Mimic and the Space Engineer

4

Friends in Unusual Places

I spent hours scouring the ship for any sign of Mimic. The hardest part was pretending that I was cleaning the entire time so I wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. I was sure at any moment the alarms would sound and the ship would be on high alert.

When I finally returned to my room, close to ten hours later, I was exhausted both physically and emotionally. I was sure that I had doomed the entire crew to their untimely deaths, and I was composing my confession over and over in my head. I could only hope that they would have mercy on me because I was just a stupid janitor when I was court-martialed. Could a civilian be court-martialed? I wasn’t really sure.

I slid my ID to open my door, only to have something massive and black rush at me. Once more I yelped and jumped backward before my brain was able to recognize my missing companion.

“Mimic!” I cried, recovering enough to shove it back into my room and slam the door behind us. “Do you know how long I’ve been searching for you?”

It trilled and shook what I thought might be its backside at me. If I didn’t know better, I would think that it was wagging its tail at me. Except for that part where it didn’t have a tail. It trilled at me again then jumped up and down several times before nudging at my thighs. It was insane how much bigger it was now that it had eaten again, which made me wonder what else it would need to chow down on and exactly how big it was going to get.

I collapsed on my bed, letting out a long sigh. What was I going to do?

Mimic seemed to pick up on my frustration and jumped onto my bed next to me. It weighed quite a bit more than last time, causing me to bounce up several inches. I flailed a bit, and I felt a spike slice across my hand.

“Ow!” I hissed, pulling my hand to me. I saw there was a slight, almost papercut-like slice on the back of my hand. “Whoops.” I remarked, wiping it on my jumpsuit.

Mimic let out a panicked warble and froze, multiple spikes shooting out from its surface.

“Whoa, calm down there fella,” I urged before laughing slightly. “I’m fine. I promise.” For being a faceless, featureless, multi-angled creature, it sure was cute.

I settled myself and Mimic scooted onto my lap, almost purring. The sound relaxed me and I soon found my eyelids growing heavy. It was so funny that after all the stress throughout the day, and utter certainty that I had just ruined my life, it melted away in the presence of my new friend. I guess that’s what I had been missing for so long.

Logically, I knew it was a bit strange for me to be so attached to something I had only known for about two days, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like the alien was depending on me, and it was really nice to matter.

As if reading my mind, it let out a warbling coo and retracted all of its spiky limbs. I smiled, and rested my face against its hard, cool skin. Curled together, we drifted off to sleep.

I slept better than I had in ages, and when I finally drifted to consciousness, I felt great. I was still curled on my side, and I felt the warmth of Mimic pressed against me.

I stretched, then curled my arms back around the alien. Except… they were much softer and squishier than Mimic was supposed to be.

“Did you shift into a pillow again?” I mumbled, rubbing the crust from my eyes before opening them.

It took me a minute for my vision to clear as I sat up, and I yawned egregiously loud. I heard a trill and went to pat the angled, multi-faceted back of my friend.

But instead of solid surface, I felt soft, smooth skin.

“What the hell?!”

I finally came to fully and looked down beside me to see there wasn’t an inky shapeshifter. Instead there was a fully grown, fully nude woman.

I screamed again. I should probably stop doing that. I sat there, frozen for a moment, before hurriedly slapping a hand over my eyes. “Sorry!”

I heard another trill and felt something move toward me. Peeking between my fingers, I saw the woman had sat up as well, and her face was just an inch or so away from mine.

I snapped my fingers back in place. Sure, I enjoyed watching naked people on the net every now and then, but this seemed very intrusive.

I felt very warm, smooth hands grab my wrists gently then pull them away. I dropped them, and came face to face with the unknown woman.

She was small, but there was a decided squareness to her features. Her hair was white and short, while her eyes were depthless black. Her face drew even closer, and when she was less than a breath away, she let out a low trill.

“Mimic?” I gasped, completely shocked.

She made the same noise again and I felt a strange mix of excitement and horror. “You shifted into a human? You can do that?”

She didn’t answer, instead rolling off the bed and standing. I slammed my hands over my eyes again, only to hear her rummage around. I heard things clattering to the floor, and then fabric rustling and then a zipper being closed. I risked another look to see that she had dressed herself in one of my jumpsuits. It was much too big on her, but I couldn’t care less.

“How did you…” I murmured. “You… you knew to get dressed.”

Such a simple gesture, and yet it meant so much. Yes, Mimic was a shapeshifter with some sort of consciousness, but I had assumed it was animalistic in nature. Like a dog, or horse. However, the fact that she knew that she needed to wear clothing as I did, and had watched me enough to know where I kept my clothes and how to put them on, meant that she most likely was a fully realized, self-aware entity.

“You’re sentient!” I blurted, the words barely getting out of my mouth.

She tilted her head, her mouth moving as if she was speaking, but no sound came out. I supposed I couldn’t be surprised about that, considering it was ridiculous to expect her to know English.

“This is crazy! Do you know what this means?” More mouth moving, but no sound. “I mean, you probably do. Man, I wish we could talk to each other. Are you a genius? Are you smart enough to make me seem like an ant? Are you like a child? A very primitive form? Who knows! Not me, that’s for sure.”

I felt my excitement bubbling up, tripling down on itself so hard that I had to start pacing. I was prattling on, not even sure if I was speaking words anymore, but when I turned Mimic was no longer standing in the center of my room.

Instead, she was sitting at my desk, messing about with my data-log and my net interface. “Whoa, what are you doing there?” I took a step toward her carefully. I did need to acknowledge the fact that I could potentially be enabling a blood-thirsty creature that needed knowledge to wipe out my own kind. But… that just didn’t seem like something Mimic would do. She could have killed me a dozen times over now. Heck, she probably could have blown up the whole ship. But she hadn’t, and that meant I needed to trust it.

“You want to learn something?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly and it was quite unnerving. Slowly, I did an exaggerated blink, and she copied me.

“Good, remember to do that every so often.” I added, sidling up next to her. Bending down, I poked at the net portal and called up the video conglomerate that I favored. “How about a linguistics tutorial?”

I handed my data-log to her and she clutched it greedily, pulling it to her face. Her dark eyes gobbled up what the screen was saying and I had the distinct feeling that I was watching something brilliant happen.

Now that she was distracted and I had calmed down, I had a chance to look at her. Really look at her. And I found I was utterly enraptured.

Although her face was inherently angular, leaning toward unnatural, there was a symmetrical kind of beauty to it. Her eyes darted all around my data-log as she observed, and her full lips mouthed gibberish.

I was watching, lost in thought, when suddenly the same face I was admiring grew slack, then began to shift and mold itself. I leaned back in simultaneous horror and fascination, as the girl disappeared and an exact copy of the video teacher was sitting in my room.

“Dude,” I breathed. What else could I say.

That seemed to catch her attention, and she set the data-log down. “D…ud.” She repeated.

My eyes went wide. “You catch on fast. You’ve been in this form for less than a few hours.”

“Catch.” She parroted again before picking up the data-log and returning to the video.

“That’s great! At this rate, you’re gonna pick up Common Northern Hemisphere in a day or two!”

“Higgens!”

“Crap!” I yelped, jumping up. Mimic didn’t budge, however, completely enraptured with the video series. “Yes?” I asked, hitting the comm after I had a moment to breathe.

“We’re about to hit a new comet stream we need to sort. I want you to double check the drill bits to make sure everything’s ready to go.”

“Yessir. I’ll get on that in a jiffy.”

“Whatever. Just have it done before eleven clicks.”

“Right.”

I looked up from my comm to see Mimic was still staring at her screen. “I have to go now, but I’ll be back in a bit. You just stay here, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, so I figured that was my cue to go. Assembling my cart again, I went out into the hall then shut the door behind me. I waited a few moments, just to see if she was going to follow me, but nothing happened.

Well, that had worked out much better than I ever could have hoped.

Cautiously optimistic, I made my way to the lift and back to the place where this had all started. I couldn’t help but wonder if we were about to repeat history and I was going to meet a new best friend.

I smiled to myself, before a depressing sort of realization befell me. Mimic had only gotten into the ship because we had destroyed her home. Literally drilled it into tiny pieces and then sorted it into different channels to be stored, used or discarded. Had any of her friends survived? Had they been flung into space to drift forever? Shredded into microscopic and very dead pieces? The thought was terrifying, and made me look at the situation in a whole new light.

Was my shapeshifting friend a refugee from a massacre my people had caused? Had we committed genocide on her people? These were questions that I didn’t like thinking about, but I had to.

Smile now fully shifted to a frown, I reached my destination and got busy running all the tests I needed to. Structural analysis, double checking the previous patch I had made the first time the tube blew, space radiation and electromagnetic readings, the works really.

It took me a solid hour to finish, and when I finally did I was excited to go back to my room and see what exactly Mimic had learned. Hitting my comm, I steadied my voice. “Finished here. Everything is good to go.”

“Great. We’re due to start mining tomorrow.”

“Cool.” I went to click off before thinking better of it. “Uh, hey. Have we scanned these asteroids for any signs of life?”

“Signs of life? Are you kidding me?”

“Y-yeah. What if there’s some sort of harmful bacteria or mutated fungus we’re bringing in? Doesn’t it seem like we should be carefully testing each of these celestial bodies before crushing them up and reducing them to their raw materials?”

“That just might be the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard, Higgens, and I’ve been a government contracted employee for ten years. From the moment we mine a single thing, it never integrates with the interior of our ship. We suck it up into those hermetically sealed tubes, then send it to the sorter, and so on and so on. All of it is entirely contained.”

“Except for when there’s accidents.” I countered. “Like the last time I was here.”

“Yeah, occasionally things go south. But you’re fine, right? If there ever is an emergency like that—which there never will be because we’re in space—we’ll deal with it.” A frustrated sound boomed through the technology. “Gods, Higgens, I don’t have time for this. Waste any more time and I’ll dock it out of your pay.”

The comm clicked off and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. What a twat.

Abruptly I was very done with humans in general. Packing up my cart, I headed back to my room. I was so fired up over how my boss had spoken to me that I almost forgot that I had left a sentient alien that could take on any form in my bedroom.

That certainly put some pep in my step, and I rushed the remaining way to my room.

I slid my card in the door and punched in my code. It seemed to take ages for the pneumatic doors to slide open and I quickly shimmied inside.

I was greeted by an empty room and terror seized me. Then, as the doors slid closed, something emerged from my scrap-box. I almost screamed again, but managed to catch myself just as the formless blob solidified into the Mimic’s human form.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, clutching at my chest. “You gotta be more careful or I’m going to die of an apoplexy.”

“Die, verb form of the noun Death, meaning the action or act of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism.” She said, voice strangely musical with intonations in all the wrong areas. “Apoplexy: unconsciousness or incapacity resulting from a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.”

My jaw would have dropped if I wasn’t so thoroughly amused by the incredibly serious expression on her face as she rattled off definitions. “Yes, those are all correct. Did you learn those on the net today?”

“Learn, to gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, experience or being taught.”

“Yup, that’s right too. But you know there’s more to a conversation than definitions.”

“Definition: a statement of the exact meaning of a word, es-”

“Right. I got it. We’ll work on that.”

I walked over to my bed and managed to plop down, gesturing for her to sit in the chair. She looked from me, to the chair, then back before tilting her head. Right, she probably wouldn’t understand almost any physical prompts or slang.

All my doubts about her potentially not being sentient were pretty much out of the window. In just a few hours she had taught herself how to read and obviously had been very busy digesting the entire contents of some dictionary or another. Actually, in our current situation, I was definitely the dumbass. I couldn’t help but wonder if the little being had been trying to talk to me since I had found it, or if shapeshifting a human’s brain was what gave it its intellect. Perhaps that was a little self-centered to think, but this was the first alien known to man. I had no idea what made her tick, tock or shift.

“So, let’s start with the basics. What is your name?”

“Name?” She repeated. “A word or set of words by which-”

“No,” I said quickly, cutting her off. “No more of those straight definitions. If I wanted to read a dictionary, I would. I mean,” I tried to think of the best way to phrase it. “Who are you?”

For the first time her face took on an expression that wasn’t a mirror of my own. “Who… am I?”

“Yes! Do you have a name? What do your friends or family call you?”

“Friends…” She repeated slowly. I waited patiently. The poor alien had obviously spent so much of the afternoon submerging herself in learning that I didn’t mind being put on pause while she searched for an answer. “Family…” More pause, and her eyes slid over the room as if they were searching for something to help her communicate what she wanted to say. “…are dead.”

That wasn’t where I was hoping the conversation was going.

“This…beast killed them.”

Now it was my turn to parrot things back. “Beast? Y-you mean the ship?”

“Ship: a vessel larger than a boat for transporting people or goods by sea. This is… a vessel? Not a beast that has eaten both you and I?”

Oh no. I could understand exactly how she had come to that conclusion, but I was about to give her a rude awakening. “No. It’s a mechanical ship, and we travel through space and mine valuable minerals from asteroids, comets and small moons.”

“Mine: used to refer to a thing or things belonging to or associated with the speaker.”

“No, not that one.”

“Mine: an excavation in the earth for extracting coal and other minerals.” Her eyes went wide as she finished her statement. “But I saw its teeth!”

“No, you saw the drill bit as it churned up the asteroid that you were living on.”

Silence again, and she almost seemed frozen in her spot while her brain churned. “You killed my family?”

Crap. Here was the moment I was dreading. “I didn’t personally, no. And the crew didn’t mean to! There’s not supposed to be life in space, so they didn’t think they were hurting anyone. Or anything.”

“S-space?”

Yeah, you know that thing outside of your asteroid?”

“As…teroid?”

I was surprised that she didn’t go into another long string of definitions. “Yeah, your home. That’s what we call it.”

“I… I see.” She went quiet again, but I didn’t rush the conversation. I was guessing her day had just gone from full of excitement and potential to decidedly awful. “So I am… alone?”

“Well, I’m here for you.”

“But my home… it is no more?”

“…no.” I finished lamely.

“So, all this work I have done to find a form and speak to you, learning your language and speech, just to find out I will never be able to return home again?”

Geeze, this was not something they taught me how to deal with in custodial and maintenance training. “I’m so, so sorry. But there has to be other asteroids with aliens like you, right? I can help you find them!”

A soft, barely there smile turned up the corner of her mouth. Had she learned that online or was that an instinctive reaction? Either way, it made me feel better to see a glimmer of hope in her countenance. “You would… help me?”

“Of course! It’s the least I could do.”

“But why? Your ship killed us all.”

“Oh, whoa, nonono. This isn’t my ship.” I objected hastily. “I’m just a glorified janitor with a handful of repair responsibilities. Mostly I handle a lot of disposal and clean up.”

“Janitor: a person employed as a caretaker of a building; a custodian. I do not understand. What is an employee?”

“Someone who works for another person for money.”

“What is money?”

Goodness, was this what it was like being a new parent? I was already feeling exhausted and we’d been talking for less than ten minutes. “In my culture, people don’t exchange items for other items anymore. Instead, we work for promissory notes that we can then trade in for the things we need.”

“That… doesn’t make sense.”

“I suppose to you, it wouldn’t. Asteroid life is probably a lot different from Earth’s.”

“Earth? Is that your home?”

“Yes.”

“And it is mined as well for the resources?”

“Yeah, actually. Only the richest of the rich live there now on carefully maintained oases. The rest of us live on colonies of varying levels of squalor or space-bound vessels doing work for the government.”

“I see.” She murmured slowly. “I believe I read about this. It is called distribution of wealth, yes?”

“Yeah, actually! Very good.”

“I couldn’t comprehend it as I was reading. It seemed so strange that some of you would be allowed to have whatever they needed to survive while others could not have enough. But now that I know your people do not even care for its own, it is easy to understand how they could so readily destroy others.”

“I’d like to contest that opinion, but given our history, I can’t really. But I am serious that I want to help. I feel absolutely terrible for what happened to you, and it’s my responsibility to get you back to your people safely.”

“How can we do that?”

“I, uh… I’m not exactly sure. I’ll have to ask around without arousing suspicion.”

“And you can do that?”

I shrugged, giving her my best ‘I-can-do-it’ grin that I could muster. “I guess we won’t know until I try.”

“I see. Thank you…” she paused again, her face going blank. “You asked me a question when you first entered the room. I did not understand it, but now I do, and I will ask it of you. What are you called?”

“Oh! You can call me Higgens! And what about you? Do you have a name?” That was a stupid question! This girl was a sentient being who had a family and home, and definite concept of what life and death was. Of course, she had a name.

“Yes,” she answered with a nod. “It is-” A sound came out of her mouth that was nowhere near human. It was somewhere between one of her adorable trills that she had made when I first found her, a bleet, and a high pitched static that made me want to kick myself in the teeth if I were that flexible.

“I uh, I don’t think I can pronounce that.”

She nodded. “Yes, human noise-fronds are much different from my own species. But you have been using a specific chirp at me since we met. I suppose that will do as well as any other.”

“What, you mean Mimic?”

“Mimic: A person skilled in imitating the voice, mannerism or movements of others in an entertaining way.” Now her face split into a beautiful, genuine grin. ‘You find me entertaining?”

“Y-yeah, of course. You’re a fun little bean.”

“Bean? That is a-”

“Nickname!” I quickly interrupted. “And that’s exactly what you need. Your name is Mimic, but how about I call you… Mimi. It’s a bit more personal.”

“Myself-myself. Mimi. Yes, it is always good for a shapeshifter to remind themselves that no matter their form, they are always themselves. Thank you, Higgens, you are truly a good…” she paused, no doubt searching for the correct word again. “alien friend.”

“We’re called humans, actually.”

“Ah, yes. I remember that. Human.” She offered her hand and another beaming smile. “I saw this on the net of which you speak. This is how two allies agree upon a course of action, correct?”

“Correct,” I answered with a smile. “Here’s to getting you home.”