On the morning when the first gargantuan starships hove into view, hanging twenty thousand feet up and yet so massive they looked close enough to touch, Kelsey Day was less panicked than most. She’d always hoped there would be proof of extraterrestrial life someday—on nights when she and her friends were deep into their cups, she would start musing about how death would lose its terror if they knew for certain that there was other life out there. Humanity would lose its importance, and therefore so would the consequences of its apparently endless stupidity. What’s one world poisoned, burned, depopulated, and desecrated when there are bound to be millions of others just like it out there?

So, while everybody else was either hiding in their homes or standing on their lawns crying laments, Kelsey got ready to greet the new arrivals. She showered, found some nice clothes, and passed her terrified neighbors in the hallway of her apartment complex, and started walking the long way to the suburbs where the nearest ship remained silent and stationary. They looked a little like skyscrapers—gargantuan rectangles stretching up endlessly—but covered in baroque designs and promontories of equipment of inscrutable purpose. The whole thing both excited her and made her feel as though a hundred-pound weight had been lifted off her back.

No sooner had she made her way almost directly under the center of the vast ship then it plummeted down to just a couple hundred feet off the ground. Even she yelped in fear when it did, convinced for a moment that the thing would crush her and a few neighborhoods under its vast bulk. The curious thing was that it didn’t disturb the air—no concussive blast of displaced atmosphere obliterated the city as physics dictated it should. Dozens of portholes opened along the flat base of the ship, orange light pouring from them to the surface, and at the center of these shafts of luminescence came the crew of the vessel.

They were horrifying to look upon. Their torsos were bulbous, mottled things with random sprinklings of black eyes. They walked on odd numbers of legs with skin like tree bark and manipulated equipment with purplish tendrils. Their mouths were enormous, practically bisecting the small fleshy sphere between the torso and legs. In short, they looked like a mishmash of evolutionary traits, something a troubled child would design in response to a nightmare.

Composing herself even as others fled in terror, she walked between houses, hopped fences, and followed alleyways to the nearest ray of light. A half a dozen of the alien visitors was gathered in the center of a street there, clacking away at strange metallic boxes with screens and boards of plastic buttons, gurgling to one another in conversation. She stayed about fifty yards distant, hoping neither to offend the creatures nor present herself as a threat in any way. Smiling, Kelsey said something along the lines of “welcome to earth” before she was struck with a ray of blue incandescence and immediately fell into a long, deep sleep.

When she woke, she was in a large, brightly lit chamber with scores of other humans, all of them blearily looking around and trying to gain their footing. It was as though a few hundred revelers had all passed out on a gymnasium floor and were struggling to piece together the party from last night. Overhead, aliens moved down catwalks, all of them with the same equipment they had been using on the surface. Some people screamed, others cursed, and still Kelsey Day was elated. She’d been abducted, certainly, and she couldn’t be sure if this was her last day alive but if she was to die here then it was as good a place as any. Quiet and patient, she waited for whatever came next.

What came next, she eventually learned, was domestication. Collars had been fitted around their necks that shocked the humans whenever they tried to leave through the open door along one of the walls. Instructions for feeding where delivered from buzzing mechanical intercoms. Evidently, the aliens had learned how to replicate human language, even if their own physiology made it impossible, through technology. They were fed tins of protein slop and green mush that tasted faintly of canned peas. Little bits of cheese were given to those who did not accost the food dispensers. Those who did were shocked, then told to move to the back of the line until they knew how to behave.

Overall, they were well fed. At one point they were again put into comas and when they woke there were octagonal cots provided to every one of them. Over what must have been weeks, they were acclimatized to their environment. Miserable and confused as all the people were except for Kelsey, whose spirits always remained high (though she learned to keep her mouth shut about what a wonderful adventure it all was after receiving a black eye), they all learned to act as she did. Complacent, braced for whatever came next.

Eventually, the aliens interacted with them. They came into the chamber and wiped their tendrils across their cheeks and arms and made odd cooing sounds. Injections were given, nearly painless little needles quickly slipped into their skin before they could react. Screens descended from the ceiling and provided them some entertainment—odd games and what seemed to be dramas in which the actors were dozens of different alien species, some of them horrifying and some of them almost humanoid.

And then, one day, Kelsey was hit with the coma beam and when she woke up, she was no longer onboard.

Instead, Kelsey Day now lived in a spectacular villa on an alien world, a Jovian world blued in the sky on its horizon, the place built atop a cliff overlooking a majestic ocean. For the first several days there, she imagined she’d been enslaved by the family of twelve-foot-tall bipedal hippopotamuses that lived in the place, until it became obvious that she wasn’t expected to do anything. She wandered through the house and the surrounding grounds, even walked right into the homes of other aliens—some of whom shooed her away, others who gave her something like kibble. She watched alien television with her family, peed and crapped in a mildly uncomfortable facsimile of a human toilet, and was provided with loud clothing.

After about a week, Kelsey Day learned what it meant to be a dog. It irritated her a little at first, and then for a little while she grew into it. There were other humans in the neighborhood, and those who spoke English she gossiped with, sometimes being watched for a moment or two by the hippos. One of the men she met became her lover for a short time, but he wasn’t much of a Casanova and in any case one or both of them had been sterilized, so the whole exercise seemed pointless. Although she never understood a single word her hippo family said, she came to love them—even missed dearly the children when they grew up and left for months or years at a time, coming back to run their gigantic hands through her hair or boom with what she assumed was laughter at the results when they slipped psychedelic drugs into her drinking water.

Kelsey Day grew elderly and infirm, but still the family’s apparent parents took care of her to her final days, when she could hardly walk or move. She knew full well what was happening on the day the entire family gathered for the first time in decades to surround her bed and give her one last injection, and as the needle went in she offered a little smile to them, hoping they understood that she was grateful—for that moment and for a long, interesting life.