By Morgan Hannah, Life & Style Editor
Thereās something very human about this thing that stands before me. This idea is incredibly unsettling, but it lands hard and sticks like rubber cement to my brain. I can feel anxiety seeping into each fold of the greyish pink organ resting inside my skull. Iāve got to shake this off! Iām a goddamn Space Geographer!
It is my mission to explore new landscapes and report back on what I find. It is my mission to bridge the knowledge gap between man and unexplored territory!
Opening the makeshift sack full of supplies I piled together, I find the translator. Itās a sleek grey remote-like rectangle with a half-moon glass panel and a faded persimmon dial. Iām more relieved than ever before that the device has a microphone and speaker built-in for listening and interpreting languages, as I wouldnāt even have the faintest idea where to begin when trying to decode something that sounds like what I imagine a cockroach on AMR would sound like.
It is such a completely perplexing noise that it almost seems fitting to belong to an alien. Aiming the microphone at the gaping maw of this life-sized pickle of a creature, I fiddle with the dial, hopingāno, prayingāthat something will come of this. What I find is even more unsettling than the distinct thought that this brined vegetable-like creature is quite humanā¦
āMaskā¦ quickā¦ maskā¦ā
Part eight