waves back with one of its claws. It just mimicked my hand gesture; it has some form of intelligence. I do the motion again with both hands this time and it does it right back. I side-step to my left and to my right and it does the same thing but without any legs. Yes, it moved side to side by floating in the air at least two feet off the ground. This caught me off guard and I immediately crouched down to see the underside of its belly which the alien mimicked, cutting off my view.

I try moving around to see how this thing was literally floating in one and a half times gravity but every time I moved the alien mimicked me perfectly. Almost too perfectly actually; this was a near perfect reaction to any movement that I made. I do a sequence of different motions lift one arm, then the other, bend at the elbow, spin around, jump, crouch, it copies me exactly as best it can. I've only seen computers have this good of a reaction time.

That reminds me, I should probably document some of my observations. After all I am supposed to study this thing, right? I step away to the lab table and start setting up one of the laptops, one of the ones that haven't been dropped at least. I plug it in to its charger, give it a few seconds and it boots up right away and it displays a desktop with at least a dozen different icons on it. I see your typical Microsoft office apps like excel and word, newest versions of each.

I also see a few file icons; some were labeled with things like camera network, software, archive, programs, and journals. I open up programs and get bombarded with thousands of different folders and applications. I'm seeing just about every different computer-based tool or program that I've seen in my life and I mean every single one including software that's outdated. I thought back to the solid state drives below my feet, this must be what they're storing. It would take me a little bit of searching but I think that I have just about every piece of copyrighted software on Earth.

I know I have every piece actually, I can't bring up the memory but I know I have it. We had to ignore every copyright law in existence to get all the data stored onto the drives; there just wasn't any time to go about the proper way of getting all the licensing. I can remember how we got the data but I can't remember what I needed it here for or why I'm the only person here. Again, that's irritating.

I open up a word document and begin to record all of my observations. I include things like behavior, physical descriptions, the fact that it can seemingly float in the air. I'm only jotting down some quick notes so that I don't forget them later on.

Tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

"What?" I look over expecting that it's trying to get my attention again but it wasn't tapping the glass; it was tapping the ground. I look down to where it was tapping but there isn't anything there that I could see.

I resume typing and just as I start, the alien continues.

Tap* *tap* *tap* *tap* *tap*

Once again I look back and see that it's using both claws to make the tapping. Almost like it's typing as well.

Is it copying me while I'm typing? It shouldn't be able to see my hands since the laptop is blocking their view. The keyboard is silent. My arms have some twitching when I move my fingers; is that little motion telling it that my fingers are moving?

I lower my arms so that they're resting on my thighs. The lab table is now completely blocking any view the alien may have of my hands and forearms. This time I use just my left hand to make a series of taps, two at short intervals and two long ones.

It mimics me perfectly.

Next I mix it up by crouching behind the table and throw some random side to side motions with my right hand as well as some taping with my left. Just like before, it copies me without missing a beat.

This is getting weird. How is it able to copy my exact movements without being able to see what I'm doing and it's able to do it in real time. Just to be clear, it won't wait for me to finish a gesture and repeat it; it will do the motion the same time as I do it.

I'm starting to get a suspicious feeling about why it's doing the same thing as me. I quickly gather up the laptop and charger then head down the scuttle back into the medical area. This time I'm very careful and I make sure that I have good footing on each step. I already broke one laptop and I don't want to break another.

"What is your name?" The robotic voice asks as soon as I step off the ladder. I ignore it and set up the computer.

One of the icons on the laptop was labeled, "camera network". I assume the cameras are the ones in the ceiling of the rooms. I fire it up and I have a complete list of the different rooms of the ship.

I know that I'm in a ship now because one of the cameras was labeled, "Pilot house" this is another name for the bridge of a ship. This must be the cockpit and where I can find all the navigational information I need to find out where the hell I am.

I click on the camera feed labeled, "Lab" and a live image of the lab comes up with the alien in the background. There aren't any controls to zoom in or change directions so I have to work with what I have.

I watch the screen as I raise one hand. Nothing happens with the alien. I try again with the other, still nothing.

Alright well there goes my crackpot theory. For a second there I thought that I might be the one controlling its actions. I bring my face closer to the screen to get a better look at the alien.

"So how did you know what I was doing behind the table?" I say while rubbing my chin, feeling the stubble starting to form.

At that exact moment the creature lifts its right claw and starts to make a opening and closing motion with it. This is the closest way it can imitate me. It's imitating what I'm doing while I'm inside another room.

"Well, aren't you just a mindless little drone."

And now we have a name for the alien. This chapter was longer than expected and I could've gone longer but I had to cut myself off at some point. I know that everyone's time is valuable but please take the time to leave a quick review with your thoughts or ideas so that I can make the story more enjoyable for you. Thank you and have a nice day.