“Is it alive?” I breathed.
“He. Is he alive,” Dr. Trout replied.
I didn’t notice Dr. Trout cross the room and get close to me until I could feel his breath on my neck. Now, not even his creepy closeness could scare me.
The creature rose to its feet. His feet. His. He was male… But not a person. I gasped as he stood tall in his cage, all seven feet of him, covered head to toe in rippling muscles like a true beast.
“What is that thing?” I whispered, not wanting to believe my own eyes. This had to be some kind of genetic enhancement, right? It couldn’t be that this creature was…
“He’s an extraterrestrial, Minerva. He fell to Earth two weeks ago and our government captured him.”
“He’s purple…” I whispered.
But that wasn’t even the strangest thing about him. Sure, he was purple, but he was also muscular with a body like a Spartan warrior, and the height of a basketball player. He had long white hair that was cropped just above his shoulders and pointed ears like an elf. His eyes were the scariest part of him aside from his tail…
Oh my goodness. He had atail.
Suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach. I took a step back and my back pressed against Dr. Trout. I was too stunned to move away from my boss.
“Easy, Minerva,” he whispered into my ears.
“I’m fine…”
“I can tell. So far, you’re the only one who hasn’t vomited and cried,” he chuckled.
“I didn’t hear any of the others do that.”
“The walls are soundproof. This one’s loud when he wants to be, don’t mind him.”
“Does he understand us?”
Dr. Trout chuckled.
“Just like a woman to think of that, eh? We aren’t sure. You have the strongest background in linguistics and communication, so your job is to care for the creature, attempt communication and study the biological aftereffects of our experiments.”
“We’re going to experiment on him?”
I couldn’t disguise the horror in my voice.
“We can’t exactly have him running around the District, Minerva. Yes, we’ll be experimenting. You will be experimenting. Nod if you understand the weight of what’s going on, and then you leave, and get some rest.”
I nodded and then raced out of the lab, my face as blank as my coworkers’ faces had been.
TWO
VIDAR [SECOND PROCONSUL OF THE POLLUTION IMPERIUM]
I hadn’t expectedsavages when I’d accepted the mission. The Alliance made it clear that first contact with this species might be dangerous, but nothing could capture the fury of of being held like a beast and forced to feign ignorance and weakness as they spoke about me as if I was invisible.
When they left me in the glass, they turned off all the lights. When it was nice and relatively quiet, I tapped the side of my head to activate my ocular implant, illuminating my eyes so I could see properly in the dark. Infrared vision is nowhere near as useful as daylight, but it helps to get a sense of where they kept me in the dark.
Their facility was low-tech, but secure. If I needed to, I was sure I could find a quick way out. I could hear guards outside the door of their soundproof room and according to data from the implant, I was about a mile beneath their planet’s surface.
Six months of this I’d promised to endure and although their months were quick, I found the hours beneath the earth painfully slow and boring. Polluxians enjoy engineering and debate, mathematics and logic puzzles, not sitting beneath the earth waiting… and waiting…
On Polluxian planets we enjoy light from two blue suns that glisten down on our purple skin. These solar beings must enjoy sunlight too. At least I thought they did. They kept me beneath the ground to torture me. Because they were afraid. Not all of them.
Only the males I’d met feared me. My ocular implants could sense their biometric data and I took it all in on the projected screen in front of my iris, controlling what data I connected with my thoughts, as if tugging on organ strings in my head.
