Sydney wasn't really sure what one was supposed to do after a visit from aliens, so she fell back on her favorite strategy for dealing with the inexplicable; she googled it. A few hours later she had fallen far down an Internet rabbit hole of blurry images and conspiracy theories.
I'm not crazy, she told herself after reading several bizarre stories on an alien abduction forum. She said this not as an affirmation but more as a ward against an uncomfortable possibility. The people posting on these blogs sounded crazy to her, but then her recent experience would sound no less crazy if it was being told to her rather than having lived it.
Maybe she really was crazy. Perhaps the stress of her cancer diagnosis had caused a psychotic break. She got her anti-nausea medication from the bathroom and searched the web for possible side effects. Hallucinations was not among them. Ironically, nausea was. Maybe that explained why it wasn't helping her with her chemotherapy.
"I should just go buy some pot," she said aloud.
Zoe looked up from her spot on the sofa and gave a quiet meow.
"Don't get judgmental on me. You were all over that catnip toy less than an hour ago."
She set the pill bottle on the coffee table and stared at it like it was a wise oracle ready to impart vital truths.
"I'm not crazy," she declared to the pill bottle, but with less conviction than she'd been trying for. The pill bottle, while providing no wisdom, was at least polite enough to not contradict her.
Sydney stood up and began pacing around the sofa. Since she rarely left the apartment, pacing accounted for a large part of her physical activity, to the point that she had worn a pattern in the carpet. Her landlord had even complained about it.
Her landlord. A thought tickled some neurons in the deep recesses of her brain. She had never liked her landlord. He was creepy, and she worried about him using his master key to sneak into her apartment at night. That thought had become obsessive until she'd set up a webcam attached to an old laptop. She hid it on one of her bookshelves and aimed it at the door. For several days, she started each morning by pulling the SD storage card from the old laptop, plugging it into her desktop system, and reviewing the video. Of course it showed nothing but her cats running around. Gradually, her fear subsided until she all but forgot about the webcam.
Now she held the laptop in her hands, fearing what truths might be stored in its flash memory. She carefully pulled the tiny SD card and walked to her desk with it cupped in her hand. She plugged it into the card reader and held her breath as she started the video playing.
A view of the closed door and her desk next to it. She saw herself sitting in her desk chair in front of her laptop, just as she was now. She resisted the urge to raise her hand to see if the image on the screen did the same. She had configured the system to record a full day of video before deleting older files to record new video, so she had to fast-forward through several hours before finding the critical moment.
This was it. She was on her cell phone at her desk, then she was getting up and walked to her reading chair. She was still talking as she sat, gesturing with her left hand as if in front of an audience. Was she always that animated while on the phone? This had to be close to the time the aliens had appeared. Or when she had suffered a psychotic break. She wasn't sure which possibility she feared more.
Sydney let out her breath in a gasp as the aliens appeared on the screen. They stood there, in all their nude mannequin glory. Sydney watched the video version of herself drop her phone. Clothes eventually appeared on the aliens, and they walked over to the sofa, nearly disappearing from the scene as they sat down. Only their finely dressed legs showed. Zoe made her appearance. The aliens eventually disappeared. All just like she remembered.
"I'm not crazy," Sydney said again, this time with more conviction.
She ran the video back to the moment before the aliens appeared, then ran it forward frame by frame. Their materialization began as a spot of blurriness hanging in mid air. A frame later it grew into a pair of vaguely human shaped smudges. Within two more frames it had solidified into her pasty alien friends. Their disappearance, what she could see of it, looked like the same process in reverse. She spent the next half hour running the video backwards and forwards, soaking up every detail. She finally stopped, closed her laptop, and plopped back down on the sofa with her cat.
"Well, that's sorted then," she declared to Zoe. "Aliens are real, and they want to hire me." It still sounded crazy when she said it out loud, but she found herself warming to the idea. Given a choice between psychosis and actually working for aliens, she realized she much preferred door number two... the one with the cancer cure, immortality, and a boat load of money.
But there was still so many unanswered questions. Would they let her take the cats? What would the spaceship really be like? When would she have to leave? Could she actually survive thirty years by herself? Sure, she rarely left her apartment even now, but she still had friends. She still interacted with people. Just because it was mostly over the Internet didn't make it less important to her. Her gaming friends were practically family. They were the ones she leaned on when she needed someone to talk to. She spent nearly as much time in voice chat with her video game teammates as she did blasting mechs or sniping zombies. Could she survive several decades with nobody to talk to but Zoe and Pixel?
And what about the Internet? It was her lifeline to the outside world, her conduit to an endless stream of information and entertainment. She would rather saw off a leg than be cut off from the Internet for a year, let alone thirty. If she was going to do this, she would need to bring along a massive archive of data. It should be filled both with practical reference materials as well as a wide variety of entertainment.
Sydney sat at her desk, opened up her browser history, and started cataloging the web sites she spent the most time on. The top three were technical forums, followed by Wikipedia. Retail shopping sites were also prominent. The ability to shop on line and have things delivered right to her door was key to her reclusive lifestyle. She scanned her purchase history and realized much of her spending was on digital goods like movies and e-books. She should stock up those before launching into the great unknown.
Pixel emerged from his hiding spot under the sofa and wandered his way to Sydney. He made a display of leisurely stretching before jumping into her lap to demand chin scritches.
"Yes, yes... cat is more important than computer. You've made your position on this very clear. I need to do this, though. You don't want mama going crazy halfway through this adventure. I might make a lamp out of you."
Pixel showed his lack of concern by studiously grooming his own paw.
"I should be more organized about this," Sydney mumbled to herself. She opened a LibreOffice spreadsheet and began filling the first column with every category of digital content she could think of. She grouped them under Reference, Entertainment, and Miscellaneous. Then she added columns to record estimated storage size, cost, time to download, and finally hours of distraction provided. Her goal was to get that last column as close to two hundred thousand hours as possible. That was about how many waking hours there would be in her thirty four year round trip. Undoubtedly she would be spending some of those hours doing spaceship work related things, but she didn't know how many, so better to pad the distraction hours as much as possible.
She started with video entertainment. Her usual routine included one television episode per night during dinner on weekdays and a movie each on Saturday and Sunday. That came out to nearly fourteen thousand hours of video over the course of 34 years. That included 1768 movies and 8840 television episodes. If she estimated an average of ten dollars per movie, that was $17,680. TV shows offered better value when purchased by the season, but even that could add up quickly. She doubted she could even bring that many DVDs either way.
Maybe she should watch less television and read more books.
E-books offered far more distraction time for the dollar. Her typical book purchase was anywhere from 99 cents to three or four dollars, but a single book could entertain her for six to twelve hours. Better yet, e-books took up far less storage capacity than video, and there were many free ones available from aspiring writers trying to build a following. She resolved to write a script that would trawl through the e-book websites, downloading every free book she could find.
She already had a fairly large assortment of music in her MP3 collection, but she should download more. It should be diverse and full of surprises, with lots of songs she had never listened to. She googled 'download free music' and eventually landed at The Free Music Archive, a massive collection of music from indie artists, all available under the Creative Commons license. She could spend the entire week downloading just from that and barely dent it.
She began crunching the numbers and realized she could never download everything she wanted, not with her 30Mbps DSL Internet connection. Not for the first time, she lamented the sad state of consumer Internet in the United States. She had gaming friends in eastern Europe that paid half as much for a connection that was five times faster. When it came to connectivity, a large swath of the US was like a third world country in comparison. Faster options were available to her, but the cost had always stopped her. She brought up the websites of the two local Internet providers. Her DSL provider offered nothing new, but their competition offered several intriguing options.
She gave Pixel another scratch under his chin. "There's no avoiding it, lap monkey, we need to call Bexley Cable."
Pixel responded by giving her hand a gentle bite.
"Yeah, I'm not happy about it either."