Growing Something New

Chapter 3

LAST CHAPTER HERE WE GO!

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John awoke and sat up in bed, stretching his arms out and yawning. The morning sun beamed in as it always did, falling across himself and the bed. Through his squinting eyes, he could see Kiz'ana wasn't in bed. He smiled, knowing she was probably downstairs looking something up on the computer.

Three months had passed since she first crash landed and came into his life, and a lot had changed in that time. Though he had been suspicious of her and fearful of people looking for her, nothing terrible ever came of it. Kiz'ana had always been pleasant and helpful to John, and he stopped having any doubts about her motivation or trustworthiness early on. Neither had he seen hide nor hair of any strange vehicles or people on his property, or anything like the helicopter he had heard that fateful night. The closest thing to it was a strange description from one of his buddies he talked to in town a few weeks after Kiz'ana's arrival. His friend, a police officer, had mentioned in passing that some men in suits had questioned the police chief about the surrounding farms and that his buddy had noticed he never saw their badges or heard what department they were from.

The news had set him on edge for some time, but it was all for naught. His new life with Kiz'ana would be almost entirely uninterrupted save from the occasional deliveryman leaving something on his doorstep. At first, it seemed his life would go on just as it always would, with only a strange otherworldly companion to bother him from time to time, but he found that having her around slowly but surely began to change things. He had never had someone to talk with at his home; before she came, he would work, eat, and sleep all by himself, sometimes going days without saying a word, just stewing in his own repetitive thoughts. With her, she could go hours asking him about history, human society, the world, anything she could think of. He thought he'd get tired of it, but the way she asked him, her dark eyes wide and focused on him as he replied, somehow made it never got old to him. Eventually, he found himself doing the same with her and listening intently as she described the massive colony-ships that her people had assembled and scattered amongst the stars, the advanced technology based on things he didn't understand, their bizarre ritualistic society, and much more. The more they talked, the more he realized he had been missing something like that, just someone to talk and listen to.

Besides the companionship, Kiz'ana began to help him out in other ways. While John did maintenance work on the farm, Kiz'ana spent most of her time inside, though she did help out with feeding the chickens and other simple labor. John had introduced Kiz'ana to his computer and internet after a while, letting her use it so long as she made sure not to accidentally tell someone she was an alien or something equally disastrous. Kiz'ana was immediately very interested in it, looking up information about anything she could think of. She would spend hours reading pages upon pages of miscellaneous little things, absorbing tons of facts on anything she found and telling John about it all at dinner and bedtime. Even more surprising, John watched her at the computer one day and noticed her scrolling through a large web page rapidly. After watching her for a minute or so, he asked her what it was she was looking for, but she replied that she wasn't looking for anything in particular and was just reading. He realized that she was in fact reading at a phenomenally high speed. It was no wonder she had so much to talk about!

It wasn't long before her reading became more than just something to interest them both. Kiz'ana had spent one of her days looking up some local food distributors and, after asking John if it was okay to check through his business and accounting records, found someone who would give him better a better rate for his corn. John was a little disbelieving initially, but double-checked himself and found she was correct. He thanked her and went the next day to sell most of the corn he had in storage, making much better profit than he had expected to with his previous year's harvest. Since then, Kiz'ana became especially eager to find whatever she could to help out around the farm. In time, he had most of his old rusted farm vehicles and machines running right as rain, began fertilizing the corn after germination instead of just before the planting season like he had previously done, reorganized the entirety of his cellar, barn and all of his sheds into a much more orderly fashion, and many other improvements. With nearly all of the facets of his work overhauled for the better, it made him shake his head in wonder at the old, inefficient ways he had done things, just going through the motions and never really taking a good long look at where he had gone. As time went on, he began to think that it wasn't just his work that had changed in such a way.