Imposter

Prologue

"We are approaching the destination." The mechanical voice startled me and I quickly rose to my feet. My surroundings seemed familiar. The same room I woke up to everyday for as long as I could remember. The same room I spent every hour of every day studying in. The same room I could not wait to escape from. But I was still there. Stuck in the same four hundred and eighty square feet in which I had spent every minute of my life.

I sighed and sat back down on the cot in one corner of the room. Upon closer examination I realized that I was not in my room. Both of the aluminum chairs were pushed under the matching table, but I always kept one chair beneath the small window. On the shelf beneath the computer, where my microchip containing all of my files, notes and lessons usually sat, was a bag. I could see that it was made of the same slippery, silver material as all my clothes. The rectangular door of my room had been replaced by a more portal-like door with a heavy, thick latch.

This was not my room, I was sure of that. I tried to remember the last time I knew for certain that I was in my own room. It was hard to separate the days in my mind. Each one seemed the same. Sleep for six hours, wake up and take a vitamin tablet, then morning lesson. Six hours later would be a short break with enough time to take a nutrition supplement. A shorter time for an evening lesson followed by another nutrition supplement and hour of leisure time Then I would get ready to sleep again and by the end of the second six hour segment the lights went out. I did my best to try and single out the memory of the last time I was in my room.

The evening lesson had been about advanced physics. The reading had hinted that humans had not gotten very far along in this field. However, the computer had been very careful, censoring any material that went beyond what the humans studying on Earth had discovered. In fact some of their studies contradicted those of other humans. I found this extraordinarily silly. Even the people on the same planet did not know each other (I still did not really understand how one planet could be divided into so many different groups that did not even contact each other).

The lessons for the past several cycles, or "days" as the humans (and now I, too) called them, had had more sections censored than I had read before. I took this to be a good sign, it meant that I was nearing the end of my lessons and therefore also nearing Earth and my purpose for living. I pondered this thought with joy over my free hour and finally breaking into my thoughts came the sound of the service tray in what the humans might call a dumbwaiter. It was actually more like a teleportation device, but served the same purpose as the dumbwaiter so that is what I called it, knowing that because humans did not know what its true name was that I would never know.

I slid back the small door covering the tray and gasped. On the small, circular tray, made from the same aluminum-like material as the table and chairs in my room, beside the usual nutrition supplement that I expected was a cup (made from the same metal material) filled with water. While I knew very little about the Kolians or their home planet of Kole, I did know that water was rare, a delicacy and was made even more so from the limited supplies available on the spaceship. I had only ever tasted the pure drink eight times on the ship, once every thousand cycles, or two years and twenty days in Earth time, as a gesture of celebration. I, myself, had never been invited to the celebration but could only listen to the muffled exclamations in one of only a few languages that I had not been taught.

I loved the taste of water and therefore did not stop to think about why it was given to me when I could not hear the sounds of celebration drifting down the hallway past my perpetually locked door. In fact, I did not even notice that the tablet I was swallowing was not what I had assumed to be a nutrition supplement.

"So stupid," I muttered to myself. "Why was I not thinking?" I pressed the palms of my hands into my eyes as though when I released the pressure from my eyes I could have opened them to see my own room again. It was folly, naturally, but I was desperate. Desperate enough to believe, to hope that I might be wrong. That everything might be normal in only a moment. I could hear the faint whirring of an engine, even through the thick walls. But that could not be right. Any living compartment was far away from the engine rooms. After all, I had seen diagrams of the ship for emergency exits, however, this proved useless after I learned very early in my studies that humans need oxygen to live.