Memory Transcription Subject: Ensign Sifal, Arxur Dominion Fleet

Date [standardized human time]: October 18, 2136

David wiped some lamb grease from off his lips. It was weird how small the humans’ mouths were relative to the rest of their heads. “Alright, so, I mentioned cognitive empathy already because that’s the more directly useful one if you’re trying to win something competitive. Visualize the enemy’s perspective, guess their plan, adjust your own plans to counter it.”

My eyes scrunched up in confusion. “How do you get enough information on the enemy to accurately simulate them?”

“Well,” said David, “that’s where the second type of empathy comes in: affective empathy, which is where you find yourself mirroring the feelings of those around you.” There was a wistfulness to his expression, and I found myself wondering how I knew it was wistful. “You feel joy when you see others being happy and sad when you see their sorrow. The Venlil trust us because this was what showed up on their empathy tests.” David paused for a moment, looking concerned. Concerned for me? “They put some humans into a brain scanner and showed them videos of Arxur harming herbivores. It showed up as the same kind of pain and retaliatory rage as if the humans had been attacked themselves.” He reached his hand across the table towards mine, reassuringly. “Sorry. I don’t mean to retread it, but yeah, that’s why your species has been getting such a chilly reception.”

I squeezed my eyes shut again as the shame and guilt came to the forefront. “I don’t want to dwell on it,” I said miserably. “How does that help?”

David shrugged. “Well, it helps you read people,” he said.

That had to be a translator error. “Sorry… read people?” I repeated back to him. “What, like a book?”

David nodded. “Yeah, exactly!” I squinted at him, like he’d lost his mind. “Okay, would you prefer a hunting metaphor?” he said, pivoting nimbly. “You guys do tracking, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “That’s how we found you. I could smell the tallow you were rendering. What was that, by the way?” Nothing he’d cooked for us had matched that scent.

“Hm?” David blinked. “Oh, like I said, I ate an hour ago. Threw together a bit of a half-assed cassoulet from the pantry. It’s a French stew of white beans slathered in bits of fat-cured duck to make the vegetables taste meatier.”

I made a face somewhere between disgusted and horrified. “I’m coming around to herbs on meat, but the reverse is never going to stop being a little weird.”

He shrugged. “It is what it is. Most of our cuisine is like that, really. But you guys can’t handle vegetables, and the rest of the aliens won’t touch meat. You’re all missing out.”

Wait, “won’t”? Doesn’t he mean the prey “can’t” eat meat?

David sighed. “But I digress. I meant like the other aspects of tracking, though. Visual cues? Broken twigs in the underbrush, footprints, that sort of thing?”

“Aha, so that’s how humans hunt!” I said, grinning. “Figured you had to have a workaround for how scentblind you are.”

“Just to animal trails, mostly,” said David. “We let the dogs handle that for us. Can you guys smell when it’s raining, though?”

I did a double-take. “What? No! What? How?!”

David laughed. “Not my area of expertise, but I think we’re mostly good at sniffing out poisons and disease? Rain on Earth stirs up some trace toxins from soil bacteria. Harmless at that concentration, but we’re incredibly sensitive to it.”

“That’s wild,” I said. Odd focus for a predator, though. “But what does that have to do with reading people?”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Well, by observing peoples’ body language--that’s the visual cues--plus a bit of empathic intuition--that’s the scent--you can guess what people are feeling,” said David. “Mix that in with your observations of them--what you know about them, how you’ve seen them react to things in the past--and you can practically guess what they’re thinking.”

I squinted at David again. I didn’t believe him--not unless sapience in pack predators was comorbid with full-blown psychic powers--but I trusted him enough at this point to give him the chance to prove me wrong. “Okay, show me how.”

David leaned back in his chair, but kept his eyes locked on me. “Well, there’s a bit of a learning curve across species. It might be easier if we asked another Arxur to join us?”

My eyes went wide. “Nothing would please me less,” I said stiffly.

David raised his hands placatingly. “I won’t force you, but do you mind if I ask why?” He kept his eyes locked on me as he spoke, though, oddly.

We Arxur were nothing if not competitive. That was how Betterment wanted us to be, and even for me, trying to outperform my fellows was an easy matter of habit. I’d come here in the first place because I’d wanted to learn something useful that the other junior officers didn’t know about, so I obviously didn’t want to invite one to join us. Even setting aside my selfishness for a moment, though, this knowledge was dangerous and blasphemous to have; I didn’t want to risk an execution. And even setting that aside… “I don’t think most Arxur would be interested,” I said aloud. My head sank down below my shoulders. “If this lesson is about channeling some urge to care about others, I don’t know how many of us have that urge at all. They seem happy about hurting… people.” I’d hesitated for a moment, reassessing if by “people” I’d meant Arxur or prey, but I decided it didn’t matter. Most Arxur seemed to take joy in hurting prey and each other. That was the nature of the nightmare we’d made for ourselves.

“Okay,” said David, still watching me carefully, “and how do you know they’re happy?”

My mind reeled. How the fuck did I know that? I tried to visualize the best example I could think of: the bomber I served on, the Bloodless, was captained by an absolute sadist of an Arxur. He took cruelty to an excessive and performative extreme. He’d taken a liking to bludgeoning his prey to death because it kept them alive to suffer for longer if they didn’t bleed out. He saved the comparative kindness of a torn throat for insubordinate Arxur, and the strong suspicion around the ship was that the Captain only did that because someone further up the chain had told him to rein it in.

The expression on his face when he pummeled something weaker than him into a discolored mess was just… pure glee….

“Body language, intuition, and observations of past behaviors,” I muttered half to myself, staring off into space as another thought occurred to me. David tried to congratulate me, but I waved him to silence. I already got it. Whatever type of bizarre psychic power this was, I had the knack. I’d been using it subconsciously for years, and never noticed. I needed time to reflect on it.

See, the other thing that stood out to me, now that I knew what I was looking for, was that, for as much as the Captain seemed to enjoy the perks of the job, the First Officer on the Bloodless had a far more subdued reaction to preparing his own food. I’d always just chalked it up to hot and cold differences in temperament--the First Officer favored the more traditionalist tactic of clawing open his prey’s jugular vein--but there was something off about his whole demeanor. When he killed something, he looked more or less “normal” by Arxur standards, but there was always a moment or so before he got into the rhythm of violence where his expression was coldly unreadable. I’d always felt an odd interest in him--he was an even-tempered professional like myself, and he had a lean and angular frame that was far from unattractive--but I was starting to wonder if my intuition was picking up on something else, too.

I leaned forward, resting my maw on my arms, and my elbows on the table. I needed to keep a close eye on David for this. “David, can you, um… actually try to murder me?” I winced from the volume as everyone at the table, Peacekeepers included, very loudly refused. “Sorry, I meant like… as a thought exercise. Imagine trying to kill me with a claw--a knife, for real.”

David hesitated for a moment, but I think he knew what I needed from him. He sighed. “As you wish,” he said, rubbing his eyes again. Slowly, his whole demeanor changed. His breathing slowed. His blinking slowed. His muscles tensed up: not just his forearms, like I’d expect, but his jaw clenched as well. And his eyes narrowed, and they burned with a cold aura of baleful hate in them.

“That’s it,” I said, shaken. “That’s the expression exactly. I’ve seen that before. What the fuck… what IS that expression?”

David sighed again, and the expression faded away with his exhaled breath like the afterimage of a switched-off holopad. “That’s someone with a strong sense of empathy steeling themselves to violently ignore it.”