The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 14 - SYDNEY

She had been reading the user manual for nearly twelve hours. The simulated daylight coming through her window had dimmed to a simulated night and was now showing the glimmers of a fake morning. The tea kettle, forgotten, had long ago grown cold. A dry tea bag still waited in her favorite mug.

The manual moved from fascinating to boring to frustratingly confusing in equal amounts. It would throw out some obscure technical term, like 'oscillating 4-brane aperture' with no explanation. She would track it down in the index, only to be led to a section with still more indecipherable jargon. Too often, she lacked the context to understand what she was reading. One half was like 'Starships for Dummies', but the other half was like the lab notes of a mad scientist.

"This is the best they could do? Why not a wiki? Then I could at least do keyword searches."

She stood, stretched, and wandered to the kitchen area for tea. As she turned the heat on under the kettle, she noticed the clock on the stove. How long since she had last eaten anything? Her appetite had suffered since she started chemotherapy, but she had forced herself to maintain a schedule with two meals a day. In all the excitement, she had forgotten breakfast yesterday. Then the aliens had shown up, she'd gone shopping, that 'matter translation' thing... It was at least a day and half since she had last eaten. Nearly a day since she had drunk anything. And yet she didn't feel hungry or thirsty. Not even a little bit. As healthy as she felt now, her appetite should have come back with a vengeance.

Sydney opened the fridge and stared at the wide assortment of food she had purchased. Choosing at random, she grabbed a banana, peeled it, and took a bite.

She promptly spit it into the sink.

It wasn't that it tasted bad. It tasted like... nothing. Flavorless. She grabbed a bottle of juice and took a swallow. Also flavorless. She swished it around in her mouth like a wine taster, then spit it out.

"What the hell is going on?" She set the juice down and began pacing. Zeo and Pixel watched as she started down her 'thinking path', a winding course that traced a repeating figure eight around the sofa and her reading chair. "They copied everything, the whole apartment. All my stuff. But they only did 'matter translation', whatever that is, in a one meter radius."

Zoe yawned to signal her boredom with this unnecessary recap.

"Well, if you've got answers, start sharing them. No? OK then, onward." She completed another lap around the reading chair. "They said they could duplicate any food samples I gave them. I told them I was going shopping." She walked around the sofa and headed back toward the chair. She froze at the coffee table. "But the groceries weren't in the matter translation radius. Should they have been? Is that stuff even food anymore?"

She dropped into her reading chair and wondered if she was going to starve to death. They promised all her nutritional needs would be met. They hadn't promised it would be five star cuisine. She had to assume her alien employers wouldn't knowingly poison her. She would just have to eat the flavorless dreck and hope for the best.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the shrill whistle of the tea kettle. Oh god, what about the tea? Was she doomed to drink only flavorless hot water for the next thirty years? With shaking hands, she poured the water into her mug and set the tea timer. She stood in the kitchen nook, watching the timer count down while the tea steeped, dreading the likely outcome. She stood another few seconds after the timer hit zero. Finally, she removed the tea bag and took a slow sip.

Hot water. Flavorless brown hot water.

Dejected, she dug back into the System Reference and User Manual to see if it contained any information about food supplies. She found nothing useful. After an hour of searching, the closest she came was a cryptic section referring to 'the mapping of chemical marker tags to olfactory and gustation heuristics'. That was it.

She decided to set the food situation aside for a while to instead focus on basic ship operations. Gradually, she made progress. Hauling the user manual into the star room with her, she worked her way through the various menus and windows. She stabbed at a particular icon, and was rewarded with a three dimensional image of the starship floating over the table. Another tap, and it started rotating. She slid her finger along a glowing squiggle on the table's surface. The image grew in size.

The ship was roughly football shaped. Various bumps and spines and incomprehensible devices poked out of its surface in a seemingly random arrangement.

Sydney felt something brush against her leg. Zoe had decided to check out the star room.

"Are you here to help?"

Zoe immediately accepted the challenge and jumped onto the table. Sydney was about to scold her and shoo her off, but then thought to see what would happen. The cat walked across the surface, sniffing at some of the symbols. As before, they were unaffected. She looked up at the rotating spaceship above her, now four feet across and turning about once every five seconds. She got up on her hind paws and batted at one of the holographic spines projecting down from the ship. Her paw passed right through it, causing her to lose her balance, topple over, then scramble to regain her footing on the slick surface.

"Zoe, I will never accuse you of being graceful. At least we know this interface is cat proof."

She gave an annoyed meow and jumped down from the table.

"Well, once more into the breach," Sydney flipped the page of the manual, then tried another sequence of icons. Different bumps and protuberances on the ship hologram began pulsing with color as she touched each icon. The manual claimed she was running a sensor diagnostic, though she didn't yet know how to interpret the results. "Baby steps. Today we learn how to make flashy colors. Tomorrow we field strip the warp core. Assuming we have a warp core."

She stuck with it another hour, learning the broad outlines of the system's interface even if she did not yet understand the details. She was interrupted by an alarm on her phone. It was time to eat.

She dragged a sofa cushion into the star room, then flipped through the user manual while eating a flavorless hot pocket and drinking purple water that claimed to be juice. The meal was awful, but the view was spectacular. The universe was her backyard.

She would trade it all for a decent cup of tea.