Escapade

I couldn’t do anything, of course, until I escaped from that closet. I tried the door, but the knob wouldn’t turn.

“Locked?” I couldn’t believe it. “Really? Who locks a closet? Who even has a lock on their closet?”

I turned my back on the offending door and my eyes toward the ceiling to address the voice that I could only assume belonged to the ship. “Do you have any bright ideas?”

“They’re coming,” it wailed in its childlike voice. “Oh, they’re going to cut me apart! Help me!”

“I can’t!” I winced as soon as I said it. I was much too harsh, and there was no call for it, even under the circumstances. I took a breath, collected myself, and tried again, but much calmer. “I can’t do anything from in here. Is there any way that you can get me out of this closet?”

The child… I mean, the ship didn’t answer for a while. I thought I’d lost connection, or it had abandoned me as useless, and then it said, “Do you mean…like… jettisoning the door?”

“Doing what now?” I felt stupid asking, but I didn’t know what it meant.

“Making the door go away,” it quietly replied. It really sounded like a little kid uncertain about itself. “I can do that… I think.”

That was good news. “If you can, it would really help a lot.”

“Okay,” it replied with the same uncertainty. “I’ll try.”

I waited. Somehow, I knew that rushing the ship to do anything wouldn’t do any of us any good, but the wait took far longer than I expected and yielded no results. The door was still there and I finally had to intervene.

“Are you okay?” I thought that was better than asking it why it wasn’t doing anything about the door. “Do you need me to do anything?”

“No,” it replied in the tone of a kid doing a difficult math problem. “It’s just harder than I thought.”

I accepted that. If anyone had asked me to disappear an entire door, I would have had trouble, too. Then, I had a brilliant idea. “What about just the knob? Can you make that disappear?”

“Maybe,” the kid replied, sounding more uncertain of itself. I knew I had to encourage it, but my experience with anything like that was pretty limited. Still, I had to try.

“Just take your time and concentrate,” I told it.

The ship groaned woefully. “But they’re almost here!”

It was going to panic, and then it wasn’t going to be able to do anything, so I had to calm it down. In my most soothing voice, I said, “I know, but you can’t think about that right now. Just concentrate on making the door or the knob disappear. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

“But they’re coming!” Its whine was heart wrenching, and it was impossible to think of it as anything other than a frightened little kid.

“I know,” I said as soothingly as I could. “And I know you’re scared. But you can do this, can’t you? You can jettison things?”

I decided to use its own phrasing, so it understood exactly what I meant, and it worked. The ship hemmed audibly for a moment, then admitted, “I’m better at jettisoning bigger things, like whole segments of my interior. The little things are harder.”

That was a bummer. I had to rethink my strategy a little bit. I glanced around the room for ideas and stopped on the racks of clothing. An idea formed. Clothes had pockets, and pockets sometimes kept things like keys and other things useful for opening locks. I rushed to investigate but soon found something quite depressing. They were women’s clothes, mostly pantsuits, and most of the pockets were fake.

“You have got to be kidding me!” I couldn’t help putting voice to my frustration, but it didn’t stop me from rifling everything that had a decent pocket until I found something very strange. It looked like a high-tech magic wand but was made of a patchwork of materials, mostly brass, was as thick in diameter as two fingers, and was full of knobbly bits. One half was bound in old, brown leather and was obviously the grip while on the other end was a green gem encased in a spherical cage. My thumb accidentally brushed one of the knobbly bits and the subsequent whirr that issued from it nearly stopped my heart. It also made the whole thing vibrate and the gem glow eerily.

“What in the world is this thing?” I wondered, and just as I was about to further wonder if it could help me out of the closet, my head exploded with images that were not mine. Other people’s lifetimes ripped through my skull. Adventures that were not my own suddenly became mine, and I knew things that I had never learned in my entire life. It flooded my head, my eyes, my ears, every sense that I knew and several that I had just then discovered, and then it was over and I was on my back, lying in a very uncomfortable position across a very uncomfortable bed of very uncomfortable shoes.

I sat bolt upright, rubbing my temples. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I’m sorry,” the ship frantically replied. “I thought it would help.”

I don’t know how I knew that the ship had forged a telepathic link with me to share the experiences of the previous pilots, but it didn’t matter. I knew the sonic setting I needed to oscillate the lock into submission. The only thing I didn’t know was what I was going to do once I got out.

“Interface,” I called on a hunch. “Can you hear me?”

“He turned her off,” the ship told me.

I sighed heavily. “Then, I’ll just have to turn her back on again.”

“And save me?” the kid pleaded.

“And save you,” I assured it, trying to sound more confident than I felt.

“How?”

It was a fair question. As an American, I should have told it that I was going to go in swinging and take out that highly evolved dinosaur. As a coward and someone that had never been in a fight in my entire life, I didn’t have a clue, even though I had a few hundred lifetimes freshly swirling through my skull to use for reference. In fact, for some reason, despite their obvious presence, I couldn’t fix on any of them for help. They swirled around like ghosts, visible but untouchable and thus completely useless.

“I’ll think of something,” I said, tuning the sonic for unlocking doors. It was weird that I could do that and nothing else with those memories.

The device whirred in my hand, the door popped open, and I leapt into the hall, knowing exactly how to navigate my way to the console room. I even knew that it was called a console room and not a bridge, control room, ops, or any of the other names sci-fi might give it. But oddly enough, I couldn’t identify any of the rooms I passed on the way, including the one with the weird metal tree and the bulbous glass fruits hanging from it. I couldn’t worry about that, though. There was a child to rescue.

“Tell me what’s happening in the console room, ship!” I did my best to keep my voice calm, so there would be no reason for the ship to panic. “What are they talking about, now?”

I ran past three more rooms and the ship didn’t reply. Worried, I asked, a little louder, “Ship? You still there?”

After one more room, it said, “He’s just standing there staring at the console. Why does he look so scary?”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mean to be.” I tried to sound reassuring, but I had to admit that the velociraptor kind of creeped me out, too. “He’s probably very nice.”

“Not to me,” the ship whined. “He wants to cut me up!”

“He doesn’t know you.” It sounded stupid the moment I said it and I knew that I had to do better, but at the moment, I was in too much of a hurry. “Just tell me what he’s doing. Is he fiddling with anything?”

That sounded better in my head. Before I could correct myself, the ship said, “No. He’s just standing there. What should I do?”

I suddenly had a wild idea. “Can you reactivate the Interface?”

“Do you mean, right now?”

“Not yet.” I was impressed that the ship could even do that. It made me think that the Interface wasn’t being completely honest with me about its own abilities. “But I’ll let you know when I get there.”

“Are you sure?” The ship was getting scared again. It probably hadn’t stopped being afraid the entire time. It was heartbreaking.

“Don’t worry.” I tried hard to sound reassuring. “I’ll be there soon.”

“Okay.”

It sounded so vulnerable that I was suddenly racing as fast as I could to get there. I still didn’t have a plan, really. Only a concept of one. But it was still important that I get to the console room as fast as possible and stop the dinosaur’s dastardly plan. The thing was, there was still a lot of distance between me and my destination, and I could only run so fast.

“With this much dimensional space to screw around with,” I couldn’t help muttering under my breath, “Why didn’t anyone think to install a train or a turbolift or something!”

An idea struck me, but it was a long shot.

“Ship,” I called, panting for my life. I’d done more running that day than I had in a very long time. “Do you know anything about dimensional folding?”

The ship let me pass two more rooms before it timidly replied. “No. Should I?”

“Never mind.” I had to drop the idea before the ship had something else to worry about. “Forget I asked.”

“Okay,” it replied uncertainly.

I kept running, really wishing that the people who had designed the ship had thought to install transporters, too.