---Evil---

---Alchyinad’s Perspective---

“So, Victor…” I smile at the brightly shining man who’s looking out of my office’s window at the swirling clouds of interstellar haze with a contemplative expression “…did you enjoy the time you spent with Tuun’s family?”

“I did.” he states, swivelling his head away from the window without moving the rest of his body “Definitely pretty tired, with how packed with activities it was, but I had the absolute time of my life!: Performed, for a straight thirty minutes, for a hall full of people and got some genuine sounding compliments on it, played the grandfather of England’s first King, in a reenactment, helped a baby troll out of a… ravine?… crevasse?… some sort of V-shaped, geographic feature that was too small for me to call it a ‘gorge’… got on the local news, went to the Don reservation (saw a kilometre wide field! 600m tall, at least!), fought single combat with Tuun’s brother…”

“I’m sorry? Could I ask you to elaborate on that last one?” I say, more alarmed than I allow myself to sound.

He gives an amused smile and answers “It’s a tradition for Don… They’re patriarchal, like Humans used to be, so they’ve got this conception of any woman as being ‘defended’ by the male head of her household… It makes a little more sense when you see male and female Don, side by side. Their sexual dimorphism’s a bit more pronounced than in Humans… Though the men ain’t anywhere near as much bigger an’ stronger than the women as your species’ women are than your men(!)… It sorta makes sense that this tradition would exist… Like, fathers wouldn’t wanna give their daughters to guys that couldn’t defend ’em… Does seem a bit antiquated, to me, though… like… sorta seems like a hang up from a time when the state didn’t function well enough for folk to rely on it for law enforcement… Anyway, Tuun’s brother an’ me was talkin’ at the feast, he’s a bit deadpan, and don’t say much, but seems like a decent bloke. He brought it up and let me know that, while he personally didn’t mind, I’d need to do this combat ritual if I wanted his community to accept me bein’ with Tuun. So… yeah… I did it… fought a King in exile… in single combat!”

“Well…” I say, not quite sure how to respond to that “…that’s… certainly… something(!)”

Silently, he gives a nod, lip curled in a mirthful smirk of ‘something indeed(!)’

“So… I assume you won?”

“Yeah, I won… though, there was this one guy who weren’t happy… said Tuun’s brother gave up too easily! Her big sis put him in his place, though! Fuckin’ hilarious seein’ him get chided like that!!!” he smiles.

“And did anything else noteworthy happen while you were on that planet?”

I see his eyes shift focus and can tell they’re not fixed on anything in the room but, rather, something his mind is showing him.

A warm smile breaks over his bright hot face.

“Yeah… I can’t tell you about it, though… I promised I’d keep it secret and didn’t wanna ask ‘can I tell my therapist about this?’, for a few different reasons… Tuun’s brother and sister (who are married to eachother but, before you ask, they’re different species and not legally siblin’s)… they… well… they showed us something incredible… It was… just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen… only vyin’ with Tuun herself for the top spot… It gave me… this like…. euphoria!”

I think I might be able to guess what this secret is… as part of an interspecies union myself, I can well imagine the feeling!

Rather than voicing my supposition, I say “It sounds like this secret, whatever it is, affected you greatly!”

“It did!” he confirms, happily.

“Would you like to talk more about it?”

He shakes his head “Can’t really say anythin’ more… don’t trust myself not to accidentally let the cat outta the bag(!)… You met the new crew?”

I shake my head “Björn ‘Mimir’ Túpuson and Lilith ‘Unicorn’ Morningstar? I’ve seen their files but we haven’t been introduced. Have you met them?”

He nods “They’re good folk… Björn’s actually one of Katrín’s congregants! He also had her as a lecturer, WAY back in the day… decades before the War.”

“Katrín?”

He shuts his eyes and briefly brings his palm to his forehead seeming to be mildly exasperated with himself “One of Tuun’s mums… thought I’d mentioned her to you. The other one’s Heidi.”

I give a reassuring smile “You’ve definitely mentioned both of Tuun’s mums before but I don’t recall you ever having mentioned their names. No matter, though, I know now.”

He gives an appreciative nod, followed by a few moments of conversational lull.

“So… Victor, do you remember what we talked about in our last session?” I ask, careful to make sure my tone suggests I’d be happy to remind him and not that I think he needs to be reminded (and certainly not that I need to be reminded!)

He nods and begins recapping without my having to prompt “We were talkin’ ’bout my sense of self-worth, I said havin’ Tuun say she loved me for the first time was the proudest I’ve ever been of myself, you asked me to come up with somethin’ else I was proud of myself for, as homework.”

I smile and give him some praise “Well done Victor! So, have you come up with anything?”

Asking after a client’s homework is always one of the most tricky times to manage your tone. It’s absolutely imperative that you don’t imply, for even an instant, that you’ll be angry or upset with them, if they haven’t done their homework.

Few things make a Human more uneasy than facing up to an uncompleted assignment!

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“I have.” he smiles “I, Victor ‘Cuddles’ Taylor, am the pilot of the official, ODR endorsed, Terran Security Officer programme!”

“And what makes that something you’re proud of?” I ask, sweetly.

“Well…” he responds “…I never really expected to amount to much… I planned to sign up as a soldier, when I turned old enough… NO shade to soldiers but… it ain’t exactly somethin’ I planned to do ’cause I were, like, passionate about it! More like something I planned to do ’cause I couldn’t think what else to do with myself! I know, when we had our first session, I described becomin’ the first Official SO as ‘dumb luck’ but I’ve been thinkin’ ’bout it, since, and I definitely still think runnin’ into Tcakqaal while she were lookin’ for someone like me and gettin’ mugged were dumb luck… but I’ve had a bit of an attitude shift about everythin’ after that.”

He pauses for a moment so I prompt “What has your attitude shifted to?”

“Well… I always thought that surely, if I could do the SO course, anyone could!”

“And you don’t think that anymore?”

He shakes his head “I don’t!”

“And why is that?” I ask, curiously.

“I just had a bit of a think about the amount of work I had to do! It’s easy to forget but… there were a million times on that course that I almost chucked in the towel and said it weren’t for me! I don’t think I’d’ve been able to stick it out if I weren’t motivated!”

“And you were motivated?” I ask.

“Yep!” he responds with conviction.

“What would you say motivated you, Victor? What gave you the drive to persevere through those moments?” I say, tenting my manipulator digits and leaning forward.

“That…” he says, matching my lean “… would be ’cause I finally had somethin’ to aspire to that weren’t…” he raises a hand “…HUMAN. SUPERSOLDIER(!)” he says gesturing through the air, with mock grandiosity, to an imaginary title.

I give a little chuckle and ask “You felt pigeon-holed? That being a Human cut down the things you felt allowed to aspire to be?”

“Yeah… like, you gotta remember I was born durin’ the War. By the time I was 10, Humanity had known we were Space Orcs for 15 years and people just weren’t bored of it yet!”

“But you were?”

He thinks for a moment before he leans back in his chair and answers “I was, yeah… Just, like, people conflated us bein’ stronger than just about anyone else with us bein’ wholly better, you know!? It was borin’, to me!”

“You don’t think your species is better than any others?” I ask, inquisitively.

His mouth twists as he considers the question.

“Nature don’t really do ‘better’… in the sense that evolution don’t inherently value strength, toughness, vigour or nothin’, if they don’t actually help you survive! Like, the reason Neanderthals don’t default to lookin’ like Thran and Sapiens don’t default to lookin’ like this…” he gestures to himself “…is cause it ain’t efficient!… I gotta eat 5,000kcal a day to maintain this! Thran’s more like 8,000kcal! We’d be the first to starve, in a famine! Don’t matter that we’ve got more strength to get food if there ain’t food to get!… Even intelligence ain’t somethin’ inherently valuable (which should be obvious from how rare it is!) All these things only have the value we give ’em, if they don’t actively help us survive. Being made of the sturdiest stuff of any Sapient don’t make us any better than anyone else… I mean, as much as a person from a Class 4 would die, very quickly, if you left ’em alone on a planet like Earth… a Human would die, on a Class 4, ’cause none of the food’d be worth the calories it’d cost to chew! We’d starve!… We spent 700 years lookin’ for E.T., all the time imaginin’ we’d be more or less at the top of the bell curve… average, in all things… never realisin’ that we were so far up the long tail that we broke the classification system! We never imagined that the hump of the bell curve actually sat around high Class 5, that there’d be such a massive gulf between us and those from the next most hazardous world, that the planets we’d gone too and said ‘Sapience couldn’t possibly evolve here! What problems are there, here, that it’d be needed to solve?’ were planets that the rest of the galaxy would’ve considered ‘adversarial to sapience’!… Growin’ up, I wanted to go starbound but… from the way everyone talked (both the kids I went to school with and any gardenworlders I found talkin’ about us, on the net) it was clear that what we were valued for weren’t anythin’ more than bein’ strong… bein’ tough…”

He trails off here so I prompt “And Tcakqaal made you feel that she would prize you for more than those attributes?”

“She did!” he says, emphatically “Like, after I chased off the kids trynna mug her, she lead me back to this skypiercer, in Westminster, and introduced me to THE Jeanne ‘Blitz’ Miyazaki and her husband (I was defo starstruck!) They explained that they needed a Human ’cause Human’s brains are hardwired to be good at spottin’ threats… It was like an epiphany!… I could go starbound without bein’ a mercenary or assassin or nothin’! There was another niche for me! Somethin’ else that comin’ from a deathworld had equipped me for, equipped all Humans for! We could be somethin’ other than supersoldiers! We could be health and safety officers! We could give other species the benefit of bein’ the product of an accidental 3 billion year long Viltrumite, eugenics experiment! I’m proud of that!”

“Viltrumite?” I query.

“They’re like… evil Kryptonians… You know Kryptonians? Superman’s species?”

“I know Kryptonians. Is there a reason you compared your species to Viltrumites and not Kryptonians?” I ask, my tone quizzical.

“Well… I guess… ’cause, on Krypton, Kryptonians are just normal… I’m mean they’re just like Humans back when we thought ‘Human’ was a synonym of ‘average’… it’s only bein’ on a planet with a yellow sun that turns Kal El into Superman… Viltrumites are the way they are, all the time!”

“But aren’t Humans ‘just normal’, on Earth?” I enquire.

“Yeah… but that’s different… it’s the context of bein’ surrounded by others like us, on a world that produced us, that makes us ‘just normal’… it ain’t like Kryptonians, who are physiologically changed by the difference between their sun and ours!”

“So you think Viltrumites are a better fit because they’re always on? They’re the deathworlders that deathworlders imagined, wherever they happen to be?”

“I… guess so?” he answers, uncertainly.

“And it has nothing to do with them being, as you put it, ‘evil’…?”

He shakes his head “Nah… I mean, I sorta oversimplified… there’re good Viltrumites… and it ain’t like Kryptonians are entirely ‘good’… one of Superman’s main enemies is an evil general who survived Krypton’s destruction by bein’ banished for his crimes!”

“So both Kryptonians and Viltrumites are… people? Complicated, messy, impossible to holistically define as good or evil?” I ask.

“Yeah…”

“Like Humans…?”

He hesitates for a while before confirming “Like Humans… yes…”

I nod, satisfied.

Of course, I heavily identify with the feelings he’s describing, since I spent the first 3 centuries of my life in the same position. Spelvuk were the Humans before Humans came along, the biggest and scariest monsters, from a Class 9.9 (which only wasn’t a 10 because that would have made it a deathworld and sapients ‘don’t evolve on deathworlds’(!))

Our situations aren’t exactly 1:1. Spelva’s First Contact was thousands of years before I was born meaning that, by my time, our status as the galaxy's highest classification sapients was quite a culturally settled idea. There wasn’t the excitement I’m sure there was in the few generations after Contact.

I didn’t truly wish to be a soldier any more than he did but I simply accepted that that was my lot.

It wasn’t until after the War, in that POW camp, that the wish to be something other than a fighter reasserted itself… thanks to the species of the man sitting opposite me.

I consider relaying all that to him, telling him how similar we are… but I rule against it.

Therapy isn’t about you… it’s about your client, Alchyinad ‘Dimitrescu’ Fischer! Focus on him!

“Alright, Victor… how about you tell me about some of your proudest moments from your career?”