I sniffed the air again, wondering if the drugs had messed with my sense of smell, but detected no odors. Also, the metallic taste was gone from my mouth. Something wasn’t right. Or, the inside of the Xeno holding cell was sterile, which I doubted.
I wondered if I hadn’t actually recovered from the drugs yet. It had never happened to me, but some people said that while under the drugs, they hallucinated. They saw things. Bizarre things.
That’s what this is, I decided. There was no way I could be awake, captured, and not have at least a couple of the bugs guarding me. This place wasn’t real, which is why I couldn’t smell anything.
The smoke, or fog, moved like it was alive. As I thought about it, one of the smoke-tendrils reached out from the darkness and caressed my face. It was cold, but not unbearably so. I wanted to reach out and slap it away, but my training told me that was a bad idea.
“If you experience a hallucination,” the trainer had told us, “don’t fight it. Don’t try to make sense of it. And most of all, don’t feed into it. It’s just your brain’s way of making sense of what it’s experiencing. That’s all. If it happens to you, don’t panic. Instead, consider it a short vacation from reality. Treat it like a holovid. Just sit back, imagine yourself a big bowl of popcorn, and enjoy.” His words had been met by a chorus of cheers and whispers. Several mentioned that popcorn was their second choice—that they’d be inserting their favorite holovid star into their hallucinations.
I rarely watched holovids, but I knew who I wanted in my dream—Reaver. But before I could focus enough to make it happen, a second tendril joined the first. Their touch was ethereal, and though I couldn’t feel any pressure, I knew they were there.
There was something happening beyond sight, sound, touch, or any of my other senses.
Bizarre, I thought. I didn’t know my brain could do this. I laughed and expected an echo, but it was as if the sound had died only a few inches from my mouth. Again, I thought bizarre.
I refocused my mind and imagined Reaver. The woman could turn anything into a weapon. Her legs were strong, beautifully shaped, and smooth. She could terrify men or inspire them to greatness. She could disappear into a crowd or draw every eye in the room. She was one of many, but special in her own way.
When I looked around, I didn’t see her and was a little disappointed. So, I tried again. This time, I closed my eyes and felt an image of her begin to form. She was naked, of course, and I didn’t mind at all. The image smiled at me as she laid on a huge, soft, silky bed. She stretched, and smooth, strong muscles relaxed under her soft skin.
By why do I have to close my eyes to see her? I wondered. This is a hallucination, a vivid dream… but I had to close my eyes to see what I wanted to see. I was no psychologist, but something about it didn’t make sense.
It was a hallucination, though. It had to be. My hands couldn’t grasp anything around me. I couldn’t feel the escape pod’s seat. There was no smell. The taste in my mouth was gone. And neither smoke nor fog behaved like that.
In my hallucination, I shrugged. Just go along for the ride, I told myself. It’ll make a great story to tell someday.
Then something even more interesting entered my dream. The tendrils withdrew, and the indistinct light in the darkness grew in intensity. Dark shapes passed in the distance, though how far away, I couldn’t tell. It was more like the suggestion of movement rather than a solid form.
The shape crossed the distance again, and though I couldn’t hear it, I sensed a noise. It was what I would have suspected if the thing in my dream was real. It was the kind of woosh it would make flying across a peaceful glade on a cold, winter night. It was completely alien, yet somehow familiar.
The shape—the presence—was joined by a second, then a third, then more than I could fathom. I wanted to count the things. I wanted the statistics, the knowledge of how many beings I faced. It was in my nature, and a result of my training, in case I had to help them, or kill them.
But their number was indiscernible. I could hardly tell one from another until one stopped. It was a squid—sort of.
I didn’t mind squid. They were squishy and looked like a knot of boogers, but they were also very tasty. They weren’t usually cooked right, though. It was like mankind had forgotten thousands of years of culinary skills. Like they forgot we had technology that reduced culinary mastery down to little more than a few button-pushes. Yet somehow, most so-called “chefs” managed to screw it up.
I reached out with one hand. The creature was small enough to grasp, but I was having trouble focusing on it. It seemed solid but indistinct, almost an echo of a squid rather than the real thing. When I curled my fingers, it slipped past. I didn’t even feel it. The human mind is a mysterious thing, I mused as I watched it travel left to right across my vision. It turned inward upon itself and grew a little bigger.
When the creature passed in front of me again, I tried to grab it, but it slipped past my fingers once more, untouched and untouchable. Cool.
The squid turned again and grew a little more. The tentacled snack wasn’t bothering me, so I went over the failed mission in my mind.
The creature turned again, but instead
