Work Text:
To be quite honest, it wasn’t sure when exactly it began to notice the behavior differences in its new companion. Or, rather, it wasn’t sure how it took so long to be able to weed it out of the other alien tendencies that it possessed. For someone very interested in the minutiae that Rocky could pull up about Eridian society, Grace seemed entirely deaf to its own biases.
The large and obvious things were picked up and explained as quickly as they were noticed. Rocky remembered perfectly (of course) the moment that they both had enough vocabulary coalesced together to tackle the ‘pronoun problem.’ An entire society, an entire planet even, split in half! In a way, it was a clean solution, a screw twisting its thread into a shaped hole to create a stronger whole. There’s all the messy biologicals about it too, of course, but a bi-sex system made sense. In theory. Grace had been very apologetic about its automatic skew towards categorizing Rocky under one of these alien ideas based on what seemed to be entirely arbitrary characteristics, but it honestly didn’t give a shit about all that. If it made communication easier then sure, give Rocky an arbitrary sex. It already had an arbitrary name, after all. It is going to be so fucking good at this interlocutor thing. Maybe humans gave arbitrary tastes too, since they are so intent on flaunting their heterostomy for the universe to witness. Now that was a thought.
The light-hearing thing, too, was quickly swept away and established as soon as the words were available to explain. Apparently Grace had figured that out during their first meeting, and the clock exchange they had was also it circulating in upon what Rocky entirely missed. Not like Rocky would have figured it out, beyond assuming Grace extremely sanded down in the auricles and perhaps a little dumb. Something like that would’ve been able to hide behind the radar chaff of other weird alien shit.
The name thing with inanimate objects was just plain weird. Grace’s ship isn’t ’Hope-Name,’ it was just a ship. Whatever.
The more concerning parts were those that Grace just seemed entirely incapable of realizing were there at all.
Rocky will call it the ‘hierarchy obsession.’ Humans, and it can be sure that it is all humans and not just Grace, seem to be utterly besotted to social hierarchies.
It had first become a little obvious when they both had, in a rather maudlin mood, talked about their dead crew with one another.
“Who your(nonspecific, physically present) (untranslated)?” Grace had asked, getting a little agitated-looking as Rocky had gone down the line and explained the various specialities that each of the crew had had, all the gaps that stretched wide between their respective roles as the truncated crew of the combined Erid-Earth team that now comprised the entirety of sentient life in the solar system. Rocky tried to get clarification, which didn’t help much. “Individual (electrical force word)? Or individual important (untranslated)?”
Rocky took a foggy guess. “Conductor? Person who coordinates - keeps thrum together?”
Grace slapped its two claws together with a loud crack and pointed at Rocky in weirdly elaborate emphasis. “Yes! Who your conductor?”
Why would they only ever have one? “We had a few, it wouldn’t make sense to have one alone.” Especially when the others started dying off - having only one conductor would have made thrums absolutely worthless.
Grace was leaning close to the barrier now, and a few clicks clarified one of the myriad ‘expressions’ that it had that, to a light-hearing being, might have been obvious indications of mood. But with the silent lack of a grounding mood-indicating hum from it (despite its ridiculous internal orchestra), that remained a sealed box to Rocky’s understanding of its new friend.
This one was… covers almost closed around light-organs, speaking orifice curved downwards. Generally that configuration indicated some kind of negative emphasis, like a diverging tremolo, it’s pretty sure.
“Contrast, who first (unknown)?”
… and yep, Rocky got exactly none of that. Time to sidetrack the easily distractible alien. “Who’s your conductor?”
“(Name of Crew - syllables distinct from other language), was ship pilot and conductor.” So maybe ‘conductor’ isn’t the exact term that works in this situation. Though with a crew of three, Rocky supposed the thrums that they would be able to get up to lacked all that much variation in structure, so perhaps they just elected one to keep it simpler. There’s only so many member configurations a group of three could be using after all.
And now a group of two, though with the sheer lack of sonic range that the alien had Rocky wouldn’t be surprised if thrums weren’t held nearly as often. And it’s been too long since Rocky had last been part of one, no mind been the conductor. It… doesn’t want to try and initiate one.
They moved on in the conversation after that, but Rocky still wondered at the weird insistence that Grace seemed to have on that as a role.
The second time it became rather clear was, embarrassingly, when Rocky realized just how poor of an impression it had been giving for all of Erid when moving onto the human ship. It shudders to recall this, because in hindsight it was extremely inappropriate of it to even think of doing, and there’s only so much that can be justified by the ‘years on years of isolation’ excuse.
It had begun as simple necessity, the environment of the ship was intolerable to Rocky and not to Grace, so Grace would need to move supplies from the tunnel connector inside and construct the habitat panels for Rocky to have a little more freedom of movement. It had complained, a fair bit, about the weight of the supplies and how it was the owner of the ship, though that seemed entirely unrelated, and Rocky - blast it, send it into the grand vacuum, - Rocky had enjoyed it. Enjoyed commanding and seeing that Grace, like a hull robot, would do as it demanded. Had enjoyed how even when it complained it still completed the tasks, and Rocky didn’t have to do anything else. It had wiggled quite happily in the atmosphere ball, flush with a weirdly satisfied feeling.
Then it froze, and took stock of that feeling, dissecting it into component parts, and. Oh, it was being dominant over Grace, it was establishing itself higher than Grace. How horribly perverse! How utterly unsustainably unsociable! It needed to not feel pleasure in this, it absolutely needed to not let Grace know it was doing this.
Except… well… for any other Eridian, the reaction to such an attempt at pushing one’s own importance above another, of trying to fracture the social system and create a lesser, the reaction would be disgust. Would be a stern warning and perhaps a little mild shunning so that the lesson can be remembered. To think of someone as lesser is to tell them to die, to break apart because the group cannot find use for them. An abhorrent insult, at best.
For Grace, though? Alien, oblivious, entirely too friendly Grace? It did the unthinkable and submitted. It growled and groused about the commanding, but unlike a firm reproof from another Eridian Grace continued to act despite it. Continued to build, continued to obey.
Social conditioning, Rocky had realized with awe. (Or maybe brain damage. Or maybe some kind of sexual deviancy. Rocky would need to prod further about that.) Such utterly different ways to Eridians. How about that.
And wretched lonely perverted strange Rocky, who had seen all of its crewmates die and had no ways to solve the problem alone, decided that it had been far enough away from Erid and other Eridians long enough. What’s another social construct broken?
The full soundscape only became discernible when they had been cohabitating long enough that Grace had begun sharing non-mission critical concepts. Things done for fun by an alien, like their interpretations of fictional media. It might be fascinating to someone specialized in the little things about psychologies and comparisons between stories, but Rocky never had much interest in that. In Rocky’s opinion, human media was interesting for its novelty (how many times in all the years alone had it craved something new?) but near incomprehensible for the time being. Perhaps it’s the fact that their vocabulary isn’t quite ready for the task, or the fact that every one of them seemed to involve the visual sense in some way that even the light translator just couldn’t quite interpret properly. Or perhaps it was just that Rocky didn’t have much of an interest in sordid alien social conundrums that are as mindless as they are indiscernible.
It wasn’t being fair. It certainly appreciated having time to just hang out with Grace, no specific task at hand (besides the stupid damn chains Rocky hates chain so MUCH). It really was a balm on the psyche after everything before, to have enough free time to even consider this. But it wasn’t sure how best to explain to Grace that, despite the light translator revealing the patterns of lines and shadows that are represented in a two dimensional medium, it would always just be slightly out of grasp to Rocky. Whatever illusion it had to light-hearing creatures, there just wasn’t enough physical depth for the shapes to clarify at all for sound-hearing ones.
What it did reveal, however, was a more complex explanation of the ‘hierarchy obsession.’ More complex manners of discussion about what humans are like when not on missions to save stars.
Child-parent relations were easy enough to understand. A little weird in just how adversarial it seemed to get in the mid years of a child human’s development, but with the speed it had to commence at perhaps it just drove every human a little mad. A child is small, squishier than adults somehow, and distressingly incapable for a good portion of a human childhood. It makes sense that an adult would protect them. That isn’t dominance, that's just responsibility.
Relations between lovers (and the vast majority of them seem to be pairs - with a bi-sex society and a planet full of bilateral life, perhaps twos are the common motif for Earth the way five is for Erid) seemed about as appropriate. Everything around it seemed to indicate this to be an equal partnership, a close bond that was equivalent to its Eridian counterpart. Except… the more that Rocky searched, the less true it seemed. It was almost like the media itself was telling some quiet lie and hoping nobody would notice.
It asked at one point about it. Somehow it looped back around to the ‘pronoun problem’ again, did humans have anything else going on with them?
Then there was the real issue that made this difference entirely impossible to ignore; Grace started talking about the structure of the project that had led to the ship being built and Grace being here at all. It had startled and unnerved Rocky so much that it had called for a 2880 second break from chain building just to tear at it with its claws for a little while in peace. Because they had enough words for the perverse and unknown to suddenly be known now.
Revelation one: there is apparently only one human that was fully responsible for the entirety of the project. (Or, Grace had tried to backtrack and say that it was a collaborative effort of course but that the weight of the choices were on one person, as if that was ANY BETTER) One. Not a collective, not the thrum that formed the basis for the Eridian team and collected more members faster than an open meal could collect scavenger-bugs.
Revelation two: Grace apparently worked directly underneath that person, as the direct conduit of that person's will to others. As if it were just an extension of that person, the diode signaller between brain and worker cells. Despite the fact that Rocky can clearly see Grace acting fully independently (when Rocky isn’t telling it to do something - ohhh… no, it needed to not get distracted).
Revelation three: Grace just… seemed to nebulously place itself on that project hierarchy anywhere between ‘mid-low’ and ‘mid-top’ at a whim? Rocky tried to track how it was placing it, trying to map out how exactly something like that COULD be tracked, and eventually threw it into the same arbitrary reasoning bucket as gender. Maybe humans shifted color depending on rank. Or something.
Revelation four: this is more of a stretch than the others, especially since Rocky cannot under any circumstance ask this of Grace but… does this self-expression of hierarchy mean that Grace inherently believes Rocky superior? Was every social interaction the two of them had that acted upon even footing, where Rocky tried to treat Grace as an equal chord member (versus what, a food animal??? An inanimate stone???), was it all extremely distressing to Grace in some way that Rocky could not detect? Maybe a human is closer to a worker cell than a full Eridian, and Grace was straining under the weight of having no direction.
(Is it not perverted then for Rocky to have done that, and instead a sign of xenocultural savvyness- no, not thinking about that absolutely not.)
2456 seconds have elapsed, and Grace was across the ship laying with one of the thinking machines, humming monotonously. Rocky resisted the impulse to start trying to catalogue every minute shift in fleshy body and sound quality that this clearly extremely social species must utilize in some tapestry of hierarchy. Grace was fine, Grace didn’t find Rocky odd enough or distressing enough to introduce the hierarchy idea itself for the sake of self-soothing. It would have only been fair, after its own concessions to proper sleeping and eating etiquette, perhaps.
So it was fine. It had to be fine, it’s just a weird difference between cultures. Rocky just needed to be normal about it all (and not wonder with horror and curiosity both how humans even functioned if Grace, an apparent subordinate individual, so easily lost track of its own bodily functions and neglected to sleep long after a standard human should without someone else to regulate him). And most of all it needed to not think about how good it feels to act like this.
Maybe humans are rubbing off on it. Yuck.
(Or maybe Rocky was always like this and - no, not going there!)
They went back to the visual media (and the chain the fucking chain) and Grace tried to ask what had caused the sudden departure earlier. Rocky hesitated, tried to imagine explaining how utterly wrong all of human society felt to it, and failed to find a satisfactory explanation. “Don’t worry about it,” it said instead.
It gave an expression (mouth turn down, negative emphasis) and hummed (single note, lower than average in tone on Grace’s personal single voice apparatus), but, like a perfect obedient little subordinate individual, it dropped the topic. It, assumedly, didn’t worry about it. Just because Rocky said not to!
(More effective scientists than it will ask the right questions one day, if Rocky makes it back to Erid to talk about humans and Grace. Questions like if they are even properly sentient, if such a social structure exists. Questions like if this, combined with the lack of thrum that Rocky had eventually realized, meant that humans were more equivalent in mind to animals that are meant to be hunted rather than Eridians which are meant to be collaborated with. Questions like how empathy and larger social structure could’ve amassed if they miss such a critical component to their own minds that enabled all Eridians to see themselves as egalitarian equals.)
(For now, Rocky would worry about the more immediate problems. Like how much more chain they would need to make together. Or if the plunge into the edge of the host planet’s atmosphere would even work to capture the presumed predator. Or if Grace would need Rocky to tell it what to do to bring out the next spool to mount on the hull - ugh. It really wasn’t doing a good job at not thinking about it!)
Fuck, was all this extremely weird though.
It did kind of explain what happened next though. Perhaps if Rocky hadn’t been slowly clueing in on the weird relationship humans seemed to have with their own self-perception, it would have seemed more illogical than it was. Grace had lied about its own survival of the trip, of the unfortunate mishaps that led to Earth having not nearly enough fuel to survive the whole journey.
Grace had smiled (mouth up, indicative of positive emphasis, but with a strained tension. A social signal of a lie of desperation). It had said that it had ‘made peace’ with the idea, and that it knew it was doing the best for the most amount of other humans.
It had said it didn’t want to think about it, but that it knew that it would expire after the mission was done. That it was a means to an end, and that it knew it was coming all along and just didn’t tell Rocky.
Bullshit.
It was clearly under that same delusion that it is lesser, compared to other humans. Perhaps it had changed some biological or social configuration and entered some kind of death-acceptance state. Perhaps all of this was perfectly natural, and the eusociality of humans was such that this kind of outcome is expected. Or perhaps Grace was just extremely brave.
(Rocky had heard of small creatures that lived in the less lush in-land areas on Erid, which formed large colonies of interconnected pieces that built false-cities. None of the individual bugs were able to talk like an Eridian or a human could, but together they could make something big. Maybe humans are like those, more than like Eridians. The chemical signals that they sent between one another are almost like the social cues humans gave one another, and they too had no qualms about sacrificing a few for the many. How many Eridians had to get their carapaces buffed after encountering a swarm of them willing to die to repel them from their false-city?)
Maybe this is the wrong way of going about all this. Maybe this will be taken as a grave insult or something to a human like Grace, to deny such an act. But Rocky is just so sick of people that it cares about dying.
And when its signals shift to hope, to wonder, to sudden wracking expulsions of emotional overflow from its ridiculous leaky body, Rocky knows it chose correctly.