"The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma."

―Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

July 2nd, 2139. Earth Central Time. San Francisco, California, United Americas.

Ashley 'Lee' McLaren stepped out of the car and walked to the front door, where a man in his 50s was waiting for her.

- "Julia, are really you?" The man was stunned, like he had seen a ghost.

- "My name is Lee McLaren, Tom." Ashley corrected him "As far as I know, Julia Jones died aboard Sevastopol station"

- "Right, it's just... it doesn't matter, please come in". Tom Bradford, the editor in chief of the magazine, invited her inside.

Tom Bradford still did not believe that the day before, his secretary had received a call from the reporter whom Tom thought died when Sevastopol station had exploded due to a reactor accident during the decommision. A memorial had been held for her, after all, Tom had sent her there.

They entered the lobby of the building, a well-lit place due to the glass panel facade of the building. They passed the receptionist sitting at a large desk and boarded the elevator to Tom's office.

Lee felt comfortable in that place, after Sevastopol she had never liked the dark places again, at night she wasn't able to sleep with lights off. After months of therapy, it was one of the few things she had not overcome.

- "Tell me, Julia... Lee, what had made you come here at last?" Tom explained "It was thought that there were no survivors from the accident."

- "No, there wasn't, there was no accident, Tom". Lee replied "It was something more terrible, something you can not even imagine in your worst nightmares."

- "What are you talking about?" Bradford was skeptical "Have you gone to therapy? It's obvious that you may be suffering from post-traumatic stress- "

- "I've already gone to therapy," Lee interrupted. "In fact, the psychologist recommended that I need to write about it. She did not believe me either, no one on his mind would do it, so I did what she said: I wrote." Ashley handed her a disk with a label that read: Monster Maze.

After being rescued, she, Dr. Lindgard and Amanda Ripley had discussed what their next course of action would be like. As Ripley had discovered, Weyland-Yutani wanted the creatures and had done more damage than good. the company would even kill them if they knew there were survivors.

Ashley and Karen returned to Earth and offered her an Amanda in a place to stay, but she also said that her mother was missing and that she would continue to look for her. Verlaine and Connor offered the position of Engineer on the Torrens while they'll look for Ellen Ripley.

Back in Wisconsin with her brother, Lee still had nightmares about the experience, no one, nor did his brother know the truth and she had attended therapy. Her psychologist suggested as part of the treatment was to open her fears to more people, write about her experiences to overcome the trauma and so she did, albeit in the form of a science fiction/horror novel.

- o -

Tom Bradford finished reading the document; He was pale, cold sweat dripped from his face. He looked at Lee and sighed.

- "Is it true?" He asked: "Because it is a hell of a story"

- "I tell you, Tom, that story about the reactor accident is a facade, this is the real shit," Lee answered.

- "And why you brought up now? You weren't never one of those who shut your mouth, the truth above all, isn't it?" Tom insisted.

- "Those things exist, and people must be warned, What happened there must never happen again, and the Company must pay for its crimes. Publish it, I do not care how... Fiction, real story, conspiracy theory, I don't care."

- "I'll see what I can do," Bradford agreed, but Lee was already on his way to the door.

- o -

Five months later, Ashley "Lee" McLaren visited Karen Lindgard at the San Francisco Mercy hospital where she was now working under the name of Kendra Darling, and had an interesting conversation.

- "The company is financing colonies in the Zeta Reticuli sector," Lindgard told him.

- "I know, they tend to reject offers of better and more promising places" Lee said: "Do you think they still haven't give up in the search for those creatures?"

- "Definitely, Ripley said that W-Y placed that order to protect the creatures at the expense of the life of Sevastopol's inhabitants, no surprise they didn't give a shit about a bunch of colonists" Lindgard replied. "But fortunately, there are few wildcatters willing to try luck on that area, some guys in the Extra-solar Colonial Administration had started to call it "Bermuda triangle of space" with ships mysteriously disappearing there.

-"Yeah, the USCSS Prometheus is the Maria Celeste of space" Lee told her, "The first ship vanishing without a trace, followed by the Nostromo, the Solace, Sevastopol and the Anesidora."

The two women paused their conversation and sat in silence for a moment. It sounded like kind of a joke, but they certainly knew that as long as the company kept searching for the creature, no one would be safe.

Noises from the vent interrupted them, Lee couldn't avoid feeling nervous. Lindgard noted this, and calmed her, as the woman expected to see a black, skeletal beast burst from the vent, she was relieved when two little kids came out the opening.

-"Gotcha!" the second kid said to the first one.

-"Kids, I told you not to play that game here, it's dangerous" Lindgard scolded them.

The kids fled the room, still laughing. For them it was only a children's game, but Lindgard saw Lee had her hands clung tightly to the chair's armrests.

- "It's a very popular game, you know?" Lindgard said: "Monster Maze, I do not know who started it, but it is based on your book, a child, the titular "monster"chases the others in the ventilation system".

- "Based on my story?" Lee asked "An innocent children's game based on what happened to us?"

- "Listen, don't blame yourself, you didn't not know this would happen, you published a novel and it was taken as such, and now we have children in all the colonies playing monsters that chase people inside a labyrinth".

- "The truth must come to light," said Lee. "Even if its not believed, people should be warned."

After a while, and prompting Karen to visit her on her farm in Wisconsin, Ashley left the hospital and took a taxi to the airport. Karen opened her desk, extracted a copy of the book and read the last paragraph that Lee McLaren had written, a quote from a former writer, as usual in Julia's previous works, she liked to quote people from the 20th and 21st centuries.

"Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again... we are survivors. If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors." Lori Goodwin, 21st century war veteran turned science fiction author.

- o -

The End.

A/N: Hello, readers. I have been revising this story and I realized the epilogue wasn't much of my liking, so I changed it a little, I hope you liked. Second epilogue about what happened to W-Y science director in Porrima coming soon.