Day 17

I woke up in a room completely unlike the one before. Literally, all five senses of mine were tapping in the dark. Whilst the previous room didn't let any spot unlit, this one was black in a way you rarely found in nature. Whilst the previous room echoed louder than a cave, this one absorbed any sound. I didn't even have walls to touch for orientation. Technically, I did, but it took me long to find them. With my ankle repaired by the Seizers, I could afford to saunter around for quite a while. Once I reached a wall, I walked to the other side to get an idea of how large the room was - always in a straight line, of course. There were fifteen to twenty steps between the walls. Any time it took me longer than that meant I had changed my direction without realizing it.

This was never pleasant. I had to recite a mantra of various star names to remain calm until I reached a wall again.

Not even that helped against the fact that the silence itself was driving me mad. Even trained astronauts couldn't survive more than forty-five minutes in complete silence without getting auditory hallucinations.

If the point was to break my spirit, they were damn good at it.

I don't want to describe the worst of it, so why not just jump to the point when something distracted me, okay?

Eventually, they had brought a monitor into my room that shone brightly. At first, I had confused its silver lights for another UFO.

The first thing its screen provided was a mirror for me. All that did was make me realize how long I hadn't looked in one.

With my skeletal limbs, my greasy blonde hair, and my hunchback, it was as if my age had doubled. I didn't look or feel like a healthy twenty-year-old at all anymore. Well, I still had acne. Beard hairs occupied places where they didn't belong and contracted cheeks testified to the length of my fasting in the desert.

I was always rather small and skinny, but seeing me like that made me severely doubt if their liquid had fed me at all.

I haven't mentioned the oddest detail yet. When I leaned forward to look at the state of my hair, I realized the white helmet I had worn. It was under the helmet of my spacesuit and looked almost like a swimming cap. Whatever it was made of felt harder than rubber though and, judging by the cables connecting it to the monitor, its purpose was to read more of my thoughts.

When I clutched my helmet in panic, the screen turned black again. At first, I thought it was a defect, but then I realized it was just changing colors. First, it was dark purple, then blue, and then purple again. This switching went on for a while, but the violet became less frequent and the shades of blue became lighter and lighter. Finally, it became cyan, then turquoise, then green, and then finally yellow. It went back and forth again, but the general trend was towards colors with longer wavelengths. As you might expect, it eventually became red before ending in infrared light that my brain perceived as a blank screen.

This was a scientific experiment. They showed me all possible wavelengths and the helmet recorded how my brain reacted to them.

The cap on my scalp was an experiment, too, in a weird way. The mirror disappeared once I tried to touch my cap.

This was surely not a coincidence, but some sort of mirror test. You know, these intelligence tests we do on animals. Take an animal, show it its reflection, paint a spot on its forehead, and see how it reacts. Dolphins, chimpanzees, elephants, but also non-mammals, such as magpies or even ants pass this test. Its effectiveness in demonstrating intelligence is controversial, but it's so simple that even aliens know it.

Don't think they ran out of colors though.

The screen displayed a pale white, the only color missing so far. As you may or may not know, white is not part of the color spectrum, but all wavelengths at once.

However, it wasn't the color that was so curious about the screen. It was the black lines drawing all possible geometrical shapes on it. Circles, isosceles triangles, squares, pentagons with sides of equal length, and so on. Then they became more irregular. The circle became an oval, the triangle less isosceles, and the square a rectangle.

Using sophisticated computer technology, they gave their shapes depth so that they became figures: balls, pyramids, and cubes of all kinds.

Once the available symbols were depleted, it was time for a math lesson. They showed me a circle and a triangle side by side. Then they continually added circles and triangles to the ones they had. Like that, they could count without using numbers I couldn't read. The symbols came next.

We counted together until we reached twelve. That was when they finally assigned symbols to their numbers.

Their number system was just plain fascinating. The number one was represented by a dash. To make the number two, a second line was added that intersected the end of the first line at an angle of thirty degrees. For number three, they added another line clockwise. This continued until the number twelve.

What I now saw was an asterisk with twelve prongs. To make the number thirteen, they removed a prong and drew a dash next to it. Basically, their "thirteen" read as "eleven plus one". The number twenty-four was, therefore "eleven plus twelve". The twenty-five, on the other hand, was "ten plus one". This continued until the number one hundred and forty-four, starting from which a third digit had to be added. The number hundred and forty-five was "eleven plus twelve plus one".

Quite confusing, but fascinating. Instead of a decimal system with the base ten, they had the number twelve as the base. This is not surprising since, given that they have twelve fingers - two fingers for each of their six tentacles - similar to how humans have ten fingers.

Their counting system is confusing nonetheless, almost as if humans wrote the number "10" as "80", but that's their logic.

The counting lesson stopped when my concentration faded and I had to sleep. The glow of the monitor faded into a night light that was just bright enough to give me an impression of the rust-gray room around me.

My dreams are far from pleasant, but luckily, I immediately forgot the details when I got up. Some stuff about ghosts and explosions is all I remember.

Normally I would have spent the morning with my laptop, but with it stolen, only the screen kept me entertained. The screen extended pincers from behind it and gave me my feeding tube. After eating, I spend most of my time pondering on the purpose of the tests.

The mirror test felt almost patronizing. That was the sort of test you performed on monkeys, not on a species you knew could build rockets. The math made more sense, given that SETI also put math tests in their radio signals. However, the point behind such signals was to find intelligent species, not to test species you already knew to be intelligent. Perhaps their tests were supposed to calculate some sort of IQ for me to see how intelligent I was based on the time I took.

Let's hope I didn't score too poorly.

Unlike what I had anticipated, I didn't get any more tests this day. Instead, the screen now showed me films of nature with sound. These were videos of dunes, clouds, oceans, mountains, and rainforests. Some even had animals in them. As expected, most followed the basic blueprint of six limbs, four eyes, and three segments that were so common on this moon. Kinda like how all tetrapods on Earth have four limbs, five digits, and two eyes. In the end, the films went into space and showed me asteroids, stars as well as planets.

Nature documentaries to relax after my math classes? I was seriously wondering whether the whole point of the abduction was anything more than sending me back to school.

After the documentaries, I was startled by a bang that was louder than a gunshot.

But it wasn't just a bang. They played a whole series of sounds I didn't recognize. Sometimes it was like airplane noise, then like a car horn, like nails on a chalkboard, and finally like heartbeats in a hospital.

After having done the colors, this was my hearing test.

As you might expect, I didn't even notice their tests on smell due to my spacesuit.

I hoped they were visual creatures like me as that'd make things much easier. Given their visual number system, I found this option most likely.

There were no more tests that day, so I just went back to sleep again. I tried to delay my awakening as long as possible, but at some point, I had to do something about the headache and move. I was also hungry again. After my tactics of self-stimulation were exhausted, various hallucinations attacked me. Noises echoed through the room even though the monitor was quieter than space. Scenes played out in my head that were identical to yesterday's films. They were always accompanied by an inexplicable buzzing in my head that my previous hallucinations did not have. Sometimes I even saw nonsense, like a giant jellyfish in the desert.

The lion's share of the scenes I saw, however, was surprisingly logical and many of the sounds were peaceful.

If I allowed them to, my thoughts could stay in my head for seconds, sometimes even minutes. When I closed my eyes and focused, it was like a dream. Sometimes I drifted through space with ambient background noise. Then I dived down into the sea so that not even solar flares could reach me. I got used to the buzzing in my head.

Once the monitor went on and showed my reflection, I got the explanation behind my "hallucinations". Every time a movie played inside my head, my white cap lit up and caused the buzzing in my scalp. The noises, too, correlated with the helmet, albeit less clearly.

These thoughts were artificially induced. But audiovisual impressions weren't everything they could simulate.

The helmet glowed and made me think of the number two. Then of five minutes. Then of ten feet. Math, time, length. They made me think of various things and recorded the corresponding brain waves. The time where I was left alone with nothing to do had the purpose of calibrating the measurements against background noise like fatigue or spontaneous changes of thoughts.

Like that, they understood my brain and made me think of whatever they wanted.

It was only at this point that I realized they didn't want to torture me.

They were developing a translator device!