Contaminated

by Amanda Milo

  The holo empties byte by byte, going dark.

  “Why is he such a miserable spalpeen?” I exclaim.

  Simmi holds his hands flat out, palms up. “I wondered that myself last solar. I took the liberty of abusing my still-remaining access to the Ancestry Research, Testing, and Reporting registry, where I located his file. His parents are Clears.”

  “No one removed your access?” I gape. I shake myself, directing my thoughts to the issue at hand. “A mutate propagated from a pair of Clears,” I murmur to Simmi, who’s smirking. This means the officiate’s parents were both clear of the mutation, living a freer, more upscale life—and the officiate would have shared their perks—if his genes hadn’t mutated. The likelihood of being born Clear is so secure if you come from Clears, it’s almost guaranteed… but you don’t get to choose what genetics you emerge with. Not unless your parents are very wealthy and aren’t opposed to gene editing. “So close,” I murmur.

  “And yet not far enough,” Simmi agrees with a grim, unimpressed expression. “His designation is six.”

  “Do you speak true?” I say in horrified wonder. A designation number correlates to how many carriers are in any given ancestry, and an allocator of six!!! His family is just shy of pure!

  He must have felt a terrible chasm from his Clear family. Not that this is any sort of excuse for his manner. Look at Simmi: he’s close to pure too, but at least he’s…

  Hm. Perhaps it is a factor in how temperamental a being grows. “Thus, he takes out his genetic misfortune on everyone else,” I say in dismay. “He should join the club. We’re all Carriers here.” I hunker down. “Skyto—err, Nancy,” I correct, “You can come out now.”

  She eases out, her eyes intent on mine, and I’m in the process of staring back, ensnared, when Simmi gives her a once-over like he can’t fathom why there’s a need to provide her a resting pad. “Why did you need a resting pad for her?”

  “Because she didn’t seem all that comfortable on my chair’s padding, that’s why.”

  Skyto moves to me, and places her hand on my shoulder, her expression conveying something to me, if only I could read her. “Thenk yew fohr tryeeng.”

  Not certain how I should respond to her touch, I pat her hand.

  One corner of her mouth jerks up, the tilt of it very pretty—as is the shine in her eyes, even for such an alien face.

  CHAPTER 10

  After a long day made longer by the need to wait until I could safely smuggle Skyto back to my dorm, I’m quite thrilled to see my resting pad again. I’ve just drifted off when I feel the foam depress next to me.

  Jolting upright, I make an alarmed sound of, “AHH!” followed immediately by my brain processing the circumstances of my wakefulness, and I manage to add alarmed-sounding words to better address the situation. “Skyto? What’s wrong?”

  She’s on her knees beside me, clutching my chair cushion’s foam, and she’s holding it tentatively, as if in question. Seeing that I’m awake enough to focus on her, she lays it demonstratively over my resting pad foam, making a double layer on half the span of the bedpod.

  I nictate at her. “Simmi would have a fit in this situation.” After all, her lack of exoskeleton means she probably sheds something. The beauty of a foam pad bed is its ease of sanitation though, thus I don’t consider making her get down.

  Somehow, I don’t think Simmi would care how easy the bed is to sanitize. Cozying up with an alien would be firmly in his Absolutely Never category.

  I pat the foam. “Come on then. This is the best we have, I suppose.” But there’s really no supposing about it—if she needs softer bedding, this is all we have at our disposal.

  Her skin makes its swishing and crinkle noises as she gets comfortable, but having spent a daycycle and a half in her company, I’m growing used to them. When she brushes me by accident, it’s the oddest sensation. Her soft to my hard feels unbelievably good every time we touch.

  The heat radiating off of her is faint, but it too, feels nice.

  And like before, simply having her presence in my dorm—let alone having her so close—makes for one of the most pleasant resting periods in my lifespan.

  CHAPTER 11

  The next waking cycle sees Skyto much more mobile, her muscles not having the stiffness they exhibited after she slept on the foam on the floor, which is a relief. I pat her puffy arm and assure her, “I’m going to bathe. I’ll be back soon.”

  I shuffle off to begin my morning necessities, but I’ve no more than stepped under the mizzling spray—the temperature perfectly adjusted for Genneӝt, the water chemistry matched to be the most favorable to our chitin—when my alien guest forces her way inside the unit.

  The sight of her vecking nearly scares my chitin right off—because she’s skinned herself. She’s shed her thick, heavy feet, her swishy-sounding, dry, shiny, entire outerskin, and when I crane around her, I see she’s left it in a pile on the facilities floor like it’s some bizarre, hairless pelt. “This is so unnerving,” I tell her, my voice shaking. But what’s really unnerving is not the way she’s prancing under the spray in her innerskin, but how much I appreciate what I see. It should be grotesque, but she’s very sleek and well-formed, with no hint of angles anywhere.

  Although, I suppose my inside layer of fascia is sleek too.

  But I’ve seen flayed open cadavers in med school, and I never looked upon them and found their innards lovely. If they’d gotten up and run around like Skyto—I’d have run screaming from the exam room and veck what anyone else thought of my stoic male constitution.

  Yet the view of this strange alien… my internal temperature is experiencing a sharp spike in reaction to the sight of her skinned body. Something is clearly wrong with me.

  I actually have the urge to reach out and brush a touch over her skinned hide.

  If someone wanted to reach under my carapace and touch my insides, that person would end up on the darkcycle newsvids for being a deviant.

  Yet it’s suddenly all I can do to stop myself from giving in to the desire to be very, very deviant with her.

  Appalled with myself, I stand in a stupor while she slicks back her head’s hairs, and sluices away the water that’s collected in the depressions of her eye sockets. She finds my cleanser foam, and avails herself of it, proceeding to scrub and rinse her body thoroughly.

  I’m mute with fascination as she then drags her membranous skins into the stall with us, and scrubs them with my chitin sanitizer. When she feels they’re sanitized to her satisfaction, she tries to reach up over the mizzling stall’s containment door to stretch her skins—for drying, I presume.

  I’d help her, but I can’t move—my eyes are too focused on the more prominent areas of her body that happen to jiggle and bounce with her struggles.

  This is gruesome. Or, it should be. Why can’t I look away?

  It’ll be a long while before I realize I never did get to wash. I’m too discombobulated by what I’ve seen to notice. I step out and indicate Skyto should follow me to the drying grid. Her steps become tentative as we near it, but she joins me between the forced air panels, and my third eyelids extend as protection in preparation of the currents that are about to strike—and for Skyto, I place my hand over her eyes.

  She stiffens immediately, but she doesn’t pull away. Even when the air blasts us, she only jumps—then she’s clapping her hands over mine to provide further protection for her face.

  And because Skyto is soft-membraned all over, the air draft is so powerful that it’s causing her skin to press in odd ways, as if she’s physically being pushed. I suppose, by air currents, she is.

  It’s a strangely compelling sight to behold, but very quickly, I’m concerned it could actually grow to be painful for her.

  Thankfully it only takes moments before we’re free of moisture. When the air cuts off, Skyto, her hairs queerly standing up in every direction, drops her hands and nictates as if her eyes have gone dry—but then she’s dashing for her heaped skins
. She drags them onto the grate, and motions to me.

  Quickly, I oblige her, stepping off and stepping on the grate to activate the dryer.

  When her skins are dried, I watch, jaw dropped, as she shimmies them on again, showing no pain as she straps on inner membranes everywhere—on her feet, her torso and arms, her… ah, what looks as if it might be her seal for an inner groin tunnel area, I suppose—and then she’s dragging on her thicker outerskin and her larger, tougher outerfeet.

  Every so often, she glances at me, and makes snickering sounds that, while they resemble a jeering sound my people make, hers holds no scorn, no sneer. Only a private sort of amusement—or it would be private, if her smile didn’t invite my system to grow as light-cardiac muscled as her mood seems.

  When it’s clear she’s finished adding skins to herself, I’m better able to force myself not to be as distracted. I clear my throat. “Instead of gawking, I should have been securing our meal. Will we never prepare it without feeling rushed? Drat.” I turn, striding to my dorm’s kitchenette.

  Skyto follows behind me, and somehow I can sense her smile warming my back with her irrepressible good cheer.

  ***

  Once at the office, and after we visit our Lʊʊnjaɠ fighter room with no casualties today (good results—with our infants showing amazingly hopeful reactions to the latest batch of Morsuflos extract) Skyto begins to hum. It’s no bother to me, and, thinking she’s singing, I leave her to it.

  But in the course of a lengthier conversation with Simmi, my ear discerns Nancy is actually repeating words Simmi and I are saying. It’s evident that she’s practicing our language: she’s employing humming to stretch her vocal cords to match our vocalizations.

  At least, this is evident to me.

  “What’s she doing now?” Simmi sighs, meticulously using a microscopic-dust collection cloth to buff all the plating on his tail before he gloves his appendage in his anti-germ stretchy creation. But he knows what Skyto is attempting, and he proves this when he suddenly muses, “What if we visited a museum and took one of the ancient translators? If we could make it operational again, perhaps it will match a language she speaks, and either we’ll be able to understand her, or she’ll be able to speak ours.”

  “You want to steal?” I stare at him as if I don’t know him. “That’s illegal!”

  Simmi’s look is cool, and holds much irony. “And harboring and hiding an alien would be considered...?”

  I fold my arms over my sternum, dipping my chin in concession to his point.

  Skyto huffs and her brow flattens. Her flexible lips purse before she carefully enunciates, albeit in a thick, exotic accent, “My translator is pick—picking,” she struggles, “up just fine. But speaking? Your language is—” Whatever she says next breaks from fluency. It sounds like, “—whaaacked.”

  Her words are heavy, flat in tonal range and thickly delivered, but she is mostly understandable. “That was amazing, Sky—Nancy,” I correct myself, grinning at her so wide my upper row of fangs feels the tingle of the air hit them.

  Skyto pales a little, the smile she returns to me a bit weak.

  Simmi tosses me a look of utter disbelief before he leans so far forward in his chair, it squeaks, and he brings his head level with Skyto’s. “Allow me to inform you unbiasedly as to the rating of your progress. I won’t sweetğurk coat this like some of us: you need a considerable amount of work before you reach ‘amazing.’”

  “Simmi!” I chastise, ready to shake his rack of expensive beakers. “Sky—,” I stop, and start again. “Nancy, you’re doing lovely—ignore him. He has a mordant sense of… everything, and he’s never had to learn another language. He also has an appalling lack of empathy.”

  Simmi sends me an acrimonious look. “You’ve never learned another language either.”

  “Yes, but I do have empathy,” I point out.

  Unable to argue this, Simmi simply inclines his head before swiveling around in his chair.

  Skyto steps towards me, pulling my attention away from my maddening officemate with ease. “I don’t mind you calling me Skyto,” she tells me, her words understandable but sounding foreign in her alien accent.

  Simmi whips his chair around and nearly leaps between Skyto and me. “What would be your reaction if we compromised and called you Skynan?”

  I send her a rueful smile. “If you’re amenable, I believe I can manage this pet name suggestion. And Simmi will be pleased because if you agree, he’ll finally feel like he had a part in naming you,” I explain.

  Simmi raises his nose in the air, silently confirming my theory, and Skyto makes dry laughing noises through her small alien nares. “I think I’d like you calling me Skynan. And hey,” she says with an impish pat to his back, making him shudder, “This is a real upgrade from ‘she’ and ‘it!’”

  CHAPTER 12

  It’s incredible that any work bore fruit for the next half of our shift. There are innumerable, burning questions between us, Skynan having a great concern for the Lʊʊnjaɠ infants’ situation.

  Simmi and I have many questions of our own, and haltingly, the three of us manage to converse. The more we do, the easier communication becomes.

  Simmi and I learn that Skynan hails from an array of like-formed beings called humans. Her life’s work is in the field of astrobotany. She was working on an exoplanet in the northern hemisphere constellation, when she grew curious about the ‘cursed planet.’

  That would be our planet.

  From Skynan, we learn what the rest of the galaxy believes about us. Generations ago, historians recorded our people—a once-great people—suddenly begin to stumble and twitch and seize uncontrollably. Nearly every crew of Genneӝt was exhibiting the same strange, frightening condition.

  “As a hobby, I research ancient plants and medicinal remedies.” Skynan hesitates a beat. “Everyone thinks your planet’s civilization is…”

  “Extinct,” I guess.

  She nods. “Your planet is a sort of bogeyman,” she says, brow furrowed as she tries to speak from the limited words she can pronounce and blend her own in. “How would I say fear… man?”

  “We’re their darkcycle terror?” I offer.

  She silently mouths the words, appearing to focus on the pronunciation of her new foreign vocabulary. “Yes, at least around the sectors I’ve traveled. No one’s heard from you in so long, rumors say your people died out from ‘stumbling plague.’ People are afraid of this place.”

  “Then why did you risk it?” Simmi asks, aghast perhaps that she’d even face the possibility of infection should that have been the truth of our fate.

  “For that.” She waves her hand to the Morsuflos. “Its potency is legendary, with literature that claims it aids in treating long-term motion sickness disorders. We have something like it where I’m from, something with promise, but not much potency. I think our plants might be related. Perhaps our races traded medicinal horticultures in some bygone, forgotten era, I’m not sure, but right down to the blood release on the thorns, they’re strikingly similar.”

  We all look to the Morsuflos, whose stem is thicker and more robust-colored than even yesterday. “Your blood has had quite the effect on ours,” I tell Skynan.

  Skynan nods. “Our blood gives a little boost to our own plant too. We don’t have as widespread a problem as your people do, but to our every individual who’s plagued with an incoordination disorder, they’ll benefit.”

  Simmi scowls. “If our people would follow sound genetic recommendations rather than the strange machinations that exist in their loins, we wouldn’t suffer a widespread anything. In a spansworth of generations, no progeny would be propagated from genetically incompatible pairs. It’s simple. Couples are maddening!”

  Skynan spares him a wry look—but not before flicking a curiously shy glance at me I can’t interpret. “Attraction is a little more complicated than pre-approved genetic compatibility,” she murmurs.

  Simmi tips a thick, attractively long
antennae in her direction, conceding. When Skynan’s eyes lock on it, I’m gripped with the inappropriate compulsion to rip his sensory appendages off his head.

  Even aliens find large antennae attractive. My alien.

  I glare a hole in the side of Simmi’s neurocranium.

  But Simmi doesn’t notice. He’s too focused on Skynan. “We should synthesize your blood.”

  I stop glaring at him.

  Skynan warily shuffles back.

  “What?” he asks, his third-eyelids sweeping over his eyes, which have downturned, slightly angled in his exasperation. “Her blood is like the ultimate fertilizer.”

  “‘MiracleBlood-gro,’” scoffs Skynan. “‘Feeds plants up to half a standard solar parameter. Get yours today!’” she laughs.

  “Well… ideally,” Simmi agrees. “How often can we extract units of blood from a human?”

  Skynan stops laughing.

  I glare at him again and this time he does notice. I cross my arms and tuck my hands under my arm junctures to prevent myself from plucking off his too-large antennae. “We will not feed her life force away.” When Skynan moves her gaze from Simmi back to me, I relax, the strange, threatened sensation abating. I try to parse the emotional states that have rushed over me. I quickly picture our hydrocarbon gas-powered burners, and imagine placing a beaker of my reactions over the flame and letting the heat boil down to the essence of my upset.

  My status in Skynan’s eyes.

  I’m feeling possessive of Skynan’s attention.

  Simmi’s brows rise. “I did state we should synthesize her contents.”

  Distracted by my revelation, I don’t have a chance to check my instinctive response to his words. I snarl at Simmi.

  I feel as shocked as he looks—but my lips are still peeled up, my fangs bared. I’m frozen like this, processing that his words only seem vaguely threatening. Yet it’s roused this innate protectiveness for Skynan in a violent reaction. I’m struggling to settle it.