Prompt: Moonbase
Moonbase was such a small, insignificant, Human term. It implied little more than a protective dome and maybe a shuttlepad. It was so much more than that. Long before they had made contact with Humans, they had been here, watching, planning, preparing... and so an observational post had grown with time to a facility the size of a city, then a small country...
Humans who knew of the Moonbase only saw a fraction of it, the labs or the research wings. Progress deeper and one might enter the areas no Human was meant to go, where the Taelons who had grown the Moonbase had recreated parts of their Homeworld in loving detail. Not only in the bio-sim of the Homeworld's canyons and forests, but in the architecture, where that spire resembled the Great Tower of what had been the capital city, or that spray of bioslurry spurs reaching for the stars resembled the outcropping of a particular mountain range. Taelons who arrived from the outer colonies, refugees from the war and their dwindling numbers, would often note how like the Homeworld it was.
Perhaps it was rather appropriate that it was placed on an airless barren rock, then.
Prompt: Globals (ok, so this one was my own prompt)
Renée produced it over lunch, like a proud aunt with new snaps of her nieces and nephews. She handed it over to Liam, after stroking it lovingly and with barely contained glee on her face.
"It's our latest model," she said, excitedly, "British racing green, sixth gen, updated bandwidth capacity, and tru-note music system."
Liam looked at the new model Global. Doors had made a lot of money off the Globals, to the point where they had saturated the market. Liam's own was just one of the cheap generically mass-produced ones that the Taelons had paid for for their employees. It was all he needed, while the rest of the world seemed content to pay again and again for endlessly new models. He smiled and shook his head.
"I'll never understand you people," he said.
Renée scowled at him. "What, women?" she asked, acidly.
"No," He grinned and held out the Global for her to take back. "Humans."
Renée saw how he thought that was a joke, and played along, making a sound of mock disgust as she snatched the Global back. She buried her head in the lunch menu, and tried to hide how intensely creeped out she was.
The Sum of Its Parts
It was when he got stressed that it was the worst.
It wasn't so much the fact that he got stressed, it was how he was supposed to unwind. His mother would have gone climbing. His father would have read. His other father enjoyed making concentric energy whorls to relax, but that really wasn't an option anyway. It would then occur to him that he had no idea what he liked to do to relax. He had no idea. He didn't know what he liked or disliked, what he enjoyed or didn't.
And that never helped his stress levels anyway.
So, when Da'an gestured to his foovlasha tiers and asked, "Would you like to play a game?" he was startled to find that he really wanted to. Two parents hadn't understood the game, and one had never heard of it. It was wholy him.
Him, and no one else.
"Yes," he said, in relief, "I'd love to."
Handshakes
I hate shaking hands. It's in my nature.
I'm two thirds Human. Surely that would make my Human instincts dominant? Well, it does, some of the time. And then someone, in all innocence, offers their hand to shake, and inside I react like someone is offering to stick their tongue down my throat.
For that one third of me, the hands are the window to the soul. Totality in the palm of one's hand, a Universe in an inch. Everything I am is summed up by some bright points of light that look almost like a cheaply rendered special effect.
And people want to touch that.
I would rather they indulged in the Taelon greeting, a trick they learnt from the Kimera first. One hand pressed to the chest to show that one would harm one's self before those they were greeting, and one aimed harmlessly towards the sky and palm open, to show that no power is being prepared surreptitiously.
But they don't do that. Humans think me Human, and so I smile, and try to ignore the brief touches of people's minds that I get every time they innocently shake my hand.
Jaridians
Jaridians didn't hold grudges, not anymore. If you were lucky enough to survive to be born, then you already knew far too well that life was too short. When the population realised they were burning up in the streets, their body's destroying themselves, the Jaridian society nearly collapsed overnight. Why work for anything if you might die before the sun set? Why care about life, or the lives of others?
The violence and chaos nearly consumed the Jaridian Empire before the military stamped its authority on the population, and gave them order, gave them a reason to live. And that reason was the Taelons.
If your parents didn't live long enough to finish a battle, you took up their place and continued. Then your children would continue in your place. What might have been a single mission might take up generations as children were born, given minimal training in combat, and sent out to fight. There wasn't time to see if they would grow up. The lucky ones did.
Fighting the Taelons was the reason the Jaridians kept living. They had a goal. They had to destroy the Taelons because they hated them. Because they were passionless. Because they would do the same to the Jaridians. Of course, for the children there wasn't time to learn to hate. They fought because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if life was too short, then you'd better try damned hard to accomplish your goals in the time you had left.
The sad part was that, these days, virtually no one even knew why they were fighting the Taelons. But they had to. Because there had to be some point to life, after all.
Shuttles
Liam Kincaid was the fastest Human to ever progress through the shuttle training program, he was told in astonishment by his trainers.
"I don't think I've ever seen someone take to flying one of these things so quickly," The Instructer said, as a flutter of the Major's fingers sent the shuttle into an arcing loop that brushed the upper limits of the in-atmosphere boundaries.
"It's easy," Liam said, "Feels a bit... simplified really. Like it's the big pictures version of how to fly a shuttle."
The Instructor tilted his head. "You flown birds before, Major?"
Kincaid turned his head to grin, his fingers working without him looking at them. Very impressive for the first day. "My first time off the ground," he said.
The Instructor tried to figure out why that grin didn't seem quite normal. "Maybe we should let you use the native Taelon interface," he said, trying to dismiss the thought.
"Nah," Kincaid turned back to the interface. "That wouldn't be very Human of me, would it?"