Love Languages (71)
A/N: Hi. I'm... back? Ish? I hope. I've been trying a lot of things for my migraines. Recently got Botox and it's helped with the pain, so that's something. Hopefully we're on the upswing now. I don't know. Hope is hard, guys. Thank you to u/uktabi and u/tulpacat1 and u/VeryUnluckyDice for giving this a look.
Memory transcription subject: Andes Savulescu-Ruiz, UN universal translator technician.
Date [standardized human time]: December 21th 2136
I found out ten minutes into my workday that some nurse had the bright idea of airing the big speech by one of the adult rescues about the stampede. No warning, no consulting, she just put it up on one of the floors with the big TVs for my kids.
I’d specifically ignored the broadcast when it came out—the kids were fine seeing human faces, there was really no reason to make a whole thing of it—and yet there it was.
Ack. Gross. What, did he think we were vampires? The longer it went on, the more kids were arguing with each other and the half-dozen nurses trying to calm them down.
“I told you they’re not real Savagenesses!”
“You’re stupid if you think there’s no chopping place!”
“He’s the one who said we were abominations!”
The video kept going. “Despite knowing the danger of predators, the Venlil decided to trust them. We have to trust the herd, or we have nothing.”
Lihla ran at me and hugged my leg. “Um. Kid, I–”
“I don't like him,” she said, pointing at the TV where the venlil—Glim—was stepping off the podium. Hey, wasn't he her dad? I distinctly remembered—“I don't like him, he's slow-going prey!”
I pressed my lips together and took a look around. The noise was starting to get to me. I whistled loudly enough for the rest of the kids to suddenly freeze and stand at attention–with better posture than the adults, no less. I walked over to where the TV was.
“One at a time, can somebody tell me what just happened?”
One girl politely raised a hand, and I pointed at her. “Yes, um, Augusta, was it?”
“The nurses want us to be slow-going prey,” she said. “They put on an old man who is scared of the new bosses.”
I nodded. “Ah. Who else agrees with her?”
A dozen hands raised up.
“Does somebody disagree?”
Most of the adult venlil raised their hands. I ignored them, and found one of the boys–I didn't know his name. There were more boys in the crowd than there had been the last time I saw the kids as a group. I pointed at him.
“They were telling us it is okay if we are scared of the new bosses,” he said. A couple of other kids started to argue, but he shouted over them. “It’s for psychology!”
I nodded. “Alright. Well… the good news is that we don't want anyone to be ‘slow-going prey’. Or fast-going for that matter. We mostly want you to be happy and healthy and enjoy life. Let's try that now…” I turned to one of the nurses. “Do the children have class today?”
“They just finished,” she told me. “Right now it's an… enrichment period.”
I nodded. “Does anybody want to watch a human cartoon?”
Every hand went up.
“Alright! Today is the day you learn about voting systems.”
It was too fun. I couldn't remember the last time I had fun, real fun, with laughing and joking around. We set up a quick little ranked voting session for three different cartoons, they argued about their favourites, they voted, we calculated the votes. It took maybe an hour. There were only a few dozen kids (presumably the rest had left to do other activities) so I could walk them through the math very easily. Clarice even got me a smartboard on wheels to make the process faster.
At the end of the day, the answer was Space Adventurers and they were soon laughing and play-fighting again. A few were arguing about voting systems, which was always fun, and I fielded a couple of questions about approval voting vs ranking vs one-candidate choices. It was relieving. Like a fist that had been squeezing the back of my head for months suddenly loosened its grip. A clear, simple set of tasks, none of which were particularly high-stakes, all of which required just… talking, and knowing some game theory basics.
Clarice kept staring at me. Once the kids had run off to join their peers watching the next episode, I gave her a curious glance, and she stiffened up with fear.
“Was there anything you um..?” I began, trying to keep my voice even and friendly.
“You're a good teacher.”
I looked at her in confusion. “Was I… not supposed to be?”
Her eyes got big and her whole body tensed up even more. “No sir, I mean, yes sir, I mean, I didn't think–you don't–I was–”
“You're not in trouble,” I said. Fuck, what do I have to do here? I gave everyone a free fancy dinner, and had fun with a bunch of kids, and still people were scared. Why?
She nodded and lowered her shoulders a little. “Um. I just… I thought… you're not really a… people… person.”
I shrugged. “I guess? I don't know. Those categories are contingent as shit, but I did spend a lot of time in Academia and ten of those years were as a graduate student TA-ing, or sometimes as the sole instructor of entire classes. So it's not like lecturing is new to me.”
“Ah, that must be why,” she said, finally fucking relaxing.
“Why what?”
Clarice winced and looked away, rubbing her arm. “It's the first time I've seen you actually smile since you um...”
I stared at her for a long moment. Chasa's comment about my being able to smile reverberated in my skull. I wasn't just miserable. I didn't just look miserable. I apparently looked perpetually miserable to people who bothered to comment.
I swallowed. “...Noted.”
She got scared again. I shook myself and began to limp away.
“That's not–I didn't mean–”
I gave her a wave but didn't turn around, just waved vaguely in her direction before turning towards the stairs. “You're fine, Clarice, get yourself that nice dinner!”
I got to the single-occupancy bathroom by my office, leaned on the counter, and stared at my face in the mirror. My lower eyelids looked a little saggier than usual, my skin looked a little paler, and my eyes weren't exactly blood-shot, but they definitely looked tired.
I mouthed some words, pretending I was talking to Clarice, or one of the nurses, and I caught myself tensing up, my whole face suddenly glaring back at me like I'd interrupted something important. The dark circles made my eyes look sunken in, and my whole expression look darker, even with the same muscle positions. Okay. So, not a baseless reaction. I should do something about that. I forced a smile. It did not work and I looked creepy as fuck. Yay. I splashed my face with cold water and leaned back in my office chair for a nap.
Within seconds, I was completely dead to the world. My body completely shut down. There could have been a stampede, and I wouldn't have known for at least an hour. Having lost the implant, I was back to working with a system of nested alarms, and with good reason, since I slept through two of them.
Thankfully, the third alarm woke me up. It was one word: Ajaad. I had completely forgotten about the meeting with Ajaad. Bahri had supposedly done her evaluation of the PD facility, and we were meant to discuss it. After an almost-heart-attack, a cab ride, and an awkwardly long elevator ride, I made it to her office a whole minute early.
I thought she was going to flay me. I kept running through the past couple of weeks, second-guessing every decision. Trying to figure out how to apologize for things, or which things I could plausibly need to apologize for. The meeting was about the PD facilities, but the paranoia was still there.
Instead, it was a quick and painless little chat. I got a nice sense of vindication when I learned that Kiara Bahri had been in the facility for a grand total of five minutes before she rescued the first patient she saw and ran off. Because they were totally torture chambers.
“We're not exactly sure what will happen, but Ambassador Williams is handling it,” she finished.
I drummed my fingers on the desk and pursed my lips for a moment. “So…”
“Well, the good news is it doesn’t matter, right?” Ajaad said. “I mean, you said the situation is largely resolved, it’s just paperwork at this point.”
“Well, yeah but… I do think I would have managed not to kidnap anyone and nearly cause a diplomatic incident,” I said, holding up my palms as a sign of non-aggression.
Ajaad sighed. “Probably.”
Since the whole thing with Stabby—who I shouldn’t think of as Stabby—was in a strange form of stasis until Officer Estala showed up, we turned this into an informal check on the facility. I ran through every number I could in my head, measuring them against every metric we were supposed to meet. I hadn’t focused on metrics in a while, and I thought that was the right call, but maybe it wasn’t. Am I behind on metrics? Which metrics? We hadn’t had a lot of adoptions, but we’d had a couple, and some were in progress. Nutrition was on point, better than on point after Larzo and the nutritionist got together with the tests I’d ordered after talking to Shathel. Education was ahead of schedule…
She pulled up the stats and flashed me a smile. “As far as I can tell, you’re doing an excellent job.”
My brain screeched to a halt. “I… am?”
President Ajaad chuckled. “Are you surprised?”
I winced. “I don’t know, I guess I assumed I missed some key thing, and you were gonna kick my ass about it.”
She laughed. “No fights, de-escalation training for all volunteers, first to initiate music and art therapy, classes are already underway, early prospective adoptive parents have already been identified and begun the process, a personalized approach to mental health, good record keeping, stable research output…”
A smile snuck onto my face. “Well, yeah but, I mean, that’s just the standard you laid out back in October.”
“Yes. And it’s an extremely high standard that at least forty percent of the facilities are struggling to uphold.”
I shrugged. “I’m struggling too, I mean, it’s a lot of things to–”
“Andes,” she told me, leaning forward. “You have managed to do this while recovering from multiple severe injuries. The first batch of children arrived in your facility twenty days ago. Take the compliment.”
My objection to ‘severe’ died in my mouth. “...Thank you, ma’am.”
“How is working with Karim?” she asked, “I understand there was some initial friction there.”
I nodded. “Yeah, he was a bit of a dick for the first week, but I think we’re getting into a rhythm now. Just standard culture clash on top of a layer of incompatible biomedical ethics frameworks.”
Her eyebrows rose up at ‘incompatible’. “Well, they should be more compatible soon, if it had to do with ‘predator disease’ as a pathological framework.”
I nodded. Things were working. Maybe not ideally, but they were working. I cleared my throat. “Can we talk about the research for a bit? It feels like some of Larzo’s findings are a bit above my paygrade.”
—
Memory transcription subject: Provisional Hunter Asleth, Arxur Dominion Third Fleet
Date [standardized human time]: January 2nd 2137
I kept staring at the joke.
Working with humans had mostly gone well, and I wanted to tell my friend that. I wanted to come to him in excitement and joy at our people's collaboration.
But it was supposed to be secret. The UN liaison made it very clear that I was not to tell anyone on Wriss, or Earth, that we were cooperating. The shared intelligence on Federation technology and how to bypass it, the extra food, all of it was to be kept from him.
>Andes, status report
I wrote. Then I deleted that. Humans were more personable than that. A status report request would probably earn some mockery. Not that I disliked Andes' mockery. There was something oddly comforting about it, like a shove to the shoulder from a hatchmate.
>Welfare inquiry?
I deleted it again. Historically, I had simply told Andes, without preamble, what I was doing. I didn't ask about his welfare. He volunteered it as a matter of human courtesy.
>I met your brother. Why are you such a runt in comparison?
I almost sent that, then decided against it. Pedro Savulescu-Ruiz had stressed to me how not everything I had seen could be explained to Andes. I did not really understand which parts the UN was keeping from “civilians” and which parts it was not. Nor did I understand when Andes counted as a “civilian” and when he did not. He had worked with soldiers, I knew that much, and he was much more pleasant than his brother and his squad.
I remembered his laugh. So incredulous. Like joy taking him by surprise.
>I miss you
I stared at the cursor for minutes, then put the pad away.
I worked. My new work was much the same as my old work, with the added step of sending information to the humans, but I had been informed I would be sent to a Resistance stronghold soon for a separate mission.
Shathel had become my direct commanding officer, and had embraced the human tradition of “checking in”.
“Ah, Asleth, I spoke with Andes recently,” he said, poking his head into my space like a curious snake. The news breathed life into me.
“What did he say?”
“He was curious about Veroth's farm. He's caring for its pups now.”
I nodded.
“I have contacted Veroth's… son,” I could almost see the words flash before his eyes, until he found one Andes would approve of. Our shared friend was like a ghost between us, haunting our words. As a quiet partner in any conversation, and shared secret, Andes made us more human. Kithjak said it was an infection.
Shathel kept talking. He seemed to love nothing more, of late. “Veroth will not speak to me. He may speak to you. Could you deliver the supplies to Greatmoon’s base and catch up to him, wherever he is headed? I have Isath's information, her ship should be easy enough to track.”
I nodded.
“You should also extract as much information as you can from their computers, and make it… less cumbersome to human data structures, if you can. If all goes well, you may be able to deliver it to Alpha Centauri yourself.”
I was startled by the implication.
“...Would he be there?” I asked. I had mostly been speaking to humans at a distance, but if I could visit Alpha Centauri personally…
Shathel shrugged. “Probably not. But he might. We could arrange for it. The important thing is that humans have access to this information, so they can care for the pups.”
They way he said it made me stare. “You care about the venlil in their care?”
Shathel scoffed. “Obviously not. But humans do, and they will see this as a good faith attempt at cooperation, in which we extend a claw in friendship their way. Given how many humans still hate us over our food, we need the… uh, how do they say… they don't say propaganda…”
“Public Relations?”
“Yes! The public relations benefit. We need their hearts to turn our way if we are going to survive this war. They are our only true potential allies. So we send them a gift.”
I nodded. “When?”
“You leave with the next round of supply deliveries,” he answered.
I blinked and gave a dip of my snout. He left. After a few minutes of clean-up work and another information package sent Olivier’s way, I made my way to my bunk. I was not the most experienced pilot, so rest was necessary.
I wrapped the thick, soft blanket Andes gifted me when we were on Earth around myself, and held the pocket pad in my hand. I had to tell him something. Anything.
>I miss you
I deleted the words. They felt too raw and stupid of me to say to my friend. Like a clumsy child’s attempt at friendship. I decided to play with the joke. I made a face of disgust and took a picture in the same way he had.
>Disgusting
I sent it.
>Can we talk? It’s about your
Pets, I wanted to type, but it rang hollow now. They were children. They were children, just like I was once.
>Can we talk? It’s about your children
I sent the message.
—
Memory transcription subject: Dr. Karim, Biomedical Engineering PhD, Director at the Venlil Rehabilitation and Reintegration Facility.
Date [standardized human time]: December 28th, 2136
The girl was doing better.
I heard it from the nurses, even as I tried to keep to my own wing. She was polite, she played, she participated in class. No one was hurt.
Perhaps the humans were right. Perhaps she was just a child who had gone through something terrible, doing what she thought was good. Perhaps instruction would be much more useful than containment.
I had assumed that would be the topic of the meeting Andes scheduled with me, and was fully prepared for him to gloat. Alternatively, there were some human festivities coming up, and his wing was full of random colourful objects, the meeting could be about that.
It was the first time I’d felt like he was respecting my time, and I quite disliked it. There was something foreboding about his choice to schedule it. If it was a normal, reasonable topic, he would have knocked and popped his head in like an Iftali.
Instead, he saw my open door, stepped inside, and delicatelly closed it behind him. He looked terrible. Not that he didn’t usually, I had come to realize that humans did in fact need the kind of rest we would, if not more, after injuries like his. He was being reckless. Still, he seemed more concerned and less combative, which did nothing to assuage my worries about the implication of the meeting being scheduled.
“So um… Hi, how are you?”
I stared at him. It was not like him to prioritize pleasantries, especially not with me. “Well. Yourself?”
He made a small sound and tilted his head in lieu of answering, then sat across from me. “This is going to be unpleasant to hear. So, before I say it, please take a deep breath and ready yourself.”
I rolled my eyes. He was half my age, his species had made first contact less than a year earlier. He had no idea of the horrors of the universe, especially since he was exempt from the atrocities of at least one of them. “I have already accepted a great many unpleasant truths, Andes, what is it?”
He pressed his lips together and looked down for a moment. “...When I first began researching the kids with Larzo, I was operating under the assumption that the kids had something like domestication syndrome going on.”
“A series of traits that your ‘pets’ have, but which wild populations don't, yes?” I checked, and he nodded, “It would make sense, as we know they are engineered. But they don't seem to be very impaired, as per your reports.”
“Indeed they don't. In fact they seem to… lack. Certain impairments.”
I frowned. “Go on.”
“A while ago, we consulted with an expert on human self-domestication, and um… Her position is that they may be less domesticated.”
My heart stopped in its tracks and my blood ran cold. “Than what?”
He grimaced, as if saying the words was itself painful. Perhaps it was. “Than… the general Venlil population.”
I scoffed. Human lunacy, that was nothing new. “That's ridiculous.”
“Yeah, um. I thought so too, but um…”
I had known Andes for relatively little time, and I had explicitly avoided his presence for much of it. However, due to our correspondence over reports, and our other meetings, I had become certain of one thing: he had no understanding of the concept of ‘tact’. I thought it was a human trait at first, but Liang’s parents proved that humans could be incredibly tactful. Rodriguez, I later learned, had an entire job that boiled down to tactfully interrogating people, and then giving them physical therapy for their psyche. So I was quite certain that tact was unnatural to Andes, specifically.
And here he was, fumbling at it.
He showed me the file and I read through it. The predator-disease information was circumstantial at best, but the connective tissue drew my attention. It would have been easy to ignore if he hadn't also provided comparisons to other animals on Venlil Prime.
“This can't get out of here until you are completely certain,” I told him. “It's clearly–the people–even if it was true, it—”
“I talked to one of my Arxur contacts,” he said. “And he’s going to try to talk to the farmer. We’re still trying to sort engineered traits from seed population effects. But, um… Well…”
I checked the methodology twice over, but the uplift had done good work. There was no denying the conclusions. My blood ran cold. I flicked an ear in agreement. “Right. I suppose providing this information is the least those monsters could do for us at this time.”
“Yeah. Hopefully it'll clear things up, if we have access to their documentation.”
I was suddenly glad that he could talk to the beasts, predator-to-predator. Such information would be vital to understanding not just these children, but… Whether our people had been modified to suit a master's whim, like the human’s pets.
There was only one suspect for such a “master”. The people we had dutifully worked with—for?—over centuries.
“Why would the Federation do this?”
Andes leaned back in his seat and let out a long sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t… know if speculating is a good idea. Larzo’s got a guess.”
“Which is?”
Andes’s eyes darted to one side, then the other, before he would finally meet my gaze. For the first time since I began working with them, I was glad for that human habit. “You fought back.”
Over the next quarter-claw, Andes walked me through his uplift’s research. How he’d gotten a bone fragment from his arxur contact, how it had matched the consultant’s previous ideas, why he’d abandoned the initial concern about ‘domestication syndrome’ and why he and his uplift returned to it later. I asked question after question that I could not answer by a quick glance at the file, and he dutifully answered them in as much depth as I needed.
I could find no fault in the questions they had asked or the way they had gone about answering them. I knew it had to be wrong somehow, but I could not latch onto anything. I was an engineer. I’d never done population research like this.
Once he was done, I took a long slow breath, and let it out. My voice was weaker than I would have liked when I spoke.
“Is that all?”
“Um. Well… no. I mean. Kind of. I…” he pressed his lips together. “I’ve been emailing back and forth with these people over on Colia and I just… it’s kind of a mess. So, I was hoping… I could ask you for a favour. Since you're a biomedical engineering guy.”
My eyes lit up and energy came to my whole body. Any distraction from the existential dread of the conclusion he had just dropped on me was welcome.
“What do you need?”
He blinked and flinched back, startled by my directness. “Oh. Um. I… need a psychiatric implant. I have the schematics for the other one—it used to have access to a lot of blood and a nice little pocket, and now it um…”
He passed me the pad with the schematics, and I changed the language settings and flicked through. It was a shockingly sophisticated piece of equipment to come from a species that had just developed faster-than-light travel.
“Huh. Well… the casing could be thinner, the delivery methods faster, and… I could probably cut it in half, make one half diagnostic, the other intervention, attach each one to a kidney?”
He sagged with relief. “Maybe! How long would it take to um…”
I shrugged. “For this? Perhaps a few paws before I’d send it to manufacturing. The biggest problem is the number of drugs involved. This is… quite a lot. It’ll probably take a few extra paws just to sort that out. The design itself should be the least of it.”
“I’m aware,” he said. “We can chop it into thirds if you want, just—please. If you could get me something that works, and we could iterate by just talking, and I don’t need to send extremely personal information to twelve different facilities and get called a basket case about it…”
I squinted at him as the realization that he needed the implant for himself fell on me. “...This was a uterine implant.”
“Yep,” he said, his face tight. "That it was.”
I concluded that humans had some strange feature in their sexual dimorphism I’d have to read up on. Perhaps he found it embarrassing? “...Very well. I shall work on it tomorrow.”
“Holy shit. Karim… Thank you so much.”
I flicked an ear at him, and then nodded to ensure he understood. “You’re welcome, Andes. Now leave.”
He choked out a laugh and limped out of my office, pad in hand. A moment later, the schematic was in my inbox, and I could evaluate it in greater detail. It was a good distraction from his words, but they still echoed in my mind.
You fought back.
Probably uplift nonsense, but it was better than the alternative.