Warped Space - Chapter 2
By Misty Steppes

Don't go expecting these every night, folks, I'm just trying to decide where exactly I'm going with this story, and I do that by writing until I'm happy with a chapter and where it takes the story. That being said, enjoy!

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Coming to after losing consciousness is an odd feeling. Not like sleeping - the feeling I was experiencing was far more odd, like suddenly becoming fully aware again after an unknown period of nothingness.
As I came to, I was flooded with unfamiliar senses, but the first thing I noticed was the feeling of the ground beneath me. I was flat on my stomach, but it did not feel like the metal-lined flooring of my lab - it seemed to be a flawless flat surface, but it was not a material I recognized. My eyes slowly opened, and the surface was revealed to be jet black, and shined like polished marble countertops.
The next thing I noticed was the chatter around me. It was not in a language I recognized, but it was extremely rapid, back and forth between different voices lasting only a few moments. It was nothing like I had ever heard before.

“Where the hell am I…”

I slid my arms underneath my torso, pushing myself up off of the odd ground to get a good look of the area around me.

My jaw dropped.

The view in front of me was stunning. Around fifty feet ahead of me stood a plasma curtain the likes of which had only existed in science fiction - but it was now the only thing that stood between me and the darkness of space.
A hand on my shoulder made me jump, and I turned to see who it was.
“Who are you?”
I half-shouted as I turned, coming face to face with a human-looking man. He was tall and broad, pale but with heavy muscle that belied the sun-deprived assumption that I might otherwise be led to by his skin. His entire body was covered in a black armor of sorts, plates of yet another material that remained unfamiliar to me.

He responded to me, but it was incomprehensible - more of that language that I had heard as I came to. I blinked in confusion, and we both frowned. He tapped a button near his collar and spoke in a monotone, evidently using some kind of radio. Releasing the button when he finished speaking, the man extended his hand to me, a somewhat universal gesture it seemed even as incomprehensible as our languages were to one another. I grabbed his hand and he pulled me to my feet, nodding solemnly.

I was tempted to make another attempt at deciphering their language, but before I could say or do anything another person ran up behind the man. A short woman in a similar black armor skidded to a halt next to him, a small box in hand. After a brief word (or words, I wouldn’t know) between the two, the woman opened the box, revealing what looked to be an earpiece of some kind - like the ones used by FBI agents or rich businessmen. She held it out to me, and I gingerly plucked it from the box, orienting it properly before sticking it into my left ear. As I let go, the woman handed me a tablet-like slab, the screen already lit with images. When I grabbed hold of it, the woman reached over and pushed on button on the earpiece. It immediately began speaking the language that they had been, but she mimed speaking and pointed to the tablet.

Making the assumption that I was supposed to speak the English word for what was on the screen, I started naming the many images I saw, proceeding left to right and top to bottom.
“Bed.
“Star.
“Table…”

~o~O~o~

“Language formula comprehended. Calibration complete. Welcome, customer.
“New Language Registered. Please provide a name for the record.”
“English.”
“Thank you. Now translating nearby surrounding conversation.”

“...That didn’t take too long. Surprising to find an untranslated derivative language in this day and age, but I’m not complaining.”
A slightly synthetic-sounding voice spoke in my ear, apparently repeating the words of the woman as she spoke - there was hardly any delay, astoundingly, though it did pause at some points. I had only spoken a few words, so the fact that it was already able to speak almost perfect English was simply unbelievable.

“Alright, you should be able to understand us now. My name is Amina Del’Roux, First Lieutenant in the Federation Exploratory Corps, and this is Joel Kar’Seth, Second Lieutenant. Would you mind telling us where, you’re from?”
The woman smiled as she spoke, gesturing to the man beside her as she introduced him.

“I- I’m from Earth, Sol System, not that that would mean anything to you most likely. My planet has not achieved space travel, something that I would find hard to believe right now if not for it staring me in the face.”
The earpiece was clearly translating my voice into whatever language they had been speaking, but it seemed to work well enough. I gestured over my shoulder as I spoke towards the plasma window into the void. As I finished speaking, I quietly took a deep breath, still quite surprised that I was taking this so well.

“A pre-spacer planet with warp technology? Impossible,” The voice-over of the man, who had been introduced as Joel, scoffed. “No pre-spacer could just show up in our interdictor bay without being torn to pieces by their own gate. Where are you really from?”

“I swear, I’m not lying to you. I’m a college student, I was doing research into warp anomalies for my thesis, and got caught up in an experiment gone wrong. I’m frankly surprised I’m still alive, much less here.”

Joel frowned, but said nothing for a moment. Sensing his pause, Amina spoke up instead, reaching for the pad in my hand, which I readily handed to her.
“Well, I have no reason to believe you’re lying, though pre-spacers this close to the Known Systems is almost unheard of, not to mention you surviving that warp. Would you possibly be able to point out your location on a galactic map? I assume your planet had that much technology, if you were experimenting with warp gates.”
After a moment of tapping away at the tablet, Amina handed it back to me, at which point I closed my eyes and attempted to remember our relative location in the Milky Way. But when I opened my eyes again and looked down at the tablet, I immediately felt confused.

“This… This isn’t what our galaxy looks like.”
Nothing matched up. Not the shape, not the size, nothing. Even if I wanted to slot the Sol system in somehow, I wouldn’t be able to make it fit in a way that made sense.
“I… It’s not here.”
I placed my head in my hands, trying to comprehend what was happening.
“What do I do…” I whispered to myself.

I felt Amina’s hand upon my shoulder.

At least I wasn’t all alone.

~o~O~o~

Still reeling from the shock of the day’s events, I sat down without a sound onto the bed I had been led to.

“I’ll send over a spare datapad for you with a language program on it, among other things. It’s best if you learn Galactic Common as quickly as possible - the translator’s very convenient, but it can be kind of unsettling to hear everyone as the same voice, not to mention the confusion it can cause when translating colloquialisms and such.”
Amina spoke softly from the doorway, disappearing when she was done speaking. The metal door slid shut upon her departure, the hiss of the pneumatic system driving it only barely audible.

I hadn’t seen most of my current location, but from what I could tell I was aboard a starship of some kind - presumably owned by the “Federation Exploratory Corps”. It was pretty stereotypically futuristic-looking as starships go - not that I had much experience with real starships.

“Mister Aaron, I’ve retrieved your datapad for you.”
The sound of Galactic Common came from behind the door, words that were swiftly translated by my earpiece, the door sliding open as I looked up. A humanoid robot strode into the room, its metal plating almost identical to the armor that Amina and Joel had been wearing. Emblazoned on the metal of its lapel was a symbol that I presumed to belong to the Exploratory Corps - that or the Federation, though the former was my best guess. It was a white circle with two horizontal bars through it, almost like a double-ringed planet, if such a thing were possible.

“We’ll have to take you to a government office once we get back to a Federation system, get you registered and all that, but you should be able to apply for citizenship fairly easy. Pre-spacers can’t exactly be enemy plants, obviously, so your background check should turn up clean - nonexistent, actually, but that is besides the point.”
The android handed me a datapad as he spoke, not pausing even as I pressed what appeared to be the power button. The screen of the pad flashed on with a pleasant ‘ding’, the same logo as the one on the android briefly appearing on screen before it faded out, replaced with a home screen of sorts.

The words on the pad were exclusively in Galactic Common, so I couldn’t understand any of it, but I presumed the icon of a book with Galactic Common symbols in it would take me to the learning resource Amina had mentioned.

“The datapad is technically only authorized for Corps member use, but I don’t think anyone will begrudge you the necessity that is learning Galactic Common in this era. Well, I’d best let you get to work - if you’d like to join the crew for dinner, most eat at around the 22nd hour Galactic Standard Time. Days are split into 30 hours, just so you know - your pre-spacer world likely kept time differently. Hours are 50 minutes, minutes are 50 seconds, and you can get an idea of the length of a second using that clock over in the corner if you like. I’ll leave you to it. Old PAD-1 will be around if you need me.”

With a casual salute thrown my way, PAD-1 stalked out of the room, its movements mechanical but quite smooth and human-like. I glanced over to the clock that it mentioned - after waiting a few moments to compare my memory of a second and the second recorded on the digital clock, I found that their second was extremely similar to Earth’s - odd, but quite convenient. A different second would have made keeping time a nightmare for years to come.

Should I live that long. I had not a clue what was to come.

I turned back to the datapad that sat on my lap, finally opening the language resource that I had received the tablet for in the first place. In a matter of moments, I was beginning to learn the language of the galaxy I had found myself in.