CHAPTER 04: MIKE - NOT LIKE ACTUAL STARFISH
"Being an idiot is no box of chocolates."
— Forrest Gump (Winston Groom)
The two men stepped into the boutique, greeted by the clerk, a polite man named Martin. One of the men, a youthful figure with an exaggerated smile, beamed at the clerk as though his face could barely contain it. The other man, older and sterner, simply glared at the smiling one.
“The last thing my daddy told me before sending me off to be a diplomat, since it’s my birthday, was to always smile when meeting new people,” said the young man, still grinning.
“I know, Mike,” the older man, Alto, replied dryly. “I was there.”
Martin mirrored Mike’s smile, though with more restraint, and asked, “What can I help you with today?”
Migesus Azmat III, “Mike,” jumped in eagerly. “I need to buy a spacesuit!” He raised his index finger, emphasizing his words with a dramatic pause. “To go into outer space.”
The store had a modern, clean feel—cool concrete floors, a high ceiling that showcased exposed ductwork far above. Mike’s eyes wandered upward, secretly wishing he could climb into the ducts to explore. He loved exploring.
Alto, Mike’s father’s factotum, examined a rather plain-looking spacesuit nearby and called out, “Mike, come here.”
Mike jogged over but asked, “Alto, what’s a factotum?”
Alto’s face twisted into a grimace, which Mike thought looked amusing. He giggled.
“I do everything,” Alto replied, his eyes closed as if bracing for more questions.
Mike, feeling slightly concerned, offered, “No, it’s okay, Alto. I’ll help.”
Together, they continued browsing the racks of spacesuits, though Mike turned down every option they looked at. None of them looked enough like what he imagined a spacesuit should be. Alto remained patient, despite Mike’s indecision. The store was lined with towering metal racks, each holding hundreds of suits sorted by manufacturer and design.
“There are so many spacesuits, Alto. I don’t wanna pick the wrong one. IVA, EVA, IA slash VE? What does it all mean?” Mike laughed, finding amusement in the jargon.
“It’s IEVA, Mike,” Alto explained, “which means the suit can be worn during both inside and outside activities in a vacuum. Just pick an IEVA suit, and you’ll be fine.”
“Oh boy,” Mike exclaimed before taking off down the aisles.
Alto called after him, “Pick one you like, Mike! I’ll go settle the payment with Martin.”
At the front counter, Alto gave his hand to Martin, who scanned it with a small handheld device. As the transaction completed, Mike noticed Alto grimacing, rubbing his stomach slightly. He remembered how earlier, Alto had reluctantly eaten a slice of his birthday cake despite saying something about not being able to digest it. Mike had sulked until Alto gave in, but now Alto seemed to be regretting it.
“Martin,” Alto said through clenched teeth, “I need to step out briefly to handle an urgent personal matter. Please assist my young charge and direct him to Port 9 when he’s done, if I haven’t returned.”
Meanwhile, Mike was examining suit after suit, trying to find one that matched the image in his mind. He recalled his assignment as a diplomat, meant to interact with starfish-like aliens. The Chornoi. Almost invisible because of their mirrored, non-reflective bodies. Alto explained it way more complicated than that, he thought, but he understood the basics. They ate sunlight and, well, sort of “peed” radiation.
He wanted a suit that would allow him to see them clearly, no matter how tricky that might be.
Stopping at an orange suit, Mike read aloud from the tag, “Energy-producing microbes? No thank you.”
Moving on, he stumbled across a name he could barely pronounce. “Von Mundhalten?” He repeated it a few times, then shrugged. “Daddy says if I don’t know what I’m saying, I should just shut up.”
Then his eyes landed on a suit that looked awesome. Red, black, gray, and white, with a golden visor that wasn’t see-through from the outside. “Olavi Corp Ablative…with a gold-plated polarized visor,” he muttered, reading from the label. “MASK technology…”
Martin approached him. “Can I help you with that, young man?”
Mike looked up from the tag. “This one says it’s got super vision. Can I get a real good look at aliens with this one?”
Martin smiled. “Well, it enhances visibility in extreme environments. Which aliens are you referring to?”
“The Chornoi. Starfish. They’re not like actual starfish.”
Martin raised his brows. “Oh, I see. Well, there’s no species this suit is known to have trouble seeing. It’s a top-of-the-line model.”
Mike grinned. “The suit looks pretty cool.”
“It’s also certified for military use,” Martin added.
“Military? Like… explosions?” Mike asked, eyes wide.
“No, not exactly like that,” Martin chuckled. “It’s more about durability and functionality.”
Mike shrugged. “Well, they feed on sunlight.”
Martin accepted that without question. “Are they dangerous?”
Mike shrugged again. “I don’t think so. They don’t recognize human faces and don’t get why we do anything. Kinda like dogs don’t.”
“Dogs can recognize human faces, though,” Martin countered politely.
Mike laughed. “So… not exactly like dogs.”
Martin smiled at that.
“But I have to tell them to start paying us back for all the sunlight they’ve been eating,” Mike said seriously. “My daddy says we own the sun.”
Martin gave a thoughtful nod. “Well, this suit will at least keep you well-protected.”
Martin deactivated the security lock holding the suit in place and offered it to Mike. “Would you like to try it on?”
Mike shook his head. “Nah, I’d better get going. My daddy’s a Vice-President, and I’m a diplomat. It’s my birthday today.” He beamed as he repeated the final part.
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Mike shrugged and tugged at the spacesuit, trying to figure out how to put the thing on. He noticed a cartoon on the backside of the information tag, with simple vector illustrations showing how to suit up. He was stuck on step two of four when the ambient music in his AVP background shifted to a song he really liked. Without a second thought, he began to dance.
A little-known fact about Mike, which he'd eagerly share with anyone, was that he couldn’t help but move to a good tune. He was known to break into dance in all sorts of inappropriate situations. Now, in the locker room, he pranced about, taking his time with the instructions while singing along to the music.
“I’m tenner than November, Alto,” Mike sang out when Alto appeared, fully dressed in his own spacesuit. “Boy howdy, ain’t this suit cool?”
“You’re behind schedule, Migesus,” Alto said, his tone firm. “Turn off the VBGM. You’re the diplomat here. Follow me, and remember everything about the aliens you’ve been briefed on.”
Mike, still moving to the beat, blinked. “What do I need to remember again? I’m still trying to put my suit on.”
Alto sighed and walked over, eyeing the situation. After a brief assessment, he helped Mike finish getting suited up, efficiently fastening the remaining straps and securing the helmet in place. Once done, Alto hustled Mike out of the locker room and into a long environmental enclosure corridor, which stretched out so far its end was barely visible.
Alto, walking ahead, began the recap. “Your role as a diplomat is to represent the authority of corporate interests to the Chornoi. They don’t have an economic system yet, but they’re intelligent enough to develop one—with human help.”
“Okay,” Mike replied absently.
Alto continued, “They survive on nothing but sunlight—yellow sunlight from our sun, which is, as you know, corporate property. If you can make them understand that feeding off our light puts them in debt to humanity, we could eventually train entire generations of them to work for us. They could become highly profitable labor.”
Mike thought for a second, then asked, “Can we turn off the sunlight?”
“What? No, Mike,” Alto replied, sounding baffled. “We can’t turn off the sun.”
“I thought we built it,” Mike said with complete sincerity. “Dang.”
Alto shook his head inside his helmet. “No, Mike. The sun has always been there.”
Mike’s eyes widened. “Always? So how do we own it?”
“Because it’s a star, Mike,” Alto explained patiently. “Humanity claimed it. That’s why we call it our sun—Sol. It’s the center of our planetary system. That’s why it’s called the Solar System.”
Mike looked skeptical. “The sun’s not a star. Ha. Ha.”
Alto sighed. “Yes, Mike, the sun is a star. A yellow giant star. It’s just the one we call the sun because it’s ours.”
“Are there other solar systems?”
“There are other star systems, but not ones we live in,” Alto explained, his patience stretching thin.
“Why not?”
“Because they’re too far away,” Alto said, trying to simplify. “The only thing we can move at light-speed is light itself.”
“But what about the lightspeed spaceships? My daddy said C-speed on a spaceship means lightspeed.”
“C-speed and lightspeed are just names, Mike. They represent the top speeds for those spaceships, but they’re not actually faster than the speed of light. Mass traveling at the speed of light would turn into energy, and slowing it down again is, well, complicated.”
Mike wasn’t convinced. “But the commercials say lightspeed is faster than light.”
Alto groaned. “That’s just marketing, Mike. They use it as a figure of speech. We can’t actually move faster than light—not without changing the definition of light-speed.”
“So, lightspeed isn’t the speed of light? You’re trying to make me sound dumb, aren’t you?” Mike chuckled and gave Alto a playful elbow nudge from behind, nearly knocking him off balance.
Alto staggered slightly, caught himself, and sighed. “Alright, listen, Mike. Focus up. I’m going to remind you of what you need to know for your diplomacy.”
Mike nodded inside his helmet, triggering the visor to lower over his face. He let out a surprised laugh when it happened, amused by the way the gold-plated faceplate reflected the overhead lights, casting a bright beam onto the back of Alto’s helmet.
“These creatures, the Chornoi, don’t have personal lives,” Alto began, his voice steady. “They only become as intelligent as they need to be. They clone themselves—through parthenogenesis—to form groups called ‘sails’ to solve problems. They communicate by storing information in their bodies and transferring it physically to others.”
Mike nodded, but Alto suspected he wasn’t following. Still, he pressed on.
“If we can get one Chornoi to work with us, it could clone itself and convince the others to do the same. A trained Chornoi could be a massive asset, performing tasks in space and reducing our dependency on expensive labor contracts, like the ones we have with the Amazon Union.”
Mike nodded again, his visor rising automatically.
“They interpret information from the light they feed on. Their entire bodies are like our brains. Science doesn’t even know how far their senses extend,” Alto added, noticing Mike’s silence.
“They’re basically just starfish-shaped, solarized space fungus from the Kuiper Belt,” Alto summarized, trying to simplify.
“The Kuiper Belt?” Mike asked, finally speaking up.
“The Horror Vacui,” Alto corrected.
“Oh, cool,” Mike said, satisfied with that answer.
Mike followed Alto and stepped out onto the stark, gray surface of the alien planetoid. The ground stretched out in a gentle curve, the horizon visibly close in the low gravity. Above, the sky was a vast black expanse, dotted with clusters of stars. A trail of spacesuit footprints led away from the end of the enclosure toward a pavilion in the distance, where several men stood waiting.
Just past the men, beyond a table set up between them and the alien, was what Mike had come for. The alien didn’t look like anything he’d expected. It reminded him of a solar sail on a spaceship—shiny, but somehow not shiny at the same time, shimmering like a distorted hole in the sky. It moved like a leaf caught in an invisible current, or a fish swimming through water. It was about as tall as the men standing near it, but there was something unsettling about the way it floated, like it didn’t belong in this reality.
Mike kept his big smile plastered on as he reached the group. Alto began introducing the men around the table.
But Mike’s attention was drawn to the alien. If it had stayed perfectly still, he might not have noticed it at all. But it moved, constantly flapping, like the white noise of a malfunctioning viewscreen that you couldn’t look away from.
“This is Count Kir Strugatsky,” Alto said, pointing to the first man, who looked ancient—like a hundred years old. “He’s largely responsible for discovering the Chornoi during his exploration of the Kuiper Belt.”
Mike nodded excitedly, wanting to tell the Count how much he admired space explorers. But before he could say anything, Alto moved on to the next introduction.
As Mike’s attention drifted back to the alien, it continued to move—slowly paddling in place with its five arms, almost like a bird hovering in midair. Its arms were thinner than the rest of its body, tapering to sharp points that gave off an eerie blur, making it look like a hole in the sky with jagged edges.
“And this is Professor Oshio Ori, illustrious professor of xenobiology at Space Harvard,” Alto said, but Mike barely registered the introduction.
The alien’s central body was thicker, almost like a man’s head. But every time Mike tried to focus on it, the creature shifted, as if it couldn’t hold its shape. It reminded him of a rigid flag, fluttering in slow motion.
Professor Ori stepped forward with a smile that shone brightly through his visor. “How do you feel about meeting Ambassador Fung?”
Mike answered, “Excited!” But then, with a frown, added, “Who’s that?”
Professor Ori gestured toward the alien. “Can you see them?”
Mike nodded, triggering his visor to drop down with a hiss and a click. The gold-plated faceplate caught the overhead lights and reflected a beam right into Professor Ori’s face. Mike chuckled, starting to apologize, but the professor’s face twisted in fear. He shrieked something about the ambassador.
“Don’t face the ambassador! The light—it’s too much!”
Confused, Mike turned toward the alien. The beam from his visor hit it like a spotlight. Instantly, the creature began to move—whipping through the air in a frantic blur. It spun faster than anything Mike had ever seen, thrashing about like two cats fighting, their fur caught in a whirlwind.
Shouts rang out around him as the alien spun even faster. Mike’s suit flashed as his HUD warned him that his ablative shields had activated. He barely had time to register the warning before the alien tore through the air, a blur of movement that made everything around him feel slow and heavy.
Then, silence. The alien shot upwards, disappearing into the dark sky like a lost kite swept away in a storm.
Mike turned, confused, just in time to see the aftermath. Professor Ori’s arm was still pointing, still gesturing toward where the alien had been—but the rest of him was gone. What remained of him was strung out in a grotesque ribbon of red, connecting back to where his body had been.
Off in the distance, Mike saw two men flailing, their bodies propelled by the explosive loss of blood pressure as arterial sprays carried them in all directions. It was like watching puppets jerked about by invisible strings, their limbs moving chaotically, helplessly.
Alto was gone too. In his place was a trail of blood arcing upward. Mike’s gaze followed the arc to where Alto’s body slowly turned in midair, his neck split wide open like a grotesque grin. His head lay at an awkward angle, resting against his shoulder as his body spun.
Mike blinked, then turned and began trudging back toward the enclosure.
“I think something went wrong,” he muttered.