Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 7.4

"Where's the backrest?" Iris asked.

She slouched while sitting on her pillar. She knew she had a long lecture before her. I didn't need a seat or anything in this silver room, my muscles had been modified to combat fatigue, but maybe she was just older than me.

"As you know," Iris began, "I used to work as Burger Bob's IT specialist, but I had thousands of jobs in my life. I also used to work in the library of Leimfeld University and guess whom I met there? Come on, guess?"

"Em, Mustafa Ay?" I said lamely. "I mean, we're talking about him."

She grinned. "Right-o! When I met him, our favorite mad scientist had just become an associate professor, you know, his dream job. But for some reason, he had a midlife crisis. He talked to me about his blues. He thought it was genetic or something since therapy or aspirin didn't fix his doldrums. He also thought that I understood him really well. I told him some lies about how I was super depressed, too, because I was always poor and lonely and he believed me. I convinced him to give me some money."

She said those last words with a smile on her face as if what she did was something virtuous. To be fair, she confessed to being a sociopath, so she probably didn't realize how exploitative she sounded.

"One day," she continued, "he told me that his childhood dream had been fulfilled. His best friend Thomas Leimfeld had organized a little field trip to Lake Vostok in Antarctica and he didn't wanna miss it. He found his singularity stone there when studying bacteria in an ice core, but at first, he thought it was just some weird crystal and didn't touch it without tweezers.

"The next day, his whole expedition team got lost in a snowstorm without warning. All of them got buried alive, including Mustafa himself. Their communications got destroyed and they all felt nauseous. Many of them vomited. You know, not exactly something that happens when you freeze. In desperation, Mustafa grabbed the bag with the crystal in it and something strange happened. His nausea was gone and he didn't feel the cold anymore. He became much stronger and his senses became better. When he tried to drag his colleagues out of the snow, he learned that they had been all turned into zombies for some reason. Thomas Leimfeld was the only one who was still normal. He beat up his former colleagues with his superpowers and then saved Tommy. He told Leimfeld that everything was okay and that he'd get back to the radio station for a distress call. Unfortunately, he forgot that their husky had been infected, too, and when he turned his back to Leimfeld, he got bumped off.

"Mustafa's whole little world was shattered that day. He was about to die when his 'crystal' started speaking to him. It told him that it came from space from an invisible starship that orbited Earth for centuries. It told him the whole blah blah about the tesseract and Fountainhead, I think you already know.

"He learned of the existence of three more singularity stones. Since they had been damaged, they couldn't carry out all their functions. They couldn't make decisions anymore. They needed human willpower to guide them. Since Leimfeld was dead, I was the only friend Mustafa still had. The dropship with the stones also contained a UFO which Mustafa used to fly all the way back to North America and meet me alone in a forest. Then, Layla and Kira accidentally saw him, Kira caught us on tape and you know the rest of the story.

"So, yeah."

Iris jumped off the pillar. She had sat for way too long and now had more energy than a hyperactive kid after twenty cups of coffee. She couldn't help but walk around, aimless like the debris of the Dragonfly.

I didn't feel sorry for Ay, but at least I understood him better now. Getting his whole team being murdered by the Plague left him helpless and traumatized. I had been there only too often. Whether it was my abduction, the thing with Sye, or the dwindling morale of my crew, I also had times where I wanted everything to end, where I just wanted the pain to end - on a universal scale, if necessary. Heck, I might be still thinking that way had Tesla not given me their pep talk. But that didn't change the fact that Ay had caused way too much suffering to deserve my pity.