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Captain Orvan sat in his quarters, looking down at the computer console while he searched for the crew manifest. He had decided to go over all the information available to him regarding the...
He sighed to himself as he opened the spreadsheet with a click.
...The human.
At this point, as far as he was aware, he had been rushed to the infirmary and was being taken care of by the ship’s doctors. As far away from Orvan as was possible.
He was, however, wrong about this. At least he would become wrong about it in... two minutes or so?
The captain continued with what he was doing there at the back of the ship, unaware of the goings on at the front, in the medical quarters. There, about ten seconds earlier, the medical staff had just managed to lift the human into the largest bed they had. His feet were still hanging off the edge, dangling like two enormous loaves of bread in the air.
Despite all this effort, the bed was still about twenty centimeters too short. His body rocked side to side as the momentum left over from his enormous body being put down on the bed slowly subsided.
“So, this is the human, hm?” The slender, snake-like shape of Chief Physician Garuch appeared behind the rest of the medical team as they stood over the bed. His long face scrunched up as he studied the human in silence for a moment.
“Why is he so...” He started, gesturing with one end of his long body at the thin, slightly crispy-looking human. One of the nurses shrugged slightly as the group began fanning out around the room. “He’s abnormal,” the nurse responded as he hung up two of the largest IV bags they stocked. It was clear the stand wasn’t built to handle that amount of weight. The construction sagged and wobbled as he rolled it over to the side of the bed.
“Abnormal? Jorm, what do you mean by that?” Garuch said, looking back and forth at the small semi-bipedal reptile and his patient for a moment.
“Over twenty percent taller than the standard for his species, and almost twice as heavy,” Jorm responded matter-of-factly while prepping the human’s forearm for the IV.
Garuch’s body shuddered in annoyance as he watched his team plug the human into a series of monitoring devices. These devices had all been made before humanity was discovered, and had to be slightly modified to interface with their patient.
Beep...
Beep...
Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep—
The sound of the improvised heart rate monitor filled the room, suddenly increasing in speed just as Jorm inserted the needle into the human’s forearm. A loud thud filled the room as Jorm was suddenly thrown into the wall behind him, sliding down and landing on the ground with a slightly pathetic flopping noise.
The eyes of everyone still in the room snapped around at the human, who was now very much awake.
And staring straight at Jorm, who was trying to look as small as possible there against the wall.
“Oops,” he said as he sat up in the hospital bed, pressing his teeth together and inhaling sharply. “That was a decent impact,” he added before turning to the flabbergasted Garuch.
“What’s the gravity on this boat?”
“B...Boat??” He stuttered.
“Yes! Boat!” The human responded cheerfully, his lips curving upwards into a toothy smile, something which unnerved everyone present to their core.
“...exactly one mean safe acceleration unit?” Garuch responded.
The human blinked silently for a moment as his smile faltered, before rotating around on the spot and placing his feet on the ground.
“Well, that tells me nothing!” He exclaimed as he stood up, the sudden motion ripping the heart rate monitor straight off its desk and plunging it to the floor. Anyone still standing anywhere close to the human stumbled backwards as he rose to his full height.
And then, with a loud THONK, his head impacted the ceiling.
“OW!” He exclaimed as he bent over forwards, rushing his huge, soot-covered hands up to his head and holding them over the top of it. His long, curly black hair bobbed up and down as he jumped around in a small circle like a blind frog while grumbling to himself.
“Sir, are you feeling quite, uh...” Garuch finally spoke up as he watched the frankly ridiculous scene unfolding before him. He had to brace himself slightly against a nearby table to not collapse from the vibrations radiating outwards from the human.
“Are you feeling quite alright?” He added.
The human snapped his head around, his face perking up as he rubbed the top of his head.
“Doctor,” he corrected, wincing slightly.
“Yes?” The alien responded.
The human blinked for a moment while staring down at the confused-looking alien in front of him.
“No, I am.”
Garuch tilted his head to the side, silently looking up at him for a moment.
“...What?”
“You called me sir,” the human finally clarified while straightening himself as much as he could, barely avoiding the ceiling this time.
“Doctor. Doctor Heimy Molecular,” he stretched out one of his hands, placing it right in front of Garuch’s face with frightening speed. “Mostly gas,” he said with a smile.
Garuch recoiled slightly at the, at least to him, strange gesture. Though he had been trained in these kinds of things, this felt a bit different. He’d never talked to someone who could probably kill him entirely by accident.
He quickly looked over at Jorm, who, to his relief, was being looked at by one of the other nurses. Then, he reached out with one of his manipulators and grabbed the human’s hand.
“Garuch al-makbali, chief physician,” he responded, trying to introduce himself in a similar way. He winced slightly as his hand was firmly grabbed and shaken up and down by the pleased-looking man.
“Pleased to meet you! And, uh...” Heimy quickly turned his head around and looked over at Jorm.
“...Will they be okay?”
“Uh... Y-yes, he will be fine. Very hardy, his species,” Garuch added as he tried and failed to retract his hand from the human’s grasp.
“Ah! Good good. I was worried that— OH, FUCK!” He exclaimed as he released the startled physician’s hand and bolted towards the door. He moved with such absurd speed that no one in the room had time to react.
“MY STUFF! MY THINGS! MY DOODADS AND MY KNICK-KNACKS!” he yelled as he charged into the door, knocking it clean off its hinges as he slid to a stop in the corridor outside. It took only a moment, and he set off towards the stern of the ship.
“MY DOG!” Heimy’s voice quickly faded away in the distance. Everyone in the room stared out the doorway, making their various species-specific expressions of shock and confusion.
“What the hell is a dog??“ Garuch blurted out after a moment of silence.
Orvan squinted at the screen for a moment, readjusting himself as he leaned forward. He’d been looking for any information he could find on the human—information that had been scarce to say the least. All he could find was that he’d graduated from a school on his home world, the only place humans occupied in any large numbers.
He let out a tired chirp as he searched for the name of their home world. To him, this had all felt like an enormous waste of time, so he figured he might as well make the most of it.
“Sol-3… Earth… Huh, a planet..?” He mumbled to himself as he entered the text into a search bar, tapping one of his hands against the table as the information loaded. The terminal he was using was, well, to say it was old would be an understatement.
As soon as the data appeared on screen, however, his eyes shot open. He stared at the short list of information about humanity at the top, his beak slowly opening in shocked silence.
They had only discovered the neutron chain reaction two end-to-end human lifetimes ago, about 150 years if you were wondering.
One hundred and forty orbits around their star. And in that time, they had managed to make an FTL-capable spaceship.
That was… well, it was no time at all really. Orvan simply couldn't wrap his mind around that pace of progress. If you had told him about this only minutes earlier, he would have dismissed it as lunacy. But, there it was, clear as day.
Orvan’s species was one of the few that had figured out faster-than-light travel on their own. And, would you, dear reader, like to know how much time it took them to go from splitting the atom to passing lightspeed?
604 years
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