One Small Step



The tin can spun unceremoniously in stellar space as the great, blindingly white rock stared at its crew just beyond the side hatch. To an onlooking spacefarer, its service module and propulsion system might well have resembled a child’s make-believe rocket fashioned from a can of pork and beans.
The three man crew, behind a shield of steel and systems, buzzed reports through headsets that transmitted their voices thousands of miles away to a room full of anxious engineers in a tight spot. It was now or never; if the Apollo mission was a failure there would be no time left in the decade to fulfill Kennedy’s outrageous proclamation. With tensions high during a moment of radio silence, the capsule communicator jested to the crewmembers who were nigh entering lunar space.
“Among the headlines concerning Apollo this morning is one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit,” the communicator reported. Confused eyes shifted to the direction of the speaker and his nonsense comment. “An ancient legend says a beautiful girl named Chang-O has been living there for four thousand years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole a pill of immortality from her husband.”
His remark was met only with silence from the engineers, but the crewmembers’ faces, lit by the shimmering space rock, were struck with silly smiles.
“You might also look for her companion, a large rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is always standing on his hind feet in the shade of a tree. The name of the rabbit is not reported.” Radio chatter died down a moment more.
A chuckling astronaut who went by the name of Collins eventually responded, his amusement audible still even in the tinny, poor quality transmission.
“Okay. We’ll keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.”
The Eagle separated from its commanding vantage and slowly set upon its landing, pirouetting through the starlit void and into the moon’s orbit. The two crewmembers aboard the landing craft, Aldrin and Armstrong, surveyed the surface through their instruments as the surface passed below them, and noted they were passing a few seconds ahead of schedule.
“Houston, we are long,” Aldrin reported.
A minute later, the navigation system broke into alarm. Something was not right—the system was overloaded, it had regressed to performing only critical landing functions. Red lights filled the small landing craft, its crew shaken both by the momentum of the fall and the apparent emergency.
“Houston, the computer is indicating an executive overflow.”
“It’s safe. Continue your descent.”
Unease settled in as they ignored the warnings. Armstrong again looked outside, greeted by a boulder-filled crater some distance from their originally planned landing zone; their craft drifted off course in the sudden panic. He grasped the controls, taking over for the automatic pilot. Only a few moments of fuel left; a slow and easy descent was necessary, lest the landing gear crash into the rocks below.
A light flickered on above Aldrin’s head; one of the probes hanging from the Eagle’s footpads was scraping the surface.
“Contact light!”
Armstrong brought the Eagle to a full stop, announced to the vacant space with a wet splash audible even from where they were sitting. Armstrong was very confused, but Aldrin did not appear to have noticed.
“Shutdown,” Armstrong said, taking his hands off the controls.
“Okay, engine stop. ACA, out of detent,” Aldrin immediately responded.
“Out of detent. Auto,” Armstrong acknowledged.
Aldrin continued, “Mode control... both auto. Descent engine command override off. Engine arm—off. Four-one-three is in.”
The speaker at mission control acknowledged them dutifully, a bead of sweat running down his brow.
“We copy you down, Eagle.”
Armstrong reported the completion of the landing checklist, and then spoke with some bravado into the microphone.
“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
There was a collective sigh of relief among the engineers, especially among those who had been holding their breath. They’d finally done it—they’d put two men on the moon.

Hours later, Armstrong opened the hatch clad in a suit of armor crafted to shield one from the vacuum of space. He held in his hand a flag covered in stripes and stars. He was expecting to see a white rocky plain, covered in dust. Instead, when he poked his head out of the Eagle’s entrance, he noticed it was half submerged in the restless shallow tides of crystal clear water, just off some kind of coast. In the distance he saw waves, highlighted with sparkling reflections of earthlight, shifting back and forth in tune with cosmic wind. His eyes opened wide; mission control soon noticed record high beats per minute coming from Armstrong’s heart monitor.
At the beach’s end were rolling green hills, dotted with leafy trees. Mountains could be seen in the distance, reaching into the sky toward the blue Earth which hung in the twilight. Some kind of building lay curiously beyond the stretch of water before him. A complex, man-made structure. A white, shining ivory tower jutting out into the star-filled void, as if to call onlookers to the gates of Heaven.
He noticed something quite closer approaching the craft from the beach; small, white, fuzzy creatures, their eyes gleaming red. A circle of them formed just before the water, staring onward ominously. Armstrong felt cold sweat run down his back and his blood froze to ice as he saw the group part, making way for a figure coming down the beach. A tall, pale thing in some kind of ceremonial dress. He tried to make sense of it, tried to picture what mistake mission control had made—could this really be the moon?—it slipped further away from him with each thought. The world darkened, his senses dulled. He could no longer see, he could only hear his own breath, echoing back to him inside his helmet. So very, very alone, so far away from everything he knew.
“Armstrong? What’s wrong, you okay?”
His copilot’s voice buzzed in his earpiece. He looked again out at the desolate landscape, the shining white rock he stood upon, lined with boulders and covered in dust. He shook his head and took a deep breath; the past few hours had been a blur, having forgone sleep and been up since early the previous morning.
“Armstrong, can we get a statement?”










The White Rabbit



A drop of water touched my nose and I awoke again, standing amid hazy streetlights on the corner of late night and early morning. When you sleep as little as I manage to, wakefulness is a vague and distant thing; the dreams seek you out even when you stand firmly on two feet.
I found myself breathing the wafting vapors of rural smoke and drizzle. The overcast sky was a myriad of dull blues and dark greys, the moon hiding somewhere among the rain. The city was sleeping silently and I felt for all the world like a lone man drifting through an abandoned metropolis, listening to light pitters and patters of water touching down onto the Earth.
There was a place in town that never closed and its unfortunate employees could be seen at all hours of the night, eyes sunken and dry, waiting for patrons that might never come. I couldn’t stand waiting in line when all I wanted was canned coffee, so the only logical thing to do was wait until it was an ungodly hour of the night, when nobody in their right mind would carry money on their person while walking around—the equivalent of shouting ‘please mug me’ until some shadowy vagabond happily complied—and go shopping.
The building was a corporate sanctuary. Its fluorescent lights, shining holy beacons of needless spending and hubris, were visible from blocks away. People flooded into this place, day in and day out, to buy addictive junk food, legal drugs and cheap plastic.
The lot it was built in was made to house several different shops. Their little buildings crowded around the consumerist castle, but they were empty and forgotten. It was as though it had planted roots in the ground and sucked the surrounding area completely dry.
As I crossed the oversized parking lot I noticed a white furry thing laying in the middle of the asphalt. It was lying very still in a puddle of blood, the dark crimson liquid soaking into its fur. A rabbit. It must have been someone’s pet that fled from its owner, only to be torn to bits by a stray cat or some other prowler in the night.
The building was empty save for me, the lighting that was destroying my vision and a mile of processed food and sugary drinks. There were of course the zombie employees, but their pale, sickly skin and dead eyes resembled no living person. I grabbed the same can of wakefulness I always do; if I lingered and thought about trying something new, an unliving thrall might come along and try to converse with me.
Bothersome questions, like ‘how are you?’ Or ‘can I help you find something?’ Or more likely, ‘what are you doing here at this time of night, are you here to rob the place?’ Their droning voices and blank stares chill me to the bone. As wordlessly as possible and doing my best to avoid eye contact, I paid the nearest cadaver cashier and left with due haste.
The place always left me feeling filthy. Some artificial pine solvent they used that smelled of noxious fumes and dead trees clung to my clothes even after leaving. It gave me a headache. I wondered if the stuff was some sort of subtle brainwashing solution, pumped through the ventilation shafts, to coerce customers into coming back. I reflexively shook myself off to resist its psychotropic influence, lest I become like the other unthinking spenders that shopped there.
As I began to leave the area, my eyes were drawn to the blood puddle from before. The rabbit was missing. Whatever attacked it must have come back to drag it off. Perhaps I’d scared it away when I was walking into the parking lot, before.
Poor thing is being torn to shreds in an alley somewhere.
No sense in feeling sorry for it. Just nature taking its course. I was curious about it, I suppose, because you don’t see many rabbits in a place like this town.
My train of thought was brought to an abrupt halt by the feeling of something very soft underneath my foot.
 There it lay, barely breathing, clinging to life, and I was one thoughtless movement away from finishing the job. It wasn’t very white anymore; it was covered in dried blood, a little ball of rust-red fur.
Kneeling down to get a better look at it, I considered my position. This is a dying animal. It might have a disease. There might not really be anything I could do for it, save for what I was about to blunder into a moment before and end its pain. Yet, watching its tiny movements, seeing its body rise and fall in rhythm with its breathing, I felt I could not just leave it there to die.
It did not resist as I scooped it up into my arms, and I worried that any incorrect movement I made would injure it further. Hurrying through the parking lot, I stepped away from the building functioning as a city night-light behind me, hoping that no passerby noticed the wheezing red ball of fluff. I folded my arms around it, hiding it among the cloth of my jacket.
Its little eyes stared up at me, looking scared and helpless. A strange violet color, like nothing I’d ever seen before on an animal.

    I lived in a hole in the wall in a forgotten corner of suburbia, a place just shabby and untended enough to hide someone like me. Not a big place, either; two small buildings, four rooms on each, and an office. Each room a tiny studio with a bathroom.
    I left my door unlocked. I was either naive or lazy—I couldn’t decide which—and had put good faith in the upstanding citizens living in this slum that no thief would wander in to steal my hand-me-down clothes, rickety old furniture or empty coffee cans.
    If I had anything worth stealing, it might’ve been foolish. It was a lucky night if the complex’s peddlers were bereft of hooked clients for their very legitimate businesses. But I suppose I had returned at a late enough hour that the only souls still awake were inside their apartments, burning the midnight oil in a glass pipe.
    My neighbor’s light was on. He’s not typically up this late. I briefly considered knocking to see what was keeping him awake, but I thought twice of showing him this rabbit. An old crackpot like him might tell me to cut its feet off for luck charms.
Stepping inside my door I took a paranoid moment to glance around the complex, checking the dark corners for any ominously glowing eyes. A peculiar feeling like I was holding something valuable pricked the back of my neck, as if I’d been followed.
The longer I stared into the dark, the more needless my paranoia felt. There was nothing there. I reasoned to myself that the smell of the animal might have attracted a dog or cat, and that’s what was worrying me—some stray animal. Not a stalker in the night, watching me.
I set the meekly wheezing rabbit down on the counter near my sink and ran some warm water with the drain plugged, causing a makeshift miniature bath to form. Holding it upright, I eased the rabbit inside and began to gently rub its fur under the water, the blood rinsing off like a layer of burdens waiting to be lifted. The rabbit went limp, and I worried that its condition was deteriorating; but it continued to breathe, slowly and weakly.
Something that was rather odd was that even though the rabbit appeared to be smaller than my quite large sink, I had trouble fitting it comfortably inside. I’d used this same sink to hand wash a load of clothes before. And this rabbit won’t fit? I reasoned that I was tired, and the rabbit larger than I’d thought.
As I cleaned it, its coat took on a lustrous white color once more. In fact, it seemed to shimmer in the dull light of my room, like I’d brought the moon in with me. This made finding the wound easy—a large gash on its underside, looking like smeared red paint on a white canvas.
I retrieved some gauze from the medicine cabinet in my bathroom and gently wrapped it over the wound and around the small creature’s body, taking care not to wrap it too tight. The creature watched me as I did it, and in its eyes I found myself perplexed. While I was sure that the rabbit couldn’t really know what I had done for it, I had a strange sense that it was acknowledging me. That deep within its black pupils there was some form of recognition for me and my rescue, such as it was.
I filled a small dish with water and another with some old lettuce from my mostly empty refrigerator—just green enough to be eaten—placed them alongside a folded towel on the floor, and seated the rabbit on top of it. I didn’t have anything like a cage, so this would have to do... and even so, I didn’t think the rabbit was going anywhere. While it was moving around a bit more, breathing more steadily, a great escape didn’t seem likely.
As late as it was, it would have made sense, with the rabbit secure, to fall face-first into my bed and finally drift off to sleep. There was still an excuse I could think of to resist it, however, and I’d take any excuse to delay sleeping on offer.

My next-door neighbor wouldn’t mind a little late-night knocking. Seemed like every vagrant in town came to his door at all ungodly hours of the night to pester him, so why not me?
Whenever I passed by his room, some drifter was sure to be waiting there, looking for a bag of sunshine. I’d become accustomed to the paranoid looks of creeps and addicts if I dared to leave my apartment during the day, and I’d learned to ignore them. After all, I’m not some undercover cop or a rat wearing a wire. There was little point in trying to get the police involved there. Trying to make a drug bust in this town made about as much sense as trying to get God arrested for the rain.
Thankfully, nobody was around. I rapped my knuckles against his cheap, hollow door. Audible grunting and slow, heavy steps soon followed. An eyeball rolled around in the peephole.
“Who the hell—” his rumbling voice, like he gargled on gravel in his throat, muffled its way through the door. “Oh, it’s just you, kid. Ain’t it kinda late? Growin’ boys like yerself need their beauty rest.”
“It’s nighttime? I hadn’t noticed. It’s hard to tell when nobody sleeps around here.” My snide sarcasm was hardly lost on him; he sighed heavily into the doorframe.
“Yeah, alright, hang on...”
Several locks clicked undone, one after another. The door was thrust open, a slovenly looking old man in sweatpants poking his head out. His greying brown mop and scruffy beard were like briars, jutting out from his face and threatening to pierce my skin. His wrinkled forehead and sunken eyes were like those of a wrapped mummy. Smoke billowed from the corner of his mouth as he exhaled, joining the screen that obscured his person in the dark threshold of his room. He stood there and stared at me for a moment, looking impatient.
While I could and have been known to go for days or even weeks without so much as a word with one of the other tenants, I couldn’t imagine this place without my next-door neighbor, Markus. He’d lived in this complex longer than I had, and it just wouldn’t be the same there without his veneer of stimulant-laced, back alley sophistication.
I wondered if I was interrupting something, like his late night pole-shining session that he enjoyed after a vigorous nasal powdering. It certainly seemed that way as his beady eyes squared in on me.
“Noticed you been leavin’ real late at night. Where is it ya go, all by yer lonesome?” He asked, his voice somewhere between suspicion and concern.
“Oh, you know. Here and there. Even someone like me’s got people to see and things to do.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked thoroughly unconvinced, leaning against his doorframe with a brow raised. But rather than try and chastise me, he just sighed and turned around. “If you’d asked me, I woulda told ya to stay inside tonight.”
“Why’s that? Did you make me deliver a bad bag again?” A joke with an underpinning of seriousness. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“No, no, it ain’t nothin’ like that.” He looked like he was about to get to the point, but then he paused to correct me. “Ya wound me, kid. My stuff is as pure as cane sugar, you know that. I’d never make somebody sick on purpose.
“Come in fer a minute, I got somethin’ I wanna show ya.”
He lead me inside, gesturing to one of the novelty diner stools he had positioned at his cigarette butt covered coffee table.
Stepping into Markus’s room was like wading through a dumpster. The guy never bothered to throw anything away, so the place was always littered with garbage, particularly ash, beer cans and milk jugs. He’d convince me to clean it on occasion, as he was too fat and lazy to do it himself, but it was a futile effort each time. It’s always just as filthy the very next day.
 How he managed to make so much filth was a mystery. If I had to make a guess, however, it might have something to do with him regularly tearing apart his room, looking for ‘the little microphones recording our thoughts.’ An apparent side effect of senile dementia is the predisposition against cleaning up after yourself.
On a round table near his fraying, moss colored recliner sat a pair of little plastic boxes. One of them displayed flickering light and pictures, and the other just made a loud, annoying whirring noise. He described these boxes to me as ‘his computer.’
“I been followin’ this fringe group online fer a while, ya see...” he began. I reflexively rolled my eyes.
“Oh boy. Did you finally find religion, Markus?” I said, smirking. He gave me an unamused look but otherwise ignored me.
“They don’t much like how society’s runnin’, see, so they refuse to take part, leechin’ off honest folks like you an’ me. They got some big pipe dream of startin’ their own.”
“Honest folks like you,” I interrupted, smirking.
“Hey, this is an honest business I got here. You won’t find a more honest dealer around.” There was legitimate offence in his tone.
“You know, you’d think we get enough losers in this town that you wouldn’t need to look for more online.”
“That’s jus’ the thing,” he said, shifting his round body toward me seriously. “They been congregatin’ nearby. Apparently, one of ‘em thinks we’re about to be visited by an angel or somethin’. Here, see for yerself.”
He turned his yellowing CRT monitor toward me, the screen momentarily losing its color as the wires shifted behind it and shed dust. For a moment, I just marveled at how old the system was. I’m no expert in technology by any means, but even I could tell that thing was a dinosaur.
His web browser displayed some generic, if sketchy looking bulletin board, scrolled to a particularly dense wall of text.

...in the heart of luna beats the lifeblood of our salvation, that which has been our birthright for centuries, but denied to us by usurpers. they who sit in their ivory towers, on stolen soil across the cosmic sea. they who sneer down their noses at the earth and those banished to rot away on it.
but all is not lost, for luna will send us a missionary. tonight, our dreams will be fulfilled. luna has not forgotten its earthly children, and she sends us our destiny, gift-wrapped in flesh.
we may never have the heaven that has been stolen from us, but from the blood of luna, we can create our own. we can have our own heaven on earth. so join me...

It went on that way for several more lines, some grisly detail about carving ‘heaven’ from the heart of an ‘angel.’ My eyes nearly glazed over trying to read it.
“Sounds like the ramblings of some insane cultist,” I remarked.
“That might be,” he said, turning the screen back toward himself. “But a lotta folk seem ta think he’s onto somethin’. An’ this is from a day ago... I’m thinkin’ whatever he was talkin’ about shoulda happened already.”
“If we were really visited by an angel, I imagine one of the churches here would catch wind of it,” I mocked. “There must be at least a half-dozen this side of town alone.”
 Markus was a well-toasted burnout who believed in some really silly things, but this is the first I’d heard of him lending credence to an internet fanatic’s idea of the second coming. Never mind that a group of apparent cultists was the foremost danger on his mind; the vagrants that wandered into the complex looking for a line were probably more dangerous than any nutjob he’d find online.
“All I’m tryin’ to say, is maybe think twice about walkin’ around in the middle of the night,” he said, reaching indignantly into his pocket for a cigarette. “You didn’t see anything weird when ya went out, didja?”
My mind returned to the injured creature I’d brought back with me, lying on a folded towel in the middle of my room. If I’d wrapped the gauze wrong, it was sure to have bled out all over my floor in the time I’d spent talking to the junkie next door.
“Not that I can think of,” I said, without skipping a beat. “Hey, uh, I think I’m gonna head to bed. See ya later.”
He squinted at me suspiciously. “What, suddenly worried about circles under yer pretty little eyes?”
He knew as well as I did that I wouldn’t be spending much time sleeping.

The hinges on my door whined in protest as I swung it open and entered, my eyes falling toward the towel where I’d left the rabbit.
It’s missing.
I quickly scanned the small studio for hidden corners it might have scurried off into, and noticed a few things had been oddly adjusted in my absence. First, the two bowls I had set near the towel had been placed on top of my coffee table, sitting among the empty coffee cans. The water and lettuce appeared to have been eaten.
Second, the stool I usually rested my feet on near the table had been repositioned next to the window. The rabbit sat on top of it, its strange violet gaze addressing me curiously. It made a little chirping noise, as if in surprise.
I scratched my head dumbly. How’d that get over there? I supposed I must have kicked it over there during a previous sleepless night and merely forgotten.
The rabbit watched me as I yawned and felt the choking grasp of drowsiness finally take hold of me. Well, I thought, it can stay there. I can understand if it doesn’t want to sleep on the floor.
I fell face first onto my bed still fully dressed, and mildly comforted by the fluffy thought that the rabbit was quite alright. If I shifted my head to look at it, however, its stare never wavered. I could feel those eyes on me, ever watchful, even as sleepiness coaxed my lids to close. Something about them was strangely soothing.

From behind my eyelids, a light invaded the darkness.
A bright, luminous orb painted white the black canvas. From its featureless face, I felt it watching me. Watching the Earth and all its living creatures. Staring, silently passing judgement. Watching what lie below participate in greed, in filth, in impurity. It knew me; it knew all that I’d done. It stared, without note or consequence.
Glowing stars filled the night sky, one after another, innumerable, until the twilight was a twinkling ocean of heavenly bodies. All at once, they began to fall. Streaks of stardust trailed over one another; I was overcome with light. Fire rained from the heavens, striking the Earth with holy vengeance.



The Lunar Emissary



A small voice I’d never heard before spoke quietly from the window of my room in words I didn’t understand. No, they didn’t even sound like words—it was more like a series of foreign, high pitched squeaking tones, sounds a machine might make. My heavy lids opened reluctantly; I turned my head to see the most bewildering sight.
Settled next to my window was a small girl with very long, bright hair. As the early morning sunlight touched it, the strands seemed to faintly shimmer. Seated upon the stool that sat near the window, she was peering into a very strange contraption I am positive had not been there when I went to sleep.
It looked like a computer, I suppose, but it had too many screens, and they were all filled with incomprehensible symbols I’d never seen before. There were no buttons or any discernible input methods of any kind on it. All across its body were what I can only describe as veins, pumping light back and forth. It was grafted onto my wall and windowsill, with something resembling an antenna sticking out of it, pointed toward the heavens.
I sat up as silently as I could and began to cautiously approach the stranger, who was distracted with the machine, making odd noises into it. I took a single step towards her and she twitched, directing my attention to something about her I had overlooked in my sleepy stupor.
Atop her crown, blending in with her sun-touched hair, were two white, fuzzy protrusions. As she turned to face me, they bent over ever so slightly, the bright hair giving way to pink flesh in their middles. They were oversized ears—like a rabbit would have. I froze, staring.
She wore a plain, pale blue blouse with a silver crescent moon pinned to her chest and a white skirt. She was barefoot, and her hair was a mess. Her eyes were a violet color with a curious red tint; they looked at me with quivering uncertainty, and were oddly familiar.
“♪★🌙!” Her mouth opened and sounds came from it, but they were only more of the strange, machine-like tones. She went on for a moment like this, looking distressed as she fired a series of nonsensical noises at me. “★♫?!” Then she quieted down and seemed expectant of me to reply.
“I, uh...” I stammered. “What? I don’t understand.”
The nose on her face twitched at me in a mousy manner, like a confused animal confronting the unfamiliar. A dejected sigh escaped her lips; she turned around again and detached a small piece of the contraption in my windowsill, one of the machine’s many screens. Wearing an uneasy frown, she presented it to me by holding it at arm’s length, clearly wishing to keep her distance. Unintelligible symbols swarmed back and forth across the surface of the little machine, responding to my every movement. The girl made a squeaking noise, as if commanding me to say something.
“Wh-what is this thing?” I stammered. As the words left me, the screen went briefly blank before filling with letters I could read.

LANGUAGE RECOGNIZED. EARTHLING LANGUAGE: ENGLISH. ORIGINS DATING BACK TO THE SPLINTERING OF THE TOWER OF BABEL. WIDESPREAD USE THROUGHOUT WESTERN CONTINENTS.

The odd girl pulled the device away from me as it continued to fill with English words.

HUMAN. MALE. ANGLO-SAXON HERITAGE. 25 EARTH YEARS SINCE BIRTH.

She reconnected it to the machine and placed her hand atop its body, closing her eyes. The machine made a low humming noise, radiating with a dim blue light—and the light was draining away into the spot her hand touched. When it had faded completely, her uneasy eyes returned to me, accompanied by a frown. She opened her mouth to speak, but several awkward seconds passed soundlessly—her face contorted, her mouth opened and closed and I saw her tongue dancing behind confused lips.
“Ti—Thii... isss...” she quietly murmured, experimenting with the syllables. “T-t-t-this... la-lang...”
I waited patiently, perturbed but fascinated, as she sounded out the consonants and explored the vowels. It took her a minute or two, but she was finally able to form a nearly coherent sentence.
“Th-this lang... language. S-senseless... Con... fusing...” She had a soft, quiet voice, with an odd sort of rhythmic tone. Every word that came from her mouth had a strange musical lisp as if her voice were simulated, but I could tell it was not. It was too human, too deliberate, too many errors to come from anything but a living thing.
“Who are you? Why are you in my apartment?” With the barrier of language apparently breached, I hoped to make some sense of the situation, though I had not yet ruled out the possibility I was still asleep. The gears almost visibly turned in her head as she thought on my words, piecing together what I’d asked.
“You. B-brought me... Here.” She folded her arms and regarded me with sullen eyes—eyes that implied I’d forgotten something.
“What? No, I never bring anyone here. I think I’d remember if I—” as I stumbled through my words, she stared into me, an icy stare that was unshaken by my denials.
“L-look...” She lifted her blouse past her stomach. There, below her chest, was a wrap of gauze accented with a deep red stain in the center.
I understood what she was trying to tell me, yet I had great difficulty wrapping my head around it. Last night, I’d brought an injured white rabbit home with me and patched it up—and that’s all. She was suggesting that somehow, I’d mistaken a young girl for a rabbit.
“Th-this, the Earth ra-rabbits did t-this to me. They, they f-found me after I fell to Earth, and...” Her words were full of shame; she stared at the ground as she spoke. “L-left me for dead. I have fail... failed my home, my, my people...” Her shoulders tensed and she quietly sniffled. She was on the verge of tears.
I’m asleep. This is a dream.
I pinched my arm and my nerves reacted, informing me I was in fact awake. I was right to conceal her from Markus. If I was not asleep, his stuff had finally found its way under my skin, or so I thought.
Sympathetic though I might have been, I was having trouble coming to terms with the idea of a rabbit-person standing barefoot on my dirty carpet, looking at me with tear-filled eyes.
What am I to do with her?
She stood in front of me, shivering and staring at my floor, her hands clenched in fists at her side. I tentatively reached my hand over and placed it gingerly on her shoulder, unsure of what else to do. She just shuddered and drew away, only further shaken by the gesture.
“Is there—some way I could help you?” I asked, my words uncertain.
She searched me with her gaze, peering into my eyes to discern my intentions. Before long, she sighed and went back to staring a hole in the floor.
“I, I h-have no way to re-turn on my, my own. I fell from my—” she stopped herself mid-sentence, as if she was about to say something she shouldn’t. The rabbit-person paused, composed herself again, and continued. “I h-have contac-ted my super... super-iors. I must sur-vive un-until help c-comes.”
Every time she spoke the situation became more nonsensical.
Contacted? She was talking to somebody from my room?
Survive? As in, whatever attacked her before is going to try again?
“Li-listen.” She took a step back and gave me a cold look. “I sh-should not be. Here. Living among h-humans... that is what Earth r-rabbits do. Sep, separatists...”
The rhythmic tones of her voice became harsh, discordant—her gaze on me was one full of fear, and something like hatred.
“W-why?” She stuttered through clenched teeth, eyes becoming red with moisture. “Im-pure. I am im-pure... now.”
Her body was tense and trembling, her face a combination of confusion and malice. Those piercing red-violet eyes caught me, they sank their sight into my being; I couldn’t look away from her terrifying, mesmerizing, bright red eyes.
A rabbit. A white rabbit, scared and hurt, trembling before me. I was frozen in place, I knew if I made a single move it would run away, as any stray animal that believed itself in danger might. But something was different about this rabbit. It was crying. Pearlescent tears rolled down its sheer white fur and onto my floor. It knew it was trapped, it knew there was no going back to the rabbit hole now. It had been tainted, its kin would not accept it now. It was crying.
Eventually, she softened. Her brow furled into worry—or perhaps defeat.
“I guess I... I would be... d-dead if not for you, so...” she trailed off, resigning herself to my stool.
The room grew quiet. Left standing there in a haze of confusion, I remembered the can of coffee I had bought the night before, waiting for me on the counter.
With a practiced, nearly automatic motion, I popped open the can. A small trail of vapor escaped the opening and the aroma of coffee beans and vanilla met my nose. I took a long swig, and then two or three more, downing half the can in a few moments. Though it quickly pepped me up and though I could feel the caffeine-induced dopamine rush to my brain, still I slumped in my chair, at a loss.
Every day the world consumes three hundred tons of caffeine, enough for one cup of coffee for every man, woman and child. I read that somewhere. Myself, I drink around three cups per day if I can get my hands on it. I don’t always have the money. I’ll drink black coffee, but I prefer it with a little sugar or cream. That extra kick of sugary pep makes me feel less like a walking corpse, and if I don’t drink a cup in the morning I feel a bit lethargic for much of the day. Common sense would dictate that I’ve probably developed a slight dependence, and I’d be better off if I quit drinking it.
Yet common sense also told me that I brought a rabbit home and not a young girl, so I wasn’t sure what to think.
The rabbit-person just sat there in that stool at the other end of the room, albeit she had begun poking at her machine again. No matter how I looked at it I couldn’t make any sense of it. It was like staring into a kaleidoscope, the incomprehensible mixtures of shifting colors and imagery spilling into my retinas.
She looked crestfallen. Her... ears... were drooping. She was staring into that contraption as if it were a window to another world, one she was pining for that I couldn’t see nor understand. Whoever she had been talking to before was no longer there, I guessed, as she hadn’t made a peep in several minutes; the only sounds in the room were the muffled tapping of rain on the roof and her breathing.
Her skin was incredibly pale. It was like she had never been in the sun in her life. Where did she come from? I hadn’t really grasped what she said before. ‘After I fell to Earth,’ what was that supposed to mean?
‘Fell’ from where?
“So, uh...” I started, scratching my head. She spun to face me, her eyes looking heavy and tired. I wasn’t sure what to say and our last conversation hadn’t been very productive. I still didn’t know anything about her, not even her name.
“Help me out here,” I requested, setting down the coffee can. “Who are you? How did you get here?”
She averted her gaze, looking at the floor. After some careful consideration, she murmured, “My n-name is ☆☽★.”
The noise she made is difficult to describe. It was as though her vocal chords became wind chimes for a few syllables, and the force of her voice blew the chiming into a word. I blinked a few times, dumbfounded.
“I, uh, I think I might have some trouble pronouncing that,” I said, scratching my head again.
“In your E-Earth language, I think it m-means...” She fidgeted, searching for the words. “I, I think it means, ‘the Star that is Bright During the Full Moon.’”
“That’s very pretty, but it’s kind of a mouthful,” I remarked. No, that wouldn’t do. I leaned back in my chair to think for a moment.
There was something about the way the light played off of her hair, how it seemed to imbue the strands with a radiant, incandescent quality. It was very... luminous.
 “If you're such a bright star, I’ll call you ‘Luminous’ instead,” I decreed. “Lumi for short. Okay?” I smiled, feeling very clever.
The rabbit girl’s nose twitched in that curious way. She looked at me like I was speaking in tongues, but then parted her lips to try and sound it out herself.
“Lumi-nous...” she repeated, like a child learning a new word. She seemed to like it at first, but a sullen look soon returned to her pale features. “This—it is a thing Earth rabbits do. They, they... they take on human names.”
It became a little clearer just why she had reeled away when I tried to touch her, before. I scrambled to change the subject.
“How’d you get here, Lumi? You said you ‘fell.’ Fell from where?” I asked. Her body tensed, she turned away from me. I seemed to have gone from one uncomfortable topic to another.
“From... a very high... place. High enough that we can see e-everything that happens. On, on the Earth.” She placed one hand on her device again. “We do not get i-involved with things on the E-Earth often, but, there has been a in... inci-den...” She stumbled and tripped over the word, not sure how to pronounce it. She was clearly not comfortable with the language, which made sense considering she’d learned it from her machine just a few minutes prior. I played that thought over in my head a few times, pondering the absurdity of it.
“★🌙♫!” She gave up and made a frustrated and flustered sound, like suddenly striking a piano. She was struggling to articulate herself.
“It would be—ah—easier if you j-just... just put your hand here. It will be... exp-lained.” She turned her gaze on the machine where her hand was resting, gesturing for me to do the same.
As I approached to follow her instruction, I examined the thing more closely. The ‘veins’ of it seemed to pump light directly into her hand, and when she looked at it, perhaps to give it a command, the light would flow toward one of the myriad screens, and information—that I couldn’t understand—would flood the surface. Moving my hand close to hers, I hesitated.
“What is this thing? How did you get it in here?” I asked, my hand an inch from its surface.
“I s-suppose in English it would be called—ah—called...” She looked at the system again and it responded with more nonsense symbols. “This is a... Selenocentric Information Computation Processor.” She gave a weak smile, like she considered it a small achievement to pronounce all that.
“These—ah—systems, are con-nected to a... data... base...” Each time she used a somewhat difficult word, she stopped to gather herself again before going on. She quickly grew impatient, however, and shook her head, frustrated. “Just! Place your hand! There!”
Without warning she grabbed my wrist and pulled my palm into contact with the machine. A strange warmth flooded into my hand as the machine reacted to my presence. Blues and greens raced from the ‘veins’ into the spot my palm sat; I could feel it pulsing. Following the lights with my eyes, I saw them flow from its body and into my arm.
The foreign symbols from the screens were printing onto my arm, climbing up from my hand. The markings etched into my skin, like a thousand insects crawling over me and biting into my flesh, but they were swiftly replaced by different symbols and colors, and the pain substituted for an unbearable tickling sensation. I panicked and tried to jerk my arm away, but my hand would not budge. Some unseen force held it to the machine.
“Relax,” she soothed. “It will not... hurt.” She looked closely at one of the screens, silently directing me to do the same.
It was a hypnotizing scene. The colors pumping back and forth, the odd symbols. The endless torrent of nonsense. Those screens contained my brain in a mixture of colored ooze, churning and twisting. I was watching my mind turn to mush. But as the grey matter seemed to drip from my ears, I was just as confused as before. This is supposed to make things more clear?
I turned my head to ask the girl what the point of this was, but she wasn’t there. Nor was the floor, the walls or the window.
The screens remained, but they were filled with nothing but blackness, gaping and infinite. I felt it pulling me in. It was only for a brief moment, but the grip I held on myself slipped away. I was weightless, my body left behind. All that remained of me a sightless, incorporeal entity being sucked into the yawning void.
As I stared into the black, one by one things began to crash into being. In the distance, a frame of glowing wires in the shape of a mountain range formed and filled in, a deep purple color. From behind it and over the horizon arose a violet orb, painting the black sky a dark blue tint.
All around me, trees, roads, buildings and finally people began to materialize, each sporting a blue outline that highlighted their being. The people passed back and forth in a blaze of light, never slowing down, and it was hard to get a good look at any of them. I did notice however that they all bore fuzzy protrusions atop their heads—like rabbits.
Below me, legs formed, then a torso and arms, and I no longer felt like a lifeless floating soul, but tethered to a body once more. Despite the checkerboard floor appearing as an empty gradient, my feet stood solid between the lines. Aside from the blue outline about my being, there was something new—long, hair-covered appendages coming from my crown. I could move them this way and that, let them fall before my face. Thin and sensitive, they were the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen.
The sound of someone clearing their throat in a very rhythmic and musical manner distracted me from my new, strange appendages. The small rabbit-girl, with pale tresses that shined brilliantly in the neon light, looked at me impatiently with her gleaming violet eyes. She’d gained a jacket and tie that she wore over her blouse, and her hair had been done up in twin tails. She noticed me appraising her and gave an indignant huff.
“What the hell just happened? Where am I?” I mouthed, but rather than coherent words, a torrent of chirping noises erupted from my mouth.
“This is the Lunar Network,” Lumi said, a hush in her squeaks. I recognized the strange speech intuitively, despite having no knowledge whatsoever of her language. “Come with me.”
She tugged impatiently on my sleeve and pulled me in the direction of a large, glowing building. Several other rabbit-people entered before us, and we followed at a safe distance behind. I attempted to appear nonchalant, but Lumi looked rather eager, her ears standing tall.
“Welcome sir and madam,” a chrome figure dressed like a butler near the door called to us in a robotic voice. It repeated this line, adjusted to gender, for every person who entered.
Past the automated attendant was a spacious lounge room, filled with tables adorned with decorated cloths, flowers, and drinks of various neon colors. Rabbit-people sat together in small groups, drinking and talking and laughing.
I watched an exchange between two patrons for a moment and noticed something odd. As they spoke, pictures and videos materialized in the air and they would stop to look at them. Videos of things occurring on Earth, rabbit faces drawn by aligning computer symbols in clever ways, saucy looking rabbit-women...
Some of them appeared to be making fun of human celebrities by pausing videos featuring them and drawing bunny ears and buck teeth on their faces. The finer points of rabbit racism were lost on me.
“What is this place?” I questioned, feeling like a stranger in a strange land.
The rabbit girl put a finger to her lips in thought. “I suppose in your earthling language, this would be called an... ‘internet forum...?’”
She tugged my shirt again and directed me toward a table with a couple other rabbits sitting at it, one tall and thin, the other shorter and wider. We sat down next to them, but they were too wrapped up in their conversation to pay notice to us.
“It’s really happening,” the thin, male rabbit patron exclaimed as he leaned back in his chair, bringing his drink to his mouth. “The invasion! The earthlings are finally getting what’s coming to them.”
“You gotta stop going to those right-wing conspiracy sites. You don’t honestly believe that shit, do you?” His plump, dark haired friend replied, looking skeptical. “EAR’s just blowing smoke up the net’s collective ass. That’s all they ever do.”
Lumi offered me one of the drinks on the table, flashing a devilish smile. I sheepishly took it from her.
“This is just virtual booze, right? Like, for ‘fun?’” I asked quietly, as to not disrupt the patrons near us. The girl didn’t answer, merely pressed the glass to my mouth. Steadying it with my hand, I took a long swig.
I could taste it, which was odd in itself. It was a green neon drink and tasted like apple juice, with a sickly sweet aftertaste that made my head spin. It hit my stomach hard and I felt tipsy in an instant, like I had been drinking for the last thirty minutes.
“You’re blind, man. Why do you think that emissary was sent down there? It ain’t ‘cause the separatists are peaceful. They need somebody to go in and cover it up when earthlings start dropping like flies,” the taller rabbit said.
It was difficult to grasp what they were talking about as I felt my head become as light as a balloon. Lumi took a drink as well, but she must have been used to the stuff, not so much as blushing.
Hadn’t pegged her for a drinker. She had been pushy and assertive the whole time we’d been here, a stark change from the girl sitting in my apartment, shaking like a leaf, afraid of me even coming near. The thoughts bubbled over in my brain like foam as I looked at her; it was like I was looking at a different person, but then again, the intoxication caused me to see two of her anyway.
“Have you read that propaganda about a ‘Heaven on Earth?’ They’re trying to start a war, that’s what they’re doing. This is how the invasion starts!” The thin one went on, excited.
The curious way these rabbit-people spoke continued to befuddle me, even when I could understand it. Their words were vocalized with rhythmic tones, almost as if they were speaking in musical notes. It was like listening to a synthesizer attempt human speech. When I first heard Lumi speak it, I mistook it for some computerized noise, as no human had the range to make such a sound. But these rabbits could do it again and again, modulating their voices at will.
“If that’s true, that emissary girl is dead by now.” The dark haired rabbit-person downed the remainder of his glass. “If the separatists got her, she’s lucky. Imagine what some impure human might do to an emissary. Ain’t like she could come back after that.”
“But that’s just it, man! They kill that chick and we’ll end up nuking those fuckers back into the stone age. They’re asking for it.”
“Hey, I’m bored. Let’s go play Defense of the Carrots.”
They stood up, wobbly and woozy, still deep in their cups. They steadied one another and sauntered away, too drunk to walk on their own.
“That game sucks, dude. Balance is all over the place. Icehare has no idea what he’s doing.”
Lumi’s brows furrowed and lids sank as she looked at me. “Everyone knows, now... I have not been gone even a day.”
“What is EAR?” I asked, and a sudden rumbling in my gut erupted into a burp. I put my hand over my mouth in embarrassment and Lumi briefly snickered at me. Her brows quickly became furled again as she answered, however.
“Earth Aggressor Rabbits, known more commonly as the separatist group.” She took another sip of the glowing green liquid in her glass. “It is an extremist movement on the Earth, and I’ve been assigned to—”
“T-they’re plotting something like a Heavenly Earth? Wh-what?” I stuttered, my speech slurred. She giggled, apparently amused with how lightweight a drinker I was.
“No, no...” She waved her hand to correct me, and her eyes drifted above the table, glinting with intent. Or maybe that was just the reflection of the glowing fluorescent lighting.
“LNN newscast,” she said out loud to seemingly no one in particular.
A video appeared in the air above us, similar to the video screens rabbit-people at other tables were looking at. A greying, wrinkly old rabbit sat behind a table, holding a stack of papers. A news anchor, I guessed.
“Lady Andromeda spoke out today against the continued rumors of conspirators among the rabbits living on Earth.” His rabbit chirps were a trained monotone. Behind him was an image of a very pale woman with long black hair. A multicolor streak highlighted strands of hair near her temples, and the color bled into her face in an odd pattern that resembled circuit boards. The circuits seemed to connect to her fiery orange eyes.
“Following new policy which limits imports and exports to the Earth, she stated today that the Lunarian Council would personally re-establish relations with the Earth rabbits. Lady Andromeda reassured concerned citizens that we have nothing to fear from our neighbors down below, in her speech earlier today.”
The image of the anchor was replaced by a video of the woman in question. She wore a thin black dress that obscured her form—no, it was as though the dress was itself a window to the stars, shifting around her form and displaying different corners of the galaxy whenever she moved. Despite my drunken haze, I quickly took notice of her lack of rabbit ears.
“‘Twas there but the smallest musing of dissidence to the peaceful agreement of our earthly scions, I would bear down upon them the greatest wrath the Heavens can offer the Earth.” Her voice was thrown as a booming echo from the floating screen, but nobody in the forum paid it notice. She tossed her hair emphatically at the end of nearly every sentence. “Howe’er, knowest they their place among the hierarchy of lunar children. Knowest they the Earth remain amongst our charitable graces, yea; and I place within them the whole of my trust.
“Taketh not solely my words!” She threw her arms forward, hands turned toward the sky as if making some sort of offering. Awfully dramatic, I thought, and briefly wondered if this woman was some kind of celebrity or pop singer.
“To dispel any lingering uncertainties—to show they on Earth that Luna remain a peaceful sovereign body—I shalt restore our ancient bond with those on Earth,” she declared, her voice full of all the commanding authority of some iron-fisted dictator.
The video feed ended and the floating player disappeared. It took me a few extra moments to process the information, as the bubbling suds from the booze I’d drank clouded my brain.
“Who was... that woman? She didn’t have any rabbit ears...” I asked dizzily.
“Not so loud... Only an outsider would not know of Lady Andromeda.” Lumi leaned over the table and hushed me, a finger to her mouth.
Returning to her seat, she looked into her lap and sighed. Either something weighed heavily on her mind or I was making an embarrassing drunken expression, I wasn’t quite sure. My face was numb.
“Making contact with Earth, talks of peace... It is me she is speaking of. It is I those patrons were referring to.” She closed her eyes for several seconds and took a deep breath. Then she opened them again, her red-violet stare resolute. “I am the Lunar Emissary.”
I blinked at her a few times, dumbfounded.
“And you see, imports, exports and travel have been limited to quell fears about the conspirators...” Her words floated into my left ear and soon exited out the right.
“Lunar... Emissary? But, but... You’re just a little girl... bunny...” The booze-sodden words oozed from my mouth in a trail of spit.
My complete failure to grasp the situation wasn’t lost on her. She gave me a troubled look and stood up, reaching out her hand.
“You do not look so well. Come with me, I can take us back.” Her softly-spoken request spurred me to movement, and I languidly placed my hand in hers and staggered to my feet, wobbling in my inebriated stance. She helped me to stumble toward the exit, my movements as sluggish as my speech.
As we left, we passed by a table of rabbits who seemed to be playing a board game. Each had a handful of cards and a small collection of glowing miniature stars in a plastic container next to them. There were symbols on the board I didn’t recognize, and looking at them made my head spin—but somehow, I understood that they read ‘100% Carrot Extract.’ One of the rabbits rolled the dice, and his player piece—a rabbit-girl wearing what looked like a red Santa Claus outfit—landed on a red square. A hologram appeared of a giant, midnight-skinned but otherwise featureless male. The table became tense. The holographic creature rolled a die, and the number seven appeared. The player rolled his die around in his hand, afraid to let it go—until it slipped out of his hand onto the table, landing on a one. He groaned loudly and the table exploded into laughter. Lumi tugged on me impatiently, headed toward the door.
She led me from the building, back onto the brightly lit intersection we’d come from. The figures passing by in every direction were like walls of streaking color, enough to make me feel claustrophobic.
I soon became dizzy looking at them. So many people, passing by this way and that, staring at me. My stomach lurched forward and tied itself in a knot.
“Are you alright?” The rabbit girl squeaked in concern. I had been unwittingly clutching her hand very tightly. I imagine she expected me to hold my liquor better, but I felt like I might die, throw up or pass out. Possibly all three.
“Look there. I will take you back.” She pointed at the violet orb in the sky, and turned to gaze at it herself.
The moon?
The deep, softly glowing violet of this moon was an unnerving alien entity compared to the comforting white I was used to. I laid my eyes on it as she commanded, and the violet color shifted to a deep red. My head was packed full to bursting with suds, I couldn’t keep track of even a simple thing like the color of the moon.
The color morphed and deepened. A bright crimson—it was so vibrant, so hypnotizingly full. There was a tugging feeling on my mind, and I felt myself sucked from my casing into a sightless tunnel. My consciousness soon faded.