“What are you doing?”
She brought her body centimeters from his head, her new skin still glistening from the final hydration procedure. Interesting—this must be a rare, uni-sexual system. He’d taken a male form for himself; he wondered what had motivated his companion to select a female form. The voice, as his thoughts drifted, was—strangely pleasing.
“What are you doing?”
He hadn’t realized she actually wanted an answer, just as he hadn’t realized he’d stopped scanning the data stream to stare at the soft curves of this female floating like the planet in the view port behind her. Assuming these alien forms whenever they entered a new system was always difficult for him. With its limited brain capacity, this bipedal bag of mostly fluid was proving to be a challenge. These beings were slow moving and slow-witted, easily distracted—apparently—and existing within very narrow physical parameters.
“Scanning for the mission target's home world, of course,” he finally answered. He reached out and pushed his finger lightly against her right breast. “What is the function of these structures?” The action sent them both drifting slowly apart in the gravity-free environment. He steadied himself before he moved out of range of the scanner’s screen, and then turned his attention back to the incoming data.
“Unknown,” she answered as she bumped gently into the far wall of their tiny craft. As her hands explored her newly formed breasts, she said, “They appear to possess erectile tissue, however." She paused as if distracted, then quickly added, "It would seem logical that they’re some sort of I/O ports, but I’ve yet to acquire a relevant spec instruct from its core processor. Perhaps there’s a malfunction.”
“I’m experiencing the same lack of instruction sets from my processor as well, he said. "It’s a wonder these creatures can function at all.”
She turned to gaze at the planet outside the spacecraft. “What’s the scanner picking up?”
“Possible home world located. Changing course now…”
“Wait!” She shouted, just as he was locking in the course trajectory. “Abort and disengage! Abort!!”
He instinctively disengaged the nav-com and manually swung the ship about. He’d learned to always trust his companion’s intuition without question. He focused the scanner on the small unary system as it slowly receded into the backdrop of stars, trying to find what she'd seen.
“No!–switch to visual spectrum only; the planet we were closest to when we unfolded into this dimension. See?”
“The Sign,” he said, as if to himself.
“Yes.”
“But when? This is such a new system.”
“I don't' care!” She exclaimed as she started below. “Just get us out of here. I’m reprocessing this horrible form as fast as I can!”
He turned control back over to the ship. As he followed her below, he felt space and time folding back in on itself as they made the jump back out of this primitive dimension and into their own. He, too, was anxious to rid himself of this physical form.
He paused to look one last time at the scanner, frozen on the image of The Sign. No wonder the mission data had been so limited. But why were these creatures being doomed to quarantine? It’s so hard to break off a mission of education and exchange. He’d been looking forward to interacting with these curious beings and feeling the satisfaction of leading them gently onto the path of their civilization’s destiny. How could these limited forms be such a destructive force to the universe that all contact with them was forbidden?
But there it was—The Sign: a planet with rings, a warning to all who entered the system that these creatures were incapable of peaceful co-existence with others, even with their own kind. He’d only encountered a planet with rings once before, and those beings had eventually destroyed themselves and nearly all life on their home world.
He hurried below. He suddenly needed the safety of his chamber, the tingling, familiar hug of his incorporeal energy field. His companion was already sealed within her reprocessing chamber.
It was all he could do to keep from peeling off this evil flesh.
Email: Tom Loper