All Business

Thomas Owens’ eyes fluttered open. His head hurt. Thoughts skittered across his mind like fleeing fish in the midst of a hook, the hook being his attempts to grasp at these thoughts.

Just as they were beginning to coalesce into something coherent, a rustle at the foot of his bed scared them away.

Wait… his bed? He didn’t recall lying down…. Hadn’t he been on a business trip to see-?

The rustle of a man clipped his thread of thought short as he moved closer to Thomas’ face. He seemed vaguely familiar, not that Thomas tended to hang around with masked men with aprons and blood-spattered knives.

The light showed him more clearly to be dressed in surgical garb, though why Thomas would be getting surgery was beyond him. Then the man lowered his mask and winked at him. Thomas’ blood froze. It was the creepy guy from the plane.

“This… this isn’t Chicago, is it?” he whispered.

The man shook his head, a smile playing on his lips. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you out of here.” A drop of blood fell from his knife.

Thomas bolted up on the bed. Or rather, he tried to. He was astonished to find he couldn’t feel anything below his waist and his wrists were restrained. Fully awake and panicking, Thomas swiveled his head wildly. It looked like a hospital room, but extraordinarily advanced, with three-dimensional holograms floating and complicated machinery whirring about here and there. “What is this place?”

The man wiped his knife clean and set it down on the table. “I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure, though perhaps somewhere near Abulgazi.”

“A- Abulgazi? Is that… in Africa? Asia? Oh my God, the Middle East, my God, I’ve been kidnapped by terrorists, oh dear Lord, you drugged me when the drink cart came by, oh God, you poisoned me, I can’t die I’m not even 30, I- I- What-?”

The cloth the blood-spattered man shoved into his mouth spared the whirring room any more of his rising pandemonium. The man sat down on a chair Thomas hadn’t noticed before. “Look,” he said, “Thomas.”

Thomas flinched quite voluntarily.

The man sighed. “You’ve been selected to be tracked, all we’ve done is insert a tracking device in you to see what you’re up to. For purely scientific purposes, of course. We’ll have you back and working in no time, call it a minor delay when you fainted from dehydration. Your company will have no more questions and we can all get along with our lives.”

A distressed Thomas succeeded in spitting the cloth out. “Tracked? Scientific? What the hell is this, some kind of FBI gig?”

“Well, if you want it straight, you’ve been… I supposed you could call it abducted by aliens. They’re interested in studying the human race and have therefore been implanting some tracking devices into various subjects.”

Aliens? No, surely not. That was ridiculous. Besides, a man with a primitive bloody knife… no, ridiculous. He fixated on something else. “Where is this device?”

The man colored slightly. “Well… the Histangi have been interested in observing your… your mating patterns, if you will, so-.”

“WHAT?! You put what in where?!”

“I’m very sorry, but don’t worry, you won’t be inconvenienced in any way. In any case, they seemed interested in you because of your particularly lively lifestyle, if you understand.”

“My what?! My girlfriend doesn’t even want to talk to me right now! What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

The man blinked. “So... you’re not Owen Thomas then?”

Thomas laughed desperately. “I’m Thomas bloody Owens, you moron.”

“Hmmm… yes… that’s rather unfortunate. I do believe I mentioned to them that you Americans tend to put your names backwards on official papers, but perhaps it slipped my mind. Oh well, no harm done. This can still be a learning experience for both of us. Your parents will be notified you were tragically killed in a car accident and we can anonymously donate them a large sum, so you don’t have to worry about them. No body of course, but I’m afraid we can’t really do much about that.”

“My… body…?” Thomas managed.

“Well of course, did you think we would return a valuable specimen?”

“Spe… spe….”

“You’ll look great next to the female we already have in the display case. And we’re starting to get together a quite nice Terran section to fill out the Orion wing.”

The whirring machines in the back started coming into focus. There was a clearly stuffed bear whose back was being sewn together by a very advanced looking machine.

“Display….” Thomas looked frantically around. Dozens of dead animals and other creatures, mostly unknown to him, filled the room. The holograms were reconstructions of those animals, he now realized, and the machines were analyzing them and emptying them of their organs and filling them with some kind of blue gel.

He started jerking violently in his bed. “You’re a madman!” He screamed.

The man stood up slowly. “I’m afraid I’m just an assistant curator, Mr. Owens. A research assistant, if you will.” He picked up the knife and twirled it around.

Thomas’ convulsions became more violent. “Monster! Isn’t there something less painful? Oh God, I don’t want any pain, let me go home!”

“Less painful?” The man chuckled as he put the cloth back in Thomas’ mouth. “But we can learn so much about the nervous system this way.” The smiled played once again upon his lips as he flicked a button. Thomas felt straps reach across his chest and hold him down. “And besides, it’s so much more fun!” The man leaned over Thomas. “This has been quite a successful business trip, don’t you think?”

(954 words)