Sold by the Alien: A Rough Sci-Fi Romance

“You must have sold me.”

“What?” Zed asks the question sharply.

“I think you must have sold me to the Aberk in the first place.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then who did you sell to him?”

Zed shrugs. “I don’t know. Someone. Can’t remember.”

“You can’t remember who or what you sold to these aliens that made them so mad you had to flee through time?”

His purple gaze slides over to me. I can tell he doesn’t like this line of questioning. It makes him uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable too. I don’t think Zed knows exactly what is going on.

“I think I can remember my own past,” he says, defensive. “And I think you would remember yours. You’d know if you’d been sold to an Aberk recently.”

“That’s a good point. Time is confusing. Does that mean that a different you and a different me will have to do all these things? We can just lay low, maybe out here, wait for events to catch up with us?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Eat your pie.”

I eat my pie.

Zed doesn’t eat his pie. He pushes it around his plate and he pretends to drink what’s supposed to be coffee until I’m done with my food.

“I’m glad I’m not in charge of this situation,” I muse. “Seems like a real mess.”

“Mhm,” he says, giving me that look he gives me right before my ass gets real sore. I smile at him, because I figure he wouldn’t do that here and now in front of this nice older couple and their baked goods. Then his hand jerks out and I realize I might have underestimated him. Again.

“Okay, please chill!”

He doesn’t grab me and spank me then and there, but he made it very clear, just with that gesture, that he could if he wanted to. And he really wants to. His hand returns to a safer position. I breathe a sigh of relief.

“This is more complex than I like,” he admits, finally. “We’ve gone back in time. That means there’s another stream of time co-existing with this one in which you are still on Earth, and I’m yet to annoy the Aberks. But here’s the thing. We are also in the future of those people.”

“The people who are us.”

“Yes. So. In order for us to be here, we need to do what we did in the future which has already happened and yet, is also yet to happen. I need to annoy the Aberk, and you need to disobey the orders of your commanders. We are at real risk now of ceasing to exist altogether if we are not careful.”

“You mean if we are not reckless.”

“Exactly,” he says. “We’re on whatever the opposite of borrowed time is.”

“Paid time?”

He shakes his head at me with a look that makes me feel excited in a bratty kind of way. I think a little snark is helpful now. It breaks some of the tension. “Not the opposite then, but I think you understand me. Somehow, I have to annoy the Aberk. Or at the very least, you need to escape your world.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m definitely going to do that. I had that planned for a long time before I did it.”

“Really. Huh.”

“What?”

“I thought it must have been some wild and desperate impulse on your part. It was so foolishly reckless. Practically suicidal.”

Is he lecturing me? Judging me? Both? Yes.

“I had to get out of the routine,” I explain. “Nothing happens anymore. I was locked into a series of tasks which repeated every day and had stopped leading anywhere. My boyfriend had left me for another node, and I…”

“Boyfriend? Node?” He repeats both words as if he does not understand what they mean.

“Nodes are organizational, uh, organizations. Every node has about a hundred and twelve workers performing a hundred and twelve functions.”

“And boyfriend?”

“A man I thought I loved, who I thought loved me. A position emerged in another node. It was a promotion, and so he took it. His position was replaced by someone else.”

“His position in the node. Not with you.”

“Right.”

“I see. So this…” Zed makes a gesture to the crumbs of the pie which have become a metaphor for the chaos of the past days. “This is the act of a broken heart. How very romantic.”

“It’s not romantic. And my heart wasn’t broken. That’s what was wrong. I didn’t care when he left. He didn’t care when he left. We had shared a bed for seven years, and it didn’t matter when he was gone. I can’t live like that. I can’t be a modular piece to be clicked in and clicked out. I want separation to be a tear, not a clean break. I don’t want to be an individual unit.”

“Ava,” Zed says. “That is very romantic.”

This time he doesn’t say it with the sarcastic lilt which he had before. His tone is softer, almost admiring. I blush a little, not knowing how to take his attention. I never intended to tell him that. I never thought I’d tell anybody.