Aina Izzah shares a sci-fi tale set within a spaceship parked over somewhere in Malaysia.
I was awakened by the sound of voices, causing me to involuntarily jerk forward so that the cables from my charging bay tightened on my five wrists. I mimicked a tic that the Solos commonly used to convey annoyance called “The rolling of the eyes,” as I unplugged from the bay and felt my ten eyes roll around the grey corneas and into my cone-shaped head. From the long windows circling our hovering vehicle, I sensed that the Sun had not yet risen over the horizon because the moonlight was still bouncing off our glass ship, creating a lullaby of flickering, feathered wings.
Before I slumbered, I had inputted a report of the day’s work into the Almanack, a holographic screen at the crown of my bay, and I’d noticed that I had forgotten to turn the power off. On the black screen, written in green text, was a transcript describing how my comrades and I were hovering over a paddy field on the western coast of a Southeast Asian country named “Ma-lay-sia,” populated by Solos of varied ethnicities. As we flew over the red rooftops of a small village within the cover of grey clouds, we’d captured five Solos with diverse features ranging from dark fleshy skin to paler complexions — a fitting collection for our upcoming travels back to our home star. I was assigned to lock the Solos in the room where oxygen was pumped regularly into the vents (a gas that had been specially imported from Planet XILU-9 due to the unfortunate discovery that Solos cannot survive without it).