SciFriday Entries

Connections - SciFriday #28

"Triple shot?" The thinly-bearded man eyed the beverage being handed to him from over his glasses.

"Of course. Wouldn't want my favorite night assistant to fall asleep on the job." The man holding the beverage flicked a blonde strand of hair out of his face by shaking his head. His other hand held another drink.

"I'm your only night assistant," the bearded man said, accepting the drink and swiveling back to his monitor.

"Details."

The blonde man took his own drink back to his own workstation: a wraparound metallic desk with one-way glass monitors hanging down from the ceiling. The man swiped his finger on his desk and the monitor brightened, showing demographics, workloads, and temperatures. The entire floor was a light shade of metallic blue, darkened from the lack of sunlight, and accented by the damp lighting and monitor glow.

"Hey Hershel, did you figure out that matchmaking bug yet?" The blonde man glanced at the bearded man and sipped his own brew.

"Almost got it," Hershel said, typing and clicking with renewed vigor. After a few minutes, Hershel sat back, wiped his brow, and reached for his coffee without looking. His hand bumped it and sent three shots of caramel-flavored energy dribbling across his keyboard and onto his pants.

"Ah, shoot!" He yelled, quickly standing up and brushing off his pants. The blonde man peered between monitors.

"You okay?"

"Ah, it's nothing, just wasted seven dollars," he seethed. He made sure the cup was placed upright again and stomped off, returning a couple of minutes later with paper towels. He started sopping up the coffee on his desk, then haphazardly brushing the keyboard. Soon the mess was cleaned up, and Hershel grumpily fell into his chair. He glanced at the monitor.

"Uh, Gary?" Hershel asked.

The blonde man looked up. "Yeah?"

"What happens when you swap variables with general mish mash?" Gary stood up and walked to Hershel's monitor.

"Heck, I don't know. Probably nothing. Just go ahead and fix it. It's not like someone's matchmaking at this very moment, and even if they were, it'd probably just pop up as an error." He watched Hershel begin typing away, then went back to his desk and started balling up his novelty paper and throwing it at the trashcan.

* * *

Quinten checked his phone and poured over the details he had already memorized. New York Interplanetary Starship Dock, third bay, 10:00. His phone read 10:11. Thoughts raced in his head at speeds he could barely keep up with.

Did I get the wrong time? No, it was posted on the entrance hologram that it was supposed to come in at 10:00. What if it's the wrong flight? What if New York has two Interplanetary docks? Worse, what if they had second thoughts and decided I wasn't cool enough? Would they leave me to wait? Ugh, where are they?

He decided to get some tea at one of the dock's dispensers to calm his rising heart rate. He poked the chamomile pictograph and placed his arm to the machine to read his UniID. It beeped, freshly-brewed tea started pouring into a biodegradable cup, and the console displayed "Thank you" in fifteen different languages. He sipped at it and burnt his tongue.

A voice resonated above. "Flight 117, Bay 3 has arrived, Flight 117, Bay 3 has arrived. Please stay behind the yellow lines while the passengers disembark."

Quinten nearly spat out his second sip. A wave of assurance washed over him and broke over the new anxieties of whether or not his blind date was actually on it. This can't be healthy. He brought up the dating app on his phone and turned on the Match Tracker. It only scanned fifty feet out, so he was left to guess which passenger who were now shuffling out could or could not be his date. He wondered again why a human would need to take this particular flight in.

The passengers themselves were a spectacle for anyone who wasn't used to city life. These days "alien" was a derogatory term, so people just started calling them the "Others." And so far as Quinten saw, not a human in sight. His tracker beeped suddenly and he looked to see a red heart flashing at the edge of the tracking area. He looked up again, eager to see his date.

But all he could see were the Others. He frowned and looked again. One of the Others were looking at their phones as well. And then the two locked eyes.

This Other was, well, kind of like an anthropomorphic squid that didn't have a mouth and had one set of arms, one set of legs, and two sets of tentacles. Its skin was shiny and pink, but other colors swirled, dissipated, and blossomed on its skin. Its eyes were large, almost the size of a fist, and its ears were less like ears than small cavities at either side of its head. It stopped and stared at Quinten, its colors churning up new and vivid expressionistic paintings by the second. Quinten stared back, mouth agape. Why a Yheri, of all things? Out of every Other imaginable, why a Yheri? The Yheri turned around and started trying to go back to the ship, but was turned away. It then briskly walked through the offloading lane, grabbed its things, and tried to leave without acknowledging Quinten. He realized what was happening in a jolt, and on instinct put down his tea and ran to block its way.

"Hey, hey, wait. I didn't ask for this either, but it'd be a real waste if you just left." Quinten stood in place, arms out, eyes pleading to the Other in front of him. Its colors shifted from darker shades to slightly lighter shades, with jets of emotion blooming and receding in patches. It reached out with a tentacle and touched him on the forehead.

Images and words swirled through his head, thoughts that weren't his. A civilization decimated and colonized, Yheri families torn apart and left in the wreckages of their own homes, humanity steamrolling and rebranding its way through things that never were its own. Quinten gasped as the events unfolded in his head, but worse than those were the emotions that came with it. Anxiety, pain, loss, and eventually hated were all joining in the symphony playing through this Other's appendage.

"I know!" Quinten yelled, drawing even more odd looks from other passengers and onlookers. "I know that we screwed up! I know that I have no right to tell you what to do, or what to feel, and I know that you owe me nothing." The tentacle lifted from his forehead tentatively.

"I just..." He glanced back up at eyes that burrowed into him. "I just don't want you to make a decision you might regret." He dropped his arms and slowly walked back to where he left his tea. He took a long drag from it, ignoring the pain, sat at a bench, and looked back to the Yheri that was a perfect match on paper.

The Other stood still and watched Quinten. Its colors continued to shift, going from lighter to darker hues, light blues to dull browns to harsh reds. After holding their gaze for a couple of minutes, the Other's shoulders slackened. It walked to where Quinten was sitting and sat next to him, offering a tentacle. Quinten nodded, and it touched the side of his head this time.

You better make this worth it.

Quinten smiled.