My fingers wrapped around the creature’s neck. They kept wrapping; one, two, three times around. Its eyes were bulging and it was trying to panic despite its suffocated inability to do so. I watched it curiously, observing how it acted in its death. In its final moments, just as it began to give up, I released my lengthy grip and dropped it onto the flat, grey dirt beneath us. It gasped for air on its hands and knees and tried to run. But I reached out with my long arms and fingers and snagged it before it could get away. I wasn’t finished with it.
I pulled it close, analyzing again its odd features. It had a head that came quite pronounced from the rest of its body from a clearly defined neck. There was a bundle of dead auburn fibers growing from the top of it and also just above the eyes. It had two strange, oval shaped eyes, which were white with a curious black and brown center and full of fear. There was a protrusion just beneath and between them of tissue with two small holes in the bottom. At the base of the head, there was a mouth, and in the mouth were white teeth and an unusual pinkish-reddish tongue. On the sides of the head were also what I assumed to be ears, which were irregularly shaped and of a similar tissue of the protrusion.
The creature was clad in rags on its body and legs and arms. The arms were short and the legs were squat, and both showed the contour of muscles that pulsed and shook with terror. The fingers were not nearly as long as mine and they had an odd hard substance growing out of the ends. I could not see the feet, however, because they had been covered with an extra layer of what looked like a worn artificial skin.
It made utterances that were short and loud before, which was some sort of instinctual screaming. But as I held there at that moment, it was just breathing in short, desperate gasps for air. It seemed as though I had pushed the creature to the edge of its limits, and I was intrigued by it. But I also had some pity for it in its fear. I had hurt it in order to understand it, but then again, it was at least still alive.
Wrapping my fingers around its torso, I carried it with me as I began to walk back to my dwelling. It tried to struggle, but only for a moment. It was either in shock or it had given up. I walked through the city, stepping over rubble and garbage. The city was not one we had built, but rather the remains of what the creature’s people had built. Occasionally I would explore the city. If I was lucky, I could find one of these creatures and learn about it. There wasn’t much else to do since the colonies started. Ten revolutions around this planet’s star had been repetitive in that we received supply packages and were encouraged to sell whatever useful goods we had from the planet such as chemicals, scrap metal, texts, art, and various other objects. Some of us even terraformed in order to grow certain foods. But the colonization had not really made progress for a while as a result of more home-world related issues, and I explored the city to fill my time.
I stepped into my dwelling; a home adapted from an old deserted dwelling from the creature’s civilization. After placing the creature on a mat, I poured some supply water into a bowl and put it near the alien native. There was more to learn, but I had to keep it relatively healthy.
What I wanted to know required consciousness from the being, so I decided to take a look at some of the gadgets I had found earlier while I waited for it to awaken. The first interesting object I had found that day was a round piece of green metal. There was a pin on the top that kept a lever secured against the ridged body. The object was heavy and seemed impossible to open without removing the pin. But my interest was lost before I could see what was inside because I saw another alien object that looked much more interesting. It was a sleek and flat rectangular object with a button on the bottom of the face. Pushing the button, as I found out, caused the face to light up. A sense of delight occupied me at the value of a working artifact. I touched an icon on what seemed to be a touch-sensitive display. A new screen opened, and I touched it again. Then it suddenly began to create a quiet noise. The noise was like nothing I had ever heard; a blend of several strange-sounding and fluctuating sub-noises. Soon it had loudened into a painful sonic pulse with the abnormal sounding voice of a creature. In panic, I pushed as many buttons on the touch-sensitive display as I could find with my nimble fingers, which just made things worse. Finally I pushed the main button of the bottom several times, and the noise stopped.
There was another noise as I listened to the silence in relief. The creature was waking up. I looked over at it and I could see that it was coughing and squinting and moaning. I approached it and it instantly shrank away as far against the wall as it could with its short hands in front of its face. I offered it the bowl of water, but it did not respond at first. Sitting beside it, I pushed the bowl against its upheld hands. The creature hesitantly accepted and emptied the bowl before I could even let go of it. It breathed a sigh of what I assumed to be satisfaction and then stared at me with a look that seemed scared, curious, and angry all at the same time. I had a hard time distinguishing between the emotions anyway, but I was getting better with each encounter. This one, however, did not run or die of shock or attack me like all the other creatures did. It just stared. The concentration was, to me, an opportunity.
I stared back, and then slowly raised my hand. It flinched back a little, but I was able to wrap my fingers around it shoulders with gentle hesitation and care. It wasn’t until my grip became firm that it struggled. Moving my face closer, I opened my eyes wide. The creature was frantically trying to escape, but this was something I had been meaning to try since I learned that they were intelligent. I focused my mind. As a result, its eyes began to glow. The creature lost its resistance at that point as energy-vapor flowed from my eyes into the creature’s eyes.
I was inside its mind. I could tell because I was experiencing snapshots from its memory. Trying to concentrate, I pieced together some level of chronology in its memory. Then, before I could really control it, everything went black as if I was asleep but aware of my unconsciousness.
Then I not only saw, but I experienced the creature as it had been since I had made contact. I wasn’t what I had been only minutes ago. I was, in every perceivable way, the creature. And something was gripping my throat and causing a sense of terror to overwhelm me; something with abnormally long fingers…
