Disoriented, James rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and yawned. How long had he slept for? With effort he turned himself around so that he could look at the countdown, displayed as big, digital letters on the room's wall, without actually having to get up.
“0:00:0: 1:2:33:70”, it read. He had slept for nearly ten Earth-hours. And he was still tired. So he slumped back down on the bed and just let his face sink into the sheets. His warm breath spread through the fabric and warmed his face with each rising and sinking of his chest. The darkness cast by his own head was soothing his weary mind.
Yet, slowly but surely, the excitement did begin to catch up with him. After all, there was only about half a day left until what was essentially his new life would begin, and yet he had not even met any of the people he would be spending it with. He pressed himself up from the mattress and jumped off the bed, looking around the room. Nothing had changed, apart from the ever-lowering numbers on his wall. With mild curiosity he crept towards the only door leading in and out of the room and pressed his head against the single window that was placed slightly above his eye height in order to look out into the hall positioned right in front of it.
He didn’t expect anybody to be there, and at first he thought his suspicions had been correct, until he spotted a figure in his peripheral vision. Focusing on it, he saw a - galactically speaking- rather small person, about two thirds larger than him, and extremely thin. A white, bib-like identifier hung loosely around their neck, clearly identifying them as a crew member belonging to the medical team. Apart from that, they were “naked”, with the exception of the tiny, bracelet-looking device wrapped around their wrist. It was the standard issue personal assistant everyone on board would use for things like communication and being able to keep track of time on the ever-lit, cycle-less ship.
Their body was covered in colorful feathers which showed mostly tones of blue, as well as indigo scales. They had a long neck and tail, as well as four slender limbs, each ending in six clawed fingers. Their face ended in an elongated beak and their eyes faced sideways away from it.
Overall their appearance could best be described to a human as vaguely similar to that of a theropod.
For a moment James pondered whether or not he should just watch and let them go by, but by now he was already too caught up in his own human curiosity to not act upon it. So he took a deep breath and lightly knocked on the window.
The sudden sound seemingly startled the crewmember, because after a short twitch they froze in place for a moment. Then they turned their head slowly from side to side, in an attempt to see as much of their surroundings as possible.
Hoping movement would help them localize him, James waved through the window. He knew that not every species out there had vision as good as that of humans.
Finally, one of the person’s eyes seemed to settle on him, even though without direct focus it was hard to tell. Guessing that hearing him through the glass would be problematic, James began to sign towards the crew member in the uniform sign language.
'Greetings,' he signed, making sure his hands would be well visible through the glass from the position of the person.
'Greetings,' the person signed back and, after a moment of seeming hesitation, added, 'Can I help you?'
James held back a grin, making sure not to expose his teeth, and answered,
'I just thought I would introduce myself. I am James, my Isolation ends in about a day.'
In a gesture very reminiscent of a bird the crew member titled their head while they inspected James.
'It is nice to meet you, James. I am called Ezcha,' they signed.
'Likewise, Ezcha,' James signed back. For a short moment they held eye contact with each other. Then Ezcha looked up and down the hall before turning back to James.
'Apologies, I have to work now,' they signed. 'But we will surely meet each other on the ship plenty of times.'
'No worries,' James replied. 'Success to you.'
'Success to you,' Ezcha anwered and left in a hurry, looking more scared than busy to James.
But he also couldn’t really be the judge of that. After all, despite having studied to be qualified for intragalactic work, he hadn’t left Earth until about a month ago, and thus had only ever met those few non-earthlings who had been brave enough to venture to the infamous class four deathworld. A world so deadly that even primates ate meat there. Come to think of it, maybe Ezcha had merely recognized him as a human, causing them to react as they did.
For the rest of the uniform day, James kept a watchful eye on the door, chatting it up with two more crew members. One was a young woman about the size of a bear back on Earth and likely of marsupial-like descent, who revealed her name to be Pippa. Her dark eyes looked concerned over her long nose as James spoke to her, but in the end, she left with a spring in her step, seemingly without fear of him.
The other one was a lanky being with black skin that James could not compare to any lifeform he knew from Earth. Instead of arms they had three long, flexible, limbs that reminded him of an elephant’s trunk growing from their upper body. They also had no head; their eyes instead being placed on the top side of their thorax. And James could see no mouth. He had a bit of trouble differentiating some of the signed words due to the lack of appendages at the end of each limb. He also had absolutely no chance of discerning any emotion of the person before him.
Still, the crew member introduced themselves as Gogua and assured him that they were looking forward to working with him.
James spent the time between each conversation with a bit of exercise, either physical or mental. The dumbbells he had brought with him helped with working against the muscle atrophy caused by the low gravity on the spaceship. His arms ached as he turned away from the door after bidding goodbye to Gogua, yet he still decided to do one more set before stopping and taking a shower.
As some strands of hair that had loosened during his training stuck to his sweaty forehead, he wished he could get them cut a bit shorter. During the quarantine they had grown out a bit too long for his liking.
With arms and legs that were heavy as bricks he then finally dragged himself towards the “bathroom” in order to wash himself off before his time would be up in a few hours. He discarded his clothes at the entrance of the cabinet that essentially functioned as a shower. Actually, it was pretty much a shower, just with a good bit more pressure. He closed his eyes and let himself be sprayed down with the warm liquid, before briefly stopping it in order to apply soap to his aching body and shampoo to his salty hair.
The sanitary unit also included a drying feature that was pretty much a glorified blow dryer. It was probably meant for people with more fur, feathers or other hard to dry things covering their body, but it worked just fine for his skin as well.
Once he felt sufficiently dried off, he lumbered out of the cabin. He picked up his discarded clothes on his way to the cupboard and threw them down the laundry shed. Then he began rummaging through the drawers and picking out what he would wear underneath his uniform when he began work later “today”.
Suddenly he halted.The prickling feeling of eyes on his bare back compelled him to turn around. He looked at the window of his door. He wasn’t overly concerned about somebody sneaking a peek, especially since there were no other humans on board and most non-humans would be, at best, weirded out by his physique. And yet, he could’ve sworn that, just a split second before he turned around, a dark shadow in his periphery darted away from the small opening, even though it might just have been his imagination.
Even so, he felt compelled to quickly put on some clothes and then drape a fresh uniform over. Just to be sure, he went over to the door again and quickly glanced out into the hallway, but no one was there. Absent-mindedly, he scratched the stubble on his cheek and slowly stepped back from the door. Suddenly, the beeping of the countdown behind him made him jump.
“They really need to rethink that alarm sound!” he exclaimed with a pounding heart while holding his chest and exhaled deeply. Then he looked at the countdown. Only three uniform hours remained. Conveniently, those translated to roughly three Earth hours. It was just about time.
The last few hours simultaneously flew past and crawled at a snail’s pace, defying all known laws of time. But in the end, he saw the last uniform seconds rapidly tick down. And finally, the red counter showed the longed-for and yet dreaded number “0:00:0:0:0:00:00” and changed into a cold lime-green. With a soft hissing sound, a light mist began to fill the room, originating from small nozzles located in each of its corners. James held his breath while the antiseptic did its work. The second it touched his skin he already felt it evaporate off again, cooling him down and making him shiver. Goosebumps covered him as he waited for the mist to dissipate. Finally, another loud hissing sound indicated the pneumatics systems opening the heavy door that was keeping him locked up.
He looked back at the room one last time. As far as he was informed, his belongings would be transported to his actual cabin for him while he was at work. So he slowly, but resolved, left the room.
On his way, he was carefully considering his steps, in order to not basically leap through the low gravity corridors while frightening any of the non-death-world occupants of the ship that might encounter him on his way in the process. Yet nobody seemed to be up and about right now.
The door was locked tight. And his name was already marked down on the sign next to it. “James Aldwin”. Right next to the sign was a scanner, which was connected to the electronic locks. The door was bio coded and, right now, could only be opened by him. A bit arbitrary, found James, but he did have to admit that it made for a great suspense builder. He inspected the heavy laboratory door. Two interlocking elements closed via electromagnetism and pneumatics. The scanner was made of a bioactive plate on top of a device that could identify the particles left behind on top of said plate through mechanisms James didn’t fully understand. He just knew that, if he put his hand on the pink organic material, the door would recognize his biological make-up as well as his vials and the locks would disengage. He took a deep breath and lifted his hand. For a moment, he just let it hover over the scanner, taking in the moment. In his head, he counted down. Three. Two. One.
With maybe a bit more force than strictly necessary, he brought his hand down onto the sticky surface. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a click. And a second one. And with a loud, metallic sound, the electrical locks unsealed, and the door slowly began to open. And behind it laid…a laboratory. Just like he was used to from Earth. He shouldn’t have expected anything else. After all, he was hired as a specialist from Earth and had picked out the lion’s share of the equipment himself. Yet it still felt a bit underwhelming walking into what looked essentially like the laboratory in which he had worked for the past years of his life.
When he entered, the first thing that caught his eyes was the massive row of cages filled with various rodents right in front of him. The animals looked healthy and clean; the computer had seemingly done a good job with taking care of them. One of the hooded rats came up to the front of the cage and pressed its little hands against the front glass. James brought his hand to the glass and watched as the rat's nose followed his fingertips on the other side. Smiling, he opened up the metal top of the cage and reached inside to lift the animal out of the enclosure.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The rat however, having lacked human interaction for more than a month now, recoiled from his touch and quickly took off into its provided hide in the back of the cage. It would take some work to get them back to the point of tameness where it would be easy to handle them.
The rat peeked out of the small box, curiously. James left his hand in the enclosure and laid it on the bedding non-threateningly, almost beckoning the animal to come out. The animal's breathing accelerated and James could see its whiskers move with each breath. Then a single foot emerged from the dark and was placed outside of the hole. Very slowly the rat shifted its weight and got ready to more closely inspect the strange appendage placed inside of its home, before suddenly freezing and seemingly staring past James.
Due to their bad vision, the probability of the rat actually seeing anything behind him was quite low, yet it still seemed to sense something that James did not. So he lifted his hand out of the cage and turned around to look at the only entrance of the laboratory. Nothing appeared to be there. James didn’t quite know what to make of the situation. But he quickly decided that the itching sensation in the back of his mind would not allow him to work anyway. So, with a deep sigh, he turned around completely towards the entrance gate. Damn his misguided survival instincts.
Yet being a deathworlder also had its benefits, because now, being pretty annoyed by his situation, he crossed the entire room in just two long bounds. Besides that, every now and then he picked up on things that many other species might have missed. Like faint footsteps hurrying away from the door. Very faint. So faint indeed, that even he wasn’t quite sure if he actually had heard something. And, seeing as he had reached the door in just about a second, and yet could still not see anybody in the corridor, he assumed that maybe he had indeed just imagined something once again.
He was about to just shrug it off and actually get to work, when movement caught his eye. Though he was pretty sure the crew member rounding a corner to his left was not who he had been looking for. Still, being a bit lost in thought, he greeted the newcomer with a smile like he had been taught to do for most of his life. And the crew member froze in their step. Their head turned to the wall so that their sideways-facing eye could be trained on him. They stood high, twice the height of a typical human or more, and were covered in dark, matted, brown fur. Their head displayed four big, notched horns that had the size of James’ forearm plus hand. Their eyes were also dark and stood out of their long face a bit and their horizontal pupils quivered while trying to focus on him.
If James was being honest, the rest of their body bore a more than striking resemblance to what he knew as a giant sloth that had lived on Earth a few millenia ago, albeit with much, much less muscle on them. Their spindly arms ended in three half-finger-half-claw-looking appendages. He could not see their feet because of the matt of long fur covering them, dragging over the ground.
To James, they looked really unkempt. Of course, he would be way too polite to mention it. That, however, seemed to not be the case for his fellow crew member, who still had not moved since they met him. What was with them? Were they just going to stare at him? Rude!
His smile had wavered by now, slowly changing into more of an incredulous look. Slowly, the person before him seemed to straighten up a bit. They breathed out deeply and seemed…relieved?
“Are you all right?” James asked quietly, making a careful step towards his colleague.
They seemed to recoil a bit, before seemingly catching themselves in the action and stopping frozen once again. For a moment they seemed to be way more focused on his uniform than on him. Then they shifted into what James assumed was a more comfortable position, their fur swaying left to right while they moved their giant body, which apparently took them considerable effort, even in this low gravity. Or was it not low for them at all?
“You…are you a crew member? Is that an identifier?”, they asked in the uniform verbalization, lifting one of their three-clawed hands to point at him. Their voice was quite a bit higher than he had imagined and reminded him of an agitated cow.
James looked down at his uniform and then back up to his colleague, who, just like everyone he had met up until now, was only clothed with a bib-like uniform stand-in and their personal assistant. It was the first time he noticed that his uniform, while bearing the same color and symbol as the stand-in, was probably not what most on board would associate with a crew member.
“Yes,” James confirmed quickly. “Hi, I am James. I just got out of isolation, actually.”
He rubbed the back of his head while chuckling to himself and grinning nervously.
This time, the crew member could not stop themselves from recoiling. Concerned, James put his hand down and looked at them anxiously, his smile fading once more.
“What…what did I do that has upset you?” the crew member asked, with fear in their voice, and they even started to shiver a little.
James was shocked and now also recoiled, although for different reasons.
“Oh, oh no!” he cried out, as he finally realized his mistake. How could he have been so careless?
Going against a lot of his ingrained instincts, he lifted his hands into the air and leaned backwards, throwing himself off balance a bit, in an effort to look as unthreatening as possible.
“Sorry, sorry, I should have thought about that,” he stammered, waving his hands around a bit. “That wasn’t a threat. It was…well, it was a gesture of…uhm…delight?”
The gigantic person looked at him unconvinced.
“Look, my species is weird, all right?” James explained, defeated, and hung his hands and head. “All you need to know is that I am neither upset nor trying to fight you when I am showing my teeth.”
“If I was, you would know”, he added in his mind. The crew member finally did not seem to be terrified of him anymore, although he couldn’t shake the feeling that a certain mistrust remained.
“James, did you say your name was?” they inquired.
James was snapped back into an upright position and answered,
“Yes. James Aldwin. It is nice to make your acquaintance.”
The nostrils of his colleague flared a bit.
“I am called Moar,” they stated. “May I ask what you are doing here?”
James was taken aback by the question. After all, a scientist in the research wing should not come as a surprise to anyone, especially not to a crew member of the same ship. A member of the same team no less. So, instead of dignifying the question with a direct answer, he just pointed behind himself inside of his laboratory, while also nodding towards the name tag marking it as his own.
Then he just lifted his eyebrows in a gesture that any human would identify as “Good enough?”, although he did not know if that gesture would transcend species.
Moar took a moment to take in what James was insinuating. The eye James could see from his position widened a little as they deciphered the literal writing on the wall.
“You are a researcher?” they asked with what must have been their species equivalent of a surprised gasp.
James shrugged and folded his hands behind his head.
“Yeah. I mean, I prefer the term scientist, but…yeah,” he replied casually.
“But…I thought…you are not a pilot?” they further inquired with big eyes, confusing an already confused man even more.
“A pilot? Why would I be?” he asked and pointed to the clearly visible emblem identifying him as a member of the research team, prominently featured on the chest of his uniform. Moar blinked slowly, their big eye wandering from the emblem, to the rest of his uniform, back to the emblem.
“Right, apologies,” they said slowly. “I had your identifier, your…what do they call it again?”
“My uniform?”, James suggested unsurely and lifted an arm as if physically offering the answer.
“Right, uniform,” Moar confirmed, sounding almost happy, at least James identified it as such, and shook their head a bit left to right. “I had your uniform confused with another.”
They seemed to be getting more energetic the more time went by. Then their eyes narrowed down on his face a bit.
“Say, I don’t mean to insult you,” they said slowly in a tone that made James believe they were being truthful, “but what species do you belong to? I thought I knew it, but you do look slightly different.”
James wiped a bit of sweat from his brow. The ship's temperature was set to what was pretty much the galactic standard, accommodating most species, technically including humans. But the equivalent of 32 degrees Celsius was a bit high for his liking, especially while wearing the long-sleeved uniform. And even looking at the thick fur covering Moar’s body made him break out in even stronger sweats.
“I am a human,” James answered, deliberately casual. Usually it would have been considered rude to ask someone their species, but neither James nor other humans really cared. They were pretty new to the intragalactic community and not yet a household name or sight for most, although they had already started to get quite the reputation, bordering on infamy, among some circles. And, as he had almost expected, the reaction of Moar made him believe that his answer had not cleared up much for them. In some ways, interspecies communication via body language was difficult to near impossible without extended knowledge of the other species. But some other things, like a dumb stare, were pretty much the same in all species, with only very few notable exceptions.
“Huemen,” Moar parroted, impressively butchering both: syllables, and emphasis. “I believe I have not heard that before.”
James smirked, this time making sure not to show any teeth.
“Yeah, that is unsurprising,” he explained, shrugging. “We are new to the community and there are not too many of us around.”
Moar looked sympathetic.
“Has your species fallen on hard times?” they asked with sincere empathy that James wasn’t used to from most interactions he had had with extraterrestrials up until now.
“Oh no,” he said, waving it off. “We have plenty of numbers. A lot of us are just reclusive, you could say, staying in our own systems.”
Moar swayed their head up and down, making their fur flail around wildly. Either it was their species also communicated by nodding, or they tried to emulate his body language.
“I see. Well I can understand that. It can be scary leaving your system behind,” they lamented.
James was fairly certain that fear did not have much to do with it, but he was not going to bother explaining human psychology and culture right now.
“I am sure we will be everywhere soon enough,” he said instead. Again, the head-bobbing.
Then Moar looked past him into his laboratory, seemingly curious.
“So, what are you working on,” they asked, a shift in their tone that James knew all too well appearing in their voice. Apparently, scientists stayed scientists, even across species borders. And he had to fight back a genuine smile this time. If he was completely honest, as excited as he was about finally interacting with his intragalactic colleagues, he had never been one to small talk. Speaking about his work, however…
Excited, he stepped aside to allow entry to the giant standing before him, holding out one arm to signal them to go on ahead.
Moar also brought his attention to his own personal assistant, which wasn’t standard issue because that, to him, would have been the size of more than half of his forearm. Instead it was a smaller device, about the size of a large wristwatch, clad in neat white plastic, and currently lying on one of the big countertops intended as a workspace while waiting to be put on.
“That is quite a lot of equipment,” Moar commented while watching James strapping the sleek device around his left wrist. “What could you possibly need this many devices for?”
Right, he reminded himself, he should indeed explain what it was he actually worked on.
“Well,” he said and started to lead Moar away from the shelf and towards the cages taking center stage in the room. “To make it short, I am currently working on a model for a system that could be used to engineer medicine based on the highly adaptive immune system of animals native to my homeworld.” The explanation was very brief, but he decided not to go too deep into it without even knowing what Moar specialized in.
“These tiny creatures have an adaptive immune system?” Moar asked, bringing their massive frame down to look directly into the highest cage in order to better see one of the rats.
“Well, they are just model organisms,” James explained, scratching the back of his head. “The real project will most likely use more specifically selected organisms to match different biologies.”
Moar’s eyes seemed to widen a bit.
“There are multiple species like them?” they asked, lifting themselves up again.
“Yes,” James answered and, badly containing his pride, confidently crossed his arms. “Most of the species back home have adaptive immune systems, if not all of them.”
He looked up and saw Moar's eyes get even wider. They seemed like they were about to say something, when suddenly, a slight noise rang out from behind them. It was slight to James at least. The thin air in the spaceship was not very conductive to his hearing. Moar on the other hand turned one side of their face towards the door.
“Oh, it appears that I am being called”, they stated. James turned around towards the door as well. A few moments passed while the sound got clearer, and he also started to make out what was being said. Someone was indeed calling for Moar.