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When she woke the meager sunlight had gone and the room was cold. She ran naked to the room console and turned on the radiator, and then ran back to bed. Ras and Bak were still asleep; Ras snoring lightly and Bak smiling in his dreams. Samantha climbed in between them and pulled their arms over her, burying herself in their scent. If she were mad, if she had really lost it, then this was a madness to which she would gladly give herself.
In a few days she had gone from boring to crazy, and she was discovering that crazy could be a hell of a lot of fun.
***
SHE LEFT BEFORE THEY awoke. She didn’t like the idea of waking beside them and them looking at her and remembering what they had done the night before and thinking less of her. Thoughts like that shouldn’t have bothered her, but they did. It was even more foolish, she reflected as she unlocked her apartment door, because they were aliens with a totally different value system. She still didn’t know how Bak and Ras had gotten her out of work for the week, but when she called the office to confirm she discovered that it was true, she had a one-week holiday.
She went into her bedroom and lay back, staring at the ceiling. In a few days they would want her to go with them. Could she do something like that? Could she just leave her whole life for... for what? For the promise of two aliens that life would be better? It made no sense and she didn’t have the energy to think on it too deeply.
Later that day, there was a knocking outside. The snow was falling heavily and the streets were fluffy white mattresses. Jessica had gone to stay at her sort-of-boyfriend’s house, and Samantha was alone, cocooned in the blankets.
There was a knocking, which at first she thought was clumps of snow falling onto the sidewalk. But when it continued she pulled open her ice-caked window and poked her head out into the bitter cold. Bak was knocking on the door; clearly, he didn’t know about the buzzer.
She couldn’t help but smile to herself as she descended the stairs to meet them. She led them to the apartment and the three of them sat in the living room, Samantha between them on the couch. In a way, she was glad that they had come for her without having to be asked. She supposed it proved that they really did want her, and didn’t just want to use her once for sex. She had half-expected never to see them again, and she knew what would follow that: years of counselling as she struggled to accept she had been deceived by two human men.
But here they were, once again in their human guises. “You left before we woke,” Ras said.
Samantha nodded. “I did.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. How could she convey all the convoluted emotions of a lukewarm, messed-life twenty-something? How could all the longing and pointlessness be conveyed? She said, “I needed time to think. But I’m glad you are here, both of you.”
“So,” Ras said, “you’ll come with us now?”
“Quiet,” Bak said. “You have no tact, Ras. You are like a stampeding quar’ta’kai.” Bak turned to Samantha. “I have a request for you, Samantha.”
Samantha inclined an eyebrow.
“I request,” he went on, “that you join Ras and me in a... what would the English word be, Ras?”
“In a Convergence,” Ras said.
“What’s that?” Samantha asked, feeling more and more like she was in somebody else’s dream.
Outside, snow fell in heavy clumps that blackened the windows. No natural light penetrated the fluffy shield and the meager electric lights, white like the ward of a hospital, gave the small apartment a sterile air. Samantha felt as though she were in the waiting room of a doctor’s office or a tanning salon.
“You have experienced the Touch already,” Bak said. “A Convergence is when both Ras and I Touch you. In this state, we are able to manipulate time in a shared dream state. It would give us longer together. We would have longer to win you over. And we are able to manipulate space. All of this takes place in our minds, you understand.”
“So where would I be, the real me?”
“Here, in the apartment,” Bak said. “We will all be here physically, but we will all be somewhere else, too.”
Samantha excused herself and paced quickly to the bathroom. She splashed her face with water and stared at her reflection in the mirror. There it was, the same freckled face, the same forest-green eyes, the same red hair. Nothing had changed. She still had the appearance of an angry squirrel. And yet when she looked at herself she didn’t see herself. She saw a different woman: a woman for whom life was a massive joke or game or pleasure-filled ride. How could life rush by so swiftly? How had she descended to such madness so quickly?
She returned to the men and when Bak looked at her hopefully, she nodded. “Let’s do it,” she said.
***
THE THREE OF THEM SAT in a circle around the coffee table in the living room. They sat cross-legged, holding hands like in a séance. Samantha had even dimmed the lights, as if that would somehow heighten the mood of this transcendental alien touch-drug journey, this Convergence. Bak sat to her right, his hand cool and calm and strong in hers. Ras sat to her left, his hand smaller and softer than Bak’s.
“Are you ready?” Bak said.
“Where will we go?” Samantha said.
“It is hard to know. Our minds will take us someplace where we all feel comfortable, and we will live there for a time. When we return, you will know if you want us, or if you wish us to go home. I hope it is the former.”
“Okay,” Samantha said, taking a deep breath. “What do I do?”
“Just keep breathing steadily. Don’t panic, no matter how much you feel like it. Just concentrate on your breathing. We will do the rest.”
“Okay, okay, let’s do it.”
And Sammy the Boring finally becomes, officially and definitively, Sammy the Crazy. You are entering a realm completely unlike anything you’ve ever encountered, Sammy. Are you sure you’re ready for it?
No, she wasn’t sure she was ready, not one tiny bit sure. But she was sure about something else. She was sure that she was tired of living in this straitjacket in which life had sneakily wrapped her. She was sure she was tired of nine-to-five; two little numbers which might as well have been two big walls.
She was sure she wanted to at least try and journey with these two mystical, strange, alien men.