Kyle was propped up on his elbows on a less-cold metal floor next to an empty and currently lid-less tank, covered in uneven yellow muck, staring up at what he only assumed was the captain. The man, for some stroke of insanity, had decided to try to look civilized instead of a pirate. He looked the part.
Kyle groped for something to say, but then the captain corrected himself.
“Yer not one of the recruits, are you?” he said thoughtfully. Then, in some weird phase his mother always reprimanded him of doing, he began his thought process out loud.
“Yer not hairless and cold (Kyle was actually cold from the air conditioning and being covered in goop) like the recruits. You couldn’t have been in a pod,” he reasoned.
“If ye weren’t in onna them pods, then you would’ve been long dead by now if youda snuck onto the ship,” he said.
“If ye didn’t snick onto the ship,” he continued, “then you was put here recently. And you look like someone threw ye in onna them sustenance fluid tanks,” he added.
“So you musta time traveled,” he finished.
“Er… that about sums it up,” Kyle said.
“And as far as I know, they haven’t made any onna them time mishines yet, which means you from the future.”
“Yeah.”
The captain stood motionless in the doorway, fists determinedly to his hips, scowling at Kyle for an unnerving amount of time, as if he couldn’t decide if Kyle was lying or just a tuna sandwich that had mysteriously been left on the floor when everybody knew that they had run out of tuna a month ago.
Then he spoke.
“Why’re you here?”
Kyle scratched the back of his head. “I’m, er, supposed to meet the war commander.”
“War commander? Ye mean Commander Piott?”
Kyle paused. “What year is it?”
“2335, course. What year you s’posed be in?”
“I’m in the right year, it seems.”
“That’s good.”
Kyle stood up and glanced at the tank. Something about it nagged at him, but he ignored it.
“Why do ye need to see Commander Piott?”
Kyle thought about this. “It’s top secret. Officially between he and I. Sorry.” Nice cover, if he said so himself.
“Ah. Well, we’re landing soon, so come on.”
The captain turned around and left the room, and Kyle followed him. The hangar of the ship was dramatically different than the first time he walked through it: instead of cold, icy, and empty, it was warm and full of kids his age, all of them bald. The captain walked along the wall for a while and stopped at a large door. The boys were organizing themselves, and the thick door started rolling up. Blinding light streamed in from under it as a ramp started unfolding, and it was only then that Kyle realized it had been rather dark in the ship. The captain and Kyle were the first to start down the ramp, followed by ten single-file lines of the boys.
The first thing Kyle saw was empty white light. After that stopped giving him a headache, the second thing he saw was a semicircular hall with sleek white a floor and glass walls. A thick door, two football fields away, in front of them had big words in red: AIRLOCK: ON. He looked straight up and saw the ship, about a fourth as big as the moon, hanging with majestic silence with a long thin tube stretching down and ending with an angled spout: the door they’d just walked out of. Seeing his confusion, the captain turned to Kyle and said simply, “distance is different in there.”
“I see,” Kyle said. He didn’t.
The boy soldiers, by that point in the fourth dimension, had filled up all of the room comfortably, but there were still quite a few of people on board, so they started to pack into the room like sardines. The captain started making his way towards the AIRLOCK door, and Kyle followed. He took in as much as possible, knowing this would be his new home for quite a while.
The captain walked up to a cylindrical booth in the corner of the large room and tapped on the glass. A thin pole rose from the floor inside and spouted two more thin horizontal poles. A section of the vertical pole spun clockwise several times and lifted itself into the air like a possessed peanut butter jar, and lit up with two blue circles. The two horizontal poles angled themselves down like relaxed arms, the ends splitting into a triangle of claws. The appearance of the humanoid robot had happened in a twenty-seventh of a second, it thought to itself. That is approximately one billion and forty times faster than the time it takes for a light bridge to power up when done so with twelve double-A batteries. Must keep the mathematical subroutines online as much as possible so as to minimize the time it takes to start running them, it is said in the robot initial programming sessions.
A deep, robotic voice squawked from the machine. “How may I be of assistance…” it paused, and the two blue circles lit up the Captain’s face with a rotating grid. It chirped after a moment and the grid disappeared. “…Captain Amos?”
“I need this boy here to go straight to Piott. He’s from the future, and he has something important to tell the Commander.”
The robot rotated dolefully and scanned Kyle’s face.
“He has no identification in any current or past civilization. He is not a soldier. I shall check the Non-temporal Identification System to see if this child is from the future, and alert Piott. Have a nice day,” it added before folding back up again and zipping into the floor - it happened in like, a millisecond or something, Kyle figured.
Captain Amos turned around to Kyle and said, “You know what the NIDS is, right?”
“No,” Kyle said, feeling he ought to have at least heard of it.
“It’s a Identification System that is connected to a flux capacitor and is cross-referenced with a regular Identification System, so that it shows everyone that hasn’t been born yet,” said a polite female robotic voice from the booth. “Have a nice day,” it added.
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