<< Alpha Log - #004
6952 SFY-Third Era, 3 days since Planetfall>>
General! Guess what?! I got a puppy!
…
What do you mean it’s not a puppy?! If it walks like a puppy, barks like a puppy, and craves the metallic tang of fresh blood like a puppy, it’s a puppy! I get to keep this one, too! — what with there being no one to stop me this time.
Now, now, I know what you’re going to say: ‘Alpha, you’re not responsible enough for a puppy.’ Look, it’s not my fault that one tried to eat Private James. No one could have predicted that his favorite cologne just happened to smell — and taste — exactly like Missy’s preferred prey. I didn’t even know Incetops could smell!
I’ll do much better this time. Promise!
Look, I’m even doing proper bioscans and recording behavioral data this time!
Whatever species Snowball is from appears to be selective carnivorous. Or, at the very least, Snowball seems to favor the strange, vaguely penguin-like bird creatures native to these prairies. ‘Vaguely’ as in if penguins were dog-sized, with rocky plates along their bellies and beaks filled with needle-like teeth.
Okay, so the teeth thing was already true for Terran penguins, but this is sooooooo much worse.
Between the fire-breathing chicken, the magic gopher, dragon orcas, and what appears to be monster penguins, I’m starting to think I’ve accidentally slipped into some insane geneticist’s secret garden. What’s next? Are the trees in the distance gonna get up and move?
I’d honestly not be surprised anymore.
The only question is, how have they kept this hidden for so long? Genetic manipulation on this kind of scale should have caught someone’s attention. There was always the possibility that these creatures are ‘natural,’ having developed from stock brought to this world by whoever colonized it. But what kind of colony ship stocks gophers, let alone penguins and orcas?!
I’ve taken samples from both Snowball and the penguins, but the TAWP’s systems are still in shambles, and there’s not much they can tell me yet.
Wait, I’m getting distracted. Where was I?
Oh! Right. Snowball! Isn’t she adorable?
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// Maintenance Sub-AI EDIT: What follows is over 50GB of video and still images of ‘Subject: Snowball’. Maintenance highly recommends that the reader take the time to thoroughly enjoy every Bit. Alternatively, click HERE to continue on to the rest of the report if you’re boring and don’t enjoy cute puppies. Your loss. //
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I found her in a sinkhole while surveying the area. The pup had been half-starved and bleeding out from various injuries. She had been understandably terrified at first — the TAWP was designed to be intimidating, after all — but a quick nanite bath and an injection of medical solution quickly lightened her mood.
Yes, yes, nanites aren’t cheap, more so medical-grade nanites. But come on! What else was I supposed to do when she looked up at me with those big puppy eyes, covered in blood and surrounded by the bodies of her enemies?! It was love at first sight!
Three days later, the little scamp is happily running around like she hadn’t just been near death. Suffice it to say, I was more than a little surprised. Sure, the emergency medical nanites are good, but they’re just that, for an emergency. They should have been enough to stabilize Snowball, but that’s about it.
That she’s almost fully recovered says a lot about her species’ tenacity and ability to heal. Though, maybe makes sense if this place is as dangerous as it seems on the surface.
Be it the magic gopher or the giant penguins, most of the lifeforms in these prairies seem oddly aggressive. Not that I’ve come across… well, any other lifeform, actually…
That’s strange in and of itself. The entire ecosystem can’t be built entirely on gophers, giant penguins, and one hyperactive whale-puppy.
So, that begs the question… Where did everything else go?
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Snowball bounced in place, giving that odd clicking bark Alpha had learned to translate as “hurry up!” Her floppy tongue hung out the side of her mouth as she vibrated with excitement, staring up at the object clutched in Alpha’s hand. Alpha sat perfectly still, letting the tension build, until he tossed the object he held into the distance with a blur of motion.
Something soggy and red flew through the sky at speeds that would put professional fastballs to shame. Snowball’s figure blurred into a black-and-white streak as she raced after it, crossing nearly 100 meters in the blink of an eye. With a mighty leap, the not-so-tiny whale-puppy snatched the object out of midair and landed gracefully on all four draconic paws.
Alpha made clapping sounds while the triumphant victor returned with her prize. Snowball held her head high as she trotted back; even with dark red blood drizzling down her muzzle from the large, still-warm penguin heart in her mouth. Alpha thought she looked adorable.
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She genuinely seemed to enjoy their games, and had quickly warmed up to the massive war machine. The AI found he enjoyed the hyperactive puppy’s presence as well. He’d always liked kids; children were simple to read and easy to get along with if you treated them right. When you let a kid be a kid, you could always trust that they would tell you exactly how they felt about you. Unlike the vast majority of adults that he knew.
Of course, there were places where kids couldn’t be kids, even in the Federation. Alpha had made it a special point to find those places and… help… the issue, where and when he could.
Often, that involved a lot of screaming and people in suits yelling at him.
But the first time he’d gotten a letter from an eight-year-old Vidaasi girl thanking him, it had made it worth all the trouble.
Snowball dropped the bloody heart at his feet and barked, wagging her furry fluke with enough force to ripple the surrounding grass.
Alpha patted her head but denied her.
“Nope, no more. It’s going to get cold… and dirty.”
Snowball wilted, her head drooping, as she whined a long, drawn-out whistle. A few scritches cheered her up, and she soon dug into the impressive organ with renewed vigor, her fluke wagging once more. In short order, the organ was devoured, and the whale-puppy bounded over to another nearby body for a second helping.
Alpha watched fondly for a moment before turning back to his work, scanning the wall of the sinkhole they occupied for any usable mineral deposits.
Snowball hadn’t shown signs of true sapience yet, though she did seem very intelligent. It was unclear whether her apparent young age was a factor; only time would tell. Until he knew for certain, Alpha was treating her mostly as a pet. Or at least as a very hyperactive toddler, if just as bloodthirsty.
The difficulty of discerning sapience at a glance was a major factor in the Federation’s policy of not shooting everything on sight. The Fli’ke were a good example of this. It was only during the Second Federation that one in twenty-five Felis catus were discovered to be, in fact, a species of sapient, feline-like aliens — ones who had been secretly monitoring and influencing Old Earth — and several other planets — for literal millennia. Their existence had only been exposed when Felis catus, a non-sapient species engineered to be a physical match to Fli’ke — allowing them to hide in plain sight — had been found across multiple, unconnected planets.
Ironically, the Fli’ke had been instrumental in the defeat of the galactic threat known as the Hunters. The Fli’ke infiltrated Hunter strongholds, acting as spies behind enemy lines, and fed the Second Federation valuable intelligence that saved billions of lives. Even those genocidal psychopaths couldn’t resist the charms of the modern house cat.
Alpha had always wanted a pet, but General Haldorðr never let him, not after the ‘incident.’
Okay, the mysterious old woman had told him not to get the thing wet, but in Alpha’s defense, it kept lighting itself on fire!
Snowball, in contrast, was much easier to handle. She spent most of the first day in her carrier but could move on her own by day two. By day three, she was running around like she’d never been hurt at all. She even showed off the same weird power over the earth as the gopher, diving in and out of the ground like water. Alpha half expected the cute little thing to vanish after that. She was a wild animal, after all… maybe… Time would tell, Alpha supposed.
But Snowball seemed to have grown fond of him, too. She stuck close to him as he traveled from sinkhole to sinkhole, sometimes disappearing for hours but always reappearing with some strange new object or plant clutched in her jaws. Like a cat bringing you a dead bird. Only cuter — if sometimes just as bloody.
Alpha made sure to store all of her presents in her old carrier to examine later.
Then, everything changed when the penguins attacked.
Snowball had gone out to explore earlier in the day and returned worse for wear. Alpha fussed over her at first, but her injuries were nowhere as severe as when he’d first found her, just a few cuts and bite marks. She would be fine in a few hours.
What wasn’t fine were the half dozen dog-sized bird creatures that came rocketing out of the sinkhole’s walls after her. Alpha physically deflected two of the creatures away from the panting Snowball with one of his legs, then mowed both and a third down with quick bursts of laser-fire from his point defense turret. The remaining three had latched onto Alpha, biting his leg armor to little effect. A quick shift in his adaptive nano-armor drove thin spikes through their mouths and out the backs of their skulls, ending that non-threat.
Snowball seemed impressed with how quickly Alpha had dispatched her pursuers, too. Alpha decided that was what the cheerful click-barking meant, at least, as she hopped in circles around one of his limbs. A quick study of the enemy revealed them to be exactly what they appeared. Some kind of penguin-adjacent avian creature, blown up to half the size of Snowball and packed with dense muscles. Snowball enjoyed that last fact as she devoured two of the corpse before Alpha finished his examination.
The largest penguin he looked at even had a strange quartz-diamond composite crystal growing in its heart. Why or how it hadn’t killed the creature, he didn’t know. Snowball head-butted the TAWP’s leg and gave him wide puppy-dog eyes, insisting he give it to her, like a puppy demanding a treat. Alpha hesitated, but who was he to question alien biology? He tossed it to her, and the whale-puppy snatched it out of the air, happily crunching like it was a piece of candy.
Thus started their bloody games of ‘fetch.’ Alpha found it adorable how excited she got when she found another of those strange crystals in a penguin heart. Not that they were in short supply; ever since the first attack, the penguins ambushed them every few hours. Snowball hadn’t left Alpha’s side the entire time, watching the various pitfalls’ walls. She would even make a sporadic, warbling, chirping sound he’d not heard her make before.
After watching her do this a few times, Alpha finally realized that she seemed capable of detecting the creatures through solid rock. She had been warning him when any were nearby. The animals here all seemed able to move through the earth freely. Echolocation might have evolved as the natural solution for navigating in such an environment. That might explain why the gopher had such a violent reaction to the transport drone’s signals. Alpha filed that tidbit of information away for later investigation.
The creatures weren’t very dangerous, to him at least, but the attacks were becoming more frequent, while they attacked in larger numbers the deeper they traveled into the prairies. Snowball put up a brave front, but Alpha could recognize the signs of her nervousness: the light steps meant to reduce her noise, her eyes scanning the walls for danger, and even how she refused to move more than a few feet away from the ‘adult’ — HA!
If the attacks got any worse, he would have to try his luck in a different direction. No point in wandering into a nest of the things if he didn’t need to.
As he considered his options, Snowball suddenly perked up, turning to face something unseen in the distance.
In an instant, his cute, sweet puppy morphed into a growling, rage-filled beast. Her lips were pulled back, putting those vicious teeth on full display as the short black and white fur on her back stood on end. Her eyes changed from cute round orbs to the dilated pinpoints of a predator ready to pounce. Before Alpha could stop her, Snowball shot off in that direction, taking a few leaping bounds before diving into the earth and vanishing.
Alpha stopped and stared after her, something in his processors not sitting well with him. He’d never seen her act like that before. That hadn’t been a simple response to danger or enemies. No, there was more — something deeper. A kind of rage unfitting of such a young child.
He hesitated for a moment, then turned in her direction, speeding off after the small whale-puppy.
Good thing he was a responsible pet owner and had had her chipped!