The voidscull was changing once more. I squinted just enough to take in basic information; light and dark, big shapes but no details – like a starfish. The walls stretched and skewed like hands under fabric. Then they expanded upward, the space transforming into a room tall enough to stand. I immediately tried to, if only to prove I still could. The lower portion of the wall was solid and I used it as a brace, pushing carefully, gingerly, upright, like a child just learning. The walls continued to stretch higher still. What had been the voidscull was now... not.

The black walls brightened, forcing my eyes shut again. I held my breath and slowly reopened them. It was like an illusion, as the source of light was ambiguous, making it impossible to tell if it was passing through from the outside or radiating from within the walls themselves. Black faded to grey to muted light blue in a gradient that ran from opaque to translucent. Maybe it wasn’t the light that was changing at all, but the walls, allowing whatever illumination was beyond to filter in.

That’s when I noticed what we were wearing.

Patton screeched. I would have too but couldn’t get any air into my lungs. There was no other way to put it: we were in gimp suits. Gleaming. Slick. Something like space-latex. Full-body rigs, just without hoods or zippers. I tried fishing a finger underneath at the wrist, but it was sealed to my skin – like I’d been dipped in liquid that had hardened around me. It didn’t stretch and wouldn’t tear. We struggled futilely, then just stood there, staring at each other in shocked surrender.

“My nipples feel like they’ve been sanded off,” Patton moaned miserably.

Our eyes drew down the tubes onto our opposite’s stomach.

They hung limply like severed umbilici, prompting such a visceral disgust that I immediately wanted to tear them out. Patton bayed sorrowfully.

I took hold of the tubes and shut my eyes, but something stopped me from carrying through. How had we been eating? Eating... and – oh no. I felt around toward the back, slowly crawling my fingers along a cheek. Yep. There was one in my ass. My eyes teared up. I flapped my hands in revulsion and howled like a pistol shrimp.74

Resigned, Patton reached around for the inevitable, and nodded in somber affirmation. He brought his own butt tube around to the front and held it tenderly like a tail that’d been up the vacuum cleaner. “Have we been pooping through these, Ben?”

“I think so.”

“Oh, god.”

To top it all off, our odor was biblical.

I began to think wistfully about our initial abduction. Who was it who said, only worry about the things you can control?75 I tried to stay calm, filing away the stench, captivity, the unbidden butt stuff into the Things I Can’t Control drawer. Can’t say it helped.