[https://64.media.tumblr.com/4370e99825a97c9e6ab39951880eca92/43758fc90ad8985c-5e/s250x400/235812314a9e35adf0ee50550db208b51e1c5895.pnj]
Picture by Timothy Morris
The door opened on a long-held puff of air.
Laura sneezed, and everyone looked at her.
"Sorry," she muttered into her elbow, furious with everyone else for making her feel guilty for what must just be a reaction to dust. They shouldn't even be here. It should be just be me and Koen.
A selfish thought, and now Laura was furious with herself, as well. She commanded the anger and shame to go away and her face to cool down. Neither obeyed.
So it was that when Koen emerged from his quarantine, Laura stood there, her smile awkward and inside of elbow damp.
He didn't notice. Koen was just so happy the door had opened when he pushed on it. What a smell in the corridor! So wild, so new, so different from the smell of his room! Cleaning agents, plastic and wood, just a hint of swamp. And of course all his friends and colleagues.
Mark tooted on a noise-maker. Li gave a shallow bow, but a smile transformed his face. "Welcome back."
Qani Ahmed clasped Koen's hand in both of hers, and tears came to his eyes at the contact, the first in four weeks at least. Possibly much longer. He didn't want to think about that.
"Oh my!" she said. "You're taller than I thought!"
Mark tooted again, and Chadwell shot him an annoyed glance. He stepped forward smartly and shook Koen's hand while trying to gauge which of them was taller without seeming to.1
Mark gave Koen an elbow-bump (which annoyed the older members of the group) and Severo skipped up to him and kissed his cheeks (which annoyed both Laura and Mark). Yoshida bowed and stepped aside to reveal Nelly and a waist-high delivery robot packed with flour, milk, and (in-shell pasteurized) eggs.
"Don't waste them," said Li and smiled again, remembering his father.
"No, sir!" Koen smiled back. "Let's all have pancakes!"
***
"Hey," said Mark half a hour later. "This is a crepe!"
Everyone else corrected Mark on his misapprehension, except for Koen, who was trying to think of a pun involving "crepe" and "crap." He never got a chance to say it out loud, which simulations indicate would have drastically altered his later relationship with Mark.
Nelly's voice was the loudest. "Not crepes. Not crepes at all. These are thicker."
"What – " Mark began, but Nelly was intent on educating him.
"And with a crepe, you add cheese or whatever you want and you roll it. You don't cook the things in the crepe."
This interruption and correction did not change Mark and Nelly's relationship, which was already bad.
Koen stepped into the grumbly silence with his serving plate. "More?" he asked. "These ones have apples in them."
Carbohydrates are interesting and important molecules. Like almost all the members of the Convention, Koen was mostly made of them.2 Clip carbon atoms together in a ring, hang oxygen and hydrogen off them, and you have a basic chunk of organism. You can burn it for energy, write information on it, and even use it as a building material.3
The pancakes Koen prepared on his first day out of quarantine contained carbs in the form of wheat starch and milk sugar. These (combined with a significant load of sugar from honey, apple slices, stroop syrup, jam, and chocolate spread) entered the bloodstreams of his co-workers through the villi of their small intestines, by which time the various forms of sugar had all been broken into simple monosaccharides such as glucose. As the concentration of glucose in the humans' blood rose, their pancreases released the hormone insulin, which instructed their muscle and fat cells to start pulling the sugar in for use as fuel.4 The insulin also activated their livers, which converted excess glucose into longer-lasting forms.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Koen's brain also reacted. His hypothalamus produced the chemical signal adenosine (itself built partly of sugar), which entered neurons through special adenosine receptors. There, it inhibited the conductance of calcium cations. The result was slowed neural firing and a long, drawn-out yawn.5
Koen shook his head and slapped his hands on the table. This startled Laura, who had also begun to slip into a food-coma.
"Coffee!" Koen declared. "Want some?"
Laura stifled her own yawn and smiled. "Yes, please." Vertical creases formed just under her cheek bones. Koen noticed these creases, and loved them.
He was not aware of how exactly the ground and roasted seeds of the Coffea bush would, when percolated in water and drunk, block his adenosine receptors and the Ca2+ inhibition commands originating in his hypothalamus. He just wanted to feel less sleepy, and he wanted to solve all of Laura's problems.
"Come on." He jerked his head toward the kitchen, which was separated from the dining area by a waist-high counter. Standing behind the counter, piloting the mighty four-headed espresso machine, Koen could look out at the now empty chairs and tables. Everyone else had left the canteen with the stated intention of getting some work done (and the actual intention of catching a nap at their desks). Laura and Koen had been left alone, which made both of them very happy for reasons they would never admit out loud.
Soon, Koen and Laura's adenosine receptors were blocked. Also, through hundreds of afternoon cups of coffee, they had trained themselves to associate the smell and taste with getting some work done.
"Oh!" Laura jerked her gaze away from his and turned to search for the box she had stashed on the counter. "How could I have forgotten?"
"What did you forget?" Koen clinked his little cup down and eyed the pile of dirty plates. He was looking forward to trying out the dishwasher.
"I'd better give you this." Laura held out the box and removed the top.
Even at a glance, Koen could tell the pouch inside was not human-made. It was brownish and smooth, with some kind of internal structure that formed facets when pressed. Laura picked up the pouch and it hung her fingers like a partially crystalized booger.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Your translator bug's inside. You had better open it over the sink."
Because of course it was full of fluids.
Once these were washed away, however, the object in Koen's palm wasn't particularly disgusting. It was almost pretty. It just didn't look much like a bug.
The translator had a chitinous shell, all right, with the iridescent green-bronze shimmer of a rose beetle. It even had two flaps on its back like a beetle's elytra. Presumably those were to protect the wings.
But where were the legs? Where was the mouth? The belly of the bug was covered with fuzz like Velcro or steel wool, and the head looked like a single fishbowl lens the size of his thumbnail.
"Why are you looking at it?" said Laura. "It doesn't use retinal scans. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Koen blinked at her, remembered the documentation. He cleared his throat and spoke in Dutch: "You are my translator."
The bug vibrated in his hand. Its lens flashed and it emitted a heavy, meaty aroma. Its elytra lifted, and a pair of wings unfolded. These blurred. When Koen let go, the bug hung in the air.
"How does it work?" he asked in English, and the bug said, "Tā shì rúhé gōngzuò de?"
Laura shrugged. "It works the same way Google Translate works. Exactly the same way, because that's the system we use for human languages."
This explanation was woefully inaccurate. However, Laura was not a technical specialist and meant no offense.
"What's hard," she continued, "is getting any sense out of the system when we're talking to nonhumans."
Koen looked around for aliens to test the bug on, but of course none were present in this small canteen. His sense of personal freedom, so great an hour ago, now seemed cramped again. He got out of his room, now he needed out of the building.
"Thank you," he said. "It's really quite pretty." He happened to meet Laura's eyes as he said, "pretty."
She realized that they were standing very close together.
1 Koen was five centimeters taller than Chadwell, but tended to slouch.
2 The exception of course being the nickle-iron Tensors and their relatives.
3 Although Koen sadly had no ability to grow wood or a crab shell.
4 Readers wishing to know more may look up "glycolysis" and "the citric acid cycle" in that order.
5 The biological significance of yawns is hotly contested.