By Morgan Hannah, Life & Style Editor
There’s 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. I’ve got to shake this off! I’m 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. It’s a sleek grey remote-like rectangle with a half-moon glass panel and a faded persimmon dial. I’m more relieved than ever before that the device has a microphone and speaker built-in for listening and interpreting languages, as I wouldn’t 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, hoping—no, praying—that something will come of this. What I find is even more unsettling than the distinct thought that this brined vegetable-like creature is quite human…
“Mask… quick… mask…”
Part eight