This shooting star was no mere space rock, but a landing capsule around which dust and debris had gathered into a dirty crust. It shuddered as it descended ablaze through Cabaret’s atmosphere, and the occupant of said capsule groggily came out of a six month’s meditation, not confused because his species hadn’t discovered confusion yet. The prolate spaceship made out of vital energy impacted in a dune, vitrifying whatever sand hadn’t been blown away by the collision. The being inside waited a few minutes for the exterior to cool down, and then, in front of a pack of astonished construction workers in their natural habitat, it began peeling off the layers of the capsule, as if it were an intergalactic banana.
“Tim! Weren’t you in charge of taking care of the sand mound?” The foreman, a strong black man whose belly could be confused with that of a pregnant woman, shook a finger in front of the newest worker.
“Sir, menaces falling from the stratosphere are not contemplated in the job description,” Tim argued like the Rules Lawyer he had been born to be.
“You are Sand Mound Supervisor, boy. Act like it. Something attacks the sand, it’s your problem,” a bald guy who had forgot he was carrying a pile of seven cement bags on his shoulder said.
The architect, with her long blonde hair flowing from the sides of her security helmet and ready to cause her death in a gruesome workplace accident, came from behind a column and began taking notes about the capsule.
“What are you doing?” the foreman asked.
“Figuring out if our insurance covers this particular kind of meteor strike.”
Tim reached for a nearby broom and used it to, following adequate workplace safety regulations, poke the space watermelon.
The final layer fell down, and it revealed the alien cultivator. Its sensitive tendrils were nude as it squealed, its wet external epithelium stung due to a variant it hadn’t calculated: the atmosphere of cabaret had a small, almost negligible amount of a substance pernicious for its kind. This substance, highly reactive and for some unexplainable reason associated to the color red by the local populace, liked to bind to numerous other compounds. Widely regarded as the electron thief of the hood and generally coming in pairs or trios, you and I know it as number eight. Or oxygen.
As the creature, with its trilateral symmetry, squirmed and struggled to use its spirit to protect itself from the harmful environment, the construction workers began doing something they were discouraged from doing: speculating.
“It’s a nudist branch!” claimed the foreman. “A friend has one in his marine fish tank!”
“Nudibranch, dear ignoramus, nudibranch,” said the architect, palming the man on his well-trained shoulder. “However, nudibranchs are restricted to the seas, they don’t come from the sky.”
“Maybe it is a cultivating nudibranch. I mean, it’s shedding its shell, so to speak, and nudibranchs do that after their larval stage,” said Tim, who had seen a documentary about sea slugs seven years ago and retained around three facts about nudibranchs.
“No,” the bald man sentenced, dropping a single bag of cement to remind the others of their place in the construction site hierarchy. “I believe it is a bryozoan. One of those moving colonies that use modified zooids — vibracula, I believe they were called — to crawl along the sea floor. Any arguments against that?”
“Bryozoans liven in the water. And a colony wouldn’t be able to get all of its zooids to the same cultivation level, or even to cultivate, even if one of them gained sentience. That aside, those mobile bryozoan colonies are rigid.”
A thin man with then darkest bags on cabaret resting under his eyes and a nose like an eagle approached. “Why are you all so knowledgeable about sea life?”
His co-workers shrugged.
“We need to be passionate about something and there are losts of somethings in the ocean,” said the foreman. “But this is most likely an alien. Do we have safety guidelines regarding aliens?”
The alien wondered why the air was vibrating so weirdly around it. The local climate felt like a mess, but it could be the oxygen poisoning.
“I don’t think we do,” said the thin man, adjusting his safety helmet that was a size too big for his head. “So what happens if someone dies due to the alien? Can their family sue?”
The alien finally managed to make an oxygen filter with its spirit, and its movements came to an abrupt halt. Now, it needed to get clued in about that which it had come searching for: prostitutes. This planet had intelligent beings who had, like his homeland, developed the complex act of prostitution. And they were broadcasting it to the heavens, to outer space. The manipulation of its own spirit and the vital energy that through it coursed had brought it to this place, that supposedly teemed with life. Yet the life around it… it seemed disappointing. It felt the bacteria and viruses wafting through the air, coming in little droplets from somewhere local-starward. They were interesting chemical constructs, for sure, but didn’t seem intelligent. Maybe analyzing them could aid in understanding what sort of replicator had persevered on this planet. Maybe they weren’t even capable of a sustained self-replication and it was just a complex local reaction that happened to be ongoing.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“Listen, okay, we need to kill that before it kills us. Or before its family sues us, which is ten times worse. Can aliens even sue?” the foreman asked the architect.
“I am positive they cannot do so in local courts, no.”
“Well then, at worst, this ends with us all dead. Not much different from leaving you in charge of an excavator, Doniel.”
The bald man laughed and flipped the bird. “Like you can drive anything except your wife crazy.”
Then they noticed an old woman with the speed of a paraplegic snail had sneaked by and now stood among them, staring at the alien.
“Is that an alien?” asked the sweet grandma, holding her purse with both hands.
“So it seems,” informed Tim. “You need to wear a helmet if you are going to be in the construction site, gram.”
“Don’t metric system me, young man!” She shook the cane she had been keeping under her armpit in the air, hitting the tired man’s helmet now and then, if only out of a sheer disregard for his integrity. “Can I adopt the alien?”
“We don’t even know if it is safe to touch it, mistress. Please, leave and let the men and the non-dumb blonde take care of it.
“It cannot be as dangerous as a gods-forsaken nigger,” The grandma grandmaed and began shuffling her way towards the alien.
The architect tried to stop her, but the strong arm of the foreman extended in front of her, preventing the girl from reaching the old woman. “I will pay for the lawsuit if she dies.”
“No, you will pay half the lawsuit, brother,” assured Doniel, dropping another cement bag to show he was not spewing out a load of hot air. “The other half is on me.”
“A third, Doniel, you will pay a third, and so will Foreman Chorlisle,” said the thin man.
“Thanks for your support, guys. Tim, are you going to support me?”
Tim fidgeted a bit with his fingers. “I’d rather be turned into a black person and be stuck on a counter providing customer service for the old lady than getting you out of trouble, Chorlisle. It’s not racism, I have no problem with your race: I just consider you an asshole.”
The foreman smiled wide, revealing teeth as white as the grandma’s attires. The ones with pointy hoods. “This is why I like having you around, Tim.”
“I hope your melanin fails you and your refusal to wear sunscreen ends in a cancer so aggressive, so vicious that the local gangsters feel outdone and compelled to step up their criminal game,” Tim blurted out, and then turned to look at the grandma, that was extending her cane to poke the alien. “And fuck you too, you racist hag. I hope this is my last day here.”
“Are you quitting?” chorlisle asked, sadness gathering in his expression.
Tim let out a single “ha”. Him, Head Sand Mound supervisor, quit? Not in a million years. “It’s just that the woman may kill us all.”
“I am glad you are not quitting, Tim. You seem like a friendly guy,” the architect said in an unexpectedly honest tone.
The alien turned a bit and started gently swaying its sensorial tendrils in the air, trying to garner a better understanding of its situation. Something had started pistoning on its outer layer. A ciclindricla object with a flexible extreme poked it once and again. The chemical composition of said object comprehended a variety of hydrogen-based substances, high in carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Too much oxygen. This could be a result of the high amounts of free water in the environment, but also of lifeforms that had evolved to use said element for more than a mere structural function. Unless there was an energy source constantly breaking water into dihydrogen and dioxygen, the second would need a biological origin, lest it all reacted with other substances in the environment and got lost. Dioxygen was a poison, yes, but it had to also be a waste product. And if it was a waste product, and oxygen was so readily found in these hydrogen and carbon structures, it was not far-fetched to think of the life here having developed a way to metabolize and take advantage of the deadly substance. After all, it was like a weaker variant of fluorine, and some beings back home used fluorine as fuel for their cells. An oxygen based metabolism… how delightfully alien.
Oxygen based prostitutes, oh dear. Oh dear.
The alien began crawling away, analyzing more of its environment as the construction workers screamed about what to do.
“Who will pay for the sand? We don’t have insurance against aliens melting it,”said Tim, to provide an example.
“Do you think it will lay eggs down my throat, like in films? Because ethat would be a cool way to go,” Doniel thought out loud.
“Highly doubt it. there are a lot of details of organic chemistry that would need to fit perfect for an alien to be able to parasite a Cabaretian. Starting with chirality, for example, and an immunity to every substance readily available inside our bodies. Living beings love.” and she gestured with her hands to emphasize this. “Absolutely love getting poisoned as soon as you take them out of the environment they evolved into.”
“But … it would be so cool. Like an action film side character dying gruesomely after saving his team form the alien. Better than a brick to the melon.” the irredeemable man insisted.
The grandma drove the cane deep into the alien’s mushy body, and the tendrils coiled around it, grasping it tightly. After that, the grandma got knocked out with her own cane. Falling on her back, still slouched, over the ground, like a tortoise turned upside down. A very racist tortoise. A turtle whose title includes either the word “wizard” or the word “dragon”.
“You help her, because I won’t.” the foreman clarified, before going back to supervising the rest of the team. The building wasn’t going to erect itself.