Captain Locke yelped, startled by the sound of something striking repeatedly against the window of their spacecraft. More concerning was the source of the noise: an armored, somewhat bulky suit, fitted with oxygen tanks, propulsion systems, and flippers, its hands beating on their window while its visor revealed the frantic expression of the suit’s wearer, who appeared to be a very panicked human woman.
Taking these nonsensical details in all at once was a bit much, so the captain ignored most of them, and focused only on the things requiring immediate action. Someone was in trouble, and needed into their ship, and that was that… though something in the back of their mind also told them to take their weapon with them as they went to meet their newfound passenger at the airlock.
SCAN COMPLETE. LIFE SIGNS NORMAL FOR SPECIES homo sapiens.
“Well, congrats, you’re a human.” She didn’t laugh— or did the corner of her mouth lift ever so slightly, for a split second? “Oh, and, uh, sorry for pointing my gun at you. Just thought you might be some kinda mimic or something, given, y’know…” The captain gestured vaguely.
“Oh, yeah, no, I mean, yeah, don’t worry about it! And. Thank you. This is all just… I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.” She spoke haltingly, unsure of her words, unsure of everything.
“Well, let’s start with this: Can you at least tell me where your ship is?” Captain Locke needed answers, as anyone would in this situation, and this (admittedly very confused and shaken) woman was the only likely source of them. Unfortunately, her words wouldn’t bring the clarity they wished for.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “This can’t be right, but… well… my ship is deep beneath the waves of the Sleeping Ocean on Petros.” A brief silence. “Oh, and it’s, um, it’s a submarine.”
“Wait wait wait. Hang on.” The captain felt as though they must’ve missed something. “So you’re not a mimic with a poor understanding of what a spacefaring human is supposed to look like, here to eat my brains after taking advantage of my good will and generosity in letting you onto my ship. As the bioscan proved.”
“Right.”
“And you’re also not some runaway with some wild backstory that lead to you having no means of protecting yourself from the vacuum of space except for, somehow, a diving suit, which you figured would make a good enough makeshift spacesuit, forced to make an emergency evacuation from your ship when the ones pursuing you destroyed said ship, floating through the inky void until you arrived at the window of my own spacecraft?”
“That’s correct.”
“You’re saying that, instead of either of those explanations, you’re actually just a diver, doing whatever at the bottom of the ocean of the planet I was just leaving, before suddenly being not at the bottom of the ocean, finding yourself peering into the cockpit of this here vessel, completely unprepared for maneuvering through space and therefore hopeless save for my own willingness to take you aboard?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that,” she said. “In terms of statistical oddness, I mean. I’ll get to that, though. First I should probably tell you about what happened from my perspective, though I’ll warn you I don’t much understand it myself.”
“Please do.”
“Right, yes, well, so, my name is Rain. I was exploring the Sleeping Ocean in my submarine, you know, as you do…” The captain was too hungry for information to laugh at Rain’s little joke, so after an awkward pause, she continued. “Anyways, uh, I started seeing all these weird lights around me. They only appeared at a certain depth… but I was just so curious. I put on my diving gear and got out of the sub to see if I could get closer to one, and by the time I realized I wasn’t looking at some bioluminescent curiosities, but rather the starry backdrop of outer space, it was too late. With what little movement I had, I looked for my submarine. It was gone. The water was gone too, just a vacuum around me. I saw your ship, and, and… well… I guess you know the rest after that part.”
Captain Locke digested the information for a moment before speaking. “So, to reiterate,” they said, “you were in the ocean, and then it gradually turned into space, and now you’re in space. You teleported to space.”
“Yes, except that it’s worse than that,” Rain replied, panic creeping into her voice, as if she’d only just now truly considered the terrifying impossibility of the words she was about to say next, her brain no longer able to ignore their meaning as she spoke them and made them real. “I didn’t just teleport to space. I ended up near another… anything. Within reach of not just an anything, which is already pretty fucking unlikely in the vast expanse of space, mind you, but a person, another soul, one equipped to rescue me. Mathematically that’s just… that’s…”
“H-hey, take a breath or something, try to calm—”
“And that’s not all,” she continued, following this line of thinking to a distance that the captain’s voice could not currently reach. “No, it gets even worse. This ship is moving. Incredibly fast. As I would be too, but at a completely different velocity, being on a moving planet. But instead, after my teleportation, I nearly matched the speed and direction of your ship, almost motionless relative to it. Able to tap your window instead of getting smeared across it.”
Oddly enough, her ramble seemed to be calming her down a little bit. “It’s like, it’s, well, there’s too much to be a coincidence. Matching your speed, matching your direction, matching your position, each of those things too impossible to be the work of some random wormhole. But think of it like this…” Her eyes were lighting up now. She was definitely onto something. “I was near my vessel, not moving very fast compared to it, floating in the ocean. Then, I was near your vessel, not moving very fast to it, floating in space.”
Something about it made an unsettling, unspoken sense to Captain Locke. They shifted uneasily, the presence of whatever Rain had figured out looming just outside of their reckoning. If she didn’t put the pieces together soon they’d choke.
“The concepts,” she declared unhelpfully, before clarifying. “The concepts were mixed up. Physically, the difference between my situations before and after my teleportation were quite vast. But conceptually, you only have to change a few words to get from one situation to the next. ‘Outside my vessel’ becomes ‘outside your vessel’, and ‘floating in the ocean’ becomes ‘floating in space’. It was metaphysical, not… well, regular physical…”
REROUTING… SETTING COURSE FOR PLANET: Petros.
The captain had gotten up wordlessly partway through Rain’s explanation, the memories of tall tales and freak accidents they’d heard of on Petros finally lining up with each other, their perfect tiling only visible through this lens of metaphysical non-coincidence. A survivor of one such tale sat here in their ship, but if Captain Locke was right, others wouldn’t be so lucky.
“Well, Rain, you’ve convinced me,” they said. “We’re going back to Petros. Something is seriously wrong on that planet, and you and I are gonna fix it.”