Giuliana

The night before her 18th birthday, Giuliana fell asleep on Earth for the last time. Later, she realized it was far from the first time she'd been abducted. Numerous troubling occurrences—occasionally inexplicable happenings that had punched confounding holes throughout the continuity of her childhood & adolescent memories—suddenly all pieced themselves together into a coherent, canonical whole, for which her current situation, light years removed from Earth, became the only possible, inevitable adulthood.

Her hosts had no need for spoken language, communicating instead via rapid exchange of telepathic streams, each comprised of series of flashing images & sensory echoes. She knew this only because she could effortlessly receive & send these streams herself, a capability she quickly learned was not an especially common trait amongst humankind. Only humans such as herself—with this rare gift of mental gab—were granted employment at the facility, along with the privilege to freely roam the station when off the clock, limited only by clearly indicated atmospheric & gravitational boundaries, beyond which no wandering human was likely to survive for long.

This earthling-friendly area was massive, kilometers across & equally deep. It would take her several months' worth of near-daily excursions to see it all: hundreds of sizable, transparent exhibition spaces where the telepathically-impaired were kept, isolated or in small groups: a literal human zoo. To her great relief, none of these people ever seemed to become conscious of their captivity, with each of their spaces featuring its own utterly convincing, ever-evolving virtual world, projected at the occupants from all directions.

The vast majority of exhibits were clearly intended to replicate some historical period of life on Earth as accurately as possible, the lynchpin of her hosts' ongoing efforts to dissuade intergalactic travelers in general from visiting and/or directly interfering with the actual, fragile planet. Thus, for all these exhibitees knew, they still lived on Earth, embroiled in humdrum human dramas of the kind they'd dealt with all their lives, unaware that their every action (as well as their innermost thoughts) was now exposed, constantly accessible for play and replay on multiple external displays, for the amusement and education of passing visitors (usually familial groups) from all corners of the universe.

Sure, the inherent strangeness of the setup was impossible for Giuliana to ever fully sweep under the rug of her still-human consciousness, but she came to feel that the people in the zoo were arguably better off than they'd been pre-abduction, and certainly treated more humanely than humans tended to treat animals kept in zoos (or bred as livestock) back on Earth. At the expense of absolute realism in their depictions, the hosts seemed to make a point of keeping evident suffering within the simulations to a minimum, and even in the rare cases where the virtual world in question was not a snapshot from Earth's history, the more novel surroundings never came close to seeming intentionally torturous.

Every constructed world she witnessed was unquestionably a better one—even if only a little better—than the unkempt Earth she'd grown up on. Because these worlds made up so much of her own new world, among other lingering reasons less pleasant to remember, she didn't miss the original Earth very much, and faced few internal obstacles as she adapted to the patterns of her new existence, enjoying her job in the gift shop, and soon enough even developing a small circle of new, also-telepathic human friends to hang out with after her shifts ended. Each of them had their own additional simulated space serving as their domicile, so they could spend their spare time alone or together pretty much anywhere they could imagine.

At work, her primary role was cashier. She spent her days interacting with all manner of spacefarers, required to do so via spoken word in her native language, to continue to offer guests as authentic an Earth experience as possible. Yet the products on sale ranged far beyond what would have been available on Earth, many of the items entirely incomprehensible to her apart from their omnipresent inventory codes. Dealing with the wide variety of currencies at checkout was often complex, but the robotic register was intelligent enough to take care of validations and conversions without excessive button-mashing on her part. She suspected that if given its own voice and a method of locomotion, the register could probably have done the entire job without her, but again, a human touch was an understandably crucial part of this particular package.

Every now and then, an especially satisfied or naturally generous customer would leave her a tip. There was no traditional jar present to encourage this behavior, but neither was there any signage prohibiting it, so she accepted these offerings as humbly as possible and pocketed them. Mostly, they were physical manifestations of modest amounts of currency (sometimes even actual Earth money—not that it meant much to anyone here), or else strangely compelling trinkets and baubles from untold, far-flung sources. She kept them all on a shelf in her simulated bedroom, in which all of her belongings were contained, somehow absorbed and retained for later whenever she directed the simulation to take her anywhere else, or when she left and it would switch off behind her.

One day at the shop, long past the point when all of this had come to seem perfectly normal to her, she was shocked to find herself serving what appeared to be her first human customer. A woman, perhaps a decade older than herself, radiating a stately beauty, speaking to her in perfect Italian, leading her around the store in pursuit of a very specific something that she seemed to have difficulty finding the correct words to describe. Giuliana tried mightily to keep her confusion and curiosity from impeding the flow of their conversation. She had assumed any human who hadn't been abducted and deposited at the station would have no idea it even existed, and even if they had, they'd still have had no means of independently traveling to it. The customer could only be extraterrestrial, she thought, perhaps donning such an impressive human disguise as its own way of heightening the veracity of its visit. Or was she human after all, yet still hailing from some planet other than Earth? And if that was the case, there were at least a dozen follow-up questions, although the one that plagued her most insistently was how (and why) the woman had learned Italian.

Without ever feeling like they'd begun making progress toward locating the desired item, the customer pointed to a small, unassuming black ring on one of the bottom shelves next to where they both stood, happily indicating that they'd found it. Giuliana became even more confused, as not only was this ring the only such item visible on any of the shelves (looking more like it had been forgotten where it lay than intentionally placed there for purchase), but it seemed to have no accompanying inventory code (a virtual price tag, in the form of a small squarish hologram, usually floating a few centimeters above the surface of the product to which it referred, visible only from certain angles, and which could only ever be removed by the register, after payment had been processed). Before she had a chance to address this apparent discrepancy, the woman snatched the ring off the shelf and marched away toward the checkout counter. Giuliana raced after her, but by the time she reached the register's keypad, it seemed to have bypassed her input altogether and already processed the woman's purchase, as both the ring and a folded wallet went into her large purse.

Giuliana felt oddly helpless, saying nothing, unsure how to proceed. The woman smiled broadly and thanked her, taking hold of one of Giuliana's hands in both of her own. The hands felt warm and comforting, so much so that their soothing quality—their sheer abundance of warmth—brought Giuliana's mind back around to the question of the woman's true nature. Then, as the woman let go of her hands, she said in English, "I'm sorry," and then left the shop without another word, as swiftly as she had appeared.

Giuliana remained lost in thought for a long while afterward, a small storm of sadness gathering atop the realization that she would likely never get answers to any of her many questions about what had just happened. She considered posing her questions to the hosts, who must have admitted the woman in the first place and therefore had at least some of the answers she sought, but felt an immediate, unusually intense resistance to that course of action. Still, her mind couldn't help but circle back to the hosts, who seemed like her only option (other than just forgetting the whole thing, which she doubted was a real option anyway), and each time she circled back, massive resistance to the very idea of approaching the hosts flared up again, even more prominently, until she realized that these flares were not normal components of her internal dialogue. When she focused more firmly on them, she found that they were not emanating from her mind at all, but somehow from her hand. And that was when she finally noticed the black ring, which hadn't left the shop with the questionably human customer, but instead somehow found its way onto one of her own fingers.

She felt the ring react to her noticing it, silencing its warning flares and then flooding her mind with even louder set of answers. All the answers, not only to the questions she'd asked, but also to the questions she'd been kept from asking, and the locations of all the various implants the hosts had secretly placed into her body over the course of her life, many designed and inserted specifically to keep her from asking any questions at all.

Giuliana 3431FC