I wake up in the passenger seat of a strange car, my forehead pressed against the cold glass of the vibrating window. A human-sized blur of dust and static sits in the driver’s seat beside me. Glimmering like one of those satellite pictures of a nebula in deep space, the creature stares straight ahead and grips the rubber steering wheel with a pair of fingerless appendages of crackling fuzz.
Outside, a tunnel of naked trees flickers past in the dark. In here, the backseat of the car sits empty.
It’s 2:36 a.m. The engine hums like a blender. The blue digits of the clock jiggle like gelatin. The speedometer floats past ninety.
Glancing at the strange creature in the driver’s seat, I ask it where we’re going. How I got here. What it is and where it came from. If I’m already dead. It doesn’t answer. It stares ahead and keeps driving. I don’t blame it. My life has never been anything special. Wherever this thing is taking me, it can’t be any worse than my empty apartment next to the highway, my job at the warehouse that ships office supplies.
The creature drives on. The engine thrums a barren tone. I stare through the windshield and study the long string of the gray road, the gnarled spikes of the bare trees, the murky black gloom of the chilly night.
Minutes later, when the giant amber moon slides into view, the creature expands in size and rotates its body to face me. Somehow, its weird arms stay fixed to the wheel, keeping the car on the road.
A basketball-sized void of shimmering light opens in the creature’s body. A deafening hiss of static fills the cabin of the car. For the next sixty seconds, I stare into the void of light and wait for something to happen. There I see the surface of a distant star. The storms of a whirling gas giant. An ocean churning beneath the crust of a lonely exoplanet.
Studying all this, I reach out my hand and touch the creature’s skin. I thrust my fingers into the void and stretch open the maw of static. I carefully unbuckle my seatbelt and climb into the light.
