Boarding School on Alpha Centauri – Chapter 1
Being the President’s son is supposed to be a privilege. All but guaranteed admission to the best schools, interesting trips, growing up in the White House.
I got sent to Alpha Centauri.
No that’s not a cool night club, which by the way would have been okay.
No no, I mean Alpha Centauri the star. Actually it’s two stars, most people don’t know that. Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B.
I was sent to the boarding school that floats in the atmosphere of the gas giant that orbits Alpha Centauri A. We, and by we I mean humans, call it Ludus. Latin for school. Ha freakin’ ha.
My entire school is like one big hostage takeover. Every involved sentient species has their head of state send their children to Ludus. We are symbols of co-operation, of brotherhood of intense crushing boredom.
That’s not to say that the moments of boredom aren’t interspersed with mind numbing terror. I’d hate to leave that out.
The problem with living with aliens is they aren’t human. Yeah I know, a surprise right? But no, really, they aren’t human. They don’t think at all like us.
It’s easier if I just tell you from the beginning.
I never would have agreed to it if they’d told me it was a one-way trip. I like to believe that mom and dad thought they were telling me the truth. It makes it easier. You never know, maybe they didn’t know what was going to happen.
Waking from hibernation was confusing. They’d told me that I’d be kept asleep for the entire journey and that it would take a month. They didn’t tell me that the entire time I was asleep my unconscious mind would be bombarded with lingual training.
When I woke there was a raised metallic surface that looked like a movie special effect (later I christened it and models like it Quasi, they’re all one big linked interface) asking me questions over and over in a weird language. It took me a few minutes to realize that I understood what was being said. Something to do with my subconscious mind integrating with my conscious mind. It’s not exactly like knowing another language, it’s somehow deeper and yet at the same time more superficial. Every now and again it causes a serious problem.
I take comfort in the fact that it screws everyone up and not just me.
Anyhow, I’m getting side tracked again. You would too if you had to speak to yourself anytime you wanted semi-sane conversation.
So I woke up with Quasi asking me questions over and over. Once I realized what Quasi wanted I tried to answer. My voice didn’t come out in English. High-pitched screeches like nails over chalkboards burst out of my throat.
I freaked out a bit at that point. There may have been some clutching of the throat, and some leaping away from the creepy liquid-metal thing. Quasi stopped being creepy after I learned what that word really meant, but I hadn’t met the weirder students yet and my threshold was lower. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but if it did, my reacting like that would have been totally understandable. Cause it was terrifying.
I mean really terrifying. Like having a stroke and not being able to speak anymore.
Of course what made it worse was that the screeches meant something to me and something to it.
That’s when I knew just how far away from home I was. It’s one thing to see it on a map, another to have it explained to you, but to have alien noises come out of your throat and for you to understand them? You realize that you are a long long long way from home.
It’s the little flashes of normal that make things harder, but we’ll get to those.
Quasi led me off the ship. There was a welcoming party that included video of my parents telling me how proud they were of me. That made it worse. The video was so realistic that for a second I thought they were real. Sometimes I hate technology.
Then the headmaster explained what was really going on. It’s standard to greet a student with a video/hologram/sense projection of their parents greeting them to the school. It’s supposed to help us acclimate. Yeah, that doesn’t work so much with human psychology.
Of course I’m glossing over an important detail. The headmaster. He was a twelve-foot tall quintuple-legged carapaced creature that oozed slime from pores on his shell. In place of arms he had three prehensile tongues that flicked out of his mouth and could manipulate things like hands. There were little symbiotic creatures that followed him around and cleaned up his slime trail. They were efficient, but they didn’t do much for the smell.
“Good news!” Those were his first ‘words’ to me. Of course I say words, they were noises that scraped over my inner ear like a medieval surgeon scraping at a bone. It’s never gotten any better. “We have a roommate for you from a similar species!”
This was not good news. When I’d agreed to this there had been no mention of a roommate. Who wants to live with an alien?
“I’m sure you’ll get on famously! He’s had a hard time adjusting without evolutionarily similar friends, but I’m sure that with you here that’s the end of that!”
I was being presented as the solution to a problem. I knew this was a bad sign, but I’d been to enough political events with dad to know what to do. “I look forward to meeting him sir.” Okay, what I said was scream, yelp, snort, gnahhhhh, but you get the idea.
The headmaster put a tongue across my shoulder and walked me to my room. Apparently that’s a friendly gesture amongst most species. If it had been an arm it might have translated better. I felt like he was going to eat me at any time.
Classes were in, so the halls were empty for our walk, probably a good thing, I might have run screaming otherwise.
The one thing I will say for the school was that it had been clean. Up until we reached my room. The entire door was covered in a matt of hair. Not like a hairy animal, or clippings from a haircut, no, the thing was bumpy and looked like the abdomen of a tarantula. The hair ran in red and black stripes as wide as my fist.
Then the door opened.
That’s how I met Bob.
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