Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 43339 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 217(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43339 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 217(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
When I lie down, they sort of sink around me, creating a bed-like contraption which hums pleasantly around my limbs — and between them, caressing me with their pseudo-mechanical undulations.
This feels good. This feels so incredibly fucking good. I don’t know how long it has been since something felt good, but I think it has been a while. My life for the past god-knows-how-long has been lying down on a mattress, getting up from a mattress, eating some bland food I barely taste that has too much sugar in it, and then going to work for anywhere from eight to sixteen hours, then doing it again.
Recreation stopped being a thing a while ago. Don't know why. It just did. It got replaced by television shows that got cancelled after one or two seasons, a series of narratives left dangling until it didn’t feel worthwhile watching anything anymore. Then the movies stopped being good. That was weird. And we all sort of pretended that they were good, but really they were all being made for twelve-year-olds and adults were just left wondering if they should make a TikTok. The answer was no, no, they shouldn’t, but many did anyway. Because what else was there to do?
These humming balls are making me think thoughts I would never have had the gall to think on Earth. I wonder if they’re magic thinking balls. Maybe the rubbing and the humming opens your brain up, gives it space to expand.
My brain has been very small. All folded up inside the structure of my day-to-day existence. Always the same thing. Never a different thing. Even though we were always dealing with different people, after a while they all felt like the same person. Just archetypes, not actual humans. The drunk one. The drugged one. The prostitute. The pimp. Like a really shitty astrological system or crappy tarot deck.
My eyes feel heavy, like my lids are turning to corrugated iron and rolling down to shutter my head.
* * *
Brawn
Sedation is necessary when handling the lesser species. They tend to panic and then, well, die, if one is not very careful. We have transported many of her kind over the years, though not her specific species.
I have gathered my crew to look at her as she stands before us in her starched uniform, a garment which frankly seems a complete abomination compared to what lies beneath it.
Punch, captain of this ship and one of my most decorated generals, has honored us both by not mentioning the shambolic circumstances of my, I must admit it, rescue, and is most intrigued by the human and her attire.
“It offers no protection? It’s just cloth?”
“Exactly.”
“Then why wear it at all?”
“Humans are strange when it comes to modesty. They respect one another more when they are clothed. Humans who wear less clothing are lower status, unless there is a body of water nearby, in which case it is deemed acceptable to only cover the most carnally interesting parts of their persons.”
I was studying the humans when my ship crashed. I have had a fascination, some might even say obsession, with the species for quite some time. There are many life forms in the universe, but few which remain captive on their birth planets while also being sentient.
“That seems capricious,” Punch notes.
“It is. It really is.”
“How do you say the species name again?”
“Humans.”
“Hughmens?” Punch’s second in command, Kick, chimes in with an attempt to understand. Human words are simple. Almost too simple for our agile minds. The ability to speak the human language is easy enough to acquire, but pronunciation is always a challenge.
“Humans.”
“Hoomins.”
“Humans.”
“Haighmanns.”
I let them go back and forth on that one, while I take my newest treasure in. Now that I have been medically attended to, and am no longer rupturing from several significant organs, I am able to appreciate her properly.
She smells like the sun. She glows in my gaze, a bright human apparition of more beauty than I would have given the unappealing rock planet capable of producing. The green and blue globe has borne spectacular fruit, and now I have plucked it from the overbuilt colonies it prefers, I intend to keep her. Forever.
But I must be careful. My romantic possession is instant and unending. I knew the moment I opened my eyes and saw her above me, radiant with the rising star, that I would keep her forever. The human does not understand me. The way she spoke to me, without respect or reverence, as if I were just another one of the little creatures skittering about that rock, it told me she did not understand what I was, not even a little bit.
“She is very beautiful, sire, but will she survive?”
“This one is stronger than you might imagine. I watched her defy a horde of her fellow men, all armed to the teeth, demanding she stand down. She is reckless, she is disobedient. She is… well, there may very well be something wrong with her. But she stood by me, when no other soul would, and in that way she has made herself mine.”