Chapter 6

Things were getting better. Every morning, the artificial sunlight through Tom's window felt a little brighter, and Kayleigh's sleeping bulk felt a little more relaxed on his chest. They had started making love again, at first slowly and hesitantly, and then with all the abandon that Tom remembered from their earthbound days. He spent his days learning about the universe, then broke from the XP system to have dinner in the backyard with Caroline, Esh and Mona.

On this particular best-morning-yet, he had woken up with his morning wood jabbing Kayleigh in the abdomen. Instead of being angry, she had taken his hard cock in her hands and began diligently stroking. Tom shifted to his back and Kayleigh got on her haunches, breasts dangling around his cock. She studied his penis with the same intensity that she paid to scientific monographs.

Tom groaned and decided to enjoy this small blessing. Kayleigh ran her tight fist up and down the length of his cock, whose sensation was rapidly awakening. When a drop of precum appeared, Kayleigh rubbed it around his head and began focusing her efforts there. Tom stared at her nude body, lithe and peach-coloured, and felt his balls tighten.

"Oh God," he moaned.

Kayleigh just jerked him off with renewed fervour. Within moments, he was spurting cum out. One string jetted out and landed on his stomach, while another pooled in Kayleigh's hand. She wiped the jism off on the sheets and bounded up to her feet.

"I'm gonna go get breakfast. See you down there."

Tom groaned. He supposed he had to get up now.

After showering and putting on some clothes, Tom joined Kayleigh in the kitchen. The aliens had done quite a bit towards replicating twentieth-century human trappings, but they had yet to master cereal. The brown squares that poured out of the box tasted a bit like cardboard, and none of them were sugar-frosted or shaped like cartoon characters. But if you drowned it in milk (obtained from a small colony of cattle bred in the planet's orbit), it didn't taste too bad.

"What are you up to today?" said Kayleigh. Ever since they had gotten here, this had been the open question: how to spend their time without employment or aspiration.

"I'm in the middle of a 41-part course – an introduction to Galactic Politics," said Tom. "And I've been watching this fictional program – it's kind of like a sitcom. I don't get all the jokes, but I'm learning."

Kayleigh raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. "I was thinking of going over to Richard's. It's been a while since we've seen him, isn't it?"

"I guess so."

"It's weird. I hope he's all right."

To tell the truth, Tom was glad that they hadn't seen much of Richard lately. He had had enough of the man – his pompous cynicism, the lecherous way he looked at Kayleigh – during their trip over here. There was a part of Tom that wanted to cling to everything from his old life, but he was rapidly forming new attachments on this side of the galaxy. Hell, maybe Richard's absence was the cause of Kayleigh's recent improvement.

Tom gestured towards the XP machine. "He's probably just absorbed in all of this stuff, like I am."

"Maybe. Still, I'm going to check on him. You want to come?"

Tom shrugged. Introduction to Galactic Politics lecture 28 was calling him. "I think I'm going to stay here. Maybe clean up a bit."

The place was, of course, spotless – whatever strange materials the aliens had built this ersatz habitat out of, they seemed to absorb every stain and scratch without any lasting mark. Kayleigh kissed Tom on the forehead. "Try to get some sunlight today, will you Tom?"

"Yes, Mom."

Tom finished off his tasteless cereal while Kayleigh left his house. Afterwards he spread out on the carpet in front of the XP station, made sure he was comfortable, and switched the device on. The world awaited him.

Things were getting better.

Kayleigh pounded on Richard's door for the third time. She knew that she had heard some movement in there, and maybe seen a shadow in his shuttered windows. It was impossible for these homes to really go to seed, but there was an air of stillness around the place that she found discomforting.

Finally, the door opened and a grey-skinned alien – no, a human – stuck his head through. "What?"

"Um, sorry," Kayleigh said. "Is Richard there?"

The grey man smirked. "Sure. He might not want to see you, though. Or you might not want to see him."

"I want to see him." Kayleigh stepped into the house, not really caring what this weird guy had to say about it.

"Hey, you got spunk. Richard is right this way. Tricky Dick, as I like to call him. You know we're just getting the Watergate broadcasts over here? I mean, we knew it happened, but getting the actual video feeds – man, that was something else. You guys had some kind of revolution after that, right?"

"You must be thinking of a different country."

Richard was lying on the living room floor. At first Kayleigh thought he was hooked up to an XP station, but there were no chords near him. Richard heard her coming and shot up, alarmed. His hollow cheeks betrayed a lack of sleep and his blood-shot, glassy eyes betrayed first.

"Richard? What's going on? Are you ... are you on drugs?"

The professor of Astrophysics raised his index finger. "One. Just one drug."

"Jesus Christ."

" ... was an alien!" Richard collapsed into giggles.

Kayleigh turned to Quinn. "What did you give him?"

"I didn't give him anything. We both scored some ruby from this girl I know. He's reacting to it a lot more than I am. Different chemistry, you know."

Kayleigh helped Richard onto the sofa and tried to remember everything she had learned about drugs from movies and TV – information that she knew was mostly inaccurate. "We need to, um ... turn him on his side. In case he vomits."

"Not gonna happen," said Quinn. "Richard is going to be all right. You should have been here the other day..."

She slapped Richard across the face, half out of anger and half in an attempt to snap him to consciousness. "Why are you guys doing this? Jesus, Richard, I thought you were dealing with this better than I was."

"Because it's fun," Quinn said. "Whole world full of chemicals – why not try some? We're out of ruby, but there's still some DO in the medicine cabinet."

Kayleigh turned on her heels and stared at Quinn. "You. Get the fuck out of here."

"Excuse me? Richard invited me in here. We're friends. I've been here a lot more than you have lately. Hell, I don't even know who you are."

"Get. The. Fuck. Out."

"Oh, are you that student he had an affair with? He jokes about you, you know, but only when he's five drinks deep. Says that he never would have wound up here if it wasn't for you."

The words were like a knife digging its way through Kayleigh's gut, and judging by Quinn's expression, he knew it. She stomped on the floor and pointed at the door. Quinn shrugged and left. Richard had watched the whole thing in a glazed stupor.

Richard's voice was quiet and toneless. "They're not as nice as they seem."

"I know. He's a dick."

"Not Quinn. Quinn is – Quinn is good. But the made-of-light motherfuckers. The ones who are running this asylum. No good. Hidden agendas."

Kayleigh held Richard. "It's all right. It'll be okay."

"Don't talk so loud. They have ears everywhere."

"It's just the drug. You're paranoid."

"They put us in these houses, Kayleigh. You don't think it would be child's play to bug them? You think they would balk at the morality of spying, after they've abducted us from our planet and taken us a hundred light-years away?"

Kayleigh looked into Richard's eyes. They were blood-shot, but there was intelligence in them, the endlessly inquisitive quality that had drawn Kayleigh to him in the first place. "The League of Worlds, the Erusmi, whoever you mean by 'they' ... I can't think of them as evil. They're trying to make the universe better. And look at this place. We have everything we want." In truth, Kayleigh wasn't so sure about what she was saying, but it sounded a lot like the amazed speeches Tom had been making lately. And Tom could always be relied on as a moral compass.

"The greatest evil in the world is always committed by those who are trying to do good," said Richard. "When I hear about people who have grand, utopian designs, I just think of how things could go wrong. And this is the grandest design I've ever seen."

"But it hasn't gone wrong. Things are good here."

Richard shook his head. "Even if you think this place is good – how can we keep it that way? We have no control. We're just pets in a gilded cage."

Kayleigh decided that she didn't want to debate philosophy with Richard while he was high on who knows what. "We can talk about this later. You getting stoned out of your mind is not going to help anything. Here, let me get you a glass of water."

She got up and poured Richard some water, but he refused it. "We don't know what's in that water."

"Oh, for Christ's sake..."

Richard's burst of verbosity seemed to be fading. "Kayleigh ... you have to help ... join the resistance."

"You need to go to bed."

"No ... can't sleep..."

But he did sleep, falling into a quiet stupor right there on the couch. Kayleight thought of trying to lug Richard's lanky body up to the bedroom, but decided to bring his sheets down instead. To her surprise, the sheets were neatly folded and smelt freshly laundered. Richard must not have slept there in a while.

As she draped a blanket over her former supervisor (was he still her supervisor? Had their academic status been lost in the trip, or was it more persistent?), Kayleigh felt that dark feeling tugging at her ankles once again. She didn't know how Richard, so strong and so rational, could fall into the grips of paranoid conspiracy. This lead her to two possibilities, equally scary: that even someone of Richard's mental strength could not stand up to these conditions, or that Richard was, as usual, right.

She didn't want to be alone with her thoughts, so she went back to Tom's house. But Tom wasn't there. The XP system lay quiet on its stand – an unusual state of affairs. Maybe he had decided to explore the outside world after all.