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Just like on Earth, robots are a major presence in the cultural imaginary of Erid. It turns out that when a civilization discovers basic automation techniques, the logical next philosophical step is: whoa, what if we could automate a person?! So, alongside the stories contemplating your typical, mechanical, steal-your-jobs type robots, you’ve got a panoply of more specific concepts: the Eridian equivalents of androids, automata, replicants, and what have you.
Before meeting me, Erid may not have had the same kinds of computing systems, but they sure as heck had the mechanical and material prowess to produce an artificial Eridian. Not an artificially intelligent one, mind you. That’s something that’s stumped humans and Eridians in equal measure. But android-type robotics on Erid has always been crazy advanced compared to Earth, likely thanks to the somewhat-mechanical nature of their anatomy.
The use cases for this tech are pretty specific. It was originally considered a branch of medicine akin to prosthetics research. An injured or disabled Eridian could, if they wanted, swap out limbs for artificial ones, swap out organs, or even swap out almost their entire body. (Unsurprisingly, “super strong killer cyborg” remains a common trope in Eridian fiction, even if strict technological regulations make this kinda thing near-impossible in real life.)
However, armed with human computing technology, and hundreds and hundreds of years of research into the mechanisms of the Eridian brain… things start to get a bit funky.
Which is how we get here.
“So even if this doesn’t work,” I say, “it won’t, like, do anything to my actual body, right?”
I’m laying down in a xenonite pod, my head entirely encased in a massive… sensor thing. It’s about to triangulate every neuron and nerve impulse in my brain. Crazy stuff!
“No,” says Beverly, Erid’s foremost expert in human medicine. “Just like the last six times we tested this configuration, there will be no physical impact on you at all.”
“Yeah,” I say, a bit petulantly, “but this time’s for real.”
“Be patient,” comes Rocky’s voice. I can’t see him well through this thing, but just hearing his voice makes me breathe a little easier. “Human memory degrades with age. Maybe Grace doesn’t remember all the other trials.”
“I’m not that old, Rock! I’m barely middle-aged!”
“I understand Grace’s fear, though.” This is my buddy Flint, the biologist, who in the past few years has gotten really into neuroscience. “Especially since he’ll be sleeping.” There’s no distinction in the Eridian language between sleep and unconsciousness.
“But we’ll be here to watch you!” chimes in Leonard, the brilliant doctor and bioengineer who near-singlehandedly made all this possible. (If you can guess my naming scheme for the two medical researchers, you get a gold star.) “We understand this technology very well, Grace. You will be okay!”
And yeah, I’m scared out of my pants, but that little spark of excitement is igniting in me again. Is it possible that this first try will actually work? Will I actually get to experience a brief moment of life as an Eridian?
“Yes yes,” Rocky echoes. “Hopefully we’ll see you very soon, in here!”
“Yeah!” I’d give him a thumbs up if I weren’t so tightly strapped down. “See you soon too, bud—”
The world goes dark.
I have absolutely no idea when my consciousness resurfaces. It’s a bit like a dream—mixed-up, foggy, with no clear perspective or embodiment. All I know is that I have a distinct impression of four presences surrounding me. Close enough I could reach out and touch the rough, craggy surfaces of their carapaces…
Except it isn’t real. There’s nothing there.
Okay, I think, rational brain kicking in. The experiment didn’t work. So they’re gonna come back in and wake me up right now. I’m already half awake, after all—I can’t feel the restraints or the sensor helmet, but the ruckus around me is so clear, such perfectly sculpted sound, that part of it has to be what I’m actually—
“Grace,” says Rocky. He’s immediately to my left. To my north? I can pinpoint his exact position in my mind’s eye, picture him standing at attention. The dream dips into wavy visions, like one of those extreme close-ups—you know, like the funny things you get when you look at sand with a magnifying glass. Except it’s just the texture of Rocky’s carapace floating by in full-HD, background all blurry. But that’s not really it either.
I try to say something like I’m straight-up hallucinating over here, dude, and it comes out as a single strangled “♩.”
Oh.
Rocky jumps. Maybe? I can’t be sure. I’m still half asleep. Maybe I’m just hearing him jump and imagining the way it looks when he does that, curious and jubilant.
“Yes!” he cries. “Yes, try it again.”
I let out another toot. Low C. Five identical tones laid on top of each other. Okay. Yeah. I open my mouth, and—
Nope. Not mouth. There are five of these things. Five individually manipulable… things.
I toot out of only one of the things. It’s kind of scary how I barely need to picture which thing before it just… happens.
“Can you say ‘one’?” Rocky says.
That’s two notes played on top of each other. I know exactly which ones they are, but—oh god, how do I do notes? I close one of the things a bit, and then another of the things a bit more, and make a noise.
Well, that’s not a word.
There’s some laughter. The dream is extremely spatial in how it locates the sound—three burbling sources in three places in the room, vibrating like water.
“Try opening one this much and one this much.” Beverly is demonstrating with her hands. Wow, I never noticed how different her voice is from Rocky’s. There’s all sorts of extra little pieces to it. Quiet inexplicable timbres, like creaks in the moving parts of her carapace.
“One,” I say. The sound is so physical inside me. I can see my own artificial organs, I think. Trippy.
“Good!! Very close!”
I readjust the mouth things one by one and attempt two. It’s discordant as heck, but it must be intelligible because Rocky whoops.
“You sound drunk,” he says.
Someone outside is talking about lightbulbs. Two people. The dream supplies me with their exact dimensions. I feel outside myself, floating in 3D space, observing like I’m in the Sims.
“Three,” I try. Two syllables! It is not like playing a keyboard. It’s like a trombone. It’s like five really complicated trombones. There’s no stop between one note and the next. So you can just—
I open and close my mouths and let out a steady stream of air. It sounds like a slide whistle. Oh god, this is a whole entire instrument! I try a scale. I try a couple scales on top of each other. It still doesn’t sound entirely right, but once I have a note down I can pretty reliably get it again.
“Can you move?” asks Rocky when he’s stopped laughing.
Oh! I can move!
Okay, wow, I’m quick. I’m incredibly sturdy. I want to go and I just go. It’s effortless. My legs can figure out how to canter in a way that my mouths can’t figure out how to sing. I have no earthly idea where I’m going, since I still can’t freaking see anything, as expected, but I’m not gonna let that stop me. If I crash into the wall, that’s just free entertainment for the group. Or maybe I’ll just wake up?
Why am I still thinking like this is a dream? Obviously it isn’t. We’ve actually gotten somewhere. The experiment worked! But my mind just refuses to believe it. There’s too much extra stuff, hovering just outside my awareness, like it’s waiting for an in to come in and be properly parsed. And then—no sight, obviously. No smell. Some touch? I can definitely feel the floor, and the air, and… other stuff that I let wash over me without trying to wrangle it into words. All of that is something. A complete sensory experience, probably? I just can’t stop my brain from continuing to expect an input it’s not going to get.
“Very agile,” Rocky says, and I realize I’ve just been weaving around him. My proprioception is crazy like this. I’d have to actually try if I want to run into something. I barrel forward blindly—
—Except it’s not blind, it’s a very calculated smack right into the table. The impact reverberates through my whole body in an unpleasant but entirely un-painful way. Huh!
I do it again, of course. It’s so loud! I’m so heavy! Whoa!
“Having fun, Grace?”
The next thing to do is obviously to smack into Rocky.
He seems ready for this. He kind of catches me and holds me at arm’s length. The sensation of it ricochets through me, sweeping through my body, and through Rocky’s, through his muscles and organs and the sacs through which stream the wavy air of his laughter, and oh my god I can see everything. Could always see everything, actually. The room and the building and the square outside, and the four Eridians crowded around me and everything on the shelves and in the cupboards and all the movement of blood inside of Rocky and the clicks of his feet on the ground. And then it subsides a bit, the details fade into the background, but it’s all still there. Too much for my human brain to wrap my mind around.
I think about the Eridians outside. I still know what they’re talking about. I suddenly realize I have no idea what color they are.
That’s so weird.
“This… weird,” I say, with wobbly chords. My speaking-Eridian sense has thus far been processed through the same part of my muscle memory that would learn to type or play piano, but the jerryrigging of my brain into the Eridian robot has more or less wired the air sacs to my mouth-sense. Except there’s so much more here to control than in my mouth. Speaking is a conscious effort, drawing more from my memory than I would like.
“Not surprising!” laughs Flint. “All of us remember how it felt to learn to talk. Feel free to speak as simplified as you need to.”
“I learned proper Eridian grammar,” I say, painfully slowly and discordantly, tooting out the notes for verb conjugations with a bit too much emphasis, “and I will speak with proper Eridian grammar!”
Rocky wiggles with excitement. “Yes yes yes! Finally you have a voice that sounds like a voice!”
“I… want to hear my old voice now.” Agh, forming words is still aggravating—like spelling out loud, letter by letter—but at least I’m getting faster at it. “On the computer. Bet there’s. Lots missing.”
“Yes, lots you couldn’t hear with human senses,” Leonard agrees. They’re in the back of the room now, fiddling with the monitors, but I can still hear them perfectly.
“Yeah! Very… rich.”
“This sucks,” Rocky says suddenly. “We are doing octave drills. Now.”
All the other Eridians laugh. I make an approximation of a question-noise.
“An exercise for very young children,” Flint says. “We hum notes in a scale, you repeat. One air sac at a time.”
The initial idea had been to test out the robot body for maybe an hour or so, but after twenty straight minutes of nothing but Eridian speech therapy, Leonard informs us that my human brain has acclimated perfectly. “It shows about the same amount of strain,” he says, “as when we recorded you solving puzzles in your computer game.” (That had been my excuse to replay Portal 2. The one good thing about leaky human memory: I’d forgotten the solution to nearly every level, and could therefore puzzle them all out again under the scientists’ observation.) So, much like Portal’s intrepid hero, I am cleared to test indefinitely!
…Well, really just til the end of the day.
The wireless mechanism that beams my brain into the robot has a pretty wide range, so the first thing Rocky does is show me all around the biodome observation center.
I’ve seen a lot of it already, of course. The halls are wide enough that I can roll through it in my golf-cart-sized mobile terrarium, flooding light over everything like a survival horror protagonist in a crystalline alien lab. But now? It actually looks like a place people live. Being able to sense the relative thickness of walls—and tell exactly where the soundproofing is—makes all the difference. As a human, Eridian architecture looks to me like a chaotic lattice, no clear indication of what anything is for or where anything’s supposed to go. Now, I can intuitively sense the way the building shuffles its inhabitants through itself. There’s hierarchy! Organization! And when you don’t have all the confusing visuals in the way, the chaos recedes into manageable units.
“You haven’t been in here,” Rocky tells me, opening a door to a new wing of the building. Definitely not a big enough opening for my golf cart to get through. “So sad. I’ve really wanted to show you these models.”
“Models!” I cry.
Every time I speak, the room lights up with a pulse of vibration-illumination. My instinct is just to keep shouting, to keep all of the details within my immediate awareness. After all, not being able to see faraway details is a problem if you’re a human; it’s why I’ve got glasses. But, I’m finding that… I just don’t really need this as an Eridian? I can remember the details fine. And my passive echolocation gives me everything important. A full, 360° view of the whole room, plus whatever’s adjacent and isn’t hidden behind soundproofing, plus Rocky and all his innards. (The 360° thing is still super disorienting. I can only really concentrate on one slice of it at a time.)
The space we’re entering now feels like an archive. Maybe a museum? It’s so hard to come up with comparisons like this on Erid. It’s multi-story, kind of jagged in structure, sporting a handful of Eridians who all greet us (even from multiple floors up!) when me and Rocky walk in. Most prominently, though, the place is completely filled with detailed sculptures. Of… Earth wildlife?!
I gambol up to the first, uh… I’m gonna call it a table. There is a large xenonite chicken statue, complete with perfectly-modeled feathers. At least I think it’s large until I realize that I’m just small. This is a life-sized chicken! It’s weird, also, to be able to perceive it on all sides at once. And on the inside, too? Yeah, now that I’m focusing on it directly, I can tell they’ve modeled the skeleton and organs, like a 3D scientific diagram.
The rest of the room’s models are similar: animals and plants and fungi, crafted at life scale, beautifully real. It’s not like being back on Earth, no way—especially when my perception is incomparable to a human’s—but it’s so cool.
“Is this for your biologists?” I ask. Still sluggish and stilted, but speaking is not actively making me mad anymore.
“Yes, and many more scientists! People come from all over Erid to look at our archive.”
“Artists also,” pipes up an Eridian on a high balcony. I’m used to the idea that Eridians can hear me way further away than I expect, but it’s crazy to be able to hear them just as clearly. To perceive them just as clearly too, especially when they’re talking. “Greetings, Doctor Grace! I read about your experiment! Please peruse the archive and report if you find any inaccuracies!”
I laugh. The instinctive noise that comes out of my body is not really like an Eridian laugh? But it makes Rocky laugh even harder, so I figure it does the job.
“I’m not used to seeing animal organs,” I tell them, stifling the urge to yell. “But I’ll try!”
“The scientific illustrators colored them as well as they could also,” Rocky says. Eridian, unlike English, is weirdly bad at making up new verbs; his word for to color sounds unnatural in a funny way. “But you can’t see light like this. So, another time, we’ll take you here to judge the colors.”
“You should make robots of Earth animals too,” I say. I tap the chicken. (Holy smokes, its skeleton is so precisely modeled.) “Robot of a… this thing. Running around the biodome.”
“Chicken,” Rocky supplies. The Eridian word roughly translates to “flying creature of the farm.” “Yes, definitely we could do this! But it would be more like an animatronic. Do you know this word?”
“Yeah. Like a robot that moves but can’t interact.”
“Yes! Sometimes your memory is good. But do you really want a chicken? They seem annoying in videos.”
“Not that annoying,” I protest. “Wait, what’s annoying about chickens?”
He answers instantly. “Terrible noise.”
“Well, okay, then, Mr. Judgy!”
Tacking an honorific onto the adjective results in a weird, spliced sound, but it makes Rocky titter. “Yes. If you heard it with Eridian ears you would get it. Some noises are bad.”
I almost demand for him to show me, but maybe I want to keep my neutral-to-positive association with chickens. “Okay, then something else. Maybe… a lizard. Or a robot school of fish for the ocean.”
“Does Grace have a favorite animal?”
I scan through the many tiers of sculptures. So much easier than with eyes, but also more dizzying.
“Yeah! Here.”
We make our way up two flights of stairs and weave around a dozen table-plinths. Up here, they’ve set up a mock-ecosystem: fox and squirrel and possum and titmouse and a bunch of other North American forest staples. Everything looks a little too posed, each creature equidistant from the others in a way they wouldn’t be in real life. A remarkably un-sprawling blackberry bush sits in the back. Oh, how I wish I could eat blackberries again—at least I don’t have a mouth that can salivate at the sight.
The fox’s fur is rendered perfectly. When I touch it, I can’t feel the softness in the way I long to, but it seems like a perfectly good facsimile.
“These guys are known for being orange,” I say. It feels like an inadequate introduction.
“Yes, unusual for Earth mammals.”
“Hey, did you know that their vocal range is about 5 octaves?”
“Amazing! More than humans.”
“They can make a lot of sounds too. I wonder what you’d think of those sounds compared to a chicken.” (I successfully stop myself from mentioning the most well-known human cultural reference for fox sounds. That can wait til I’m back at my computer.)
“Yes yes. I’ll research this.”
He moves past me, to the further part of the diorama. There’s a small pine tree here, perfectly sized so its tallest branch ends just shy of the ceiling. My sudden awareness of all of its little needles is dizzying. Inside it, I can sense the concentric circles of growth rings, the dense whorl of a knot or two. If it were alive, I wonder if I could hear its vascular system transporting water and nutrients.
“Amazing how many trees there are on Earth,” Rocky says. “I wish I could visit a forest.”
Most of Erid’s ecology happens in its upper atmosphere—what goes on down here is all about catching that airborne life, or about catching the catchers. No big photosynthesizing things; all the stuff that eats sunlight is up where there actually is significant sunlight.
“You have big rock spires,” I say. “Crazy rock spires.”
“Yes. Very beautiful. But it’s different if it’s life.”
He appears to be thinking about something. One of his hands bats at the pine tree’s fronds. Then, suddenly, he stands up straight.
“What’s the exact range of Grace’s wireless receiver?”
The question is directed at Beverly and Flint, who have been observing us from the room just outside the archive. I totally didn’t notice them before! Gotta get better at my spatial awareness.
Beverly replies with a number that I can guesstimate is the equivalent of a few miles. “We can boost the signal that far using other transmitters around the complex and adjacent centers.”
That is honestly insane. How much data are they even sending? Terabytes? Petabytes? Surely not that much, since only part of my brain is doing the experiencing here—the rest must all be focused on maintaining my physical body. Then again, there’s nothing like Earth’s internet infrastructure limiting the Eridian team. They can afford to pour all their resources towards just this for a few hours. Whoa.
Rocky abruptly starts back down the stairs.
“Where are we going?” I ask, scampering behind him. Moving as an Eridian is super satisfying. There’s no way I’m gonna trip. How do humans even survive having so few points of contact with the ground?
“It’s a surprise! Follow me!”
We leave the archive, then the labs around the archive, then the… something… around the labs. Eridian buildings are confusing. All of them seem to be huge and multi-segmented. We stop briefly at the mechanics workshop so Rocky can retrieve some unknown tool (his satchel is annoyingly soundproof), then it’s back down the halls. I love being able to catch “glimpses” of Eridians hard at work in their separate rooms, doing tests with machinery, monitors, water, everything under the sun.
I can notice, too, when we travel through a sort of courtyard, and I beam my senses towards the ceiling and find nothing there. It just keeps going up.
“Is that the sky?” I ask with wonder.
“Yes. Not so interesting.”
“Still can’t believe you guys can’t look up at the stars,” I say in my best imitation of a mutter. Then: “Wait, there is something up there!”
Three chevron-shaped things, swirling around so high up there’s not much to bounce soundwaves off. I can’t get a clear picture back to me at all.
“Birds,” Rocky says, still moving.
“Wait wait wait. Birds?!”
“Not actually birds. These are called ♩♫♪♪♪. I told you about air predators, right?”
“Yeah, but I’ve never seen them before! Let me try…”
It’s so much weirder than just seeing a blurry thing in the distance. For one, it can’t be a trick of the eye—there’s definitely something there. Its flight path is clear. I can even make out its density, which is crazy. But I’m very aware of the partiality of my perception.
Rocky stops to let me watch longer. “Cute,” he says. “I didn’t think ♩♫♪♪♪ could be so interesting.”
“I didn’t think pine trees could be so interesting!” Well, that’s not true. Trees are cool as heck. Maybe novel is what I mean.
“They won’t come down to places with more echoes,” Rocky explains. “Grace! Let’s keep going! I have something better to share!”
The ceiling reappears. Post-courtyard, we’re in a sort of open-sided tunnel, paved with a new type of grooved xenonite tile. It makes complete sense, actually, why Eridians would be partial to more enclosed spaces. First, there’s no reason or need to see the sky. Second, a ceiling is another surface off which to bounce sound, which helps give some definition to my surroundings.
Right now, we’re following a curving path around the back of the wing where we exited. Similar paths radiate off in many directions towards other parts of the research complex. I’m a bit surprised to see so much architectural dead space—liminal space, I guess the kids would call it—as the built environment on Erid is usually a lot more dense, efficient, and all-encompassing. Without the psychological need for “outside” areas, you don’t get a lot of spaces that are purely devoted to shuttling people around.
Excepting, of course, the subway stations. That’s the true nexus of all these little paths. Eridians zoom past us on their equivalents of bikes, only slowing briefly to shout “Greetings, Doctor Grace!” They’re heading towards the compact, multilayered structure in the center of the facility, where one can take a “train” (Astrophage-powered, obviously) to any other corner of the complex, and far beyond.
But Rocky isn’t leading me towards the train. We turn at the huge, spherical antechamber before the station and head off in another direction. The human part of my brain can’t fully comprehend multiple conversations at once, but I still savor the snatches of dialogue I catch from all around me: Eridians telling each other about the robot body experiments, discussing the progress of new technologies, sharing some odd scraps of human knowledge (“did you know that human children have a tradition of hitting each other with balls of frozen water?!”), or admiring Rocky’s confident gait.
“I can’t believe we’re not taking the train,” I tell him. I’m not sure how to add a pout to my voice, so I just load my verbs up with incredulity.
“The train doesn’t go to our destination,” Rocky says.
We seem to be headed towards a huge rocky outcropping—like a hill but steeper, jutting from the ground. If only I knew more about geology, then I could interpret my instinctual knowledge of its density and structure into some guesses at its composition. The wings of the facility fold around it, unperturbed, but there’s also a door leading straight into the middle. Which is where Rocky takes me.
“‘♪♫♫♩♫♩♪♫ – access limited,’” I read from the sign on the door. “What’s ♪♫♫♩♫♩♪♫?” I can pick out part of the word for “ecology” and the etymological root for “space” or “area.”
“Not sure if there’s an English term. A specific type of research site.”
Like a field station, maybe? I’m buzzing with excitement. Eridian ecology is something I’ve sunk years into researching now—not as much as microbiology, but how could I not learn about their ecosystems? —and still I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The elevator inside of the hill encloses us fully. My awareness, once vast, reduces down to a tiny little room, the shaft above and below us, and the mechanisms that keep us moving. I tap one hand against the elevator wall, trying to tell how far up we’re going.
“You’re learning to use your perception well!” Rocky says. “Tap with two hands to see clearer.”
He’s using the word for the human light-sense, not Eridian echolocation. “I can’t see,” I protest.
He makes a high, curious noise. “Wow! I thought your perception would be translated into human sight.”
“It’s a bit like seeing with my—” Huh, I’ve never had to refer to this concept in Eridian before. “Eye of the mind?”
“Internal spatial awareness?”
“No, the, um…” It’s a bit funny to consciously reach for Eridian filler words. “Internal representation of vision. Like a dream.”
“Yes. Hm. I remember when you explained this, but the concept is really weird.”
“Not that weird! Eridians have something similar, right?”
“Similar, but not as vivid as actual perception. You say your internal vision is like real vision. Which is crazy.”
“There’s some difference,” I begin to argue, but then the elevator clunks to a stop. I notice that I’ve gotten no vertigo at all throughout the trip. Benefits of not having an inner ear, huh.
We step out onto the peak of the hill. It’s a mostly-flat rock surface of about five square meters; a simple fence around the perimeter protects visitors from a dizzying drop. On all sides—and above us—is complete sensory darkness. It bothers me immensely that I can’t look down and see the buildings below—well, I can if I tap my hands against the railing, but they appear only as vague shapes, nothing like a proper bird’s eye view.
But that’s far from the main point. What Rocky has clearly taken me here to see are the trees.
They aren’t actually trees, of course. I remember these things from my biology research. They’re very like coral: sessile animals that feed on tiny creatures floating in the air. But from Rocky’s explanations and diagrams, I really thought they would be… well, coral-sized. Not, like, as tall as an oak.
“What are these things called in Eridian again?” I ask, bounding up to the first and largest.
“♪♪♫♩♪♫ is the scientific term.”
Tapping two hands against it, its internal mechanisms slide into sharp focus: the long digestive tracts in its “trunk,” its multiple circulatory systems. Yeah, nothing like a tree. Which honestly makes it sweeter that Rocky immediately thought to take me here. To an Eridian, who sees all layers of an object at once, the connection between this sort of creature and an Earth tree would be less intuitive. But Rocky knows that I perceive shapes a little more abstractly, more two-dimensionally. He made the connection because he knew that I would also.
“In English you called it ‘calcium skeleton of the sea on land,’” Rocky continues, which stumps me for a moment before I remember the Eridian word for coral. That’s it. Land-coral. Good going, past me.
“Yeah, and it’s not just because they share an ecological niche. The shape of it is like—” I gesture to its big, wavy fronds, sprouting branch-like from the central trunk. “There’s a type of uh, calcium skeleton animal, that’s shaped like a human brain. The texture of the…” Darn it, I don’t have the words for this. “The big flat bits. The way they, um. Twist? Crumple? Like fabric. Is also like a brain. Right?”
“Yes,” muses Rocky, “I understand. Like a big flayed brain. This should be in a human horror movie.”
“Big flayed brain that eats you!” I try to wave my arms at Rocky in an intimidating, I’m-gonna-get-you gesture, but I’m pretty sure it just reads as jazz hands.
“No no no! It eats tiny things! Millimeter-sized!”
“Great horror movie for bugs, then,” I say, using an Eridian biological term that shares only the connotations of smallness and flittering in common with the Earth concept of an insect. “Okay, since they’re not scary, then I can…”
I scan the little grove, searching for a land-coral with a frond that branches off close to the ground. Finding a suitable candidate—a branch that rises just above my vents—I place two hands on it and consider my angle of attack. Man, how I wish for the 3,000 nerve endings of human fingertips right now—touching the coral’s “bark” doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know from listening to the vibrations around it. It’s hard and rough but also porous. I mentally scramble for texture comparisons from my days on Earth, but they seem a little out of reach. It’s like a dried, brittle sponge, maybe? No, more solid than that…
“What are you doing?” Rocky asks.
I brace a third hand against the coral’s trunk. Okay, so Eridians don’t have core muscles. Right. But maybe with a little bit of maneuvering…
I cling onto the branch with two hands, resting my weight there, and walk two more up the trunk. No idea yet how I’m going to get my whole bulky carapace up, but I’ll figure it out as soon as I—
“Grace!!” Rocky yells, galloping over. “What! What the fuck are you doing!”
(I should note that this phrase literally translates to something like “no way are you doing that, idiot,” but the way Rocky uses it just feels vulgar. So he gets to swear in my head. Lucky him.)
“Climbing,” I say, dangling awkwardly from the branch with four limbs.
“Stupid human! Eridians can’t climb! You’ll hurt yourself, dumbass!”
He puts two hands on my carapace, like he could catch me if I fell, and I get a wave of perfect, rippling awareness of all the little details of his body.
“It’s an important human thing,” I say, wiggling a little. It sucks so bad that I can’t visibly sulk. “Climbing trees. Especially a new, super-cool tree that no one’s ever climbed before…”
Rocky considers this. Then he takes his hands off my body and hunkers down into a sturdy position right below me.
“Walk on top of me,” he says, exasperated. “Use the top of my carapace as a stepping stool to the branch.”
I trill out a long string of gleeful notes and detach partway from the tree to clamber onto Rocky. It is incredibly unwieldy. My instincts about my center of balance are all wrong—I could walk fine by handing control over to the Eridian part of my brain, but now I’m using my human brain, and that just does not work for this.
“Turn yourself the right way around!” Rocky is instructing. “Then it’s just like stairs. That’s terrifying,” he tells me as I right myself, half on top of him. “Don’t do that again. You’re like an Earth arachnid.”
“Spiderman,” I say. Or, you know. The closest Eridian equivalent.
“Yes, like a man and like a web-arachnid. Grace’s skills extend across species.”
He scuttles away, leaving me marooned on the coral-tree branch. Not gonna lie, I’m feeling a bit precarious now—not that I’m in danger of falling off, not with five limbs planted on the branch, but I really don’t like that it’s thinner than me.
“Okay!” I cry. “I have conquered the land-coral! You can help me down now…”
But Rocky is standing back, fiddling with something in his satchel. It’s a small, circular mechanical device with a protruding… lightbulb?
Oh! It’s a camera!!
“I brought this so you could see the land-coral as a human as well,” he says, clipping an Eridian monitor readout to the side of the camera, “but now we can engage in another important human tradition. Stay still!”
I instinctively shut up, though speaking obviously won’t have any effect on the photo. I guess the flash goes off a few times? Not like I can see it. Rocky at least seems to take a lot of pictures. Then he carefully stows the camera and moves back under me.
“Amazing!” I crow as I climb down him. I jump off his head, and the reverberation of my feet on the rock lights up the scene. “Amaze amaze amaze. Give that to me!”
I fish around in the bag and aim the camera at Rocky. He freezes instantly. I know it’s just because he doesn’t want the picture to blur, but it makes me laugh.
“Camera-shy?” I ask.
“What? Shy? I’m not shy.”
“Not used to being photographed.” I move back and snap some pics of him in front of the coral tree, hopefully with interesting compositions. “Savior of Erid… you’d think there would be more… uh… alas, there’s a specific word in English for this. Fans trying obsessively to photograph you. There’s a song about it.”
“Very specific word,” Rocky says, impressed. “You should show me the song later. This and also the fox sounds.”
“Just your luck! The fox sounds are also a song.”
“What! They sing like birds?!”
“No, it’s—never mind. You’ll see.”
“Yes, soon.” He taps his hands together, thinking. “We should go back.” He repeats the word go a few times, each with a greater level of grammatical uncertainty: the effect is like saying maybe, maybe…
“Still plenty of juice to go,” I say encouragingly.
“Ew. No juice. You’re an Eridian right now; you don’t need that shit.”
“It’s a saying! I’m saying the body still has power!”
“Oh. Yes, still much power.”
“So… maybe we can hang out up here a little more? You know, just us. It’s nice.”
“Very nice,” Rocky agrees. He steps closer to me, bumping his shoulder gently against mine. “Hmm. Sometimes. Sometimes I…”
He lapses into thought.
“Yeah, bud?”
“It’s terrible. Very horrible thing to feel. But I sometimes miss being alone in space with just you.”
I’m not sure if my heart cracks or melts, but it sure as heck does something.
“Yeah,” I whistle slowly. “I know what you mean.” And I echo his earlier phrasing: repeat I know, I know, but more and more certain.
“But!” He bumps me again. “This alone-ness is much better.”
“Yeah, we’re not at risk of dying horribly any second.”
“No! Not that. I mean—” His fingers click and click as he searches for the words. “It’s not so lonely, because we’re not separated. Both because there are no physical barriers and because our experiences are more similar. Not the same. But a bit more… orbiting the same mass. You perceive what I perceive.”
“Yeah,” I say. As happens to us so often these days, he’s taken the words right out of my mouth. Er… mouths. “It’s really special.”
“And exciting! There’s so much more you can experience now! Not everything, but so many things!” He bounces around me. “Later we can take the train to Adrian’s compound! The lab isn’t built for your vehicle, but now you can see it! Oh! And! And you need to listen to more Eridian music now! You’ll be able to hear many more nuances in it! And we can play Eridian body-games! And!!”
He dissolves into a peal of melodic, meaningless tones. His excitement is literally palpable: it reverberates off my carapace, bright and elated.
“So much art,” I say. “And architecture! So many labs I need a full tour of now; I don’t even know where to begin!”
“Yes yes yes!” Rocky bounds towards the elevator—then stops, and very deliberately turns around and walks back to me. “We begin by hanging out.”
He crouches and leans against me. I do the same, listening to the flow of air and liquid inside him, the signature rhythms of aliveness. It’s not that he normally appears to me like a hunk of stone—he’s so much more than that, even visually—but this has really unlocked a whole new dimension of him. A new intimate access to him. All the more so because of how long it took us to get here, technologically. But now that we’re here…
“Yeahhhh,” I trill. “Hanging out. Sounds perfect.”
Despite being used to the lack of lights on Erid, the way the photographs are lit still feels slightly spooky to me. The singular light source picks its subjects out of the darkness with just a tad too much precision. Totally not how it “looked” when I was there. But, still, there I am! My robot body—knobbly, Rocky-sized, colored sandy as my hair—perches hesitantly atop the bluish coral branch, standing at attention in a pose that makes me snort.
“Good pictures?” Rocky asks from the next room over. He’s helping the scientists sift through more brain scans. I’ve been able to catch a few lines of conversation from in there—something about planning the next time I can have one of these excursions.
“Really good.” I laugh louder, shuffling through the ones I took of Rocky. He looks exactly as awkward as I did. “I’m putting them all on my dresser.”
“An honor!” Rocky chirps. “Biggest honor. Maybe my new hobby will be photography.”
“First Eridian to travel to Tau Ceti, first Eridian to meet an alien, first Eridian to be a photographer… what can’t you do, Rock?”
“See photographs like a human. But this doesn’t matter. This will be photography meant for Eridians. To truly appreciate it, you will have to become an Eridian again.”
“Sounds like we have to expedite my next robot body adventure, then, huh?”
“Yes yes. Many more adventures to have.”