Operatic Bliss

The Vex were, well, vexing. They can hack our technology without having to be in range for a counter-hack. There is not anyone to call for help nor know details of the Vex as they continue to hijack the airways. There are messages coming in languages not found on Earth. Hollering in an alien language became the norm of the military. It wasn’t anything bizarre to Major John, as he called it in.

The rows of burning corpses used to make John want to vomit, even the chitin filled fuckers weren’t anything truly resembling human. The man was even once one of the protesters that advocated for peace with the Vex, they seemed like if a bug and human were cross bred.

The Vex woman that John met did disturb him with how her face seemed more like a mask with her glasslike eyes and almost plastered on smile. A notion that seemed true when lower jaw opens to reveal mandible, dripping with a yellow viscous fluid to grab onto her meal. Her hair was covering up the sides of her head so to cover up the fact that she didn’t have ears. The eyes themselves were there to emote the emotions they felt but they couldn’t actually see through them.

The woman's name was unpronounceable, but she chose the name Betty, not the name that one would assume that she would take to fit in. Her hair was ironically the only thing that was easily human passing about her otherwise uncanny appearance. It had a beautiful shine that made her black hair look iridescent. But it was too long to go along with her lithe frame that made her shorter than the usual woman. Wherever possible, she wore large, baggy clothes that hint at her form, but the people knew that her kind had visibly segmented limbs, making the Vex look more like machines in the form of humans rather than something that was alive. But whenever Betty was called out about her clothes, she would smile in way that looked normal, as she would chitter away as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

John was brought out of his reminiscent by the ringing of his phone. The man looked at the caller ID, it said Bitch, he answered and out came a woman’s nasally voice.

He answered, “Hi, 3DO. How are you doing?”

3DO sighed and said with little conviction, “The Naomi was hacked again. We believe it was Hacked by the Vex again. I kinda wish the government propaganda was true, and they just nuked us out of our misery. The bastards are just annoying us to death.”

John would have felt sympathetic if the bitch was anyone else, but he did need this gig, so he said that he agreed.

3DO asked, “So how’s the wife?”

John wished the bitch was right in front so he could demonstrate he felt about her asking that.

He reined in his anger and said instead, “She is hanging in there. She recently received some experimental fluid transfusion, but it didn’t as well as we hoped.”

He heard the clicking of her teeth; he wanted to knock all her teeth. She audibly breath through her nose and the bitch seethe, “So the bug lives then. Good, if lost her, the Vex would continue to be an allusive threat.”

John wanted to threaten her, he wanted to kill her and all the bastards that benefitted form this farce of a war. When the Vex originally came to the planet, to their country, they were nothing but refugees and at first everyone was aware of that. But they were convenient scapegoats, they had an uncanny appearance, they had customs that seemed strange or scary. They had beliefs that ran counter to most civilizations and they were literally inhuman. Oh, it didn’t matter that they had plenty of similarities to humans and the fact that a human vex hybrid was possible which meant they were so close in DNA that most human medicine worked on them fine.

He was saddened by it all, and he hated himself because he was once one of them. He never understood how Betty forgave him, let alone marry a former soldier who was on mascot for this madness. He heard the squish and sigh; the neighborhood brats vandalized his house again. He wiped his shoe on the grass and walked through the front door. He heard voices and saw the back of the wheelchair, and he saw that Betty’s “mask” was fully open, from how furrowed the “eye”s of the mask is, she must be having a very bad conversation with someone on the hivemind. On the other side was one of 3DO’s goons, Zeff. Zeff first came into the house like someone who would take care of Betty but really it meant that he was there to monitor and drugged Betty as she was constantly connected to a psychic force called the hivemind which gave access to all the information that Vex never accumulated. Betty said it was no different to having smartphone, but you hear the notifications in your head, and the emails are read to you whether you want to or not. She used to take ibuprofen for the headaches it caused her, now she had to deal with it as Zeff control her medication.

John wanted to Zeff nowhere near his house, even going as far as threaten him with a knife but Betty stop him by saying they need to to trust him, John was confused by that so one day he asked the sniveling fuck that he should give one good reason to trust him or else, he pointed out that John and Betty are desperate for money as no one wanted the man who married a Vex as an employee. Zeff had a damn good point so they agreed to work with him and allow he to experiment for the bitch on Betty while in exchange they receive free health care.

He heard wife cry in agony. He ran forward and grabbed his wife by the shoulder; her mandibles and antennae were convulsing. Her large eyes and snout and maw were leaking a red fluid, John came to the worst possible conclusion, his wife was dying. He looked at Zeff with desperate hope. Zeff saw all this with a stoicism that didn’t match what he knew about the coward, but he hoped that it meant that Betty was going to be fine.

“Please tell me she’s going to be ok”, John pleaded. Zeff didn’t look at him but clearly, he heard him as he put a comforting hand on John’s massive shoulder. It looked odd that John, a man who larger than the average man was being comforted by a small feminine man like Zeff, but John himself didn’t care as Zeff was the only one who could do anything for Betty.

She is going to be fine was all John wanted to hear from Zeff. It was stupid he knew as Betty continued to scream and bleed and Zeff worked for awful person like 3DO who made it no secret that she wanted all Vex dead and Betty was included in her vendetta despite being a peaceful civilian the whole time she was here.

Zeff interrupted John’s doom spiral by saying, “She is going to make it out of this fine, she is actually showing positive result from the mixture.”

What was all John said, Zeff seemed to find this funny as Betty finally stopped screaming and was breathing heavily. Her mask slowly going back into place and her mask was displaying the very human emotion of exhaustion, it actually surprise John how human she looked as he never seen her mask display the nuances of human emotion on this level before, her mouth especially as it was actually moving in sync with her breathing.

“I asked Zeff to make me a mixture to alter my connection to the hivemind,” Betty pointed out after finally getting her breath back. She looked in the eye, and he was taken aback by how natural and full of life those eyes had.

She continued, “Zeff is going to help us escape.”