She stood at the window, watching the rain. It had started at four that afternoon, which made sense, considering it was a Wednesday. She looked out at the trees, the grass, the small two-lane road that ran in front of her house. It was all so easy to believe sometimes, so easy to forge that none of this was real. But then, that was the point.
"OK Teegan, that's enough for now."
The world around her faded first to gray, then to black, with just the faintest whooshing sound. As her pod opened, the light from the lab flooded in cold and bright. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the light-- it always seemed like it was too bright on the ship-- and after a moment she glanced around the room, taking a few deep breaths to steady herself. Coming out of the sim was always a disorienting experience. The pods were designed to replicate every form of input the human body could detect, and having every single one of your senses change so abruptly from a cozy room watching the rain outside to the bright, cold, solid metal interior of a cryo-stasis lab was a bit of a jarring experience. The other experimental pods lined the walls of the room, empty at the moment, looking for anything like the coffins that the Anwar kept insisting they were not. All of their assurances to the contrary, she still couldn't bring herself to trust this idea of an alien salvation. Humans had always made their own way on the Earth; why should they suddenly need help from another species to get off of it?
These questions quickly faded from her mind as her Anwar partner entered the room. Teegan had always had a way of making her relax when he was around. He had told her that it was the way his species communicated with each other, through subtle telepathic signals that the human brain could detect but not interpret, but she preferred the illusion that it was her familiarity. She liked to believe that she could find some common ground with something so very different from herself, that she could understand how she reacted to this particular alien using good old human logic and intuition. Even if it was very, very wrong. Like the sim, it was a pleasant delusion.
"OK Teegan, that's enough for now."
The world around her faded first to gray, then to black, with just the faintest whooshing sound. As her pod opened, the light from the lab flooded in cold and bright. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the light-- it always seemed like it was too bright on the ship-- and after a moment she glanced around the room, taking a few deep breaths to steady herself. Coming out of the sim was always a disorienting experience. The pods were designed to replicate every form of input the human body could detect, and having every single one of your senses change so abruptly from a cozy room watching the rain outside to the bright, cold, solid metal interior of a cryo-stasis lab was a bit of a jarring experience. The other experimental pods lined the walls of the room, empty at the moment, looking for anything like the coffins that the Anwar kept insisting they were not. All of their assurances to the contrary, she still couldn't bring herself to trust this idea of an alien salvation. Humans had always made their own way on the Earth; why should they suddenly need help from another species to get off of it?
These questions quickly faded from her mind as her Anwar partner entered the room. Teegan had always had a way of making her relax when he was around. He had told her that it was the way his species communicated with each other, through subtle telepathic signals that the human brain could detect but not interpret, but she preferred the illusion that it was her familiarity. She liked to believe that she could find some common ground with something so very different from herself, that she could understand how she reacted to this particular alien using good old human logic and intuition. Even if it was very, very wrong. Like the sim, it was a pleasant delusion.
