Work Text:
Look. It wasn’t my choice to take on this research project. I wanted one of the big flagship projects, an interesting anthropological assignment that would make my fortune and provide enough material for both academic books and cocktail parties. It’s not just how smart you are, or how much work you do, but who you know and how amusing you can be describing your research. I’m no dewy-eyed undergrad who doesn’t know how the worlds work. If your project is an analysis of the society of the dung beetles, you’re unlikely to be a hit at very many parties.
But – well, life happens. And there was this semester where I got a little too caught up in this epic soap opera that was being performed in real time and was far too easy to bingewatch, and ended up cutting things slightly too close on my coursework in order to get in one more episode (if it matters, it was the one where the tentacled seductress finds out that their long-lost twin is dating their ex-boyfriend’s daughter, and let me tell you, I did not see the twist with the waterfall coming). So when we picked our summer projects that year, I was 21st in my class, which meant that I got stuck on the project nobody wanted.
Terra.
Talk about a downer of a planet. At least the dung beetle society has learned how to talk to the other societies in the universe! Terrans don’t even have the beginning of telepathy down yet, the most they’ve got is this tiny prickle they call déjà vu. It’s literally their brain trying to make sense of the fact that what they’d call an extraterrestrial is standing right in front of them, but their brains haven’t developed enough to process the fact, so you can stand there and wave all five of your hands at them and they won’t even blink.
Boring.
Because my P.I. has some scrap of merciful feeling left in her mid-spine, she did take pity on us four unluckies and threw in one measly interesting wrinkle. She assigned our anthropological project to study a group of Terrans who were meant to be studying us. That is, we were assigned to observe and report on Terran ‘scientists’ who were trying to identify and contact extraterrestrial life.
Mostly they took copious amounts of a Terran stimulant called coffee.
But then one day a new Terran joined their lab. Her name was Sonia, and the very first thing she said when she walked in the lab was, “Hello. I’m Sonia, and just so you know, I don’t believe in any fucking aliens.”
My groupmates say that I was doomed from the moment she opened her mouth. Because that – they say – is exactly like a line from Tentacle Love.
I don’t have tentacles, and neither does Sonia. (In our five years together, I would have found them by now.)
But coming this moonrise, you can read all about our romance, courtship, and partnership in “I Don’t Believe In Any Fucking Aliens: The Terran Who Made First Contact With The Universe (And Fell In Love With A Fucking Alien Along the Way)”.
Sonia says the title’s a little long, and thinks it’s a little too soap opera for academia. I tell her extraterrestrial academia’s different than Terran academia, and she goes along with it even when she rolls her eyes.
If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.