In loving memory of
Samantha Aete Mange
May you live in our hearts forever.
Hmm… I think that should be fine enough. It’s short, sweet, and to the point. Anything more would be… extravagant for someone with such a minor role here. You have to remember, Timothy, the vast majority of the audience won’t have heard of the girl. If we carry on about it too much… well, the last thing we need is for some obsessive busybody to start digging.
No, no. Far better we simply acknowledge that something unfortunate happened while filming and move on.
…?
< teeth audibly grinding >
No… Timothy! We are not planning on showing the footage. Why would you even—have you completely lost the plot?
Bad enough you decided to go with a bloody suicide note.
…
Yes, I know I asked you to come up with a reason for her—oh, sod it! I should have known better than to farm out something so important. Bloody imbecile!
Do you have any idea how vast the universe is—the number of ways that girl could have disappeared, never to be seen again? The blasted pirate capital of the sector is less than four parsecs away from here. How difficult would it have been to simply claim she was on her way home but was captured and sold into slavery? No one would have even twitched an antennae! Then there’s the Cult ships. You never know when one of those might show up. She could have even… even had a random encounter with Archaeos!
…?
A full-on Archaedic battle—Bloody Nora! After the last war? No, no, no! Something smaller… like a-a… well, I don’t know. But surely, even they have regular transport ships.
Bah! Never mind. You get the idea!
Now, be a good chap and assign a few of the interns to recover the equipment you just jettisoned out of the airlock, won’t you?
…!
< receding footsteps >
Wait, Timothy.
< footsteps return >
…?
Under the pretense of recovering the body?
…?
No. I don’t expect you to actually—pretense! Pretense! Just how thick are you, you absolute—
< sharp inhale >
Look… just don’t do anything else… too creative. Alright? Just… just tell them to do their best. With the state of our scanning equipment they’ll be lucky to find much of anything, and that’s exactly how we want it. Yes?
Good lad. Off you go.
< footsteps recede again, sigh >
Bloody muppet… I wonder about that boy sometimes.
Mark poured over the display panel excitedly.
It was just the same as he remembered from back in the pod. Monochrome lines. Simplistic readout. Several boxes competing with one another over his attention, each highlighting a different section of the innards of the human body. It had not been a dream, after all!
Though, why it should be appearing here and not on the pod’s actual display…?
“What do you mean, words?” Naomi prodded. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
Mark fully closed the one eye he had managed to coax his secondary lid from. The display vanished with it, leaving him in total darkness. “I’m… not sure,” he admitted. “I can’t see them at all without the heat vision. It looks like… well, kind of like a computer screen, I guess. But it’s floating on the stream here. Like a projection.”
“Ah ha! I knew it was weird you weren’t seeing anything! And what did I tell you? A projection! Just like I said,” she replied smugly.
Mark rolled his eyes. “It only looks like a—oh, whatever. The important thing is, I’ve got some options to choose from.”
Naomi leaned over him instantly, nearly overbalancing him into the water in her haste. “Options?! What kind of options? You’re getting options, too? What can we get?”
“I don’t know,” he said patiently. “It’s just a bunch of lines and arrows pointing out our internal organs. I mean, it’s labeled. Like I said, there’s words, but it’s all in that same alien language we found on the pod… I think.”
“Well, of course, it would be in their language. It’s their tech! What other language would it be in? Portuguese? Anyway, you said it was our internal organs?” Naomi wondered. “There’s male and female?”
“Well, no,” he admitted, squinting with the one eye he could see out of. “I don’t see any sexual organs. Or several others, now that you bring it up. I guess it’s only showing me the ones that might be affected by our options.”
“Okay… but there’s no crayon pictures or anything? Nothing to indicate what the change might do?”
Mark shook his head and pointed, not that Naomi could have seen. “There’s a picture, but it isn’t crayon. More like… 80s sci-fi? And I assume these labels over here say something about what might happen if I picked them.”
“Huh… weird. Okay, then. What are our options? The lungs maybe? Maybe your water-breathing idea is still on the table.”
He nodded and shifted his finger over to indicate the item in question—again, not that Naomi could have seen what he was pointing at. But he had a tendency to talk with his hands even while on the telephone. “Yeah, the lungs are there.” He shifted his finger over toward the corresponding label which seemed to be straining toward his finger hopefully. “And there’s a label pointing them out, so I’m guessing that’s an option I can—”
One of the words on the label in question blurred. Half a tic later, it resolidified, replaced by by something instantly recognizable.
“Huh.”
“What?” Naomi asked, curious. “What is it?”
“One of the words changed. It’s in English now.” He pointed at it ineffectually. “This one. It says, ‘lungs.’ I guess… it somehow heard us talking? And relabeled it once it knew what it was called?”
Naomi frowned in thought. “It heard you, huh? Now that you mention it…”
Quickly, she glanced to one side, presumably toward her own unseen set of options. With a deliberate sort of gesture, she held her hand in front of her face and loudly proclaimed, “I sure do wish these pictures would show me what would actually happen to my body if I picked one of them.”
Mark noted a bit of a flicker coming from her wrist, but if her facial expression was any judge, nothing else had changed. And now that he was thinking about it, it was kind of strange that only she had a visible light on her wrist. What was that even supposed to do? It was not bright enough to see anything with beyond a few inches away, that much was certain.
Regardless, he now had a reference frame through which he could at least begin to improve communications with the thing that had been implanted within them.
“Okay, well this is the stomach,” he began, pointing as he went. And thankfully, the relevant parts of the labels continued shifting to match. Obviously, this change did not tell him anything beyond what he already knew, but it was a step in the right direction. “And here’s the large intestine. The small intestine. Uhh… the liver—”
“The liver?” Naomi interrupted. “What possible use would changing the liver serve?”
“How would I know?” he asked. “You’re the scientist.”
“I’m studying horticulture, dingus. I take botany classes. Not… animal sciences.”
“Biology?”
She flicked his ear. “That’s all life. Everyone takes that. Even computer nerds.”
He grimaced and rubbed at his ear. Now that she mentioned it, he was pretty sure that had been on his curriculum, but he had never gotten around to it. But he did not otherwise protest.
She was still leaning atop him, and he could feel certain parts of her anatomy squished to his back. It was one of the only times he had ever felt an actual boob! And technically he was! But unless she allowed him to touch it himself, he could not count it. For all that he would remember the experience forever more, actual bragging rights could not be obtained from incidental brushes and hugs. So he was not keen on giving her an excuse to move.
“Anyway,” she continued, apparently oblivious, “most of that sounds like it has to do with the digestive system. One of my pictures here shows a turtle eating… some kind of crustacean, I guess. It’s got a shell, anyway.”
“Sounds… reasonable,” he hazarded, trying not to reveal his excitement. “Maybe the liver has something to do with… filtering out sea water? It’s showing the kidneys over here, too. That all has to do with getting rid of impurities, right?”
Naomi frowned into his shoulder. “Why show us that kind of stuff, anyway? Every animal has its own specialized diet, so of course, it’s going to have some adaptations to handle whatever crap it eats. I mean… okay, sure. Being able to drink sea water would be useful, but it isn’t going to get us out of this hole. What else ya got?”
“Well, there’s the heart.” He pointed. “And… actually, I’m not sure what this is.”
She leaned down closer and stared. For no apparent reason. Still, he quite appreciated the result. “Where?” she whispered curiously.
“It’s just here. Right above the stomach.”
“What would be above the stomach besides the heart and the lungs?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The diaphragm? The gall bladder?” He paused uncertainly, trying to recall what the gall bladder was even for. It had been a long time since high school anatomy. Hopeful, he glanced over at the words, but none of his random stabs at the proper name had changed anything. Which, after a moment’s consideration, made sense. If even he did not know what the thing was called, how was the computer going to properly translate anything. “It could even be some new, specialized organ that only that sea turtle had.”
She sighed into his back. “In that case, I say skip it. We don’t want to pick something unless we know what we’re getting into.”
That much he could agree with. He gave the image another quick scan, but nothing else jumped out at him. “Alright. That’s the last of it.”
She drummed her fingers over his spine a bit before rolling off him. “In that case, I say we just stick with the lungs and hope it gives us something like what we wanted. Ugh… damn it all. Would it really be so hard to just tell us what’ll happen?”
“Could be worse.” He turned to his side so he could look at her.
The heat vision was pretty neat, he decided. The blues and blacks of her clothes contrasting with the deeper oranges and reds of her skin was… kind of fetching in a totally abnormal sort of way. And the heat distortions rippling the air above her were fun to watch. Especially because there was no equipment needed. He could just… do it. Now, if only he could get that other eyelid working…
“At least we have choices,” he continued. “It could just pick everything randomly.”
“I don’t know about random, but it definitely will pick something if we don’t,” she informed him, then began filling him in on the subject of the timer, and the varying lengths of time she had seen on it.
“That’s concerning.” He tapped at his lip thoughtfully. “And inconsistent. Why wasn’t there something like that with the fruit?”
“I don’t—” She started to shrug but paused mid-gesture. “Hang on… what if…”
“What?”
“Well… there’s been several times the computer in my head has… flashed on things. Like… highlighted them. Right? To get my attention?”
He nodded, not certain where she was going with this but at least following along. He had his sonar, after all. It was different but similar enough not to be surprising.
“Well… what if the computer has a stake in this whole thing?” she continued. “I mean, as far as a computer can have a stake in anything. Like… well, it’s at least somewhat intelligent, but it’s a tool, right? And tools are meant for certain tasks. So an intelligent sort of tool whose main purpose was in our continued survival might sometimes choose a thing for us if it sees no other options.”
“Hmm…”
If the computer had the option to force a change at its discretion, that would certainly help explain a few things. Like why he had been allowed to eat so much of the fruit versus that cricket thing. Clearly, the computer had wanted them to have access to their recent visual improvements. And given that he was only able to see this screen because of the heat vision, he could well imagine why. But that had less to do with survival than it did simple interface upgrades.
Which was still critical, but in a different sort of way.
“I think you may be on to… something,” he allowed. “And while we’re on the subject, I’m not actually sure what meal is prompting this set options. It could still be from the fruit. I never got to pick anything from that, remember?”
She tutted. “Why would a fruit be able to affect your lungs?”
“Why would a fruit make us taller?” he shot back.
She worked her mouth for a second before hazarding, “Corpse flowers are really big?”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
There was a moment of silence. They both knew none of that fruit had come from Earth, so the ‘Corpse Flower’ they had harvested it from was an appropriate name only from the standpoint of established convention. But it had been pretty large. “Point. But it still doesn’t answer the question. Which item is this set of choices for?”
“Can’t you ask the computer?” she tried. “If it’s changing the words you already understand, can’t you get it to specify? You know what a sea turtle is, even it was an alien version with too many legs.”
“I can try,” he began, turning back to the floating panel. However, before he even opened his mouth, he noticed a totally new label. It was not selectable, but right above the display, there were a series of English words. They read:
Sea Turtle (Alien Version) - Too Many Legs
He blinked. “Huh. How ‘bout that.”
One of the less well-understood facets of the VENUS device is in how it attempts to communicate with the species it is installed within. The reasons for this, however, can be easily understood once one takes into consideration the sheer number of potential species candidates one might make use of. After all, the rigors of communicating with say… an Ack-dog would be very different from those one might experience with an Earthworm.
< muffled laugher >
Yes, that’s rather clever. Hmm. Still… < brief distortion > Editing? See if we can’t find some stock footage of the relevant species. Uh… and paired with their corresponding planets? The visual will help sell the joke.
Ahem…
So it is no wonder that our subjects are not only experiencing differences between their unique use-cases, but that their experiences are evolving as their devices become more accustomed to communicating with them.
Still, that the device within Subject #2 has chosen to utilize our own alphabet is… well, you’d almost thing it was trying to…
Hmm… < scratching sounds, as from writing a note > Check… owner’s manual… language settings?
‘Struth and botheration. Who bloody knows where that might be. If I ever get my hands on who wrote that blasted thing… Ha ha! Tar and feathers will be the least of their problems.
Now then… where was I? < mumbling > Oh, hang it all.
One of the less well-understood facets of the VENUS device is…
“Okay, then. We’re agreed,” Naomi said excitedly. “Lungs and feet?”
Mike nodded with some reluctance. “Yeah, but… at the same time?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she assured him quickly. Every time they had selected something thus far, the experience had been wondrous, so there was no reason two at once should be anything less than more of the same. Keyword: more! “It’ll be great. Besides, I want out of this cave. The sooner, the better.”
“Yeah, but…” he tried again. “The last time… Well, what if we… what if I—”
“Oh, stop quibbling,” she cut him off, forcefully suppressing her urge to strangle the man. How could he not have figured out by now that all those what-ifs he was stumbling over were exactly the point? But that was Mike for you—ever primed to say the right thing at the wrong time and clam up once his actual moment to shine was staring him in the face. She had literally laid on top of him, skin to skin, and he had not said a thing! He could have at least complained about her lard-ass crushing him. The poor guy really did not understand women, at all. “So what if it’s a little pleasant? It’s not as if the change is going to force us to do anything. Right?”
He assumed something of a complicated expression. “I guess not. Just… don’t hit me if I… i-if I get another uh…” Grimacing, he gestured toward his lower half. “You know.”
She quirked an eyebrow. The only way he would be earning a beating today is if he did not get a ‘you know.’ “Push the button, Mike.”
“It’s not really a button—”
“Push the button… Mike,” she growled.
“Fine!” he grumbled, then poised his finger over his invisible-to-her panel. “You don’t have to be so violent about everything.”
“I’m not violent.” This man might just earn that beating yet. “You’re just an idiot. It’s not my fault the only way to teach an idiot is through pain. But don’t you worry. I’ll be sure to train you up properly.”
He looked at her askance, instantly concerned. “What?!”
“Don’t worry about it, Mike. It’s out of your hands.” She moved her own hand toward the hovering panels. “Ready?”
“Wha—but—” He sighed. “I guess so.”
She gritted her teeth. He could at least pretend to be enthusiastic. But then, he was probably nowhere close to having guessed her intentions. And if she were honest, that was part of why she was enjoying his company so much. He was that rare sort of breed raised to be a gentleman. A clumsy… oafish gentleman, perhaps. But one who would not hesitate to leap into danger for her sake… or ever so much as dream of taking advantage of her. Frustratingly. Nonetheless, once she clubbed him over the head enough times, she felt confident she could beat that part of his upbringing out of him—even if she had to strip naked and rub her ‘intentions’ directly into his face!
She clicked her tongue. “Go!”
The cartoonish image of a flipper had scarcely flashed beneath her palm than her body was slammed with a confusing array of sensation and emotion. Like a seizure victim, any semblance of self-control became like a sick joke. Her vision swam as her eyeballs danced crazily within their sockets, flashing between interludes of pitch black and the rainbow hues of her heat vision. Her breathing became erratic and disordered. Her skin felt hot as blood rushed through her veins, surging and pulsing through every inch of her.
It was all she could do just to fall in the correct direction. But when her face thumped against the heaving chest of her companion, desire struck the beating core of her being like a drum. Before she could even think about what she was doing, a powerful and erotic moan ripped from her lungs. Pretense fell away like so much unneeded chaff. She wanted him. She wanted him with her every fiber.
But she could scarcely move with anything like intent. Her hands were uselessly curling and twitching about, seeming at random, and her arms were trembling so badly, it was all she could do just to rub them along the writhing, bucking expanse of skin beneath her. And her legs were scarcely better, so pushing herself toward something more interesting was completely out of the question.
Worse, her lungs felt on the verge of collapse. Or perhaps exploding? She had no sense of whether she was breathing in or out. She felt simultaneously dizzy from too much oxygen and verging on passing out from not enough. Her world had gone insane!
And if that were not bad enough, she could detect no effort on the part of the blasted man flailing away beneath her to even so much as cop a feel—discounting the occasional uncontrolled jostling, of course. She was not about to count those… despite her private thrill over each. He had not even uttered a peep! Instead, he seemed determined to ride out their shared turmoil with as much mute stoicism as he possibly could.
Well, she could hardly allow him get away with that! With a monumental effort, she managed to flop her head around so as to at least be looking at his ‘you know.’ That, at the very least, was reacting more honestly—just as he had feared and she had counted on. The red-hot symbol of his manhood was holding proudly at attention, straining the elastic of his already far-too-tight basketball shorts to its absolute limit in its effort to escape their confines. Much more and something down there would have to give… an eventuality, were it come to pass, she would cherish for the rest of her days.
By the name, she wanted it in her hands. In her mouth. Or better yet…
Frustration contorted her face as her lady bits burned and itched, desperate for any sort of contact. She was right there! Inches from the scratching pole of her dreams. Her tongue trembled from between her lips, tasting the salt at his belly. Scenting the faint traces of aroma wafting from the symbol of his need. If she could… just… get a little closer…
Abruptly, the exultant cry she had been longing for escaped Mike’s lips. But he did not snatch her up. He did not take her into his arms. He did not seek out her lips… nor any other part of her—not that she realistically thought he could have, nice as it would have been. Instead, he jerked away from her completely, leaving her head to thump bonelessly to the hard stone beneath him.
Molten spikes instantly settled into the pit of her stomach. He had pulled away! He did not want her! He had—
Spastic jerks and cramps began to ravage her, far worse than before. Her hips. Her legs. Her chest. Everywhere all at once. Torturous waves of longing—made all the worse by the hot sting of his rejection—raced from the top of her head, to the tips of her toes. She wanted to vomit. To scream.
But she was choking. Bile had settled into her throat. Her clothes—already tight to the point of cutting off the flow of her blood—felt on the verge of crushing her bones to—
—and then it was over. All at once. No more warning than that.
For some while, she merely laid there panting as tears fell unnoticed down the length of her nose. The secondary lids she had been so proud of now hung listlessly, leaving her with alternating intervals of light and dark.
She was such an idiot. Honestly, she should have known better. She had never been pretty. Not like other girls. Sure, she had gained a bit of muscle tone, and she had filled out a little from their recent changes. But not enough. Not enough to overcome his… stupid… reluctance.
Gritting her teeth, her fingers curled around the knot between her breasts, the one holding her shirt in place. Some distant corner of her mind had taken note of it having moved out of alignment, probably from all the writhing and thrashing about, but the automatic move to adjust it ran headlong into her desire to punch something, and she squeezed a little too tightly.
Sharp stabs of pain hit her as from needles poking into her palm, and with a gasp, she jerked her hand away. Dully—almost uncaring—she stared at it.
Her fingers were still thin and elegantly feminine… if a tad longer than they had been. And now, between them, there seemed to be some kind of membrane. It was not very large—just enough to distort the contours between her fingers. But when she spread her fingers wider, the membrane seemed to… grow somehow, stretching into a kind of taut webbing.
But her gaze was mostly fixated upon the claws that now tipped her digits. Only slightly curved, each extended by the length of a single knuckle, giving them an nonuniform but proportionate sweep from claw to claw. Strangely however, the blue-black colorations her heat-vision made of them revealed a needle-sharpness at their tips—not at all the dull things the picture had indicated.
However, these observations came only as passing fancies. Icebergs carried along by uncaring oceanic currents. At that moment, she would not have cared had they turned into tentacles.
“I’m… sorry, Naomi,” Mike’s—no… Mark’s—tremulous voice drifted to her ears. He was not a Mike. Not to her. Not any longer.
Sorry? He was sorry? For what? Crushing her world? Ha! He only thought he was sorry. Once she was done with him, she would—
“I didn’t… hit you did I?” his voice came again.
“Hit me?” she snarled, rising—and suddenly grateful to have been gifted with the perfect weapons to make what remained of this man’s existence an extraordinarily painful one. “No, you ridiculous buffoon, you only smashed my head against—”
Her voice caught as her eyes inevitably fell upon a strangely bright-orange spot splattering the rocks on his far side. Her first thought was that it might have been blood. But as the constant waves from the nearby stream washed over it… it seemed to stick to the rock in a peculiar sort of way. Almost… egg-like.
Her mouth fell open as realization set in. And slowly, the events from a moment ago began to unfurl within her mind in an entirely different sort of way. A sort of way that left a very self-satisfied little smile curling at her lips. No part of his actions had been from rejection. Quite the opposite. He had not wanted to… hit her… with what usually resulted after a… ‘you know.’
“Mike…” she cooed, relishing the moment. He was definitely a Mike now. “What is that?”
With an air of completely feigned innocence, her fingers stretched for the substance, but he was quick to catch her hand. To her delight.
“Uh… nothing!” he managed in the most strangled tone she had ever heard. He looked so horrified even his other eyelid had snapped into place, and most of his next sentence was reduced to a series of unintelligible grunts as he attempted to hastily assemble some likely excuse. “Wha—it… bu-uh… it’s uh… Must b-be uh… a jellyfish!”
“A jellyfish?!” she exclaimed gamely, and her eyes lit up with mischief. “Then… then we should eat it!”
Without an ounce of hesitation, she surged forward, but Mike nearly tackled her in his haste to keep her from discovering his shame. She fought him, of course. A little.
“Mike?!” she exclaimed, struggling—to tangle herself just as deeply as she could into his arms. “Mike, please! After all that… I feel so light-headed… so hungry!”
“Nuh… hahooh, Jesus… Christ, Naomi!” With that, he finally managed to roll over top of her and pin her to the ground—a place she was quite content to remain—precariously near the edge of the water. Regardless, she made certain to continue wiggling a bit. In as innocently seductive a manner possible.
“What’s the matter, Mike?” she asked, pressing every inch of herself to him she could manage despite the water lapping at her shoulders. Keeping her head out of the stream was providing an excellent excuse toward that end. “Aren’t you hungry, too?”
“Good god. I think your uh… Have you gotten uh…?” His eyes quickly jerked away from her. He had been staring at her chest. It made her feel deliciously empowered—confident in a way she had never been before. Sexy. “U-uh… not… not for jellyfish, N-Naomi. They… those are dangerous! They could… they could sting you.”
“But sea-turtles eat them all the time… and I’m so hungry,” she protested. Gently, she began nibbling at his skin, pursuing the obvious lie. She was not certain what color his face would have been right then, but she was certainly enjoying what it looked like in the heat-vision. He was blushing so hard, he was almost white! “Maybe we could have… adapted?”
“No!” he said far-too-quickly. “We uh… we didn’t buy any of the stomach ones. Remember?”
She was pretty sure the ability to tolerate eating a jellyfish would have more to do with the mouth and esophagus, but that was entirely beside the point. She had him in her arms now, and if she had any plans for actually moving beyond this ridiculous pretense, she needed to make certain even this blockhead would understand that was precisely where she wanted to remain.
However, before she could do much more than delicately run her claws over the back of his spine, the bumbling oaf jerked in ticklish reflex. And in his attempts to catch himself, his other hand slid against the rocks. The next moment, his entire weight crashed against her, and the two of them went tumbling into the water.
Before she could so much as fight to the surface, she felt a mighty tug at the back of her shirt, there was an instantaneous, yet extremely brief constriction along her breasts, then nothing. For a few disorienting seconds after that, she felt as if she was in free fall, and then something slapped into her side with the force of a thirty-ton wet mop.
Ah, there you are, Timothy.
Do you know, I believe I’m detecting something of a pattern here. Are we… quite certain… well, I know it’s standard procedure for an engagement of this kind, but… We did spay the woman prior to engaging in this experiment. Did we not?
…
Yes, yes. I know the veterinarian signed off on the both of them. Still, it is curious. She has been behaving rather… well, you would think that kind of operation might curb some measure of her mating instincts. And with the way everything else has been going.
Ah, perhaps I’m being paranoid.
…?
Well, no. I suppose not the worst thing. It isn’t exactly illegal… for once. We might get a bit of blowback from the conservationists, though. Transporting a breeding pair of an invasive species onto any sort of unpopulated world is not something a thoughtful scientist should do lightly.
Fortunately for us, the VENUS device is not capable of self-replication. Ha! Ha ha! Can you imagine?
…?
What do you mean, have I checked? Why would the—? Even for military hardware, that would be… Good heavens! A self-replicating—?! There are laws, man!
…
After-market modifi—!
< sharp inhalation >
Timothy… I am going to go over that manual with a fine-toothed comb. If I discover that your uncle has also made illegal alterations to the military grade VENUS devices he sold us without so much as a by-your-leave, I will throw you to the jaws of those two jackals down there myself!
… … …
…
Something else? What something else? I know that look, Timothy. Out with it.
…
And who the bloody hell is Oscar?
…
Boyfriend? Whose boyfriend?
…!
Really? Samantha had a boyfriend? With a face like that? Heavens…
Well, never mind. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Did I not specifically state there was to be no fraternization amongst the crew? This is exactly the kind of situation…
…
Yes, I know he didn’t find the body. He wasn’t supposed to find the—she was eaten, Timothy! How could he have—Idiots! Everywhere, idiots! And now he’s gone down to the planet to look? For what? Even if she had ejected herself from an airlock, atmospheric reentry would have disintegrated her body long before she ever made landfall.
…
Is… that… so? And why might he not have believed you?
…
Timothy?
…
Timothy?!