Memory Transcription Subject: Chiri, Gojid Refugee

Date [standardized human time]: November 1, 2136

The sun was setting over the urban sprawl off to the west as David brought the boat full of supplies back to the rubble-specked island we were living on. I had my new holopad in my coat pocket, but aside from that, we’d left our purchases on the boat until we had a better idea of what was going on back at the restaurant. Strong-looking humans in blue uniforms, a darker shade of blue than the Peacekeepers, were filtering out of the building just as we strolled up.

“Hi, I’m the owner, I called it in,” said David, waving the law enforcement agents down. “What happened?”

One officer glanced back into the restaurant, and shook his head. “Nothing to report,” he said, an annoyed twist to his mouth. “There were no looters. You’re safe to head back in.” He wasn’t making eye contact with David when he spoke. I thought humans normally did that.

“The door wasn’t unlocked, was it?” asked David. He’d made a big show of locking it as we left. He’d said I was already the second alien to barge in while the place was closed.

“Have a nice evening, sir,” said the police officer, conspicuously neither answering the question nor setting us at ease.

David and I watched the officers filter out and drive off, not sure whether or not it was a wise idea to quietly dread whatever, if anything, we’d find inside. He took a deep breath, and led the way.

What we found was a human woman in a formal suit--wasn’t that normally menswear?--seated at a table, glaring at the door, her polished black shoes propped up on another chair for comfort. There was a glass of some brown liquor on the table in front of her, along with a couple lime wedges, some already used, and the rest of the fancy-looking bottle. Behind her, I noticed that the only gap in the bar’s lineup was on the top shelf. Beyond that, my deductive reasoning had nothing. I had no idea who this woman was.

Jilted former lover, here to steal him back from you, the critical voice offered immediately. She was always happy to put that kind of evil into words.

“Good evening, Charmaine,” David said coldly. “We’re not currently open. Shall I close out your tab for the añejo?” Aged tequila, then, if my memory served.

“Fuck you,” she said, pointing her glass at David aggressively. “You called the fucking cops on me?!”

“You broke into my restaurant,” David scoffed, incredulous.

“How did you even know I was here?” Charmaine asked pointedly.

“I’m sorry, you want hints on how to break into my building?” David said, eyebrows raised.

“If I wanted to go around intimidating civilians, I would have joined the CIA in the first place,” Charmaine said. “I didn’t. I joined the Peacekeepers. It’s a big, scary galaxy out there. Somebody with experience had to look after all those green fucking volunteers.” She glared bitterly at David. “You and your Plucky Space Girlfriend are the reason I’m stuck in this shit job on the home front instead now. So yes, the least you could do is help me get good at it.”

Plucky Space Girlfriend? I pointed to myself in baffled confusion.

“What? No, not you,” said Charmaine, incredulous. “Who the fuck even are you? Hell, how did you even get here? Aren’t all the Gojids supposed to be back at the--”

David cut her off, and redirected her back to her initial question. Away from asking questions about me. “Security system went off,” he said, patting the pocket containing his holopad.

“I disabled the security system,” Charmaine shot back.

“Backup security system,” said David, pointing at the ceiling. The two humans stared at each other in baffling silence for a few moments. Faintly, from several stories up, at the very edge of hearing, I could just barely make out the sound of a dog barking.

Charmaine’s jaw dropped. “Oh come on! You had a fucking nanny cam going for the dog?!”

“Yup! Poor little guy was freaking out, so I checked the main security system. Couldn’t see the feed for some reason.” David shrugged, smirking. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, you’re new at this.”

“Again, go fuck yourself,” said Charmaine. “You know goddamn well why I’m new at this.”

“Where’s your Plucky Earth Boyfriend, by the way?” asked David, taking the seat across from her. I followed David, but I wasn’t following this conversation.

“Do I look like I fuck dudes?” Charmaine scoffed, running her hand through a head of hair trimmed shorter than David’s.

“You look like a cop,” offered David helpfully.

“Fuck. You.” Charmaine clearly hadn’t found his observation helpful. “If you’re asking about William, College Boy’s at a plum desk job down in Arlington. Old jarheads like me get stuck with fieldwork.”

“Oh, you never mentioned your service history,” said David. “I’m surprised the Peacekeepers didn’t just transfer you back to the Marines.”

“The Powers That Be wanted me on a shorter leash than that,” said Charmaine, icily. “The leash feels great, actually! You should put one on, too.”

David rolled his eyes. “Is that why you’re here? You and I both know I’m entirely too stubborn and opinionated to follow orders at all, let alone to do proper intelligence work. This is just about loose ends, and making sure I don’t talk about what happened. They can’t properly call it Top Secret if it happened in plain sight of a civilian with no clearance, and they’re mad they can’t arrest me if I run my mouth about it.”

I blinked, as the puzzle suddenly started to click into place. “Oh! Okay, wait, is this about that Arxur you met?”

I didn’t think Charmaine’s jaw could drop any further, but there it went. Even David froze in shock, his eyes impossibly wide.

“You told a fucking HERBIVORE?!” Charmaine screeched. “How stupid are you?!”

I was on my feet in an instant, claws brandished with rage. “Call me an herbivore again and I'll rip your fucking skin off!” I roared.

Chairmaine’s eyes went wide and whipped over to David. Her head shook incredulously. “You son of a bitch,” she said hollowly. “You fucking did it again, didn’t you. Didn’t you!”

David smirked, and tried to regain momentum. “Did you know that the Kolshian meat allergy, at least in Gojids, isn’t triggered by cheese?” He leaned forward, conspiratorially. “Ask me how I know,” he whispered.

“How the fuck…” the human woman breathed. “You realize this isn’t making your case easier, right? Like, what, I’m supposed to head back home and tell my handlers that the goddamn Alien Whisperer doesn’t want to work with us?”

David shrugged. “It was a fluke.”

“Convincing an alien to betray its culture and defect to Earth once is a fluke! Twice, it’s becoming a fucking pattern!” Charmaine shouted.

“I barely did anything! It’s selection bias!” David insisted. “Only the open-minded ones are willing to come to Earth at all. Seriously, have we had a single visiting foreign head of state yet? Even our staunchest allies are still too terrified to come see the Savage Predator Homeworld.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Charmaine muttered. “The CIA needs you.” She rolled her eyes. “Probably.”

David shook his head. “There's only one intelligence job I'll accept, and I'm already applying for it.”

Charmaine raised her eyebrows. “And that is?”

“Gang of Eight.”

David was a somewhat reserved person, most of the time. So were most of the on-duty Peacekeepers I’d run into. It reasonably followed from that, then, that the sound that came out of Charmaine was, without hyperbole, the loudest I had ever heard a human laugh, ever.

“You’re running for Congress!?” she managed to eventually squeeze out between full-body comedy convulsions.

David shrugged. “City council first, maybe work my way up, but yeah. Gonna try my hand at politics.”

“Sorry, what’s the Gang of Eight?” I asked.

“America’s main legislative body has hundreds of delegates,” David said. “On paper, they’re supposed to oversee all intelligence work, but it’s just too impractical to brief all of them on matters of utmost secrecy, so in reality, only eight of them get briefed on the full picture. It used to be eight specific members back under the old pre-SatWar two-party system, but it’s a little more free-form nowadays.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

Charmaine rolled her eyes. “It’s still never a first-term congressman with no previous intelligence work.”

“It can be if the CIA says he’s got a talent for it,” David said, smirking. “In fact, I hear they’re so optimistic about my abilities, they dispatched an agent to ask me in person to work with them.”

Charmaine snorted dismissively, but there was a hint of a smile as she took another sip of her tequila. “Smartass.”

David smirked. “Now, now, there’s no need for obscenity! Why, I’m just a down-to-Earth small business owner with some strong opinions about how our mismanaged foreign policy’s starting to hurt our economy,” he said. “Who’s going to speak for the hardworking average American? Not those fat cats up on Capitol Hill, I’ll tell you what!”

“Stahp,” Charmaine groaned, as she slumped over her glass. “I’m not fuckin’ drunk enough to hear your shitty talking head impersonation.”

“And you won’t be,” said David. “Again, we’re closed, and I have some ingredients to unload, so unless you plan to help carry groceries, would you mind calling yourself a cab?”

The agent looked at the door, her brow furrowed, deciding her next course of action. The conversation sounded like it was concluding, at last, but it didn’t feel like the matter was resolved at all. If they wanted David’s silence, then it didn’t sound like Charmaine’s employers would consider a long-term career in public service to be a serious compromise. She looked like a woman who’d reached a dead-end, not a destination, and so she was already plotting a new course.

She’s a threat to the life we’re trying to build here, said the critical voice, far more emotional than usual. We’re leaving ourselves vulnerable. She’ll keep coming back until she gets what she wants.

She could interfere with our visa application, said the odd voice, far more methodical than usual. Force David to choose between silence and us.

Did I have the voices on backwards?

The two greatest threats to our safety are your weakness and your foolishness, the critical voice explained. I have to say unkind things to keep you alive. We are NOT getting hurt again!

You were raised an herbivore, but your blood remembers the hunt, the odd voice explained. You live astride two worlds. Your instincts know how to hurt people. Your imagination knows how others can hurt you.

What’s the Council’s recommendation, then?

Strike now, they said.

“So I’m sorry, but could I ask the obvious question?” I said, doing my best impersonation of a Fissan businesswoman in the midst of a particularly icy negotiation. “Why does it matter if David talks about this Arxur woman? The world’s been turned upside-down around once per month since the United Nations made first contact. What’s one more terrible revelation on the pile going to do?”

Charmaine shook her head in frustration. “I don’t fucking know. The ‘why’ is above my pay grade. I just have my orders.”

I tilted my head. “You don’t even know why talking about it is bad, but you somehow know that telling a former member of the Federation is worse?”

“I…” Charmaine began, baffled. She leaned back in her chair, away from me. “I mean, we don’t want state secrets leaking to the wider world.”

“I said ‘former’, though?” I said quizzically. “I'm on Team Earth now.”

“If I might interject?” David brushed his hair back, and seemed to mimic my stance at the table instinctively. He fell into formation as naturally as he breathed, covering me like a gunship off my wing. Was this the power of a social predator? “Look, if I had to speculate,” he said, “I’d say it’s a policy concern. I have more fingers on one hand than there have been conventional attacks on U.S. soil, and every single one ended in escalation. People are already calling for blood. Pull up social media from the last few weeks, and the only topic that was trending harder than ‘Glass Nishtal’ was ‘Humanity First’, and that particular movement has already drawn blood.”

Charmaine looked like she was searching for a good spot to hook into that argument. It had the cadence of supporting keeping the Arxur incident secret, but David had omitted that connection when making his case. He was technically just describing the regional zeitgeist without actually making a point. It was a good distraction, and I trusted that he had a deeper point he was thrusting towards.

The human woman is strong, said the odd voice, but we can outwit her. It’s two against one.

She’s probably beginning to regret drinking before this conversation, yes, said the critical voice.

“How does that tie back to the Arxur?” I asked, trying to set David up for the kill.

“Because my little incident makes the Arxur look sympathetic,” he said. “When the Federation had us dead to rights, it was the Arxur who bailed us out. That knowledge is already fucking with the narrative. Add in this idea that they were victims as much as victimizers, and suddenly policy shifts. The UN is gearing up for total war against the Federation. If this gets out, there’s going to be a massive popular push for us to detour into Arxur regime change.”

“Right!” said Charmaine, taking the bait. “So that’s why this can’t get out!”

David tilted his head forward. “You want us to go to war without letting the public make an informed decision on who we’re attacking?”

Charmaine flinched like she’d been struck. “That’s not what I--”

“No no, it’s fine, we’ve got a wonderful track record on undeclared wars with no civilian oversight,” said David. “We should just let the nice powerful men in suits do whatever they think is best for America and the economy. Aafa could use a few pineapple plantations.”

Charmaine leapt to her feet in a fury. I did likewise, and she froze up. The ex-Peacekeeper wasn’t wearing her shiny blue body armor anymore, just a set of clothing that humans called a “suit”. See, I’d been learning a lot today. I’d learned the names of a number of different kinds of human clothing, for example. I’d also learned that my quills alone could pretty trivially shred through most of them.

The human woman glared at me, and sat back down. “Keep Hawaii out of your fuckin’ mouth,” she muttered at David. “But yeah, I see your point.”

I sat down as well. “That covers the issues with telling humanity,” I said, “but what about people like me?”

This time, David’s attention swiveled, and it was me that he looked at with concern. His mouth opened, but he said nothing for a few moments, choosing his words carefully. “There’s too much hatred for the Arxur among the people of the Federation,” he said softly. “Opening doors with the Arxur might close them with the Feds. Even seeing us openly considering working with the Arxur might send what few allies we have running to the hills.”

Charmaine nodded. She hadn’t made the point, but it supported her position nevertheless. “Yeah, I mean, that’s a pretty big geopolitical concern. Good enough excuse to keep this under wraps, right?”

I didn’t need the chorus inside my head for this one. Deep down, I already knew what to say.

“I don’t feel like my life has been better for having the truth hidden from me,” I said softly. “If the Arxur were always willing to talk with meat-eaters, we Gojids might have been greeted as allies, like you were, if our culture hadn’t been stolen from us.”

Charmaine looked afflicted. Was that just empathy, or had her culture been stolen from her as well?

“So, wait, are you still Catholic, or did you finally stop living in fear of centuries-old missionaries?” asked David, showing an aggressive lack of tact.

Charmaine leapt to her feet again in a rage. “What did I fucking say?” Charmaine said threateningly.

“You said to keep Hawaii out of my mouth,” David said calmly. “I’m talking about the Philippines.”

“I’m from both archipelagos,” Charmaine growled.

“Then you can appreciate the damage that colonialism can do to a culture twice over,” said David, “and how important it is to reverse it. Do you even recognize the name of Kulalaying, the Moon’s Shadow, or do you simply accept the gods the Spaniards inflicted on you?”

Charmaine shook her head, hollowly. “So… what, that’s a pre-contact mythological name? Why the fuck do you even know that?”

David snorted. “Because I can cook a better pancit palabok than your grandmother.”

“Okay. Why don’t you reel it the fuck back in, buddy,” Charmaine said coldly.

David held his palms up in a gesture of peace. That was an out of line thing for him to say. I didn’t know what “pancit palabok” was, but it sounded like an old family recipe. Trash talking someone’s generational home cooking was considered “a dick move” in most cultures.

“Savory-sweet noodles flavored with sea creatures,” David explained. “Classic celebratory dish from Filipino culture.” He shook his head. “And… yeah, I was mentored by an outspoken expat for a while. He had some very strong opinions on the importance of reclaiming his precolonial heritage.”

“And ‘Catholic’?” I asked.

“Subtype of Christian,” said David. He turned back to Charmaine. “‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ Gospel of John, Chapter 8, Verse 32.”

She squinted at David incredulously. “Wait, I thought you were Jewish.”

David shrugged. “Think what you like, but it’s a poor Atheist who can’t quote scripture.”

“And the Bible quote is in reference to, what, your cooking?”

David shook his head. “No, that was back to the meat of the matter. Whether or not we should hide what I know from the Federation. We shouldn’t. It might be rough in the short term, but they’re better off in the long run for not living a lie. There’s a Krakotl Admiral in international prison right now who’s going to lose his shit if he ever fully grasps that humans are people. We shouldn’t hide from the Federation that the Arxur are people, too.”

I didn’t want to admit it, not about the Arxur, but I knew the score. “Don’t treat us like lessers,” I said. “We’re sapient. If the evidence is there, we’ll come around to it.”

Charmaine slumped back down into her chair, and just shook her head. “You two are exhausting, you know that?” She perked up for a moment, as a thought occurred to her. “I don’t think I caught your name, actually,” she said, looking towards me.

I stiffened, and repeated the words to the magic spell I’d learned. “I’d like to speak to an attorney before answering any further questions, sir.”

Charmaine snorted. “It’s ‘ma’am’. And see? Exhausting.” She sighed, and sat up. “Look, I hope you appreciate that I can’t actually make policy decisions. That happens way the fuck up the chain. Best I can realistically do is run interference. Drag this out long enough that somebody else’s cat gets out of a different bag, and keeping your secret becomes moot. So I suppose, to that end, I’ll be stopping by from time to time.” She smirked. “It sounds to me like I’ve almost convinced you to join up! I’ll let my boss know that it’ll just take another visit or two, and you’ll come around.”

“Might even take three, who knows?” David said, playing along. “I’m sure you’ll convince me eventually. Just keep trying!”

“Put the tequila on my tab, then,” said Charmaine, rising to her feet for a third time, but calmly at last. “And for the love of God, please stop casually deprogramming aliens.”

“No,” said David, smiling.

Charmaine groaned. “Fuck you, then. And I’m coming back for that better-than-my-Grandmother’s palabok, you hear me?”

“Only if you start respecting locked doors,” David shot back.

“No,” she said, smiling, and left.

For a moment, everything was quiet, and just the two of us were alone in an empty restaurant. David reached over and held my paw in his hand in a show of support and sympathy. “What an exhausting day,” he said, and I couldn’t disagree.