Page 14 of Her Alien Boss

He nods. “I will attend to some business matters,” he says.

I am feeling very small and very lost as he leaves. I knew that I would be the only human in many lightyears when I came all this way. I knew, too, that I would be working for aliens. I didn’t know how I would feel when I got sick for the first time, and how much I’d want to have someone around who knows how to make chicken soup.

Maybe I look forlorn, because the doctor puts her hand on my arm.

“I want you to rest,” she says. “I’m going to lower the lights and give you a chance to sleep. A nap would be ideal to help your consciousness re-sync with your body.”

She dims the lights and leaves the room, and I am alone on an alien outpost. I feel pretty normal by all standards, not like my mind has been glued back to my body at all.

I think I’m fine. I’m also not tired. Everything I’ve been through recently has been intense as hell. The dog fight among the stars, and before that, the way Arkon touched me. My alien boss is a very hands-on manager, I think to myself with a little giggle.

The door opens and the doctor looks in. “You’re supposed to be resting,” she says firmly before shutting the door again. Apparently I am being monitored more closely than I imagined. Good to know.

As I was looking around, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tech here. I bet I could slip some of it into my pocket. Or I could, if I had my normal clothes on. And if I wasn’t almost certainly being watched through a monitor or similar. I have got to get better at telling when the aliens are looking at me.

The urge to steal is, well, not a new one. It certainly didn’t first emerge at Alpha Core. This is the first time it has felt something like noble, if I am to be honest.

I have been snatching stuff most of my life. First I did it to get a little extra in the way of food when the credits didn’t quite go far enough. My mother worked as a secretary in the public service, and we lived in a little apartment in a building full of more than a thousand of those little apartments. She had to work a lot. I used to sit at home, feed myself on whatever I could scrounge up, and do homework. But sometimes I’d go out and snatch things from the various vending carts that would park up on some of the main lobbies. Our building had twelve of them on various levels. I could get donuts, noodles, and sometimes fruit. Kebabs, even.

My stomach growls. I’m hungry.

I sit up and make noises in the general register of wanting to eat until the doctor comes back in.

“Sorry,” I say. “But I think if I don’t get something to eat very soon, I am going to eat this bed.”

“Ah, yes, of course. You probably want a hot dog,” she says.

“Uhm, sure?”

“That’s what humans eat. Hot dogs.” She says it as if she is very proud she knows this, and is also very much uncertain that it’s true.

“Okay,” I say.

“I have to take it out of the plastic wrapper and put it in the air fryer. We got an air fryer specially for you, because we know that’s what humans like to cook in.”

I am actually quite excited about the prospect of an air fryer cooked meal. It’s old tech, but it’s good. Air fryers pretty much overtook all other forms of cooking for a time in human history, to the extent that it’s recognized as a major epoch.

It doesn’t take very long to prepare me a meal.

The hot dog that’s presented to me is a sausage in a bun with a hint of something that might be mustard.

The bread has the texture of chicken, somehow. I think the bread might be meat. The sausage in the dog tastes like macerated cauliflower and cheese. None of this is bad, it’s just very odd.

Arkon returns when I am almost halfway through the meal. I’ve been eating slowly because the doctor is watching intently and it’s making me feel a little self-conscious.

“Good?” Arkon says.

“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

Now two aliens are watching me eat a hot dog. It’s not the oddest thing that has happened today, but it feels like the most awkward.

“She seems well enough. If she starts showing any concerning signs, you can bring her back,” the doctor says. “But for now, I think we’ve gotten her more or less together.”

The best anyone can hope for, really.

“Can I get dressed again?” I ask the question with a great deal of hope. There’s something about the way clothes feel that really brings me back to myself.

“On that front, it would be better if you wore an appropriate uniform,” Arkon says. “I’ve brought one with me.”