Chapter 4
I open the door to chaos, more chaos than I could have imagined compared to how non-urgent the beeping sounds.
I won’t say I know exactly what every company in this building does, but as far as I know, it’s mostly boring corporate stuff.
Bland conference rooms, cubicle farms, people in cheap suits and H&M’s finest. The kind of jobs that a character on a sitcom has, just a mélange of vague stereotypes and shared symbols of corporate beige.
So why…the fuck…is there a science lab in an unlabeled room in this building? And more importantly, why is there a mysterious tank filled with green fluid sitting in the middle of it?
My horror doesn’t stop as I take a couple steps into the room.
As my eyes adjust to the green glow of everything, I see that the beeping I was hearing is coming from a display on the tank, accompanied by a glowing red LED.
I would go over to try to shut if off, but I don’t know how much damage I could do to.
.whatever all of this is, if I touch any part of it.
But, I am fully owning the fact that I’m a nosy bitch, and when something like this presents itself to you, curiosity has a good chance at winning out.
I walk toward the tube, my heart beating in my throat. I have no idea what’s in there, but I have to assume it can’t be a good or even banal thing, and I can pretty much guarantee it’ll be a problem for me.
When I finally get to the tube and see what’s inside, I have an instant moment of regret. I know, right then, my life has changed forever and there won’t be any coming back from it.
Because in that tube, floating in a goopy green liquid, breathing silent, shallow breaths, is a goddamn alien.
I’m not being dramatic here. I don’t mean this is a weird animal that I’m interpreting as an alien.
Whatever this is, it’s clearly not from this planet.
It’s roughly human sized, with long arms that extend almost to its knees.
Its skin is a milky green, like jade, and its legs, that's…
where things start to get more strange. They start as thighs, but then split into a tangle of tentacles, extending down to the bottom of the tube and curling back up, creating a tangled mess.
Its face, though, in isolation, is pretty human-looking, and so it gives me pause. I see something in pain, something probably in need…
…and something that I don’t even know how to take care of even if I wanted to.
What am I even saying? It’s not like this is a wounded animal I found on the side of the road, this is something far more complex and a whole lot more than I’m able to deal with.
I think the best way for me to get out of this would be to just call the cops, I guess.
Yeah, I know, ACAB and all of that, but, maybe I’ll just leave the building and let them sort it out.
I already have way too many complications with my life, and I don’t need to add tentacled aliens to that list.
The display on the tank states, “Life Support Systems - Failure” along with a mess of other screens of text that look like dire warnings, full of facts and figures that I can’t make sense of, but there’s enough red and flashing on the screen that I think I get the point enough without having to have an engineering degree.
I know that if I don’t attend to this thing, it will probably die.
Probably. But I can’t save it myself, whatever it is, so, I do the utterly cowardly thing and turn to walk away.
I get about a step and a half before I hear a dull thudding coming from the inside of the tank. Then another. A cracking sound, like ice breaking apart in liquid, follows.
I take another step. It’s nothing, it’s absolutely nothing.
But when the third thud comes from behind me, and the next cracking sound is far louder, accompanied by a splash of liquid hitting the floor, I know I can’t be imagining it.
I turn around just in time to see the rest of the glass give way, shards flying to the ground as the pressure from the inside propels them out, along with flashes of grey tentacles.
The thing in the tube sits up, its face strangely human-like, delicate features making it look ethereal and soft. But I remind myself how much of a problem this could cause in my life. So once again, I turn away.
“Are you actually just going to leave me here to die, like this?” The voice echoes in my head. At first, I think I’m just saying it to myself, but, no, I soon realize that it’s coming from whatever’s in that tube.
But if I keep not looking at it, maybe I can retain some kind of plausible deniability. Maybe I can just act like it isn’t capable of speech, isn’t capable of thought, isn’t capable of pain, isn’t…
Fuck…no, there’s no way I can do that.
“That’s fine, I’ll just desiccate here, and you can…go back to your life or whatever.” It says.
I turn around and see the thing sitting up, staring at me, the jade skin shimmering a bit in the light. It’s…oddly attractive in a way that something that isn’t a human definitely shouldn’t be, but I can’t really ignore the feelings it stirs inside of me.
Wonderful job, Lucy, always the monsterfucker, and now you’re horny for the tube creature.
“I wasn’t…going to just leave you to die.” I say.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.” I hope that this thing can’t read my mind…or read less than convincing lies as what they are. “I was going to go get you help…”
“And how’d you know what help for me would be?”
“I was going to call the owner of the building, I don’t know.” I take a step toward the thing, the briny smell of the liquid that was formerly in the tube with this thing filling the room.
“You were going to call the people who kidnapped and imprisoned me?” It says, an incredulous smile spreading across its ovaloid head.
“That’s…I…” I step a little closer.
“To your credit, you didn’t know that. I know.” The thing nods. “I’m…Xyzo, by the way. At least that’s what I’m using as my name here.” Xyzo reaches its hand out to me, a hand that is oddly tentacle-like despite retaining five fingers.
“Hi Xyzo, I’m…” I wonder if I should give this thing my real name, but, hell, I’ve had so much shit in my life about giving different names that I’m done trying to hide anything. “I’m Lucy. She/her.” I shake the somewhat slimy hand.
Xyzo nods, “I’m just going to tell you that gender is a whole…really complicated thing with my kind that we aren’t going to get into right now, but, let’s just go with I’m the rough equivalent of a she/they in terms you’d understand.”
“I was she/they for a bit…before I just fully transitioned to she/her.”
“Whatever you use, I’ll remember. My brain is about nine hundred times as dense with neurons as yours, so, there’s plenty of room for whatever pronoun configurations you throw at me.” Xyzo smirks.
“That’s, um…that’s cool, thanks for understanding. And, uh, speaking of transitioning…”
“This early?” Xyzo raises what would be eyebrows if she had them. “You’re telling me that right away?”
I shrug, “I figured it would come up eventually…” I take another step toward Xyzo’s pod, gaining confidence from somewhere to try to confront this strange situation head-on. “It always does, one way or another. And then people get to have their reaction, and I have to just deal with it.”
Xyzo sits up in the tube, carefully lifting themselves up without slashing a tentacle on an errant shard. “Have you talked about transitioning to a lot of extraterrestrials before that had a bad reaction or something?”
“No…” I smirk. “It’s just that…it’s never really up to me how things will change when they know, so I want to get it out of the way right from the top.”
“Well, I’ll just say that my home planet has about 780 possible genital configurations, so we can’t spend our time policing what’s in everybody’s pants.
” Xyzo swipes at some glass shards on the edge of the tube.
“So whatever someone says they are, that’s what they are, and we worry about genetic compatibility later. ”
For as scary as this situation started, I can’t help but to be charmed by Xyzo at this point. Maybe it’s the instant acceptance…but maybe it’s also the fact that she’s a hot alien with tentacles. Either way, I can’t help but be captivated by her.
“How did you end up…here?” I say. I extend a hand to help her out of the tube, and to my relief she accepts, wrapping her long fingers around my wrists as she carefully extracts herself from the goo and glass.
“It’s silly, really. Just poor focus on my part when I was flying on a foggy night about five years ago.”
I help Xyzo get to her…feet…tentacles, whatever, and she stands in front of me. I’m five feet ten inches, something that’s always made me self-conscious since I began transitioning, but Xyzo is at least six feet and makes me feel small, which is nice.
“I was coming down to do some field observations and misjudged my altitude when I started to try to leave, hit some high-tension wires, and, well, next thing I knew I was in a tube.” Xyzo looks down at me, and then down at the flimsy wetsuit she’s wearing that’s been stapled together to conform to her body.
“So, what were you doing exactly?” I say.
“We’re given a sector of space to patrol, and we just make sure things remain orderly in that sector.”
“So you’re like a Green Lantern?” I say.
“No. Not at all like that. Absolutely nothing like it.” Xyzo stares daggers at me.
“A space cop, then”
“Space…journalist, let’s say. We never intervene. Just observe and record.”
“Oh, like The Wa—“
“—If I wasn’t currently atrophied, I would choke you with one of my tentacles.” Xyzo seethes.
I grin. “That’s not the threat you think it is.”
She closes her eyes, or at least the membranes that cover them slide across the smooth black surface. “So, Lucy, are you going to help me, or are you going to let me turn into a desiccated husk?”
I stare at Xyzo. This is a bad idea, and a girl like me attracts enough unwanted attention without carting around a six foot tall squid, but, there’s something in her eyes that pleads with me. That needs me. And, in the same way, girls like me like to feel like we’re needed.
“I guess, uh, what do you need from me?” I say.
“I need a computer…” Xyzo looks to the ground and then back up at me, a little worry in her eyes. “And, I need to hope that in the last five years they haven’t changed the emergency extraction protocols.”
“I can help you with one part of that at least. It’s a shitty computer, but, we have pretty fast internet.”
“Perfect.”
---
“Fuck.” Xyzo says, starting at the computer.
“What?” I look at the screen, but it’s useless for me to try to interpret it. The moment she touched the computer with her long tentacle, the screen flickered into patterns that looked both jagged and smooth at once, glittering colors that my brain is hardly able to process at all.
“Well, the protocols haven’t changed, but, the nearest extraction ship is four hundred lightyears away.” Xyzo rolls her eyes as if this is a repeated annoyance.
“Do you mean they’re not going to get here for more than four hundred years?”
“No, god…sorry.” Xyzo spins around to face me, leaning against the desk. “I forget that you all think that light is the fastest thing in the universe.”
“It’s not?”
“No, it’s like the fiftieth, but, I can’t deal with explaining the transit properties of…” Xyzo says something, but the sound doesn’t even resemble language, and my brain aches to even consider what it means.
“Ok, ok, so how long, in earth time, before they can get here?”
“Tomorrow, probably by noon or so.”
“You could have just said that.” I say.
“I know.”
“So…where is it going to be?”
“About a hundred fifty miles down the coast…sorry…” She winces.
“I don’t have anywhere to be tomorrow…could be fun.” I smile.