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.