TOC MetaStories: Ineen Aldrop's 'He Stood taller Than Most'

Part 13 -More Questions than Answers-

Jakiikii moved towards the small distressed alien as Mack turned back towards Paulie and repeated his last question. “Paulie, what level of technology do your people possess?”

Paulie scratched his chin, the shadow of stubble that crept across it making it feel bristly. “Well, we have been using electricity for a hundred years or so now. Things really started to take off around world war two when we discovered the atomic bomb, oh yeah, and we started using primitive computers then too. That was like eighty years ago.” He paused, looking at the three aliens. “Wait, do you know how long an Earth year is?”

Jakiikii shrugged her shoulders and the small oniuh cocked their head. Mack was the first to speak as they gave an exasperated noise and pulled over the folder. “Yes of course we do. Let me check. A galactic standard year is defined as the passage of a terrestrial world around their sun. And the mean time has been determined as four hundred galactic standard days. Your planet’s year in comparison seems to be..” He paused, his eyes roaming over the page as he shook his head. “No that can’t be right.”

Paulie leaned forwards. “What isn’t right?”

Mack glanced at Jakiikii and then seemed to lean back from the table a bit. “Well it says here that your planet orbits around its star once every one thousand and forty days, that would make your years the equivalent to a little more than two-and-one-half of a galactic standard year. How far from your home star does it orbit?” He looked back through the notes.

Paulie blurted out, “Our mean orbital radius is about eight-point-three light minutes, a minute is sixty seconds and a second is equal to something like nine-point-two billion oscillations of a cesium one-thirty-three atom.” He smiled proudly as he said it. He had been paying attention in science class and loved to watch science videos on the internet. He knew that his values were not spot on, but it was close enough to get the point across.

Flurn seemed to chuckle. “This Urrenian is not the dumb savage we may have been led to believe. I am sorry that I misjudged you.”

Paulie was a little taken aback. Sure the small alien had apologised, but what he had apologised for still made him frown. “Is that why you became so frightened when you saw me?” The little toad-like alien licked his lips with a fat tongue as he seemed to think it over.

It was the six-armed termaxxi that answered for him though. “Likely a mixture of reasons, not the least of which is his cowardly nature.” She said in a jesting manner, her words not polite but seemingly neither said to cause hurt.

The oniuh stood as tall as they could, which wasn’t very, and seemed to puff out his lab coated chest. “Oh yeah? I stand up to you every day, and you are the same..”

She silenced him with a loud hiss, several of her eye-petals looking at Paulie as she waved her middle arms for silence. Flurn ducked their head as they drew back, their wide mouth snapping shut as they were rebuked. Paulie raised an eyebrow, it seemed the termaxxi still had secrets she was loath to tell.

Paulie contented himself with eating yet another of the nutrient cubes before dusting off his hands. “Okay, not to be a buzzkill. But I didn’t get to finish talking earlier.” He leaned forwards onto the metal table before motioning to Mack. “As I was saying. The second world war was about eighty of my years ago, so about two hundred galactic standard years ago. Well, since then the world evolved rapidly. My people developed better medicines, antibiotics..” Paulie froze. Antibiotics!

He pushed himself up and away from the table. “Wait, I forgot, I might get you all sick!” He put his arm over his mouth like he had been informed that the aliens breathed anthrax.

Mack chuckled. “No, you can’t. We have universal inoculations, they keep the GGI free of world ending super plagues just as well as the common cold.”

Paulie was dumbfounded, and by more than one thing the alien man had just said.

Mack looked at him and raised one eyelid as if he were cocking his brow. “Your people have not invented universal innoculations then? I wondered why you were so concerned.” Jakiikii nodded as if it were the most simple thing in the world. “I mean, Urren is considered a quarantine zone, but not because of the pathogens.”

Paulie had to ask, “The common cold? What do you mean, we have that on Earth.”

Flurn nodded and made a strange hand gesture whose meaning was lost on Paulie. “Oh yes, it is thought that it may be the origin of your system’s quarantine in the first place. The common cold originated from the Urren system many thousands of years ago. It has proven a most impossibly resilient malady.” They grabbed a chart from under the top of the cart and handed it to Mack.

The alien’s neck quills stood on end as they looked over the data contained therein. Looking towards Paulie, the alien tossed the paper to the table. “It’s official. You are a genuine apocalypser from the world of Urren, or Earth as you have designated it.” He said it as if ending some long internal debate.

“Was there really ever any doubt?” Jakiikii asked, her reverberating voice seemed to hit him like a slap of cold water.

He shook his head and grabbed the redout. It might as well have been written in ancient cuneiform for all the good they did him. He pointed at it, “What's all this say then?”

Flurn waddled over, their muscles seeming a little tense as they neared him, but they didn’t lock up this time. The diminutive alien reached over the top of the table and grabbed the paper. Pointing to various locations on it he answered, “Well this is your genome type and a rough mapping of its total origin. Over here is your biological makeup, the stuff that makes you, you. In the middle is the tag for carnivore, though I happen to know that your kind are more likely true omnivores. You seem to have a strangely close biological symbiosis with the microbiome in your guts, so we made sure to tailor the inoculation to avoid harming those.” He reached over and placed the page back down before moving to the cart they had brought in.

Jakiikii moved closer from the other side of the table and Paulie flinched as all six of her eyes suddenly stared directly into his. He felt that wall around his mind seem to flex as if something was pressing gently on it from the outside. He shook his head slightly and noticed that the termaxxi woman jerked at the same time, several of her eyes blinking in what looked like surprise.

He frowned and muttered, “What are you doing? You are giving me a headache.” She froze, her body twitching slightly as Mack leaned back in. Seemingly oblivious to their nonverbal interaction.

“So, your people discovered atomic weaponry? How did that go? Surely you understood their destructive potential and never had to use them.” He looked a little concerned when Paulie just snorted. “You didn’t use them on your own planet I hope?”

Paulie glanced towards the slightly more concerned face of Flurn and muttered a warning. “You might want to cover your ears, I am about to say something very concerning.” The small oniuh did as he had prompted, and to his surprise the toad-esk alien clapped both hands over the small ear holes to the sides of their head before starting to hum in a gurgling manner.

“Paulie..” Jakiikii began, but he waved a hand.

“No. It needs to be said. I am not ashamed of my species history, especially since we have been learning from it.” He took a breath. “Yea, we nuked each other. Twice in fact. Two terrible bombs that wiped two entire cities off the face of the Earth. It was so long ago, people live there again even now. But that isn’t all.”

Mack seemed to be alarmed, his grey eyes were wide as he leaned in closer. “Not all? What do you mean.”

Paulie pounded a fist into the table. “Well, we just can’t seem to get along with each other ya know. So many countries started to develop their own weapons programs. And weapons testing programs.” He stopped, a little ashamed of his own species in spite of his earlier remark.

Flurn was looking between them, hands still over their ears as they waited for the all clear. Jakiikii shook her head at him, her eyes moving to keep locked on Paulie as he spoke again.

“No. After the war there was a peace of sorts, we called it the cold war as it was not fought with bombs and bullets, but with espionage and disinformation. It was a dark time, a fearful time. The threat of total nuclear annihilation hung over the heads of humanity like the executioner's axe. From what I can remember reading on the internet, more than two-thousand sanctioned nuclear detonations were tested in those times. Some were even detonated within sight of major population centers.” Mack grunted, his quills shivering in sympathetic pain.

The detective leaned back a bit. “That is crazy, you must forgive me if I have a hard time believing it. Surely such a profusion of atomic testing would have made it into the observation reports?” He didn’t sound as sure of himself as he may have wished to, and Paulie grasped at that seed of doubt. For some reason he felt as though the entire fate of his species was hanging in the balance, and he was the straw that would break this proverbial camel’s back.

Paulie asked Mack, “Surely if the signal dampening array could block signals from getting in they could block signals from getting out?”

Jakiikii nodded towards Flurn as she answered him, “Yes. The possibility exists. But why would they need to do that? As soon as a species is sufficiently advanced to achieve powered spaceflight they are inducted into the GGI. Or at least given the chance. Some species do not play so well with others.”

He nodded to her, a hand raising as if to agree. “Yeah, like the zen’kkalkians! There are others?”

Mack passed a hand over his face. “Yes. Many others, but not all as bad as the zen’kkalk. Some much worse.” He didn’t say it, but Paulie got the impression he was talking about something else entirely when he said it.

Suddenly Paulie got an idea. “Well, when a species is getting close to that level of technology what is the GGI’s standard operating procedure?” He was following a hunch.

Mack shrugged and blinked his large grey eyes. Folding his arms across his dapper suit he replied, “Well, they are surveyed via non-invasive methods and if deemed a risk a signal dampening array is deployed around their home sys.. tem.” He broke up the last word, his brows scrunching as something occurred to him.

He grabbed the notes and rifled through them again. Finally, he stopped and then looked at Paulie. “Earth has had a signal dampening array for more than twenty-five-thousand galactic standard years.”

The air in the room was still.

Jakiikii seemed to pale, her mottled color bending skin shifting from mostly blotchy tan to a near bone white. “Twenty-five-thousand? That is more than..” She seemed at a loss for words.

Mack put out a hand and touched her longest arm. “Yeah, before the destruction of Terminaxx. Long before.”

Paulie asked, “When did that happen?”

Jakiikii whispered quietly, so quiet in fact that Paulie barely heard her. “Two-thousand-six-hundred-and-seventy-three years ago.”

He felt his heart go cold, that was only about a thousand Earth years ago. That meant her people were annihilated back before man had even mastered gunpowder. Right around the same time that the ancient norse explorer Leif Erikson was sailing around the northern parts of the world.

He felt his heart sink and instinctively he reached out towards the woman who to his surprise gripped his hand tightly with one of her delicate third arms. She took a deep breath, and not for the first time he noticed she didn’t seem to breathe through her mouth. Instead her chest swelled and contracted from somewhere lower on her body.

He didn’t think the time was appropriate to comment on it, so instead he just looked into the three eyes of hers that were turned towards him as he released her hand gently. “I am so sorry Jakiikii, what happened?”

Her gaze grew steely, the fire in her eyes flaring as she cursed and spat, “My people were betrayed by those we thought friends.” He noticed that Mack gave her a concerned look and raised a hand. “I cannot tell the events exactly as I was not there. But I can tell you that there were many chances for them to kill us all. But my people are adept survivors, maybe as much as yours.” He would have prompted her to say more, but she turned away and walked into the corner where she promptly vanished.

Just before she turned into a shimmer, he saw a bit of how she did it. Her skin mottled and shifted till it seemed to turn a silvery static color, and the suit she wore changed to match the effect before the shadows seemed to warp and wrap around her. For a bare moment he could actually still see her, her body shadowy and indistinct, then she moved and became a simple shimmer that his eyes insisted wasn’t there.