The Abduction of Stefan Bossi

Sometimes the nightmares—like her missing arms—faded, and then there was only the vacuum of space. Peggy Lance remembered Earth: bright blue planet visible from the International Space Station (ISS). Did that mean she was dead? Will she ever make it back to Earth and back to her hometown of Missouri? Is her partner going to wake up? She didn’t have the answers to these questions. Why did these questions even matter? She was getting frustrated with her situation.

The pain was somewhere in her stomach. It felt as if someone had kicked the wind out of her lungs. That was all she could feel right now.

Six minutes felt like an eternity (and because, since the aurora was the only light inside of the ISS that glowed), the rainbow colors illuminated her miserable reality. She had no idea who had survived the meteorite impact or if Stefan Bossi would open his eyes. She hoped he was okay, but through the space junk hovering in the antigravity, she felt claustrophobic like a rat in a cage; she did not know if she would make it out alive.

As everything hovered, she became aware of movement in Stefan’s spacesuit. And for the first time since waking up in this nightmare, which had caused her anxiety, she believed that the German cosmonaut was regaining consciousness. This hope was clouded with the responsibility to restore the station’s main electrical supply. Her parents didn’t take her seriously when she said she was going to become an aeronautical engineer at NASA, and they had always insisted that she follow in their footsteps where she could make a comfortable living for herself, which seemed to her like the most boring job in the world—bankers. She liked to float around and watch the sparks shoot out of the main distribution board until it flashed. Then, five minutes later, after she revived Stefan and informed him of their predicament, she stuck her gloves into the panels, extinguishing the smoldering wires like a wild animal.

By the time she was pulling out damaged cables with her bare hands, the German hovered behind her.

“We should evacuate,” he insisted.

“Not a change.” The engineer smiled. The two of them had been through many successful spaceflights together.

Reluctantly the mechanic smiled back at her.

“You gotta come with me.” Stefan handed her a screwdriver. “The damage is severe, and we must get out of here.”

“You go.” Peggy lowered her helmet onto the chest of her spacesuit and started to loosen a few screws. “Where is Ground Control when you need them?”

Stefan shrugged. “Just after I woke up, my memories came rushing back. I think I’ve been abducted by aliens.”

“Aliens—are you mad!” she said humorously as she removed the screwdriver from the panel. “Did you sustain any injuries ‘cause you don’t look that good?”

“I feel amazing.” Stefan shook his head. “I was abducted by grey aliens more than once.”

“You were unconscious.” The engineer stopped working. “Any chance that you’ve seen them in your dreams? I get nightmares about my hands sometimes—they go missing.”

“Not a chance, sorry. Just before the meteorite strike, I saw two extraterrestrial beings in my cabin, watching me intently, two humanoid figures with enlarged heads and enormous black eyes.”

“I don’t believe in—aliens!” the engineer said and continued working.

Her voice echoed and echoed, reverberating inside of her helmet. She hoped whatever was going on with Stefan that he didn’t lose his mind, and for a long time, her voice echoed.

aliens, aliens, aliens

aliens . . .

aliens . . .

aliens . . .

Then eventually her voice faded into her spacesuit. Then Peggy continued working on the distribution board. Her first clear memory of what happened, the moment before the impact, was of fear, of being greatly aware she might just die in space, and that wasn’t cool; it was terrifying to recall the moment just before the impact. She could cope with a lot of stress and to face death wasn’t something new—but this was no simulation.

Her teeth clamped against each other. Her breath fogged against the inside of her visor in two round circles. She breathed in like the oxygen was a gift from the Earth, as if she could smell the green grass and forests of home, a truck driving over the dirt road in front of her parent’s house, and breathing in the smell of dust. And she couldn’t help it but the idea of her parents organizing her a job after her failed career at NASA made her fucking nervous.

“Come on, goddamn it!” her heightened voice shrieked, and she knew she had to get the power back on. But before she could flick the switches, she needed to replace the earth strap and a few cables, and she carefully stripped the insulation of another conductor. There were lights flashing and Peggy heard sparks of electricity from behind the panel, and her shadow flickered in front of her.

The mechanic waited four minutes in the dark, then moved forward and leaned over her shoulder.

“Each time I tried to escape from the aliens my legs went numb, their big eyes watching me. I always tried to shout without being able to make a sound. When you woke me up they were gone.”

The engineer breathed deeply and sighed.

“I don’t believe in aliens, Stefan—but you know I care about you.”

The distribution board flashed. Peggy turned her helmet away, not minding the sparks that shot into her visors, and glanced into the void of the station.

“Dammit, Peggy. We can’t die like this.”

“Why not?” She glanced back at him.

Before Stefan could reply, Peggy pointed her glove towards the hatch and stared into his cracked visors. His mouth was a mess, teeth chipped and stained with blood.

“The aliens were trying to force a cybernetic insect into my mouth,” Stefan said. He looked into her eyes and then at his own reflection. “I grabbed a knife from my toolbelt and stabbed. But I think the insect slipped down my throat—can you check?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“Please check if there’s anything, Peggy.” The mechanic was beside himself, tilting his head back and stretching open his mouth.

“There’s nothing there, okay.”

“Are you sure?” he asked in disbelief. “There must be something there.”

“You sound like Fox Mulder.”

She laughed at her own joke, and stared at Stefan through her visors.

With the glow of her cheeks he seemed to gain self-confidence, pulling his body up to the roof with one hand. His voice regained its coarse and manly reverberation. “I must have been dreaming.”

Stefan turned away from her, and she continued working on the electricals without looking at him.

“The cybernetic insect, Stefan. I think it sounds—”

She hesitated.

“It’s strange. But it sounds like the drone of the two medics that disappeared yesterday. I found their dead bodies in the storage bay floating in the antigravity.

When he moved away from her shoulder, she connected the main earth strap from the distribution board to the body of the ISS and the current situation of the electricals seemed to become a glimmer of hope. The pain in her hands wasn’t permanent. That was the effect of prolonged spaceflight, which was the reason for her nightmares. The pain only seemed to come and go. It was like a terrible cold inside her bones, sometimes painful and sometimes numb, but always uncomfortable. When the pain wasn’t haunting her dreams, the numbness rendered her hands useless from her elbows to the tips of her fingers. She was very grateful that she didn’t lose mobility over her fingers, waiting for it to kick in, but it didn’t.

Stefan twitched when he saw the roof lights flicker. The two astronauts were staring at each other. They were the same age, in their mid-twenties—both fit, both black hair—but opposite skin tones.

Stefan was broad at the shoulders and narrow at the hips and belly, his skin very red and tanned by the cosmic sun. The square lines of his jawbone stood out clearly, and his eyes were set deep in those dark sockets. His voice scratched with the harsh accents of extreme thirst.

“I’ve seen the medics before my spacewalk,” he eventually confirmed. “Ground control reported the threat of a meteorite strike while I was out there. Did the medics die of natural causes?”

Peggy half-closed her eyes. Her skin was chocolate brown, tanned by radiation since the atmosphere inside the station was compromised. Her lips were swollen, as though they’d been inflated; the artificial pressure inside her spacesuit was above normal. There were black rings around her eyes and freckles on her nose that weren’t there before.

“Fucken hell. I found them drenched in blood, stabbed to death. The other crew members also didn’t know what happened to them. The video footage was deleted. The backups formatted. What do you think happened to them?”

Stefan turned away and stared into the distance. The compartment was fogged with white smoke hovering in the antigravity. The air was filled with particles—hydraulic fluids, space junk, and water—a depressing sight of expensive engineering turned to scrap.

“Don’t you remember, Peggy?” he said softly, and Stefan’s surprise turned his cheeks a deeper red.

“I was busy lubricating the servo motors,” he confirmed.

“Yes, during your spacewalk—tell me about it.”

“The solar panels on the east side of the ISS needed adjustment. I came on board after ground control issued a warning—a short time later. You can’t possibly suspect me of murder?”

Stefan felt his own anger surge wildly, but his voice remained calm.

“And what about the drone, Peggy?”

“Hovering next to their bodies, covered in blood.”

Astronauts know about the risks of prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. Stefan was no different; he moaned as the nails inside his left glove started to separate from the bed of his fingers. A large drop of blood hovered inside his helmet. He moaned for a minute, maybe. He clenched his jaw while he grabbed his glove and tucked it under his arm. Then suddenly, confronted the engineer, almost shouting at her. “What does this have to do with my abduction?”

“Jesus Christ, Stefan,” her voice became aggressive. “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound normal. Perhaps you’ve got radiation—”

Stefan interrupted her impatiently. “Ground Control is lying to us. Now I think I know the truth behind all of this. The aliens are responsible for their deaths. How about it, Peggy?”

“Aliens?” Peggy was annoyed. “Alright, then. But you must deal with the holes in the cabin and re-establish the pressure, or we will die. I’ll take a look at your hand after we finish. I’d like to go and help you, but I must first get the power back on.”

She hovered slowly across the air and placed her hands around Stefan. They moved through the air and held on to each other.

And it took a long time before she let go of him, able to release his hands that had locked together behind her back. “Stefan!” she said, but the line of his mouth tightened with disagreement. The name of the German who she’d come to love so deeply was Stefan Bossi. She recognized his boyish temper tantrum, and it made her smile.

“See you later,” he snapped.

“How much oxygen do you have, Stefan?”

Suddenly he went pale. “Sixty minutes, exactly,” he replied when he was eventually able to say something. “In an hour from now I’ll be dead. And you—”

“We can do it thirty, okay!” Peggy grabbed his shoulder and pulled him closer. “You lemme know when you get there.”

Stefan hesitated and licked his lips nervously with the tip of his bleeding tongue.

“Yes,” he said, “Godspeed.”

“Jinx,” she said, smiling, “exactly what I was going to say.”

He pushed himself away. Stefan crossed the void, floating toward the hatch. He reached the end of the compartment and grabbed the lever to open it.

Working on the distribution board like a wild animal with the electrical tester in her hands and tools floating around her and lights flickering behind her. The engineer often looked down at the empty cabin to check if she could see Stefan and then returned her attention to the panel in front of her.

Numbness. Then the pain in her hands. Then the awareness that, although the feeling was getting worse, it might cause her to fail her mission by restricting blood flow to her fingers, ending in disaster. Another memory: getting a letter from the USPS mailman, ripping it open, and being accepted by NASA for the Mars project to adapt people for deep space colonization. Her fingers were going limp at regular intervals now, almost like fried potato chips, and since there was no control over them, she got shocked by a thousand volts . . .

(Cosmic nightmares, how terrible they were. Another bad, horrible nightmare where her hands were invisible from the wrists down; she needed to wake up now, hush. Hush little girl, wake up before the aliens come.)

It was that nasty smell of burnt hair which caused an overdose of adrenaline to wake her up. When Peggy eventually came around, the cooling fans were blowing, and the cabin pressure was stable. It would have been great to spit out the blood in her mouth, and she could do with an aspirin right about now. She experienced an almost painful excitement when she realized the power was back on.

Then turning to the distribution board, she flicked the switches and pulled out the emergency stop button. Always in that order—switches, then e-stop. The wall-mounted monitor rebooted while Peggy stared at it. She moved her head toward the computer screen. It was the main server’s “deleted” files. She touched the screen, and a voice recording started to play.

“Radiation sickness will cause a rapid decline of their mental health, so we need to take precautionary measures.” The voice was pitched high as it scratched over the speakers. “The mind has control over the body and will alter their perception. Everyone will die in three days from now. So if you agree that they are better off without the pain, then—”

While listening to the voice recording, the engineer was interrupted by a loud reverberation inside her helmet, as if someone was shouting. She turned her body and pushed herself away from the distribution board towards Stefan’s location.

Peggy wondered why she chose to become an astronaut. Her parents always tried to talk her out of it. The same way she wondered why she fell in love with a German cosmonaut. The romantic part of her mind saw Stefan as her husband; she knew she was going to marry him, and since he was the only person in the world who understood her sexual needs—why else did she adore his naked, muscled features? Then her erotic fantasy ended suddenly, the whole warm exiting daydream of her lover faded into the vacuum of space.

“Stefan, I’m coming for you,” she shouted.

Peggy tried to open the emergency hatch but it was stuck. She pulled the manual override lever with all her power as it slowly opened. On the other side near the patched wall, with a smashed visor, hovered Stefan gasping for oxygen.

“What happened to you, Stefan?”

Stefan’s hands drifted beside his dying body in midair like a deep-sea diver. Peggy jerked his spacesuit closer and hugged him.

“I think you better tell me the truth about those medics, Stefan.”

She could remember the exact feeling of his hands on her hips, warm, matter of fact, as it brushed over her skin for the first time the soft tissue around her nipples started hardening. She was surprised that the memory of their first sexual intercourse hurt so intensely—his lifeless body only heightened her suffering.

In the antigravity she clung to his weak body.

Stefan’s mouth gasped for survival. Soon there was a lot of blood, for a few minutes the cosmonaut was bleeding from his mouth as the red liquid rushed through his broken visors into the void. And the coagulating of his brains and the clotting of the mechanic’s blood ran over her spacesuit, tumbling in midair, bright red.

“Did you do this to yourself, Stefan?” she said, suspecting it to be suicide.

No wait, this isn’t fair. The image of Stefan Bossi as a failed cosmonaut who had committed suicide in space was both sad and extremely depressing. He was an excellent spacecraft mechanic who seemed to have fallen for her feminine curves—there was no doubt that he was in love with her (she tried to convince her mind that he would survive and that the doctors would save him). But his life was slipping away from him and fast. There was a feeling inside her chest that burnt rather seriously as if she was dying as well.

Peggy pulled his helmet away from his head and flicked it up toward the roof of the compartment. She tried to stop the bleeding and clamped her glove behind his head but the hole was too big. Instantly her mind leapt to the moment when they first met.

One morning in the gym at Cape Canaveral, Stefan had come to exercise before swimming pool practice. He entered the gym barefoot in his pajamas, removing that tight shirt as it gave her goosebumps. He was fit as a football player, eighteen years old, and afraid of nothing.

Peggy was weeping on his shoulder after he stopped breathing.

“Stefan. What have you done? Why did it have to end like this?”

She held his arms, looked at his face, and beamed her eyes over his wounds. The cosmonaut had six deep, long scratches around his mouth. Peggy was confused while holding her breath, thinking about the horror as if begging the Lord for protection.

Above all, this gave her an extreme fear of insects, as if she might not make it toward the escape pod or even burst open from the inside since she might have been implanted with the same thing that caused the German’s ultimate demise. She felt more and more afraid that something was hiding in the cabin behind the panels of the ISS to attack her if she turned her back toward whatever the fuck it was. It seemed to her that if she made it toward the escape hatch at the end of the cabin, she might be able to make it back to Earth (her manager might be pissed) alive. So her feelings of being an astronaut were like the ultimate milestone of the impossible and not that difficult to achieve after all. Like an astronaut, she focused her mind.

“You warned me, Stefan! You told me about this.”

Peggy was shaking with fear, the confusion of her brown wrinkled face radiating sharply like a rainbow-colored eclipse. She pulled Stefan by the arms and gently pushed him away into the emptiness.

After a while—after his body got stuck in the far corner—she was able to gain control over her mood. “Show yourself?” she cried, clinging to the roof with one hand and leaning backward to kick anything that might wanna kill her. She discovered two things almost simultaneously, about three minutes after looking around and seeing no hostile insect emerge from behind the panels. The first thing was that Peggy Lance was proud to be an astronaut (she still had, in fact, a great passion for aeronautical engineering). The second thing was that she was in love with a dead person.

Sobbing, hanging from the roof, she moved herself toward the end of the compartment. She threw her body into the emergency escape pod that sent her falling into a confined space. She strapped herself into position. The silence served as a reminder of the inevitable.

The blackness of space only prolonged her sadness and the spectral lights of the aurora; she had begun to remember what a deadly cold the darkness had—her last spacewalk with Stefan. She pressed the blue button. Slamming her head backward, clinging to the handles of her seat, booms of rocket bursts in her ears with blinding flashes of light, blasting back to Earth.

There were a lot of reasons for her not to look back into the darkness, but one last look at the International Space Station persuaded her to say goodbye, miserable and depressed.

Earth—thank God for the blue planet—finally going home. Stefan had died moments ago doing what he loved. She remembered their conversation about the aliens and the idea now struck a sensitive nerve at the back of her neck—the extraterrestrials from outer space had now been the prime suspects behind the mysterious deaths. After a few more minutes of thinking about what happened, the idea no longer seemed silly at all. It seemed, in fact, almost the only rational explanation. But the kind of story she’s going to exclude from her statement as far as possible to protect herself from ending up in a mental institution. And no one will believe Stefan Bossi’s story anyway, abducted by aliens—come on, that’s bullshit.