Night Shift on Delta 6

I stretched out my arms and squeezed my body and head through the aperture to Zylaxxic mode. I always started the night in Zylaxxic. It painted the fuel depot in a cool blue wash of gel-like atmosphere that I found relaxing and could swim freely through. It reminded me of home.

My pale blue contented pallor rapidly ran red with irritation as soon as I was confronted by the mess that Coquelicot had left for me before clocking out. I sighed and got to work, she was always running off without doing even a minimal amount of cleaning, but I never reported her. She was nice enough in spite of her complete lack work ethic and I vastly preferred Coquelicot’s absence to corporate’s second most recent hire.

Gamboge used to constantly follow me around during my shift, hours after his own shift had ended. Everyone experienced the mating instinct, but any Otoporodan with half a brain should understand the consequences of seriously pursuing the instinct. Though I had long suspected that males were the naturally thicker sex regardless of species. Thank the tides he finally moved and left this job behind him. 

I finished putting the last of Coquelicot’s mess into flotsam when the light ding and a green light alerted me to the arrival of a new customer. I twisted the gradient filter two turns and squeezed through the aperture. The cool blue light was replaced with a verdant forest green. The alien air stung my skin mildly and would dry me out if I spent longer than an hour or so in the arid atmosphere.

Each item in the fuel depot stayed in place on the shelves as the atmosphere shifted, maintaining its superposition across the filters. The filters were all constantly in place and overlapping, maintained by the strange power of the lodestone box, but each creature within the fuel depot only experienced one atmospheric filter at a time, customer’s choice of course. This allowed customers to experience their preferred atmospheric environment over the course of their visit and also separated customers who did not choose to cohabitate, significantly reducing potential conflict.

After I finished squeezing through the aperture, I pulled myself up to the top of the nearest shelf, now fighting local gravity, and spotted a large Falx as she folded her wings and ducked her head to enter through the sliding doors to begin perusing the aisles. I flashed pale green in greeting.

She turned and examined me with one teacup sized eye, then twisted her head to the right to looked at me with the other. She blinked and stared straight past me as she began perusing the aisles. I tapped on the closest shelf anxiously and then began reorganizing a stack of Chrome Refresh unnecessarily. I never knew how to engage with customers, that’s why I always took the night shift to minimize the customer service I was required to engage in.

Eventually, the Falx stopped in front of one a refrigerated compartment and made a loud “keee-aaarrr” sound. I flashed orange and climbed back to the register to tap the sign:

No Sounds Over Fifty Decibels.

I sometimes liked to pretend that this corporate policy was in consideration for mine and my coworkers preference for a silent, unstimulating auditory environment. But the corporate representatives I had met had never been Otoporodan and it was more likely that the policy had something to do with the operation of the lodestones.

The Falx stared at me for several seconds, then bowed her head and tapped an item three times. I walked along the top of the aisle, released the item from stasis and collected the bucket.

Night crawlers a la mode.

The Falx followed me back to the register and then tapped the sign for fuel service. I adjusted the pattern across my skin to show a series of integers. The Falx looked at me and then tapped twice on the counter. I held out one tentacle and pushed a second tentacle into the sucker pointedly. The Falx began to caw again, then caught herself and shook her head. She reached under one wing with her beak and fished out a bag containing several small hard pieces of metal.

The multicolored little metal pieces rolled like dice across the counter creating little rainbows as they caught the light. I had a good head for numbers, but Falx currency was impossible to make sense of. Every cluster of more than two islands on their planet seemed to issue their own currency and the rates fluctuated wildly, sometimes doubling or halving over the course of a single day.

I shut off my mental abacus, gathered them all up, and dropped them into the lodestone machine. It whirred for a few seconds and then spat out two rainbow dice as change. The Falx accepted this without complaint. I set the hydrogen pumps to port two and bagged up the night crawlers.

The machine automatically calculated the amount needed to refill the tanks on the puddle jumper the Falx flew in on. Most of the job was just putting a head and a tentacle on a largely automated system. I bagged the night crawlers and held it out for her in one tentacle. The Falx squawked softly, accepted the bag, and headed back out the door. Another satisfied customer.

With no one else in the depot, I adjusted the device to my preferred filter and slid through. I popped out and found that the station had taken on a nasty black tint with a scentless, sludge-like texture. It was like being lost in an ink cloud. I flashed crimson as I punched the instructions in again, certain I had done it correctly the first time.

It took three tries before I returned to the familiar, ultramarine light. Something had clearly gone wrong with the lodestone device. I wasn’t an atmospheric engineer so I wouldn’t be able to tell anything more specific about the strange box of glowing rocks by the register except that it was not working correctly. I sent a maintenance request via the console, but I knew from experience it would be at least a day or two before anyone even showed up to look at it.

After the excitement, it took some time to fall back into the familiar rhythm of night shift maintenance operations mode, but eventually I did. I deactivated stasis for a whole shelf as my tentacles stretched across it, suction cups adhering and lifting all forty-six cans at once. Another tentacle brought up the cleaner to remove the scum and other grime from between the shelf and the items. I repeated this process fifty-eight times and then started working on the floor as my skin patterns shifted casually between light green and pale blue.

I tended to mentally berate Coquelicot and the other day shift workers for their slothfulness, but I had always been an obscenely fastidious person, particularly in regard to cleaning. It didn’t really matter whether they did a better or worse job of cleaning up, nothing lived up to my standards until I’d cleaned it personally. I wondered if my mother was the same way. I wished I’d gotten to know her.

I set the last bottle of formula for newborn mammalians down with one sagging tentacle and feel a pang of regret as I look at my own aging skin. At seven years old, I had entered the early stages of senescence. Modern medicine could keep the process stalled for a while longer (as long as I didn’t mate with anyone, and as long as I could continue to pay for the treatment) but I still felt a certain guilt at letting myself age so far. As a female Otoporodan, I was expected to have born my own children years ago. My mother hadn’t lived to be half my age before doing her duty to our species and yet there I was in all my hubris. I wasn’t even doing anything particularly important with my life, I was just living it. Every day I just worked in that fuel depot stocking shelves, then went home to watch the Telly.

I often felt this insidious sense of existential guilt for the life I’d chosen for myself, but at the same time I still had no real desire to fertilize a clutch of my own. Hundreds of children, all eating one another and then my corpse only for the survivors to get swept up by their father and enrolled in some school where they can could gain self-awareness just in time to watch their father succumb to the same anatomical doomsday clock that took their mother. Then, they would be left completely alone to work for the same directionless interstellar machine until they could repeat the cycle. It all felt so pointless.   

I wondered sometimes if awareness wasn’t really a curse. What good had all this thinking really done for me? Wouldn’t I be happier just following my basic instincts like my ancestors did and doing whatever came naturally with little to no awareness of the long term consequences? Being a member of a species with such a short lifespan pretty much guaranteed that we would never achieve much on the interstellar stage, we are all destined to be cogs until our own reproductive cycle killed us and we were further branded with an inescapable guilt for the responsibility for the killing of our parents just by being born.

Maybe I would have been happier without language and the self-awareness that came with it, but then again if I didn’t have a conscious brain I’d never get to find out who would end up hooking up with whom in the latest season of Sucker Cove so there was that.

An alarm rang me out of my reverie. Two new customers had appeared. One was in the Kiamopsus filter and one in the Veraginous. Wait, no. Something was very wrong. The division had collapsed! Both were being pushed into an unlabeled filter. I rushed through the aperture and onto the scene.

The air was brown and somehow both slimy and dry feeling on my skin. The Falx had returned or maybe this was a different one. I couldn't really tell them apart. She was clutching a single bottle of Right-O Energy in one claw and watching anxiously as a large reptilian with beady, predatory eyes stared across the shelf at her. The reptile only came up to the Falx’s shoulder, but it was a tetrapod that likely outweighed the Falx by a factor of five or six. It was the worst possible failure, a predator customer and a prey customer from compatible biomes together in the tight quarters of the depot.

I flashed a soothing panorama of muted colors and walked slowly across the shelf until I was between the two large customers. The reptile grunted a long low sound like the grunt of a spotted Phocidae. The Falx squawked back, headless of the sign. The soothing colors were not working.

The reptilian stalked back and forth threatening to tip over the display of Chrome Refresh as large spines protruded out of its back forming a single threatening fin. The Falx hopped backwards and spread her wings. She kept glancing between me and the reptile. I looked back and forth between the two customers desperately trying to think of any way to de-escalate the situation when a flash of light reflecting through the window drew my attention to the Falx’s familiar puddle jumper in the fuel loading station. The one ship.

I looked at the Falx, and my mind ran back to the origin of the issues with the lodestones. They hadn’t started until she showed up. Not until after I put her strange money in the box to be sorted. I squinted at her and she seemed to be glancing at me quite a lot. The reptile too, though her gaze were harder to follow. The reptile was snapping and the Falx was flapping, but neither were actually coming close to making contact with one another. The whole drama began to look like a giant farce. 

I looked away from the scene the two customers were making and finally noticed the flashing red light. The register. I jumped off of the shelf and expelled all the water in my body at once. I couldn’t help but worry about the mess I was creating on my freshly cleaned floors as I shot across the fuel depot in the blink of an eye. I spotted something moving behind the register and crashed into it, wrapping a dark red tentacle around its small body.

The creature was tiny, less than half my full height and maybe a quarter of my width. It squirming helplessly against my strength. For a boneless creature that could squeeze through an aperture the size of a pinhole, Otoporodans were surprisingly strong compared to other species. I squeezed the creature a little harder and forced the air from her lungs before lifting her up to get a good look at her.

She was some sort of mostly hairless monkey thing with light brown fur on her head. I was staring accusatorily at her when I spotted a smaller creature wrapped to the monkey in a cloth-like pouch an inch above my arm.

I relaxed my arm involuntarily. I could have crushed the baby monkey if I had grabbed just a bit higher!

Both creatures were horribly ugly, but I felt extremely conflicted in that moment. At least I felt conflicted for a good five seconds before something heavy slammed into the back of my head.

I woke up in the dark. I felt cold metal floor tiles against my face and realized that I was still in the fuel depot. All of my tentacles had been tied into a bundle behind me with some sort of strong polymer rope. The filters were fully down for the first time in my history working at the fuel depot. The hot air smelled vaguely of sulfur, I was exposed to the natural, hostile atmosphere of Delta 6 for the first time in my life.

“It’s nothing personal, just business. You understand.”

I glared up at the monkey woman as she stood over me with the small monkey dangling in one hand.

“Oh this?” she asked, following my gaze. “Just a little trick,” she slammed the baby monkey onto the ground. It deflates and flattened out. “Tugs at the heart strings don’t he?”

“All done bossssss,” the reptile announced as it stepped into view with a large bag hanging from one of it’s spines. I heard the clatter of the lodestones bouncing against one another in the bag.

“Kreee-aaaahhh,” the Falx added.

“Great. Let’s get out of here then. Bye snookums,” the monkey bared her teeth at me.

I shot a tentacle out and wrapped it around the monkey’s ugly face. I hopped onto the counter and squeezed on her neck. I didn’t know what gave them the impression that a rope would be able to hold me, obviously squeezing out of something like that was child’s play for an Otoporodan.

“Wait,” the monkey growled as the reptile closed on us. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“The cashier already did sssomething sssstupid,” the reptile took another step forward.

The monkey yelped as I tightened my grip on her throat. The reptile stopped. I didn’t really understand why I was fighting back. The owners would be fine even if they had to buy new lodestones and replace the cash out of their own pocket, but they probably wouldn’t since the depot was covered by insurance. I guessed that it was all about the fake baby. I probably would have let them go if it weren’t for that.

“Now, let’s all stay calm here,” the monkey said with an effort. “Jeronah just set the bag down and take a step back.”

The reptile, Jeronah, carefully retracted her spines such that the bag was placed gently on the ground.

“See, we’re all friends here. Now just step back. You’re crowding me.”

Jeronah took one step backwards and then another as I watched. The Falx watched me carefully but did not move.

Suddenly, quick as a whip, the monkey pulled out a weapon from somewhere. She was aiming to bring the gun up and shoot me in the head in one quick movement. I lifted a free tentacle and casually moved to intercept. I heard a loud crack as something in her arm broke. I relieved her of the weapon.

Jeronah screeched and charged. I tossed the monkey, launched upwards, and wrapped my arms around the reptile’s throat. I squeezed it into unconsciousness in a matter of seconds. Tetrapods usually had some sort of air intake below the head in my experience, and my muscular arms were strong enough to constrict even the strongest windpipe or maybe blood vessel, something in there caused the creatures eyes to go dull and its struggling to cease. I looked up and saw the Falx fluttering out of the building and back into her puddle jumper. Good riddance.

I had forgotten about the monkey. I spun around to look for her and found her crumpled up against the wall. She was bleeding strange red blood from where her skull struck the edge of the shelf. I walked over to the first aid kit and grab the insta-skin. I figured that it would probably worked on monkeys. It stopped the bleeding so I assumed that she would live long enough to be arrested.

I recovered the deepest blue lodestone from the reptile’s bag, slipped it into the machine, and hit the button to wake up the gradient filter, plunging the entire station into Zylaxxic mode before I punched the emergency signal. The customers could stand to be a little uncomfortable while we waited.

I started cleaning up the blood and water and hoped I’d make it home in time for Sucker Cove.