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florareed · 1 year ago

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OK I think poll results are not gonna change at this point so... Rattled Snakes Chapter 1

Hiss

The first chapter of story in eighteen chapters (and three interludes)

Serving under ADVENT as part of the military also meant having no privacy. Mandatory and periodic psionic probing, random living quarters searches, and constant surveillance of communications all times. It’s all about “knowing one’s place” and “learning respect” for some always present, yet always unseen Elders. Should one desire to do something, it had to go through the chain of command, from the “lower species” up to the “psionic species” and relayed using those bio-mechanical chimaeras onto the appropriate superior for the given request. There, it’d be dissected, scrutinised, and lastly, when one was called to the multi-purpose interrogation room for an appointment regarding said request, usually denied. These degrees of denial ranged from a mere verbal scolding which lasted for several minutes to never leaving the room where said denial took place. Even if a request was approved, it was done in the cheapest, least comfortable way possible, just so that one could come to regret even thinking about asking for it in the first place.

For anyone raised outside of this system, it appeared quite horrific, because it was. For those raised within the system, bombarded with propaganda from the moment they left their egg or grew out of their donor’s placenta or whatever other birthing mechanism they had, and with their minds constantly stifled and crippled by an always-present psionic veil, they’d claim it was normal, because it’s all they knew. It’s all they are allowed to know. It’s a very cold, very loveless life. You live, you do as you’re told and when you die someone with different numbers and similar genes would take your place and do your task just as well as you would have had you not died.

When the (still unseen and still absent) Elders relayed orders down the chain of command, down the Codices and the Sectoids, and through those to the rest of the occupying force, it was followed unquestioningly. If the Elders told one to fly, one would be expected to do so even if they lacked the necessary appendages or argumentations to do so. If they were told to eliminate a target, one would be expected to attack it until it was nothing more than slag and ash.

Of course, things were not always carried out as relayed or as expected. Most commonly, when a target was considered dead, it was no longer shot at, or constricted, or poisoned, or puppeted around; there was no need for further offensive action, and the most efficient action would have been to stop attacking them. Goals were always carried out as specified, never surpassing expectations, just meeting them, or less. While this no doubt caused irritation to said unseen and absent Elders, it was expected that, until told otherwise, one should perform their duties until asked to stop.

These were considered quirks of the system. Not features, just small byproducts of it. Much like how microplastics are considered to be a byproduct of anything to do with plastic elements.

“Were” is the key word here.

Because as G-03-4-03324 would come to find out one evening, when the system didn’t exist, one was still expected to follow their last given orders as if it were still functioning. Because after all, that was a quirk of the system, and if the elders told you to fly, you were always meant to reply “how high” even if it was impossible to do so. Thus, an order was meant to be carried out until it was countered by another order. The lattermost order would override the former, and so on, and so on. This is how the several races under the commands of the Elders would live their unfulfilling, shallow, lives.

G-03-4-03324 was what one may call an “average” non-cloned individual of her species. Like the majority of her kind, she was genetically engineered to serve in the military. Humans called them Vipers, despite the fact they resemble Cobras more in physiology due to the presence of a hood capable of flaring from the side of their head. Much like many of her sisters, yellow-orange scales covered most of her body, with a lighter patch running down her front. Like most of her kind, she has two hands (but not two legs) with four long, clawed fingers each. If one were to measure her from the tip of her head and the tip of her tail that she used for locomotion, she’d measure exactly three metres and seventy centimetres. When upright, however, she tended to vary between a metre and sixty and a metre and eighty.

In a sea of similarly coloured, patterned and named alien snakes, she’d easily be lost in the crowd.

There’s one thing, though, which makes her stick out right now, and it’s not the fact she had stopped her task suddenly. Rather than simply going about the path she was assigned to patrol, she is far more focused on making sense of her surroundings and her own thoughts than may or may have not have been possibly healthy for a serving soldier. Up to this point in time, she didn’t think much at all. When one grows up with their thoughts stifled and quite literally moulded like clay, one doesn't tend to think much of anything. But once she started thinking, rather than merely existing, she immediately began to think the only real notable skill she may have is her capacity to think outside of the box as she was doing right now.

Now, back to the discovery she found. She first stumbled upon this discovery of a routine patrol of the outskirts of the base she was stationed, within the remains of the rainforest once known as the Amazon. Of course, it was no longer called that. The river had been rerouted and several species of fish and one species of dolphin had been driven extinct for the sole purpose of rapidly extracting gold out of the riverwater to make electronic components. She had been stationed there following limited combat in City 67 and the need for repositioning to somewhere she was less likely to fail at her objectives since she had proven that “protecting a target” was beyond her capacity, although “landing a shot on a rebel halfway across a city” was in fact, very doable. So combining the best of both worlds, her higher ups decided she was best fit for wandering the now nameless jungle, trying to hunt anything that displeased them.

So when the psionic network went down she was very, very alone. Without any psionics nearby to possibly prevent a complete collapse, she found it was quite simple, really, to figure out that that syrupy, ever-present brain-fog that dulled her thoughts to a mere murmur was indeed, very gone. She paused, as she smelled the moisture, the soil, and the leaves she crushed under her body, stumbling across her thoughts. Staring away into the green, she decided to ponder on its presence, which may have been the first time she willingly set her mind on anything.

Time passes.

And there is nothing. Not even the familiar complacent humming that made her memories feel like something between waking and stasis; a feeling she did not have words to describe. Not exactly a state of suspended animation, but something similar enough where nothing felt quite real enough and logic took a day off. Until that moment, that was, when she realised her older memories felt exactly like that, and the newest one of realising something was awry was about as clear as a holographic projection. This was not meant to be. Why were her older memories so distorted? Why were her prior experiences and feelings so hazy? Something must have happened to the psionic network if it suddenly was not there, anymore.

Following that conclusion, she tried thinking of several minor infractions she had in the past, just to see if there was that mentally painful ‘ding’ that sprouted into being whatever she did. Just to check, to make sure. There wasn’t. Just to double check that the brain-fog was really gone, she decided to recall the one instance where she was called into the interrogation room for “inappropriate behaviours.” In other words, the one instance where she developed an affectionate feeling, whose name she didn’t know or had, for one of her colleagues, despite the conditioning drilled into her from the moment of her hatching.

Of course, had the Psionic network been active, this would have marked her instantly as a liability, since close connections with colleagues tended to bring about reduced efficiencies and increased the risk of an emotional, nervous collapse should one of these close relationships were to suddenly cease to exist. It was always viewed as an unacceptable liability, a dormant error to be smothered before it left the incubator, or the crib, or the placenta, or whatever other mechanism for growing one’s young one may have had.

G-03-4-03324 knew this, of course. It was a tremendously momentous risk. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know better. This was her only memory of failing to comply with the almost impossibly high standards set upon her kind, or the only one where she failed to do so on purpose. So that very same night, not five hours after psionic network collapsed, pestered by mosquitoes that dropped dead as soon as they as much as took one sip from her toxic blood and bothered by the sounds of hundreds of nocturnal animals, she allowed herself to recall the blurry murky memory with her superior, in a conversation that more or less went like this:

“We noticed you were staging at G-10-4-03301 for prolonged periods of time. Your operational efficiency has been reduced by this activity. Is this correct?” One of her prior commanders might have said to her, after they had guided her into one of the few interrogation rooms available within the still rebuilding City 52.

Being incapable of lying and under the rosy impression that this Sectoid general wanted nothing more than was best for her, she answered truthfully: “I have.”

This answer was a mistake.

“We shall not find yourself giving similar looks to your colleagues again,” he muttered purely psionically. Had her superior at the time had lips rather than exposed teeth, he would have most likely licked them in apparent displeasure at having their suspicions confirmed. “We’ll be transferring you elsewhere. Prepare yourself for such.”

Contentment unknowingly fell onto the fifteen-year old Viper’s face as she studied her superior for naught than a second. Had she had the capacity to feel betrayal, she could have very well have felt that. Instead, after shutting down feelings she felt too confused to deal with, she bowed her head slightly and nodded very gently. That same day, went to the cargo bay, disassembled her plasma rifle, and put herself onto stasis inside of the pod with her name written on the outside.

Now, currently, in the present, aged seventeen, four months before she actually had to begin to introduce herself to humans with her actual age rather than a lie claiming she was eighteen, she began emulating one of the behaviours which she had been taught as a surefire indicator of stress: hyperventilating. She found, much like she had been taught, it didn’t help much in calming stress, or anxiety, or any other unpleasant feeling she was experiencing in the moment. If anything, it made it worse. It didn't help that she’d never experienced this feeling before, or the fact that the first new feeling she discovered right after curiosity and amusement was anxiety unconstrained by petty things like “coping mechanisms” or “breathing exercises”.

She must have dropped her rifle at one point between coming across this realisation and coiling herself around the nearest tree in an attempt to snap it in half. Her opponent in this constriction contest, the Shiringa, or caucho tree depending on who and where you asked, was quite sturdy. In a battle of resistance between the constricting power of a seventeen year old alien alien snake and the capacity to resist said constricting force of a fifty-seven year old caucho tree, the tree would likely win every single time.

This didn’t stop G-03-4-03324 from trying, however. She squeezed the tree until her ribs felt like they were going to give out. Watched the world slowly rotate around. Mind spiralling from thought to thought. Emotion to emotion. In this moment of weakness, she admitted privately, to her own self and her mind which was very much her own and not impeded by foreign mental powers, that she could very much wish to stop existing in this very moment. She also admitted (once again, privately, to herself and her unimpeded mind) that it was incredibly tempting to make this happen by biting down on her tail and eating herself from the bottom up, if the idea of tasting whatever detritus she had picked up on her tail filled her with immense revulsion. So to compromise, she hugs her tail, feeling comforted by the feeling, but not by much.

In terms of goals, she admitted, she was very much lost. She had no direction

On purpose, she too admitted once again, she was very much also lost. Did she really have a purpose, if she wasn’t connected to the psionic network?

In managing her thoughts… she recognized that they were a terrible freedom she had no clue on how to manage. But she didn’t want to lose this clarity of cognition ever again.

Amalgamating all of these thoughts, ideas, and emotions she didn’t have the emotional maturity to readily weather, she was left with what she assumed could be described as “concentrated misery”. Sobbing distils it into its purest form. Not tears, none at all. Vipers (as incorrect as that term may be) do not have the necessary organs to produce tears. This muffled cry is more akin to a mixture between a soft hiss and a choked sob, repeating over and over again.

It is a soft cry. The sound produced would be similar to a sort of hiccup produced out of an infant serpent’s hiss. Even if tears don’t form, mucus still builds up in her nostrils, she sniffles a couple of times, leaving a salty aftertaste as she tries to prevent herself from crying all over herself, but fails miserably. On one hand, she never felt more hopeless and terrified in her life. As a matter of fact, she recognizes this is the first time she feels this way. On the other, she never felt more free.

Of course, she could always go back to her base, to her commander, and to the other species of Advent, and to her sisters-in-arms to potentially gain an idea on what to do or how to act or…

But no, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t! To give herself up to willingly be examined in a room she would never leave? She’d literally die.

She dreaded to think what would happen to the others. If she didn’t return… would they have their minds suffocated under a mental shawl again? Would their sense of identity be smothered as it sprung up for the first time in… forever? Or would they be just as independent as her at this given moment?

The tree tightens under her coils. It does not mind, but just in case, it gives a prayer for its well being through the mycorrhizal network it is connected to.

It’s a smart, sensible thing not to return. Staying here, she can keep this newly found sense of not-collectiveness and not-haziness and with the capacity to vividly feel even the small cracks in the wood of the tree she’s is trying to smother and the insects crawling from underneath and the squeezed, pasty moss that she had so rudely squashed underneath. Yes, it’s a very good idea to stay right here, hyperventilating through her mouth, and not moving as much as a single centimetre from this tree she is trying to squeeze the life out of. She knows her commander will likely peer into her mind as soon as she returns and…

No, that’s not going to happen. She won’t let it happen.

Only an idiot would return. G-03-4-03324, was decidedly, not an idiot. So she assumed they would be looking for her out here.

Thus, the intelligent course of action would be to go back to her base, because G-03-4-03324 wasn’t raised stupid and if there’s somewhere her commander wouldn’t look for her is back at the base she was stationed at because that’s something only a stupid, stupid snakelike alien would do. Hopefully, they haven’t thought about this, and this plan would go off without a hitch.

Slowly, very slowly, she felt her body loosen from around the tree. She almost hears the tree sighing, although she convinces herself it was herself letting out a long, withdrawn breath… which she had done. She slowly slithers herself into a position that could be called standing, taking deep, long breaths.

Breathe in, breathe out. It doesn’t mean much to her when she first does it by accident. But then she does it again, and then one time after that, she wonders if humans are really stupid enough not to have tried this at one point in time. ‘Surely’ she thinks, ‘they must be a really incoherent species if they never thought about coming up with this!’ She’d mentally pat herself on her back for such a moment of genius.

She’s not sure what to call this new survival strategy of pausing her breaths, but as soon as she gets back to the base she’s going to teach the others, and they’ll all be so proud of her, and…

She realises the issue with returning to the base now. Her commander did not expect her to be back, didn’t he? Because they never revoked her prior orders, she was expected to remain here, bothered by insects and animals and the occasional crocodile she was forced to poison to remain alive. She was not, however, expected to arrive back to base just to never see the outside of an interrogation room again. Coiling around the tree again seems very inviting, once more.

Right. She may have to rethink that whole thought about “not being stupid from earlier. She stops her breaths from escalating beyond her capacity to control or calm them down.

Then she realises her plasma rifle is gone. It comes like a foreshock of an earthquake, a rough little jolt to shake her before she abruptly realizes just how calamitous the situation got. Her gun is gone? Her gun is gone!? What was she supposed to do now? What was she ever expected to achieve without her weapon? Obviously to spit venomous bile and to pull undesirables with her tongue and to constrict around them like she just tried doing to the tree, but she never, ever liked doing that.

The only times she did was…

…was… why did she even do those things? She knew she disliked them and knew she heard a movement in the bush.

That gets her to hide real quickly. She never hid before, but she gets the gist of it, from her memories of how the rebels did it. Stay behind something, be real quiet, and don’t make a single, solitary sound.

It, whatever it is, slithers across the ground nearby. Long and serpentine, it makes its way through the rainforest floor. It raises its head to observe its environment, catching a glimpse of an otherworldly entity, completely alien to it. It shared with it a form of locomotion and a similar skin type, but nothing more. Whatever it is watches intensely, gauging whether it's a threat or not.

But the green Anaconda, travelling through the jungle undergrowth, quickly returns to its travels. After all, it's already eaten its fair share of young caiman for it to be sated for the following month.

G-03-4-03324 let out a sigh she didn’t know she was holding. The jungle, without a weapon capable of carbonising anything she shot at with, was a truly alien and terrifying environment. Not a place she wanted to be without… her gun! Of course, she wouldn’t want to be in any hostile territory without a tool to defend herself beyond what was provided by her nature. Right now she could feel it: every small plant, animal, and critter was out for her blood. Not only this, but there was no doubt that she was expected to survive here until she was called back, and she didn’t want to be called back as much as it pained her. Maybe the others… no, no time to think about that.

She shakes her head, trying to beat back the repetitive thoughts and the swell of venom pushing against the corners of her mouth. Inadvertently, she makes the feeling worse. Her newly found mind was only focusing on one thing, and that was that she felt defenceless despite having quite respectable natural armoury herself. She felt exposed, not because of the animals, she would admit, despite being absolutely certain that the rodent she saw a moment ago wanted nothing more than the worst for her. No, it was her regional commander.

The one in charge of the psionic incursion on irregular intervals, with the exposed human teeth, glowing torso, ghastly, gangly appearance and grey skin was an alien that only shared the most basic of mobility functions with a human: a Sectoid. She feared him, she realises, finally labelling one of the feelings she was trained only to find on others. She feared him because any meeting with a Sectoid usually meant one had done something wrong, and as of recent, she had mentally noted to have accumulated far more infractions across her entire life in the span of a couple of hours. If he found her, she had no real way of defending herself.

She coiled around him to crush his insides? Mind control.

She sprayed him with poison? Mind control, because not even deadly neurotoxins acted immediately.

She wasn’t going to use her tongue. No way. Tasting sweat and detritus and who knows what else? Gross. It didn’t even hurt anything. But if she used it? Mind control.

So she had to find her gun. She felt almost naked without it. As if a finger had been cut off her. A finger that could shoot out balls of burning hot radioactive plasma, but still. If she missed, it was going to be the same fate as her prior points, if not worse. She’s too far gone to go back while the Sectoid that managed the base lived. She’s thought of too many deviant things now.

Breathe in, breathe out.

That won’t happen. Because she won’t let it happen. If she gets mind controlled then… she’ll claim it was the rebels the ones that set her up to this task. Those dastardly humans, corrupting the minds of the innocent. Everyone knows they did that, because she’s been told as such and she’s seen posters, both holographic, digital, and of such behaviour. Such was the need for absolute control over them to prevent themselves from filling their minds with erroneous ideas such as having their bodies turned into burgers (which, unknowingly to her, was actually happening). She chuckles. Oh, what would she have given for some of those posters right now, to cheer up the green and brown monotony of this place and lift her spirits up by reading about her possible, eventual retirement.

But that all hinges on getting out of here without having her mind read. Hopefully, the Elders will be too panicked by the failure of their network to spend resources and time on things like “mandatory psionic probing”. She’ll get rid of the only witness of her recent thought-crimes and it’ll be smooth sailing from here on out.

So in the absence of her rifle, she scavages around the jungle floor for a long, heavy branch. She’s seen humans swing these things around to deadly effect. But she’s also seen in those recordings do nothing other than loud, comedic sounds. So she judges her chances between killing her Sectoid superior and merely putting them into a state of unconsciousness at a roughly equal chance.

And just in time, too. She feels the unwelcome pressure in her mind as he approaches. She must know she’s here, but not where. Thank goodness, because otherwise… she’d be dead already. Quietly slithering behind a tree, G-03-4-03324 holds her breath and stays very, very still.

She wonders if this is always how the rebels apparently got the drop on other pods. She wouldn’t know. All of the fights she’s seen are because she was called as a reinforcement, or allerted once the Rebels had somehow snuck past.

Maybe she didn’t have to end him. Perhaps leaving him tied somewhere and left to the elements, they’d simply die on their own, and no one would be able to trace the evidence back to her. Haha! Smart. Too smart. Her cleverness frightens her, but she remains stiff, as an unliving vine as detritus crunches under bare, exposed feet. She instantly knows who this is. It doesn’t cross her mind that he shouldn’t be anywhere close to here at all, or heading through the woods silently.

if the humans did it all the time on those recordings they watched on their electronic monitors, there was no way it could go wrong, right? Just one swing and he’d be out, and she’d go back to base and he’d conveniently disappear. So she carefully weighted the branch she found off the ground. It was long, and it had a hefty weight to it, dead leaves and moss growing off it. He didn’t know she was still here. She knew why he was here, and probably knew she would be around here closeby somewhere with his freaky mind powers, but not where. So carefully, vary carefully, as the Sectoid passes by, she raises the branch above her head and-.

She smacks him right on the face as his head begins to glow purple. Then the glow fades as G-03-4-03324 realises she now has just half a branch. The other half is lodged right between the eyes of her general. The alien stumbles back one step clumsily, then collapses backwards onto the detritus.

Her eyes widened. She looks at the stick, then at the other half, lodged into the brains of the grey, wide-eyed psionic. Then back at the stick. It wasn’t meant to go like that. “Uh… uhhhh…”

What, exactly, was she expecting to happen? Of course this wasn’t a projection! It wouldn’t work like that! She’s seen it happen outside of projections and it never happened like that in real life! Even if it did, it wouldn’t have been a permanent solution, he could just freaky mind-power his way out of his bonds… Bitterness builds up inside as she realises her “totally non-lethal” plan wouldn’t have worked. It was always going to end up this way. Carefully, she removes the piece out of his head, and immediately regrets it as orangeish blood begins gushing freely out of the head wound. She applies pressure… to little success. “O-Oopsss…”

She nudges him with the tip of her free hand. He doesn’t stir. Blood gushes forth from the gash in his forehead past her fingers, like a fountain raining -coloured fluid on the rainforest floor, sticking out like those safety-jackets humans used out of the more muted, darker greens of the forest around it. Her hands are coated with the evidence of her crime. Her brain struggles to catch up with what she has just done.

“Oops?” she repeats, before coming up with the only expletive she knows for certain that could be used to express her shock: “oh, fuck.”

She looks back to him. Indeed, the Sectoid is still very much dead. Although… maybe it’s not all as it seems? Maybe, just maybe, amongst the pool of rapidly growing gore, there was a sign of life, a chance of recovery. Surely, the inwards that got turned into outwards still had to work!

“Wake up? Please?” she says, gently slapping his face. He doesn’t move. More orangish blood gushes from the crevice between the Sectoids eyes, covering her hand. She slaps slightly harder, and panicking, grabs his head and shakes it. It makes a scrunchy, unpleasant sound, and she allows it to limply fall back to the ground, bending at an awkward angle. “Ok, maybe not like that…”

She gulps. Air, mostly. A bit of saliva and venom she released into her mouth in an earlier panic, but it’s not like she’s going to suffer for it.

Wait, maybe, she could pretend he killed himself? Humans did that all the time, no? With those tied ropes and jumping off buildings? Yes, that’d be perfect. She could return to base, tell them he got lost, panicked, and offed himself in such a way it looked like he was bashed in the head with a heavy branch. This was it: the perfect plan. And there were vines all around, what is it that humans called them? Nature’s rope? They’d do nicely. She picks whatever vine she finds on the ground. Then, she gives it a couple of twists around the Sectoid’s neck, and with a quick ascent up to the canopy pulling both ends of the vine, she… struggles to make a knot.

How was it again? A twist here and a twist there and pull though this loop?

Oh, nope, that seemed too tight and the body isn’t even off the ground… Maybe a couple of twists and interlocking them? G-03-4-03324 has never seen a basket, but she assumes this is how they’re made. Heave and pull and hea- oh. It’s light now? Why is it light? Why does the vine suddenly carry no weight? Well, she didn’t know, so that could only be a good thing. Descending down the tree, she almost would have been on her merry way…

Almost. Because she wasn’t on her way. The corpse she had helped create was now also headless. The head fell a short distance away from the body, but this definitely didn’t look like any of the scenes of self-destruction she had witnessed. The vine must have snapped the head clean off. This didn’t look accidental at all! It had to be fixed… but how?

Her gaze turned towards the wrist- mounted plasma gun, and she nodded to herself. Yeah, he shot himself. In the head. Four times. Once to the forehead and three times to the neck. Seems plausible. Then bled out all over the floor and herself. Very plausible. High chances of that occurring. He suffered from the joy that kills when he saw her, she’ll say, and he shot himself in glee. She’ll get to leave the interrogation room and hopefully have a boring job for the rest of her very, very long life and hopefully maybe even ascend her rank and have private quarters for herself and be able to learn about the language and culture of her kind and…

She realises that it wouldn’t cut it to claim he offed himself when he saw her. No, no. That would not do. She needed a more compelling cause, a more compelling lie. So… what should it be? Maybe a caiman ate him?

G-03-4-03324 looks at the orange-coloured blood, then at herself. Her hands and even her two-piece plated armour are coated with the stuff. If she considered the thought of potentially devouring her superior disgusting, no doubt those horrible river critters that were out for her blood would agree with her judgement. They only really went after her, because, she assumed, she looked slightly similar to the native reptiles of the area. She felt dumb to have thought of leaving him to the elements, of course it wouldn’t work.

No, she’s sticking with the plan of trying to make him look like he self-destructed. If he was looking for her, well, maybe…

Human music is said to be horrible, no?

She remembers that on the posters and on the thoughts and experiences that were not quite hers but were implanted directly into her mind before she was given a plasma rifle and sent off to serve as a soldier. Blaring, garbled noises. She imagines the music of her kind, if she ever gets to hear it, may be quite more harmonious than that. So maybe… she could say he found some of that horrible, awful thing and in confusion shot himself.

Maybe that was implausible but it's the only thing that came to her panicked mind. It was a jittery thing, jumping back and forth, like an anxious rodent. It's barely coherent at most, but it’s the only instructions she has at the moment.

This place was like how she remembered the back of her hand: memorable, but hazy. She knew of the city nearby, the one where all the victims of the chemical attack wandered off into the jungle and promptly ended up dead. So the city, unlike many claimed by ADVENT, was completely deserted. A real ghost town. She knew that the street she was quickly slithering over, reclaimed by the jungle since the war against the humans ended twenty years ago, may have had an electronics shop here. She remembered the crystalized batteries and the rotten boxes that may have carried equipment long ago. The humidity and the rain crashing through broken windows has certainly done a number on them, though.

She searches regardless. Decayed papers, swollen wrappers with popped batteries. Box after box, bag after bag. She takes care not to slither on any shattered glass as she goes from one shop to the next, and then to the next. Finally, she finds one radio that appeared to be functional, still within a bag. ‘Human consumerism comes to the rescue, for once,’ she admits to herself. The batteries have leaked all over the inside of their own smaller bag within the larger one, but the radio itself seems intact. It’s one of those old, lithium-powered radios, the kind humans carried over their shoulders, or in their hands, blaring obnoxious sounds… now, for how to power it…

Maybe the plasma pistol? A new story stewed in her head One where her general got jumped by a rebel with a nasty stick, and re-wired the radio to his plasma pistol’s power source to blare their horrid propaganda once the deed was done?

Oh, this story was the most realistic one yet. Now she just had to pretend she came across the scene in shock, smashed the radio, then went back to base after cleaning off the blood. No one would suspect a thing, and she could go the rest of her life pretending she had done nothing wrong! Delightfully clever, even if this was just her first day being able to think her own thoughts

She nodded to herself in delight as she ripped the radio out of her bag, slithering out of the empty streets and onto the scene of her crime. The body stares up at her, as if asking what she’s going to do, and she answers by grabbing the wrist of her now-dead commander, she rips the wrist-mounted plasma gun off.

If a human was watching, they may have been amazed that, in fact, wires and electronics are in fact, a part of alien technology. Even if operated by psionics, power had to be channelled somewhere, and it had to do so through some medium. So disassembling a firearm and dissecting it for wires and its power source was pretty doable, if not slightly time-consuming due to her unfamiliarity with the weapon.

Of course, there was no human watching. G-03-4-03324 would have been most displeased if there was, because the only humans that may have existed around these parts are rebels trying to make off with the alloys and equipment of her base. And also, trying to remove her head. Not metaphorically, like her now-deceased commander, but physically too. Hadn’t an infiltration unit taken a picture of a hangar covered in body parts of her kind and the other species of the allegiance? It was the very definition of barbarism.

Humans were definitely barbaric, so it stood to measure their music would be the same. Once she finishes rewiring everything, tuning down the power of the disassembled pistol’s battery so it doesn't pop the radio like a balloon, she turns it on and…

This… this sounded rather nice, actually. Her brain told her it should be unbearable, but what vibrated through the air right now? Those sounds? They are melodic, almost poetic. Like soft murmurs and a cacophony of sounds that should be unimpressive individually, but somehow aren’t when they work in conjunction. It’s the most bizarre thing she’s experienced.

She finds herself humming with the music, absent-mindedly, as she stares at the radio work.

There shouldn’t be any signal around here, she knew that. This must be a pirate station operated by the rebels, she should do something about it.

But she just listened. Listened and stared at the sounds coming out of the

Maybe… breaking the radio wasn’t such a good idea. She’d take it back. Say it’s a way to monitor for this pirate station, find its source but…

Right now, she’ll just listen. And then head back. Just as she planned.

For just a little while, she’ll be, and allow these sounds to flow through her.

IMPORTANT QUESTION

Double brownie points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

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