Day 89 - On board Gaia

Strangeness still envelopes me as I stare out of the porthole. I think it’s a porthole as I’m on a ship. But not a water-faring vessel. A military vessel, the aliens called Gaia. Gaia! Meaning ‘Earth’, but with every passing work shift, we were further away from my home. Maybe Gaia meant something different or was, in fact, a real per…alien. Something that looks metallic to me crystallises over the porthole like water icing over, and I can no longer see out of it, so I turn aside and look around at my cabin. It’s big, for a human. I’d been told it was small for the large-sized aliens who were apparently over 12 feet tall. I have a large bed with coverings in a cosy bedroom, a bathroom, a compact kitchen and a lounge area. Off the lounge was a studio. When I was rescued, still in my house, they ‘saw’ my studio and spent some time recreating the room, complete with every art supply I could need. The human ambassador explained that they wanted to preserve the human race as well as their culture. That meant any art I produced. I knew my face went bright red as the heat crept across. Risking losing my studio, I told him I was only learning and training to become an artist, and he kindly bowed and patted me on the shoulder. ‘They understand,’ he said mysteriously. But then I found his Japanese culture and manner quite different from my own Australian culture and manner. He was elegant and gentle, while I was not.

The aliens had saved us, what was left of humanity, and so I felt under pressure to create ‘art’ when I wasn’t working. I had two jobs on board Gaia, one was helping the archivists and recordkeepers preserve what was saved from Earth in terms of artefacts, paintings, records and technologies. This took four hours a day, each morning. I had laughed when I first attended my job, realising I was doing what I had done in my career on Earth. However, as the months went by, I appreciated the stability of doing something worthwhile and familiar.

My second job was more … interesting. One of the Earth engineers trained a few of us in ship repair. So, when I wasn’t trying to paint a masterpiece in my studio, I was painting some kind of metallic grey gloop on the hull, usually while we were in geosynchronous orbit around a moon or planet, but sometimes when we were on the move. Of the twenty who had been trained for external work, only two of us were regulars, so I guess that made me a bit special.

I shuffled past the small dining table in my paint-encrusted Ugg boots and entered my studio, complete with two long windows and my Earth view. It made me a bit nervous, but I could ‘turn off’ the windows if I wanted. I turned on a studio lamp, studying my latest creation. Ugh. I’d learned that often paintings look bad before they look good. I poked at the plastic on my wet palette and realised I had left brushes in the dirty water. I rinsed it all and laid the brushes flat to stop the water from gradually dissolving the glue that held the brush hair together (Tip document). I had to document my daily practice, techniques, steps, my final pieces and even my failures. I think two aliens had some of my bad art hanging somewhere, maybe in their toilets, though I did not know if they went to the bathroom like we did.

In addition to documenting the steps, I also had to record the classes I took, how I built the craft, and where I gained inspiration. The aliens had copied our entire internet, and some humans on board still contributed. When the aliens found the darknet, they erased that, and some humans disappeared. I couldn’t have cared less.

Time had escaped me, so I had only time to do a practice sketch from Earth Matt’s Sketchbook Nation 50-day challenge (Sketch challenge document). Actually, it is the second time around, and Taka said as long as it helped me develop my skills, that was okay. While my first digital sketch of a bee is stored on a server somewhere, this second one will live on my aPad for a bit longer (my iPad modified by an alien, apparently, that didn’t need charging).

I make a note to upload the two documents to ‘Resource’ and my finished ‘second’ bee to ‘Gallery’, which is the folder I was told to use, allocated to me. Does it look better than the first bee? Dunno. I head out, turn off the lights, and press the button to exit into one of the secondary corridors. As usual, I take a moment to adjust from being in my humanised room to feeling the full impact of the alienness of the passage.