skonen_blades

(a short story about a species that amalgamates others, not unlike the Borg)

The last thing I remember was the ship overtaking us.

I call it a ship but it was the size of a continent. Asymmetrical and biological. Crusted with horns and glowing holes. The closer it got, the more our ship started to shudder. I don’t know what kind of field, energy, or radiation would do that through the nothing of space but it got to a point where I felt like my teeth were going to rattle out of my head. The whole crew, now bathed in the glare of the red alert lights, clutched the sides of their helmets in panic.

It had appeared above us in an instant and then started closing the distance. If it was an attack, we’d already lost.

We were in a deep part of the sector, far from a base. Nothing like this thing had ever been reported. It didn’t look like we would have a chance to get to be the first. We could barely hear each other shouting over the noise. Our distress calls would bounce off a few antennae in a decade or two but the object came up too suddenly for logs to be recorded to supralight. Some passing freighter might accidentally pass through the waves of our basic broadcast feeds. They might see us screaming over the racket and hear the sound of our entire craft stressing to the breaking point. But space is big and that could be in thousands of years.

Or never.

There are always disappearances and tall tales about what happened. Later, when the wreckage is found and analyzed, it’s almost always obvious piracy or mechanical/pilot error. Whatever was happening here was new to us.

It floated over us, making our research vessel into a quaking little speck near its hull. I say hull but it felt more correct to call it skin. On my viewscreen, it looked like a scab under a microscope. Like we were a dust mite getting close to a face.

I remember feeling a pop inside my skull. Not painful but definitely alarming. I feel like I could see clear space through a crack developing in the hull but I wasn’t feeling the pull of vacuum. There was a brief feeling of weightlessness as the gravity turned off. We all floated up a few inches with our papers and tools. There was a brief whirlwind and then blackness.

I awoke in a haze on a bed. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I couldn’t move. I felt heavy. The ceiling above me was far away. I couldn’t see a light source but the room seemed bright. The air was layered and foggy. A few streaks of the fog had colours drifting in them. That couldn’t be healthy but I seemed to be breathing fine.

“This one’s awake.” I heard a voice say to my right.

I could feel the bed motor buzzing as it became more a recliner and adjusted my body into a sitting position.

I couldn’t identify the being in front of me now. Presumably the owner of the voice.

Part mantis shrimp, part boa constrictor, part octopus, part lionfish. Copious technology jammed into it at odd angles here and there. Was that a respirator? Ski goggles? A bright stripe of fur over the crest of this odd collision of flesh and plastic like a roman centurion’s mohawk except the hair had glowing tips like optic fiber. Lights blinked like monitors in the crevasses of its flesh. Iridescent crystals jutted out at several points, glinting. Were those a few tubes of neon? Long, thick, bird legs jutted down to the floor ending in rugged, nimble, ten-toed feet like tree roots come to life. The legs were banded with color that kept changing and mottling in no apparent pattern that I could detect. First, they’d be zebra stripes and then they’d look like ink spilled on a page. The many tentacles of the creature poked out between the fur, scales, and nooks of its body and drooped down to its knees.

I realized I was assigning it earth creature archetypes as a mental layover to parse what I was seeing but I honestly couldn’t grasp the biological chaos I was looking at.

“It sees itself” said the voice again. It wasn’t the creature in front of me who was talking.

I turned to the right, towards the sound of the voice and saw another creature identical to the one I had been looking at.

Then I pivoted one of my many eyes over and noticed the creature in front of me had turned its head towards the sound of the voice as well and that’s when I realized it was a mirror.

That bizarre freak show was me.

“He’s not imprinting. He’s going to thrash. Get a team in here.” I heard the voice say as I started to try to scream. It came out as a thin, soft dog whine. Evidently, I was still under some sort of anesthetic. I strained with all my might to move and could start to feel the tips of all my tentacles and fins and claws. I was the organic menagerie I’d seen in the mirror.

I felt a pinprick and more darkness.

That was eighteen months ago.

I’m more at home in this body than I was a year ago but I can’t think I’ll ever get used to it. Two of my crew committed suicide. The other ten seem to be adjusting slowly like me. Only Alison seems to be thriving in this new form.

We’re part of the Church of the Galactic Average now.

This race started as “research biologist priests” on a quest to find the perfect xenobiological form. They had developed a religion stating that once they could mix every intelligent life form into one, they would find the form of God. They’ve been doing it for sixty of our human millennia so far. They’re on their eighteenth galaxy. Which, if you know much about galaxies, means that they’re still about 200 billion galaxies short of their goal. Luckily one of the perks of the upgrades is near immortality.

Voluntary death keeps the numbers manageable. It’s not an easy gig after a few thousand years and people get tired. The ship can bud more quarters as necessary with the waxing and waning of the population.

They only need a small sampling of a race’s genome. They’re satisfied with the cross-section of humanity collected from our ship so that’s humanity off the hook. I’m lucky I had a pretty diverse crew. I’m not sure they all see it that way.

Forced converts. Considering the crusades on old Earth, this feels like humanity got off lightly. We are the sacrifice and they’ll leave the rest alone.

The one that woke me up I called Peggy. Her actual name is a collection of scents, squeaks, and sparks I can’t write down, much like the name that’s been assigned to me. They call that form of communication True Talk but they let us speak our own language through translators until we’re ready to transition away from our form of speaking. Like we’re being weaned off of who we were.

Peggy actually told me that I was lucky that humans were so close to the galactic biological mean. A nervous system, multilimbed, visual and auditory sensors. She was actually surprised that I noticed that much of a difference between my original form and what I saw in the mirror. Once I started to take a look through their astonishing library of previous converts, I could see why. Last year I wouldn’t have been able to see what Peggy meant but now I see.

Imagine being the size of ten whales and then being crammed into something roughly the size of a human. Imagine being an insect first. Or a gas cloud. Or completely silicate before being introduced the smelly wetness of biology. Or a being that takes a year between thoughts having to be brought up to our speed.

Echoes of all of them are in me in some small percentage.

The first change is the hardest, they say.

Whenever a race is absorbed, updates waterfall through the entire collective. We’re all an extension of the ship. Our sleeping cocoons update us as more beings are noticed and introduced. Since we’ve been here, they’ve grabbed and disseminated 26 species. They grabbed the locations of the six known intelligent species we humans have discovered from our records. I honestly can’t say I’ve noticed too much of a change except for some of the gas composition in the air we breathe and a slight flutter of expansion in the spectrum of colours available to my sight. And I taste mint when I get sad. That’s new.

But that first change, yes. That’s the hardest.

I’m a little less clear on the role of the ship itself. Is it a manifestation of all gods made flesh? Do we worship it or does it serve us? Is it a tool, a mere form of transport and library, or are we the ants and the colony itself is the point of all this? I’m still not clear on whether or not the quest itself is the church or if this living ship is the cathedral. Conversations down that pathway can quickly get out of my philosophical depth so I’ve stopped having them for now.

I’ve been a little bitter because of the cures they could offer the known universe. I think of the friends of mine who died from diseases we still can’t fix. They could change all that. What they do with biology is magical.

But they don’t. It’s not part of the quest. All inquiries to that effect are directed to what appears to be a FAQ list they’ve prepared. Not an uncommon query, apparently.

Surprisingly, the Church of the Galactic Average wasn’t very interested in our entertainment media or history. The culture of the races they absorb isn’t part of the quest. To them, the biology IS the culture.
There’s a section of the library devoted to it but it’s not very big compared to the rest. I spend a lot of time there, looking at the plays and shows of the cultures that had such things. The ones uploaded from our ship weren’t comprehensive at all. Just what we had downloaded before the trip. Probably the same with these other ones. That seems a shame to me, to not have that as a similar priority.

They’re a fascinating people.

Them. I still think of the people of this ship as a separate race. I need to start saying we.

Because, after all, I am now one of the most average people in the universe.





tags

The alien space invasion we’d all feared came in the form of a virus that invaded our minds.

It was a clear day when the first strike happened. It was a small meteor storm with seventeen tiny ones making it all the way to earth, impacting harmlessly away from populated centers. Being somewhat unusual, enthusiasts and professionals went to the more accessible sites to record what had happened.

They came back changed, a little dreamy and unfocused. Nothing too alarming. Most put it down to the wonder of seeing an event like this up close.

It wasn’t until their colleagues and family became bleary as well that the center for disease control got involved. But by then it was too late.

The disease spread over the planet in a matter of days. One hundred percent communicable and airborne, it even survived in the water table and plant life. It went up and down the food chain into the animals as well as us humans. Total absorption.

And then it switched on.

As one, the earth became one mind. But no one was in control.

The virus didn’t destroy us, its host, and it didn’t have a directive. It wasn’t out to annihilate the planet. It had done this to thousands of planets so far. We had the memories of those conquests in our heads now, along with the thoughts and secrets of every person on the planet. Our miniscule senses of self were drowned in a tsunami of other identities.

We became a groupthink with the added data of nearly three thousand other planets’ worth of animals, plants, and data we couldn’t even begin to classify.

But the virus had never taken over a lifeform with a consciousness. Up until now, it had taken over the equivalents of plants and simpler, baser beings.

Now it had a brain. Now it could reflect. Now it could plan. Now it could track where it had been and it could catalogue all that it had seen.

It was an overwhelming moment of sentience for the virus and a deeply religious moment for us humans.

For the first time, we could act in accordance with complete efficiency and a complete lack of secrecy. Money disappeared immediately.

First off, we organized enough food for everyone and kept our numbers sustainable. That took four years.

Then we built ships.

We had the maps in our head. We could backtrack to those previous worlds and colonize them.

The virus continued to spread forward and we backtracked where it had been.
It was the dawn of a new age.



tags

“So why’d you join the off-world diplomacy exchange?” buzzed Zazzy through his translated. His mandibles glistened and his iridescent bright-purple eyestalks waved back and forth like windshield wipers in a light rain, scanning my face. Speared lunch larvae wriggled on his clawtips.

“Scientific curiosity.” I answered. “And I like to meet new beings.” I looked around the cafeteria. Hundreds of aliens were eating here; a dizzying array of every sentient being in the Galactic Union. All here in this station to learn about each other in the interest of peaceful coexistence. So far, so good.

Zazzy’s full name was a series of clicks and buzzes and a gust of pheromones that my human mouth would never be able to ‘say’. The translator collars gave us all nicknames that were the easiest, closest names in our own languages.

“Hey, Zazzy, what’s my translator nickname in your language? ‘Carol’ doesn’t have a lot of buzzes or clicks. Wouldn’t it be hard to translate?” I asked.

“Your name isn’t a sound to me, it’s a smell puff. It’s quite pleasant.” he said, the larvae disappearing into his mouth.

“Why did YOU join, Zazzy?” I asked.

“Well, you might not know this, Carol, but I’m quite ugly.” said Zazzy.

I gaped a little at his honesty. "I have a hard time believing that, Zazz." I responded.

His exoskeleton had sheens of colourful whorls that caught the light. His eyestalks glittered purple, even in the dark. I saw the powder blue of his wings once when he jumped down from an upper level. They flashed out like a cricket. I thought he was dazzling.

But I had no frame of reference.

Zazz continued, “On my planet, I’m socially ostracized because of my hideousness. But here, there are no other of my kind for you aliens to compare me to. Or even if there were, you probably wouldn’t even know there was anything amiss. To me, this is a very special place. I studied hard to get this assignment. Not that I had to. My race is pretty xenophobic by nature so it wasn’t too hard to win the posting. Nobody wanted this job.” he chittered at me. A wave of pink rippled down his arm cilia. Embarrassment?

I picked up my knife and I looked at it. I could see my face in its clean reflection. I could see the crooked nose, the buck teeth, the mousy hair, and the eyes that didn’t quite line up. I saw the acreage of my forehead with its unnaturally high hairline. I was physically fit but nothing would ever make me pretty.

“Zazzy, I know exactly what you mean.” I said. “Back home, I’m not thought of as pretty either. But I haven’t even thought about it since I got here. I was wondering why I was so relaxed. I chose this post because of the scientific possibilities, the exchange of knowledge, and the xenobiology opportunities, not to mention a universe of contacts to one day visit. But you just made me think that maybe I strove to get this post for another reason that I was in denial about."

“I wonder if we’re all ugly?” Zazzy wondered out loud, extending several arms to indicate the room.

We both looked out at the lunch crowd. A bright-yellow, bus-sized slug sat across from a ten-legged frog. A tiny, tentacled monkey was telling a joke to a levitating cyborg fish. A brightly-flashing flesh balloon was whispering to what looked like a giant pile of grapes.

We sat there, pondering the scene.

"Well, they all look beautiful to me." I said.




tags

They came back every century to monitor our progress. Our benefactors. The Saviors. Once a generation they returned.

I was young the last time they were here. I barely remember it. I only have impressions: my four-year-old fingers in my father’s beard, the summer day pristine, a dog with wiry hair close to us that I found fascinating, and the giant silver ship at the top of the hill surrounded by the thousands of us. I remember the adults crying and rejoicing. I was confused but I felt safe.

Now I am 104. With the medical extension technology they’ve given us, I still have the body of a 60-year-old and should be good for another 20 years. There are few others here who were present last time. We’re guests of honor and have bright silver pins on our shirts.

Back at the same hill near Brighton. The mound is still green, the sky is overcast this time. I am here with my own children, Rebecca and Therese. They are in their forties and Rebecca carries my two grandchildren with her.

There’s a puckering in the clouds above the hill and gently, the clouds form an opening, a perfect circle to admit the craft.

It descends bottom first, the silver skin glistening with rain. A massive tower of silver with the anti-gravity stabilizers throbbing through our bones like a deep bass. It’s majestic. I’m crying and I’m not the only one.

They will come bearing technology and systems of governance they feel we’re ready for. They’ve already balanced our atmosphere and given us peace.

It took the eradication or adaptation of all the religions. If needed, they named themselves the second coming or the apocalypse or whatever end of times prediction was necessary for each religion. For those that wouldn’t comply, a rapture was arranged. If they could not be converted with sights of the universe and proof of technology, they were frozen. If they wished to be sent on to their afterlife, they were destroyed. An astonishingly high number of them chose death. Only the faithful remained on Earth after the culling.

And faithful we were. Lovers of science, trusting of the visitors. United for the first time in Earth’s history and it had been that way for centuries.



tags

Coming home to your planet is always such a bittersweet experience.

Visiting simpler locales always leaves me feeling thankful for Karroway, my home planet. Simpler systems leave me in wonder at how the locals can even function. I had just gotten back from a recent addition to the galactic council. The inhabitants referred to it as Earth. I hate to call them primitive but they only had one mind state with a small percentage capable of two. The current minimum for intelligent life was at least five mind states but an exception was being made in their case because of their accomplishments. These one-state mammals had created basic silicate life, broadcast technology and even brushed with higher math. And not only did they suffer from one mind state, they had finite life spans! The definitions of membership and the galactic definition of life were being revisited. Earth was currently a pretty big tourist destination as a result.

That's why I went. I needed a distraction. Life on Karroway could be boring just with sheer noise. I turned three of my minds towards the porthole.

Karroway's four-planet heliod system came up bold and backlit by its three differently coloured suns. A red giant, a blue dwarf, and a yellow star sparkled brilliantly through the 8 ring systems interacting with each other. Our orbit-locked planets stood out beautifully. The gas-giant fuel center Leptus, the turquoise cloud-covered Reena, the temperate volcano paradise Cheng, and the startlingly Earth-like Rhoodus. Together the four of them orbited tightly around each other in traffic controlled ellipses and all four in turn orbited as one around the three suns. Each planet had a moon system of at least thirty moons, all inhabited. The rings collided through each other on the ecliptics, throwing sparkling dust out in constant rainbow fantails. Borealis sparkled along the gravitational bridgepoints between the four-bulbed shared magnetosphere. Unsuited travel between the four planets was possible as their atmosphere was also shared.

3 suns, four planets, 128 moons, and 8 rings. Overpopulated with complicated eclipses, dawns, and sunsets.

You can imagine my boredom at seeing Earth. No rings, one moon, one planet, and one star. Hard to believe complex life evolved on that rock at all. But my time there was relaxing.

It was contemplative. My multicolored body was of great interest to them. The fact that a good percentage of my biology inhabited the quantum was unbelievable to their scientists. There was a buzz of activity with every new alien that visited them. I was the first of my kind to be there, they said. My frilled tendrils blushed with the memory of how much I was fawned over.

I felt aggrandized and god-like, sure, but I was also humbled. These backwater rock-dwellers had accomplished so much. What had I done with all of my gifts? All of my insight, all of my dimensional awareness? All of my engineered biology? I had the ability to move single molecules with my tentacle tips and zoom in to watch it happen. I was immortal, having my choice of when to ascend. I had the capacity to speed or slow time, to access higher levels of energy life and talk to them.

For what? Idle fun. For all my complexity, all my afforded privelege and advancement, I was boring and lazy.

I felt invigorated.

When I got back to Karroway, I was going to write a book.



tags

They didn’t bathe and they wore their dead. They stank like a sleeping bag full of ammonia-soaked gym socks. They reeked like a slurry of sauerkraut and feces poured into a rotting pumpkin and left in the oven to burn. They had the pungent ass-crack aroma of a dozen dead moose decomposing in a steam room.

What I’m saying is that the one overwhelmingly true characteristic of the Vitralsi was that they stank. Their stink was a cloud that warped the air around them like a heat haze on a highway. It was the kind of stink that could clear a forest.

Luckily it wasn’t poisonous but that didn’t stop us ‘oversensitive’ humans from passing out now and again when we had to share the cockpit.

And I had to share the cockpit with one right now.

Even with my lips suctioned firmly around an air filter, a plug on my nose and goggles on my eyes, I still felt as if I was being coated in tear gas and dunked in a sewer. It was like my skin could taste it. It was like I’d discovered a new human sense, suddenly activated because of never-before-experienced extreme conditions.

And I was a person that prided himself on having almost no sense of smell. All seven of the humans on the ship were selected for just that reason.

The scary thing was that in keeping with the humans having little to no sense of smell, the Vitralsi on this ship were picked for this mission because they were the least malodorous ones available.

My mind reeled at the thought that the creature beside me was tame in comparison to other members of its race. My eyes watered at the idea of a full-frontal nasal assault from a regular Vitralsi’s pores and gland sacks.

“Okay, we’re coming close to the surface now” burbled the Vitralsi. A fresh wave of garlic-flavoured oblivion washed across the cabin and broke across me.

“Roger that” I responded through clenched teeth.

The scent of a Vitralsi could literally give a human PTSD with enough exposure. That’s why there were seven of us on the ship. It was shown that if a human only served once a week, we could tolerate the smell.

And today was Sunday. My shift at the wheel. I was looking forward to six days of fresh air in the cramped and sweaty human compartments with other members of my race. Even though shower use was harshly regulated on this journey, they still smelled like potpourri to me after a shift in the ‘pit.




tags

The thing about sleeping in zero g is that I have a lot of dreams about being in my mother’s womb except that in my dreams, my mother is sleeping in zero g as well. That’s impossible because my mother never went to space. She was sixty before the alien diplomats came down to earth, one in every major city and no two aliens the same. Glittering ships that defied all reason touching down like inverted chandeliers before discharging creatures trained to field questions in English through their translators. The one in my home down of Phoenix Arizona was a tall insect that looked like a violet, leafless tree that walked around on crab-leg roots with a tight line of softly-glowing blue eyes down its trunk.

I was twenty-five years old at the time but still, when I saw that creature, I felt like a six-year-old who knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. Your calling can come at any time, I guess.

I wake up smiling at the memory and uncurl, the light slowly branding up to daylight in my quarters. I turn on the gravity and look out the window. Through the porthole, I can see a cadmium cue-ball planet with scudding blue clouds and a double meridian of shadow from its two suns. It’s beautiful. I’ll be briefed about its name in a second but for now I just drink in the view and once again swim deep in the wonder and pride I have at my job.

And then I look in the mirror.

I had alopecia when I was thirteen which means my body hair grows in patches now. I also have a dark wine birthmark that splashes across half of my face and most of my right arm. One of my eyes has too much eyelid and is higher than the other while my wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ragged jut of my huge, uneven teeth. My chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. My nose is more like a beak and would probably come down to nearly touch my shelf of a chin if it hadn’t been broken in a youthful bicycle accident. It’s like a shark fin shaped into a child’s drawing of a lightning bolt in the middle of my face.

My point is that by human standards, I’m ugly. Hideously ugly. Almost comically ugly.

And the aliens don’t care. Because of that, I smile again like I do every day here. I don’t care if I ever see Earth again.

I take a morning sip from the protein udder on the wall and zip up into my jumpsuit. As I leave my quarters and join the flow of traffic to the main hall, I bump into a krinotaur. I think it’s beautiful. It flows past me like a wave settling next to the shore.

Maybe it took the job for the same reason I did. Maybe its eye cluster is too bulbous. Maybe its leg-stalks are too short. Maybe its communication mandibles have a noticeable stutter or lisp equivalent that's erased by the translators.

I would have no idea.

Everyone's earned the right to be here. We're diplomats and we're intelligent representatives. I know that the other life forms have tests and training just as stringent as my own that brought them here. We’re good at what we do; useful to our homeworlds.

I head to the briefing room to learn about the white planet below us and what city I’ll be assigned to welcome them into the galactic council.




tags

April 30/30

26/30

THE UNEXPECTED PACKAGE

Randolph Beaucoup of the Terran Diplomacy Wing had been selected from fifty candidates for this particular First Contact mission. Little was known about the Marenko other than they were anamorphic pseudopods without discernible features. Smooth gelatinous bags that had the ability to form as many multi-fingered tentacles as needed to build or manipulate technology. The Terrans were still trying to figure out how they saw without eyes and thought without visible brains.

There were large ones and small ones although that seemed to have no bearing on age. There was talk of one the size of a small ocean but it may have been a god myth of some kind. All was unclear at this stage other than the fact that they had space-travel capability and were, by and large, peaceful. The math constructs had been sent and received as proof of intelligence and no weaponry was detected at the landing site.

Randolph stood on the plateau a few steps away from the Terran landing plank beneath his ship, clad in a fishbowl helmet to clearly display his face and wearing a tight spacesuit that showed his musculature to curious species. It was known as the 'nothing-to-hide' approach. The stars twinkled above him. The Marenko balanced in front of him like a transparent rearing slug trying to impersonate a capital S. It was the size of an elephant seal. Unlike slugs, however, the Marenko were unnervingly quick.

The Marenko extended a glittering flower-tipped pseudopod towards Randoplh and paused. Randolph extended his own hand and grasped the pod tip in what, in his experience, was a universal sign of greeting. A sharp pinprick zeroed in on his palm. His suit easily patched the tiny rupture as Randolph withdrew his stinging hand with an involuntary hiss of shock.

Before he could move, the Marenko extended another tentacled pad that slapped wetly up against Randolph's helmet and stuck there.

"Hello Randolph. The earth-name I have chosen for myself is Mary." said a pleasantly-modulated voice. The tentacle was vibrating against Randolph's helmet to produce the sound. "It is a pleasure to meet you. This has been a delightful first contact and I am honored to be the first to produce our communication."

Randolph thought that was an odd choice of words.

"The pleasure is mine, Mary." he replied. "I'm happy to meet you too. I'm curious, what was the purpose of poking me like that?" he asked, tentatively hopeful that the answer would be benign.

"I needed a small tissue sample to produce our communication. You are in me now, growing. Soon you will be large enough to leave yourself here and then we can talk after you leave."

Randolph couldn't understand the words. The sentence must been parsed wrong in the alien's nascent attempt at translation. "I'm afraid I don't understand, Mary." he said.

"Look closely at my center, Randolph." said Mary.

Randolph looked closer at the core of the huge alien's wavering, smooth gelatin. There, in the center, curled up and twitching, was what looked like a tiny human baby.

A tiny baby with transparent skin and gelatinous bones. A tiny baby with dark hair and dark eyes, just like Randolph. It grew as he looked at it. A Meranko-Human hybrid of some kind.

"This version of you will stay here. We will converse. It will have your memories but it will be of my race, too. After a short amount of time, you may come to collect him and talk to him as well to gather your own information."

"Uh.....what?"responded Randolph eloquently.

"I am, as you say, pregnant." said Mary.





tags

As was usual with First Contact, communication had been the problem. The problem we were facing here was that the Nitkas had 56 mouths around their gigantic heads, 28 on each side.

When they spoke, each mouth spoke one word but all the mouths spoke at the same time. If their sentence had less than 56 words, the unused mouths would hoot when talking so as not to be left out. Each sentence was one big crowded shout, like a whole orchestra playing one note for one second. If a Nitka barked several times, that was a paragraph. It was a very efficient method of communication.

We were there for six Earth months trying to put together a translator. It was frustrating because we talked at an obscenely slow speed compared to them with our one lonely mouth. We said our words in a linear order taking forever to meander to the end of a sentence. Only the most patient Nitkas partook in our studies.

Seeing them learn English had been humbling. They broke the dictionary into groups of 56 words and shouted them staccato-blast at each other in their classroom. That took an hour. After that, they blasted rules of syntax to each other in the same way. They could learn our language in a day.

But they couldn’t speak it one word at a time. The one trick we’d been able to teach them was to treat each word as a sentence. They could say ‘the’ with one mouth while the other 55 mouths droned. Then they could say ‘cat’ with one mouth while the other 55 mouths droned. Then they could say “went” with one mouth while the other 55 mouths droned. And so on. The Nitkas were uninterested in that as a solution because it took so long and it was hard for us to hear what was being said by the one mouth with the other mouths droning. In a way, that led to our solution.

With a Nitka standing in a spherical cage of directional microphones pointed at each mouth, we could isolate the one word being spoken. With that discovery, we realized we could isolate all the words. With speech recognition programs, we could recognize all 56 words but then we had to order them. The computer could work out the versions of the sentence that the Nitka probably meant and show them on a screen. The Nitka could point to the right sentence. That let them talk to us fairly quickly.

Speaking back was a challenge. We could dictate words to a small bank of 56 speakers that would say them all at once. We had to be careful to make sure not to say sentences longer than 56 words or the Nitka would get confused. The result was us speaking in a straight line, one word after one word, and then pressing a trigger and the sentence was barked to the Nitka by the speakers. After that, they’d respond and then point to the sentence on the screen that was closest to what they meant. On our side, there were still embarrassing pauses as we spoke but it worked. It encouraged us to be succinct.

The result was a lightweight net of microphones worn by the Nitka ambassadors around their heads with an accompanying datapad for clarity and the humans wore a small bank of speakers on their chests. It remains one of the hardest challenges I’ve faced as a translator designer.


tags

It’s the glowing catfish moustache that gives the only light down here, the fish’s lower lip tracing powdered silt on the ocean floor.

The dead eyes of dead faces stare eternally, skull-holes hollowed out by crab-things long ago. Each dog tag wrapped around bird skull furred with mold. Fistfuls of lariats and identification cards stick up out of the ground like exposed wiring and Barbie-doll gravestones. Magnetic strips discolor with algae. Barnacles clog the gun barrels. Long strands of seaweed reach up through ribcages with too many ribs.

Fore-armed is forsworn, said the recruitment packages. Join Earth’s Army to Help Bring Civilization to the Stars. First pick of the spoils. Beings signed up. Jelimorphs, hellicorns, annamen, retreads, and silicates. Even now and then an esper became corporeal, risking truedeath to join the fight and get a slice.

And now, down here under intense pressure in the blackness of an ammonia sea miles deep, bottom feeders nudge their bones. The soldiers are strewn across hectares of dull, smooth reef down here amongst the glowing fish that target carrion. Soldiers with many limbs and some with only a few. Soldiers with hard bones and soldiers with exoskeletons. Soldiers with tentacles and soldiers with articulated mandibles. Poverty-stricken, uneducated, and greedy. Their death is not a tragedy.

An entire shipload arced into orbit here with an exterial winch brushing too close to a moon that wasn’t on the charts. The explosion was instant and inside the shields. The ship opened wide and spilled nearly a million sleeping soldiers through the soupy atmosphere into the cold ammonia sea.

They never woke up.

Here they lie while battles rage and lovers love light years away on other planets. The ebb and flow of conflict and union continues to play its song across the stars.

While these dead soldiers are watched by a glowing constellation of fish.




tag