Outposts.

“Would you like a brochure? Sure, here you go.”

I remember the first time I was abducted. Whisked away at virtual ‘probe-point’ to a distant galactic ‘depot’ called ‘Zudprillipud.’ Why? Well, that’s a good question. It was kind of like sleepwalking except I wasn’t asleep, and I don’t think I was walking. Anyway, they brought me back. Dropped me off in my car. It seemed like ten minutes had elapsed, but when I awoke, I soon realized I’d lost an entire week. A week! And nobody even noticed.

I asked Cathy where she thought I was. ‘Out in your boat,’ she says, dicing an onion. Shedding a tear.

“For a week?”

“Well, you were kind of vague when you left.”

“In that...?”

“In that you said, ‘Don’t wait up.”

“And you think, ‘Don’t wait up’ means 'I’ll see you in a week?”

She had every reason to be livid, but she wasn’t. “I bought you a valentine,” she said, pointing at a heart-shaped box with the knife.

“Thanks, uh… can we talk?”

She was open enough to listen politely and asked pertinent questions like, ‘Were there any people?’ or ‘What kind of creatures live on Zudlillipudski?’

My answers? “I don’t know. I was in a rest area? A galactic depot. And Zudprillipud’s a galaxy, not a planet, so, technically nobody lives on it. Any other questions?” She shook her head. Even though I was the one who had been gone for a week, for some reason, I was the one who was annoyed. I would think if she was gone for a week I would've filed a missing persons report. Maybe she was in on it too.

*****

Enter one Stan Waters, Private Detective. “At your service,” he says.

He claimed he was ex-military and looked it. Acted like it. He was all business, but I hadn’t convinced him to work for me yet. “I just don’t see it as a problem,” he said. “What I wouldn’t give to take a week off and not be missed.”

“You’d freak out,” I said. “You’re confusing a vacation with an abduction. Don’t do that.” I explained how speed and time are connected, the faster I went, the less time I experienced. It seemed like ten minutes to me because it was ten minutes, to me, everyone else aged a week or more, everyone around here that is. This much was clear, because I’d already hired someone else to do the math.

But this guy was pretty shrewd because he said, “You did the math, huh? How’d you know how far it was to Zudsparilla?”

And to that kind of question, hypnosis seemed like the only answer.

I was convinced that all hypnotists were incompetent idiots as I rubbed my eyes and sat up. I was on a couch and my belief was reinforced when the hypnotist audibly murmured, ‘all finished.’ We hadn’t done a thing. I didn’t remember anything. I didn’t remember him, his office, walking in, laying down, or any recollection of Stan Waters for that matter. “Crap.” I barely knew my own name.

How do I know all this? I had a note in my shoe. I did a little research before rushing off to the mesmerist. It wasn’t that difficult to break the post-hypnotic suggestions. I kept a video log, reference material, receipts, and a post-hypnotic trigger phrase: ‘What do you have against opera houses?’ As soon as I read that phrase in my notebook, all of my memories came flooding back.

I was abducted again, somewhat more skillfully, and whisked off at near-light-speeds to another distant galaxy. A place with a name that sounded like ‘Paramecium.’ 13 minutes each way with a two-minute layover in what I now call ‘outposts.’ At the far end of a 28-minute interval, I was discreetly dumped back on planet earth three days later. I came to in my boat, on the river, the anchor so deeply embedded in the bottom that I had to cut it free, but the boat ran well, the car was in the marina parking lot and the keys were in my pocket.

When I burst through the front door Cathy greeted me cheerfully. “Hi, how were the fish?”

“The fish?”

“Yeah. The fish. How were they?”

“They, um, there—were no fish, I don’t think.”

“Aww, no luck, huh? That’s too bad.” She patted the couch and I went and sat down next to her. She seemed nicer, and softer than usual.

The following night, after sex, in the dark, I said, “I need a new anchor, you know…”

“It’s fixed,” she said.

“I’m not mad, I just…, what’d you say?”

“I fixed it.”

“You got me a new anchor?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is it?”

“I put it on.”

“On what?”

“The end of the anchor line, of course.”

*****

I got abducted again, it was different. And then again after that, and this time there was another person present. A human being, like me. I felt like part of a team, however marginal my contribution.

My ‘trips’ grew shorter, and the ‘returns’ neater and less awkward, as we fell into a routine. Cathy and I had the best sex ever, and, well, I knew it wasn’t her. It was a better Cathy than the one I’d had. I don’t know what they did with the original, but this was not her. She was too accommodating.

I admit, I was as happy as I’d ever been, happy to play along. I had no control over aliens whose technology was so advanced I couldn’t even remember it, let alone explain it, and, I felt like I was a part of something vast, some huge undertaking. We were far from being the only two people with huge gaps in their memory. I suspected they were abducting thousands of people each month, using them, like memory chips.

One night, I asked my duplicate Cathy, what is it that I do? And she said they use my brain because it has a hundred billion connections, and functions wirelessly.

“So why don’t I understand what we’re doing?” I remember asking.

And she said, “You don’t need to, or want to, you’re a node.” And that was it, that was all she would divulge about that subject, ever.

One night, Cathy entered the house looking dazed and stunned, walking around, looking at things curiously, picking things up. Then she looked at me as if I had changed overnight. I approached her tentatively, and gently embraced her. Her voice was muffled against my shoulder but I still heard her say, “How long was I gone?”

I held her at arm’s length. “About two years.” Valentine’s day was a week away.

“Two years? Oh my God. How can that be?”

I shrugged. “Physics?”

She went to the fridge and grabbed a beer. “Yeah, I was on some kind of starship. I know. It sounds crazy.” She drank one-third of the beer. “God that’s good.” She looked around. “You kept my stuff. How sweet. So…” she peered at me over the rim of the can, “how was my funeral? Pretty small affair?”

“Uh, no.” I cleared my throat. “No funeral. They gave me a substitute. So how long did you think you were gone?”

“About three months,” she said. “It was…” she shook her head, “grueling but rewarding. They were very happy with me, I think. A substitute? What’s a substitute? What does that mean? Did you even know I was gone?”

“Yes. I did. I mean, I figured it out. Eventually.”

 “How? Where is she?” She began circling the apartment. Opening closets and pantries, slamming them shut.

“She’s gone,” I wailed, a touch too plaintively.

“I’m sleeping on the couch,” she announced. “No, you’re sleeping on the couch.”

Once I realized that she knew exactly what a substitute was, even before I told her, we worked things out, and waited anxiously for our next abduction, but it never came. I guess they fired us. We didn’t know what to do so we started a support group, Abducted Nodes Anonymous. We have over a million members and we’re still growing.