"KSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHTTTT"
The cold hiss of steam announced my arrival to System 67-54-86. As the various tubes methodically unhooked themselves from my body, my memory began dripping back.
I am Omn Sassen, charter to the Collective of Mounds. I am here to explore Furyam’s seventh world.
I ran a routine systems check. Everything was fine, except some small stardust punctures. My ship, the Cilliary Orator, is a tough one. Then I waited for a few moments, unsure of what to do. I was still recovering from cryosleep, and mind blanking is a terrible side effect. When I got my consciousness back, I immediately used the masturbation pole. Ahhh. Nothing like the sizzling of bodily fluids to freshen up the mind. I wonder how the first spacefarers managed it without the poles. Sexual frustration is a terrible madness to overcome. I remembered my breeding stock, waiting eagerly for me at Home. If only I was there…
Enough of these bodily behaviors. Now is the time for my mission.
My nanosats mapped the planet in a tailflick. It was mostly water, with green and brown splashed artfully over the landmasses. The poles wore thick caps of ice. From a distance, Furyam-7 would look more or less like home, except that home has red instead of green for plants. Or were they plants at all? For as far as I know, those green blotches could be anything from fungal masses to sessile animals to bacterial slime to something completely different. Never mind.
I would find out sooner or later.
When I saw the night side, I got my first major surprise. Certain places glowed with twinkling masses of light. The only similar thing I knew were the blaze forests on Netapode’s Secondary. And even those were far smaller than these…things.
I knew then that it was time for a SEXP landing.
-
A SEXP (Sensory EXploration Probe) is a slightly ovoid, medium sized sphere bristling with all kinds of sensory devices for our nine senses. Seven miniaturized Bcnof antigravity generators serve unlimited mobility in all environments. I’ve seen SEXPs travelling at excess of the speed of sound and then immediately stopping in midair, as if they had never moved at all. And finally, an ultra-fine Shred laser gives the SEXP the ability to cut effortlessly through any potential enemies.
When you link yourself to a SEXP, it takes over all your sensory input. You become the SEXP, you see what it sees, hear what it hears. And should you be careless enough to bump it somewhere, you feel its pain by a slight electric shock given out by your SEXP suit.
I chose to land my first SEXP to the middle of a large peninsula, surrounded by one almost-inner sea at north, and a bigger, warmer sea to the south.
What I first saw was a landscape covered entirely by alien growth that resembled tufts of yellowish-green hair. But the strands of this "hair" was flattened and it tapered to a point, like an ancient Murderblade.
Then I worked out what it was. It was a Cilliary Transport Network! Such structures also existed at Home, where the continuous beating of robotic cilia moved large items across the great plains. But this network was a strange one, I must admit, for its cilia never moved except by the wind, and during my long wait on the field, I saw no moving loads. So I concluded that these were something completely different.
But I did not stay there to find out.
I rose up above, and saw dark lines crisscrossing the fields. Closer inspection revealed their composition, which was some kind of rocky substance I could not identify. Maybe a lava flow or-
Wham!
Some large mass, moving at an extreme speed, hit the SEXP and bounced it away like a toy ball. Small jolts of electricity sizzled through my body.
Without warning, another such object roared past, but luckily missed me. I followed it at a high speed and saw…
It was an animal, without a doubt. Four circular feet pushed it along its path like one of the circulapod grazers of Thinnitap. It had no discernible head, but its front side bore a complex arrangement of lenses, no doubt a sensory array. Its body was covered with shiny metallic armor with no apparent joints. I tried not to imagine the monstrous predators that caused these beasts to develop such protection.
I let the animal go away, for my attention was drawn to the large poles at the sides of the animal's trail. These poles, with very thin wires stretched between them, were like nothing I had ever seen before. I noticed a large electrical charge moving along the wires, and understood…
These things were plants!
They used the electricity for defense against herbivores. No such creature was ever known within the Collective of Mounds. I took the honor, and named them Sassen’s electrophytes. Truly an honorable name for such incredible creatures!
That night, I hid the SEXP among some rocks. Taking the clumsy SEXP suit off, I prepared a simple festival of prefab meals and synthalcohols to celebrate my triumph of discovery. Sassen’s electrophytes! Sassen’s circulapods! Sassen’s world! Now, more than ever, I wished my breeding stock by me.
-
I woke up, head down on crusty vomit. What a wild night it was! I remember using the masturbation pole at least twice, and an overdose of syhthalcohol. The food consumption compartment was truly a mess now. I spent a long time cleaning up, and slipped hastily into the SEXP suit, eager for more discoveries.
Ouch! The suit throbbed with electric shocks! Quickly hooking into visual, and revealed…
A metal instrument, in the grasp of a fleshy branching appendage bobbed up and down onto the SEXP’s static shell. A pitiful effort, since static shells cracked only under atomic explosions, but a painful one anyway.
My tongues hesitated over the Shred Laser knob for a while, then withdrew.
I activated the seven Bcnof gravitons, and the SEXP came humming back to life. This was probably enough to scare the soul out of my primitive tormentor. Then, I was able to get a good look on it.
It was more horrible than I could ever imagine. Two stalks rose directly from the ground to support a body whapped in complex arrangements of cloth. From this body emanated three appendages. Two of them I had seen before, trying to smash my SEXP open. The other was a monstrosity on its own accord.
It bore three, no five openings. One of them was situated more or less in the center, surrounded by fleshy folds. Presently, it opened, and out came a harsh noise, like an amberworm in its death-throes. Two smaller holes were directly below it, and two larger ones, filled with black and white jelly-like tissue and situated above the central orifice, were probably sense organs of a kind. The top of this circular mass was covered with the blacker miniaturized version of the ‘cilliary network’ I had seen, possibly a symbiotic organism.
The creature was startling in many respects, but it really stood out in one way. The science folk at Home had theorized that no creature could possibly exist on two legs, and they had ample proof, for no single organism in the entire Collective of Mounds was a biped! Furyam-7 had bewildered us once again.
Suddenly, another of these beasts came screaming in through a swinging hatch with a metallic instrument in its grasp. It pointed it towards the SEXP and-
BANG!
Ping!
Ouch!
A discharge instrument, eh? We’ll see about that!
The invisible Shred Laser defined a zigzagging arc along the walls and some crude instruments in the room. Sparks and dust flew as the creatures ran screaming away like a swarm of squirmers. No! Leave no evidence of your existence. Bearing this Mother Principle in mind, I flew out through a glass-covered porthole, and played the Shred Laser on the supporting columns of the structure. Then, I increased the heat variable and widened the beam. Another well-aimed burst heated the crude concrete and steel construction to a point where everything- stone, steel and concrete, exploded in an uncontrollable storm of fire. Ouch! I hadn’t expected it to harm the SEXP!
After the smoke cleared out, I found out that the structure had been completely obliterated, and several adjacent ones had been severely damaged. Then I wondered where I was. A check on the holo-globe revealed my precise location. I was in one of the glowing forests.
It was still night, so I could clearly see what caused all the lights. Tall, rectangular prisms dotted with portholes showing light inside made up the skyline. Huge queues of Sassen’s circulapods, making infernal beeping noises and with their lenses aglow, flowed through this protean landscape like rivers of light. Structures like Sassen’s electrophytes stood all over with bright pinpoints of light on their tops.
Then I saw…This place was a like an inverted city mound! It was built and run by these disgusting bipeds. Sassen’s circulapods, with their hollow insides and light-up lenses, were nothing but machines, built by the bipeds to ease transportation. Sassen’s electrophytes carried energy, they served the same purpose with the power pipes back home, only here they provided light as well.
And Sassen’s world belonged to the Bipeds.
At that moment, I considered activating the total converter in the SEXP, flash-vaporizing both this forsaken city and everything within a five sound-hour radius into a radioactive wasteland.
But I would never do such a thing.
The following fleet of Devastators would.
I ascended up through the atmosphere and was gone.
Bio: Mehmet was born in 19th May 1984 in Ankara, Turkey. Currently he lives in Istanbul where he attends high school and does Sf art as a hobby. Something Completely Different is his first full-scale attempt at science fiction.
E-mail: memo@turk.net
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