them in. Once the process was completed, the young man hurried around the counter to take—he stopped, confused. None of them had a suitcase he could carry. Especially not a suitcase that only he, a slight man who had never worked out in his life, could carry.
“Down the hallway, on your right,” he said, then put his hand on the small of Spike’s back, applying a bit of pressure.
She stopped. And spun around to glare at him. “Are you steering me?” she asked loudly.
Everyone within hearing distance turned to look. Which meant everyone in the lobby.
“What?”
“Do you think I’m a frickin’ car?”
“What? No!”
“Then what’s your hand doing on my back?”
He couldn’t say.
“I’m not blind.”
He stared at her with a look of dull incomprehension.
“I don’t need you to guide me to the hallway.”
“Actually, even if she were blind, she probably wouldn’t need you to guide her to the hallway,” Jane added helpfully.
“But—”
“I don’t need you,” Spike stated. Baldly.
But he still didn’t get it.
Once they were in the room, which they’d managed to find all by themselves, Jane announced wearily, and unnecessarily, “Shower, pizza, chocolate. Not necessarily in that order,” she added, grabbing a chocolate bar out of one of the bags on her way to the bathroom. Spike set the two pizza boxes beside the tv, opened the top box, took out a slice, grabbed one of the cartons of chocolate milk out of the other bag, then claimed the bed Jane hadn’t dumped her stuff onto. X helped herself to the bag of chocolate bars and flopped awkwardly into the armchair in the corner.
When Jane came out of the bathroom, she took another chocolate bar from the bag. The last chocolate bar. Wait, what? She saw then that X had helped herself. Okay, so they knew something about alien physiology. That is, if—
“So,” Spike said to X conversationally, “if you’re not from around here”—Jane groaned, Spike grinned—“why can you speak English?”
“It came with the brain.”
That stopped them both in mid-bite.
Spike eventually queried, carefully, “What else came with the brain?”
“Neural access, sensory inputs, motor control.” X got up to get a piece of pizza and fell flat on her face. “Not very much motor control.”
They waited until she’d gotten back up.
“And where did you get the brain?” Jane played along.
“It came with the body.”
Of course it did. Jane got up to get a slice of pizza. And one of the cartons of chocolate milk. She handed the third carton to X. Then she asked, not sure she wanted to know, “Are you using someone else’s body?”
“No. Not exactly. Sort of. Yes.”
“Okaaaay …” Jane said, thinking maybe X lived in some sort of quantum reality. Well, if—
“If I merged when the other person was alive, that’d be wrong. And if I merged when they were dead, that’d be”—she seemed to search for the word—“yucky.”
“So … what else is there?” Spike asked.
“The time–space between. Duh.”
“Oh yeah. The time–space between.” She took a big bite of her pizza. As did Jane. They chewed slowly.
“And the oxygen thing?” Jane asked, still trying to establish evidence for or against believing X.
“A byproduct of the merge.”
“Ah.”
She drank some of her chocolate milk, thinking, thinking …
“Okay, so if you’re using—merging with—someone else’s body, and brain,” Jane said, “what makes you think you’ll be able to figure out our time–space coordinates. Chances are, you haven’t got a genius in there.”
“You’re definitely right about that.” X grimaced. “But it’s got a lot of unused RAM.”
That took a couple of seconds. “Gray matter?” Spike asked with some excitement. “You can access the gray matter?”
X turned toward her, a look of horror slowly spreading across her face. “You … can’t? This”—she flipped a finger at her head—“this is all there is?”
“Duh.” That was Jane.
X set down her slice of pizza. “Oh.”
X reached for the bag of chocolate bars. It was empty. She reached for her carton of chocolate milk. It too was empty. Wordlessly, both Jane and Spike passed her what was left of their own cartons. She drained them. By drinking them. The chocolate milk, not the cartons. A moment later, she got up and went into the bathroom.
“Good thing we met her on this side,” Jane said.
Spike had the same thought. “Would’ve been impossible to get an illegal alien across the border.” They both started to giggle.
“Hey, where’s your ship?” Jane called out. “Isn’t it a ‘smart ship’? Can’t you just set the GPS or whatever—”
“It doesn’t work anymore,” X called back. “At first I thought I’d entered a quarantined area …”
“We’re quarantined?” Jane called out, then turned to Spike. “That’s why no one’s visited us yet!”
“Maybe Earth is a penal colony,” Spike mused.
“Or a mental asylum. Maybe the human species originated somewhere else, or is at least flourishing somewhere else, and they shipped their defectives here. Its stupid, its morally-challenged, its beauty-blind …”
“But what about evolution?” Spike said. “We developed here.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Plus, it doesn’t explain us.”
“Maybe we were supposed to be the guards,” Jane suggested. “Or the doctors.”
“Maybe it’s an experiment, and we’re the researchers.”
“Or the control group.”
“But
