Chapter 26
Survii
The world tour on Earth was going great!
Survii was making loads of friends out of the world leaders. New garments were added to his closet every day. The sights, the food, the music, the new cultures surrounding him were a joy to experience as each country and region had their own variation.
He absolutely loved it.
What he loved the most was experiencing it with Alanna.
But, of course, they hadn’t come to Earth to have fun. That wasn’t even a secondary purpose. It just so happened that the humans wanted to show off their planet. And with such splendor and beauty and differences, who could blame them?
No, they were here so Survii could sit at a table with the other members of the contact delegation as Scarlet set up their virtual link to the other world leaders in preparation for the negotiations that were about to take place.
The meeting was going to be broadcasted to the entire planet.
Every human that knew about them wanted to know what they were talking about, and to get a true idea of what their countrymen wanted, the human leaders decided that it was best they knew what was being said.
The idea of broadcasting the meeting had been put to a vote and had won – but only by a narrow margin, apparently.
Survii wasn’t really paying much attention as things were being set up. Below the table, out of sight of the camera, he and Alanna were playing a traditional human game that he absolutely loved.
Thumb War.
It was a tiny battle, with their thumbs as combatants and their own entwined fists serving as the arena. In this contest, strength wasn’t as much help as speed, strategy, and dexterity. It was a way for him to fight his female on more even grounds.
When she caught his thumb, he did have to ease off his strength a bit, giving her a chance to win, but the only thing at stake was her smile, and it was so bright when she won that the loss was a cheap price to pay.
“Survii, are you paying attention?” Atem asked from his other side, not able to see what they were doing under the table from his angle. Survii was sure that the jerking and constrained giggles made it appear much more salacious than it was.
“You have my absolute focus, vi Dominani,” he lied without compunction, his upper eye fixed firmly on Alanna who had bitten her lips inside her mouth to fight back her laughter.
Atem growled and was only kept from standing by Peony taking his arm and forcing his focus back onto her. Survii was infinitely grateful for her human sensibilities.
The joys of courting an alien female. It was all exotic and fun.
They kept up their thumb combat until the meeting finally connected. Judging by the number of battles lost, he would have to concede the war, but the delighted sparkle in his female’s eyes made it an uncontested victory.
The virtual meeting was not an unusual format for him.
Survii didn’t always manage to meet with the various species he worked with in person.
Sometimes, the meeting was short and didn’t warrant the trip.
Sometimes, he had other responsibilities that made it impossible to leave.
The human’s distant meeting setup was rather rudimentary, and they had yet to master subspace technology so there was no accounting for the delay it took for the old-fashioned signal to reach the various regions of the planet, but at least it had video.
Alanna’s uncle wasn’t on the conference comm – it was just the UN ambassadors that represented the countries.
Unfortunate, as Survii rather liked the male.
He wasn’t able to accompany them on their world tour, on account of having his own country to run, but he called Alanna frequently to check up on her and to prepare for when they crossed the hemisphere to explore that side of the planet.
They still had some time before that, however.
After India, they were visiting South Korea – though not North, for some reason – and then they would be visiting Japan before crossing the ocean to finally reach her half of the planet.
They weren’t going to Alanna’s country immediately though.
There were plenty of other countries to see first and they were saving her home for last since it was the place all of the abducted human females were from.
By then, they should be finished with negotiations. They would formalize the agreement then finally begin the actual work of opening trade. They had to figure out a way to host the experiments and a way to mate the humans to potential alien matches.
But those things would not be Survii’s task.
Once the agreement was set, he could assign a domini ambassador to Earth specifically to make it their full-time job.
The experiments would be conducted by the Coalition.
As for mating? He had no idea how that was going to be conducted, but he already had his mate, so it wasn’t his concern at all.
Before any of it could happen, however, he needed to actually make an agreement.
Already, today’s meeting was not going well.
Some of the world leaders were saying that they didn’t mind letting humans, as a whole, mate with aliens, but their people specifically would be forbidden.
But they still wanted all the benefits of trade.
Others were absolutely against it – stating it felt like they were selling human lives for the sake of advancement.
More disturbingly, however, were the ones who saw it the same way but were completely okay with selling human lives for the sake of advancement.
They didn’t say it like that. Not while the entire world was allowed to watch this meeting stream live, but they said things like, ‘for the greater good’, and the subtext was clear.
None of those reactions seemed to surprise any of the human females with them, however. Even the one about selling them. A concept so vile, it nearly made all the domini males in the room growl when the first human leader suggested it.
Only years of training and practice kept Survii from letting the sound free like Atem and Tuvo. They couldn’t be heard as they had to manually activate their microphones, but Survii could as his was unmuted since he and Alanna were doing most of the talking.
The human leaders were rather callous, and it was unnerving. These were the ones supposed to protect and provide for their people?
When one of them suggested that they shelf the mating idea entirely, come back to it after the other agreements had been made, Survii had to deny them. Unfortunately, Earth’s status as a protectorate hinged equally upon the three conditions brought before them.
However, he did agree to let the topic drop for now.
Instead, they focused back on trade. A favorite topic of all the leaders. They hadn’t given up trying to get more out of the Coalition – technology specifically – but Survii stood firm because, like the condition of human mates, this was something he could not bend on.
Today, however, they were trying to figure out exactly how trade would progress. Survii suggested the Standard version wherein the Coalition would trade with the planet as a whole, while any private companies could trade with each other – while still obeying the restrictions – as they desired.
Though, that was an issue as the UN did not conduct trade and the planet had no other centralized form of government.
In order for trade to commence on a global scale, they would have to create an organization specifically for trading with the Coalition.
Which presented a problem as, to keep it fair, the members of that organization couldn’t favor one country over another.
It was a headache. This precise thing was why governments of planets tended to centralize after the Coalition arrived.
But luckily, it was not Survii’s headache.
His only task was to offer trade to the planet on behalf of the Coalition.
How the humans accepted that trade and disseminated it amongst themselves was their own problem. Fair or not.
A fact that he tried not to remind them of too eagerly when their negotiations were getting bogged down with such particulars.
After that, they moved onto the scientific exploration – a word the humans decided to use in place of experimentation on account of the fact that it sounded less invasive and frightening.
They had given up arguing allowing their own scientists to assist with the experiments and were now arguing for absolute control over approving or disallowing any studies that took place.
An oversight that Survii wouldn’t have allowed even without Romival quietly telling him to absolutely not agree to that condition.
If humans had that kind of control, they could demand to know the details of every single thing the Coalition scientists did.
Including information they had no right to have.
Moreover, they could just keep denying them any chance to do anything while still claiming that they were allowing the exploration to continue as promised.
He hadn’t known the human leaders for long, but he already knew that they were the exact kind of manipulative and cunning to give themselves that kind of edge.
Unfortunately for them, they weren’t the only species to be led by such people and Survii was used to dealing with their kind. The trick was to always anticipate what they would gain and seek to deny it to them without being overt. Kind of like a game.
One he excelled at on an intergalactic scale. The humans had no idea who they were dealing with.